The Retreat

  The man gestured for me to take a seat.

  ‘So you’re the new guy,’ he said, sticking out his hand. ‘Max Lake. This is Suzi Hastings.’ The younger woman mouthed hello.

  ‘And I’m Karen,’ the older woman said. ‘Karen Holden.’

  I’d heard of Max Lake, of course I had. He was a writer of literary fiction who’d been talked about as a kind of enfant terrible a decade ago. Now, as far as I could tell, he spent most of his time on Twitter, trying to make every injustice in the world about him. I didn’t recognise Suzi’s name. A first-time novelist? She and Max were sitting very close together, almost touching. I was sure I’d seen Max mention his wife in an interview – yes, he was wearing a wedding ring – so it would be faintly scandalous if he and Suzi were sleeping together.

  I introduced myself as I sat down.

  ‘Lucas Radcliffe as in L. J. Radcliffe?’ Karen said. ‘Goodness. I loved your book.’ As I tried to look modest she turned to the others and asked if they’d read it. They hadn’t. ‘It’s about all these children who disappear and this creature who eats their souls. So deliciously scary. I loved it. It sold squillions as well, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it did okay.’ I hated talking about this kind of thing. It made me cringe to my core.

  ‘I heard it was being made into a movie. With Emma Watson?’

  ‘Well. Maybe. But probably not with Emma.’

  While looking at Karen, I could feel Max scrutinising me.

  ‘A horror novel, is it?’ he asked. ‘My agent is always telling me I should write something genre, a thriller or crime novel perhaps, between my proper books. Something to help pay the bills.’ He chuckled. ‘But I don’t know if I could bring myself to stoop to it.’

  Before I could respond, Julia entered the room, carrying a plate piled high with bread rolls and a dish of butter. There were a couple of bottles of sparkling water on the table already. She hurried out and returned with four bowls of vegetable soup.

  ‘Smells lovely,’ Max said, pouring himself a glass of water.

  ‘Julia, I don’t suppose there’s any wine, is there?’ I asked.

  The other three exchanged knowing looks as Julia said, ‘Ah, sorry. This is a dry house.’

  ‘That’s why we go to the pub every night,’ Max said. ‘To get our rations.’

  A dry house? That wasn’t mentioned on the website.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ she asked.

  I told her no, water was fine. The disappointment must have shown because, as Julia left, Karen leaned over and, with a conspiratorial wink, said, ‘I’ve got a bottle of gin in my room if you get desperate later.’

  As we ate our starter, I asked Karen and Suzi what kind of stuff they wrote. I was tempted to ask Max too, to prick his ego by pretending I hadn’t heard of him.

  ‘I write genre stuff too,’ Karen said, with a pointed glance at Max. ‘A mystery series and an urban fantasy series.’

  ‘Women bonking billionaire werewolves,’ said Max with a smirk. ‘She writes a book a month. Can you believe that?’

  ‘Self-published?’ I asked Karen, and she nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Oh yes. I couldn’t bear to have people interfere with my work.’

  ‘An editor, for example,’ Max said.

  She ignored him. ‘I like to be in control. And I like the money too.’

  I had a horrible feeling they were about to descend into a tedious argument about traditional versus self-publishing, so I cut them off by asking Suzi what she was writing.

  Her voice was soft. ‘I’m working on my first novel. It’s a . . . picaresque, set at a university . . .’

  ‘Not a werewolf in sight,’ said Max.

  Karen caught my eye. ‘There is a lot of bonking, though.’

  ‘Max is helping me with it,’ Suzi said. Her face pinked. ‘With the writing, I mean.’

  Karen chuckled. ‘If you say so, dear.’

  Suzi was saved from further blushes by the arrival of Julia with our main course, a goat’s cheese tart with potatoes and salad. We ate in silence for a few minutes. Suzi still seemed mortified by what she’d said. Karen kept looking at her phone.

