Downsizing. That’s what we told people. It was the quickest and easiest way to explain what we were doing. Because then it sounds like something admirable, it sounds like a lifestyle choice, like something they have programmes on Channel 4 about, rather than what it really was, which was something a lot messier and more confusing that I’m not sure either of us could have found the right words for even if we’d wanted to. ‘Ooh, you are lucky,’ more than one person told me. ‘We dream of doing something like that.’ I just smiled, and something about the way I smiled usually made them tell me how brave I was too.
But it didn’t feel like downsizing. Not when we stood at the back door and looked at the vast expanse of green hill behind us, and beyond that the big sky. A proper sky, stretching all the way from east to west without a single building to block the view, and one that was filled with stars at night-time. I don’t think the girls had ever seen the stars properly. You don’t, living in London. I remember saying to Tom that it felt like we were living life on a whole different scale.
Of course it wasn’t perfect. The survey said we would need a new roof sooner rather than later, and there were a couple of windows at the front that were rotten through and needed replacing straight away, but the estate agent put us on to a local builder who got them done before we even moved in and didn’t charge that much more than we’d have expected to pay in town. And it was a shame the garden was north-facing. The hill that had seemed to cradle the cottage protectively when we came to view it in the summer turned out to overshadow it in the winter, blocking every scrap of sun from the raggedy back garden that trailed up its slope, but Tom was still convinced he could do something with it. There wasn’t a scrap of vegetation growing on the windswept hillside above, just sheep-cropped wiry grass uninterrupted by so much as a gorse bush, but Tom insisted that there must have been a garden here in the past, and he could make one again.
I don’t know where his confidence came from. It wasn’t as if he’d ever done much in the way of gardening before, but somehow that was part and parcel of the new start.
He had such big ideas. When he hacked all the brambles back he found the original wall, a drystone one, all tumbled down and coated with moss, and he was convinced he was going to rebuild it, even though there didn’t seem any point because there was nothing behind the garden but the hill and the worst thing that was likely to come in was surely a sheep or maybe a lost rambler. But he joined the local library with the girls and came back with a book about drystone walling to go with all the ones about growing vegetables. He did at least agree that it was a job to put off till next year, if he was going to stand a chance of getting any veg sewn in time for the spring. Although he was absolutely determined to get rid of the old hawthorn tree that stood at the very top of the garden, because he’d got it into his head it was shading the place where he wanted his rhubarb to go. I’d protested that it might get us into trouble with the local council – it was properly old, a great gnarled thing that looked like it had been there for hundreds of years – but once Tom sets his heart on something, there’s no telling him. I tried to suggest we at least get a tree surgeon in to do a proper job of it, but he insisted he could do it himself, and he went out to the garden centre and came back with an axe so heavy and lethally sharp that it set me off worrying about exactly how long ambulance response times must be all the way out here.
At least it kept him busy. The idea was that he was going to pick up locum work while I commuted, but between the end of August when we moved in and the end of November I don’t think he got more than four or five days in all. A lot of the surgeries he contacted said they were waiting for their budgets to be set under the new system and they might be able to give him more work in the new financial year, but that wasn’t much use in the meantime. I know it got him down, but I didn’t want to push it in case he took it as criticism. We were alright for a while, anyway. Our friends back in London couldn’t believe it when we told them how little we’d paid for the cottage. It was the first time in our lives we hadn’t had to worry about mortgage payments.
It also meant Tom was around while the girls were getting settled in their new school in the village, which I have to say they took to like ducks to water. Within days they seemed to have their little group of friends and invitations round to play. And soon they were arriving back from their friends’ houses with new enthusiasms like riding lessons or keeping chickens that would never have crossed their minds in a million years if we’d stayed where