  ‘The Wi-Fi here is terrible,’ she said, as Max made his excuses and went off to the loo. ‘And don’t talk to me about the mobile signal. Still, I guess that’s what we came here for. Solitude. Time to concentrate.’

  ‘Maybe you can teach me how to write a book in a month,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’

  I sighed. ‘My deadline is mid-May and everything I’ve written so far is . . . well, it’s shit. It’s not scary. It’s boring. Boring as hell. I need to start from scratch.’

  Karen shrugged. ‘Easy. Three thousand words a day, every day, for a month.’

  She made it sound so doable. The problem was, I didn’t have a story in my head. I barely had an idea. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, because it sounded like a first-world problem, but I was blocked. Worse than that – paralysed. Soon, everyone would find out that my bestseller was a fluke and I would be exposed as a fraud, vanishing back into obscurity before you could say ‘one-hit wonder’.

  Like I said, it was a first-world problem. But it was my problem.

  A week before, I’d called my agent, Jamie, in a panic, telling him we were going to have to give the advance back, that I was washed up, finished.

  He told me to calm down.

  ‘You need to go back,’ he said. ‘Back to the source of your inspiration. Where did the idea for Sweetmeat come from?’

  ‘I don’t know. A dream.’

  He groaned.

  ‘No, really. I woke up one morning with the picture of the creature in my head, and a woman crying because her daughter was missing. The idea came from my subconscious.’ I made a pained noise. ‘It’s so frustrating. I mean, I’ve always written. It’s always come easily, since I was a kid.’

  ‘Then maybe you need to go right back. You need to fall in love with writing again. Find whatever, or wherever, it was that caused that first spark.’

  Wherever. That caught my attention. Although Sweetmeat was set in an invented community, it was very much based on the place where I grew up in North Wales. The green, empty landscape, the relentless rain. Dark woods and low mountains; the river where a boy from our school drowned. And boredom – that was a vital ingredient. There was nothing to do, so I’d made stuff up. I started off by drawing and writing comics, then moved on to short stories. I invented whole worlds to entertain myself.

  In London, where I’d lived since my early twenties, there was too much to stimulate me on the surface but not enough to stir my deeper imagination. I needed darkness, but lived in a city where lights always shone.

  It was time to go back into the dark.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Jamie had asked.

  ‘That it’s time to go home,’ I replied.

  After dinner, while Max and Suzi went upstairs to ‘work on her novel’, Karen gave me a tour of the house. I didn’t know where Julia had gone.

  ‘The rooms are all named after prominent Welsh writers,’ Karen pointed out. ‘The dining room is the Roberts Room, after Kate Roberts.’

  On the opposite side of the hallway to the dining room and kitchen was a decent-sized sitting room, called the Thomas Room, presumably after Dylan. The room was dark and cosy, stuffed full of books, with a library ladder attached to the highest book shelf. There was a utility room, and another large room – the Follett Room – that contained a number of desks with chairs but which appeared unfinished. One wall was only half-painted white and there were no curtains at the window.

  Most of the rooms had open fires or log burners, so the smell of woodsmoke permeated the house. It threw me back in time to my childhood, to long, drowsy Sunday afternoons, a black-and-white film on TV, listening to the top forty on the radio, finger poised on the record button. I didn’t miss those days but the memory stimulated a nostalgia gland, the sense that life was hurtling by too fast.

&nbs
p; ‘Fancy a ciggie?’ Karen asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

  ‘Oh, go on then.’

  We went out front – I noticed that she winced slightly as she walked – and she passed me a cigarette. I was strictly a social smoker, but it tasted delicious.

  ‘Max is a terrible literary snob,’ she said. ‘And a huge narcissist. But he’s quite good company.’

  ‘Suzi seems to think so.’

  ‘Good for her.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Though she is a little weird . . . She asked me to read a few pages. I mean, I’m a woman of the world, I write pretty strong stuff myself. But hers was disturbing. A couple smearing each other with animal blood, using it as a sexual lubricant. Gross, actually. And there’s this horrible bit in it with a dead baby in a freezer.’ She shuddered.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘And as for our literary friend, I heard him on the phone to his wife the other day, arguing about money. About whether he should be frittering the last of their cash away on a writing retreat. I think he’s going through a sticky patch.’

  ‘His patch is going to get stickier if his wife finds out about him and Suzi.’ I frowned. ‘Some people just don’t appreciate what they’ve got.’

  Karen raised an eyebrow.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and reminded myself I’d just met this woman. ‘Ignore me. I don’t want to come across as judgemental.’

  ‘Oh, me neither.’ She gestured at the land around us. ‘You know this place used to be a slate mine, a hundred years ago?’

  ‘Interesting.’

  She smiled. ‘You sound like my daughter when I try to tell her about my youth.’

  Back inside, we passed a closed door. Karen noticed how my gaze snagged on it.

  ‘That’s the basement,’ she said. She leaned forward and whispered in a mock-spooky voice. ‘We’re not allowed down there.’

  ‘Yes, Julia told me. Something about the stairs being unsafe.’

  Karen checked over her shoulder and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I heard a guest strayed down there once and Julia flipped and chucked them out.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Uh-huh. She is a little intense. I like her, but I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. Now, fancy joining me for a small gin?’

  I checked my watch. It was only quarter past nine. But I needed to be disciplined if I had any hope of getting this book written, so I said goodnight to Karen and went to my room.

  I paused outside the second door along in the hallway, noticing that unlike the other rooms it bore no number. There was Room 5, by the stairs, then this door, then Room 6, which was mine. Standing in the silence, I heard a noise come from inside the numberless room, like a radio turned down low. Looking around to ensure no one was coming, I gently pressed my ear against the painted wood.

  Inside the room, someone was singing. A female voice, soft and melodious. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like a child’s song, a nursery rhyme or lullaby.

  I shifted my position and the floorboards creaked beneath me. Abruptly, the singing stopped, and I hurried to my room, hot with guilt, like a Peeping Tom caught in the act.

  Chapter 3

  I woke up early the next morning, after the best night’s sleep I’d had in a long time. It might have been the country air, or the lack of alcohol. After showering in the bathroom along the hallway, I headed to my desk, opening my laptop. Normally, I would spend an hour catching up with Facebook and Twitter, reading the headlines, answering emails from readers. But I had binned the sheet of paper with the Wi-Fi password. I wanted to remain isolated, to go grey. No social media, no email, no Internet till I got this book written. If anyone needed me urgently, they could call.

  I opened my work in progress and stared at the blinking cursor. I kept staring. It was too early. I needed caffeine.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, I found a pot of coffee and some croissants on a plate with a note saying Help yourself. There was no sign of Julia or the other guests, but there was a man in the garden. He was in his sixties, with curly grey hair and red cheeks. He was fiddling with a lawnmower, scraping dried clumps of grass from the rotors and shaking his head.

  He looked up and saw me watching him through the window. He raised a hand in greeting, then pointed at the mug in my hand and winked at me.

  I didn’t want to upset the locals, so I made one and took it out to him.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘I take it you’re one of Julia’s writers?’

  ‘I guess so, yes. I’m Lucas.’

  He stuck out a hand. ‘Rhodri Wallace.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘Julia’s a lovely lass. I hope this writing retreat thing works out for her, after the time she’s had.’

  ‘The time she’d had?’

  ‘You don’t know? Well, it’s not for me to tell you.’

  He returned his attention to the troublesome lawnmower and thanked me for the coffee.

  I was about to go when I remembered the singing I’d heard the previous night. ‘Are there any children here?’ I asked. ‘Young girls?’

  His face darkened. ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘I wondered who the garden swing was for, that’s all.’

  He turned to look at it. Now, in daylight, I could see how rusty it was. How it clearly hadn’t been used for a long time.

  ‘That thing needs taking to the tip,’ Rhodri said, turning away to indicate our conversation was over.

  I ate breakfast and knew I should go back to my room, force myself to write. But I still felt uninspired. I had come here to reconnect with the place where I grew up, hadn’t I? Outside, the day was clear and bright. I would go for a walk. That was sure to help.

  I headed down the drive towards the main road, tossed a coin in my head and turned left. It was cold despite the brightness and I stuck my hands in my coat pockets and put my head down, not really looking where I was going. I headed across a field towards some distant woods. Snowdrops sprouted from the earth, the first harbingers of spring. Birds sang in the trees. It was so peaceful here.

  So why did I feel uneasy?

  A woman with a spaniel on a lead passed me as I entered the wood. The sight of the dog stirred a memory, which I tried to ignore, exchanging hellos with the woman.

  I walked for an hour, still not keeping track of where I was going, failing to drop imaginary breadcrumbs behind me. The path was muddy and I felt foolish in my canvas footwear, but I was determined to keep going. I was lost in thought. But I wasn’t thinking about the book I was supposed to be writing. I was thinking about Priya.

  We met in our early twenties. Recently, I’d been listening to the radio and the DJ said something about the approaching twentieth anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer. I reeled, unable to believe it had been two decades since Priya and I bought that album. We used to listen to it together all the time. When ‘Karma Police’ came on the radio, I had to turn it off. It hurt too much.

  At the time I’d been working in an office and she worked in my local bookshop. I was in there a lot, one of their best customers, and Priya and I got chatting. She was beautiful and clever and all those things. Funny and sexy and wise. Moody and crazy and restless. She had shiny black hair and little moles that I loved to trace with a finger when we lay in bed.

  I told her I was an aspiring writer, and when we started dating, through the period when we moved in together, all of those early years, she supported and encouraged me. When I got my first book deal, she was as ecstatic as I was, possibly more. She told me it didn’t matter when my book failed to set the world alight. She counselled me, told me it was all about building an audience – one reader, one book at a time. She calmed me down when my first publisher dumped me. She celebrated again when I got another deal, even though it was tiny. She told me to keep going.

  If it weren’t for her, I would have given up. One day I was going to make her proud, show her that her faith was justified. I fantasised many times about calling her, giving her good news. The bookshop where she w
orked had gone bust and she was working in an office, doing a job she hated, surrounded by people she had nothing in common with. I was going to rescue her, rescue us.

  But by the time it happened, it was too late. She was already gone.

  I stumbled on the path and the shot of adrenaline brought me out of the pit I’d been mentally wallowing in. I looked around. I was in a clearing in the woods, with one path ahead of me and three behind me. I had no idea which way I’d come. I looked for footprints but had mostly been walking slightly to the side of the puddle-strewn path, on the grass, so couldn’t see any.

  I was lost. I took out my phone, hoping I could find my location on my Maps app, but had no signal. I tried to decide what to do – head back in the direction I’d come from, or plough on. Listening carefully, I thought I could hear traffic in the distance. I decided to carry on.

  I passed a stagnant pond, gnats darting about the surface. A dog poop bag hung from a branch. I couldn’t be too far from civilisation. As I headed on, the trees thinned and the path became muddier. Within minutes, I was in a large clearing, in a field of overgrown, yellowed grass.

  In the centre of this field, which was ringed by trees on all sides, was a dilapidated stone hut. I approached it. The windows were smashed and the wooden front door had half rotted away. I pulled at it, and peered into the hut’s interior. A rank, musty smell floated out. The floor was strewn with ancient litter, but apart from that, it was empty. I stepped inside, trying not to breathe through my nose.

  Among the rubbish – rusting drinks cans, crushed cigarette packets and a porn mag with curled pages – was something furry. At first I thought it was a dead rat, but peering closer I realised it was a soft toy. It looked old and weather-beaten, the clumpy, damp fur coated with mould. Its glass eyes stared at me until I had to look away.

  I closed the door. I had the sensation that fate had brought me here, because suddenly I felt inspired and keen to get back to my desk, an impulse I hadn’t felt for a long time.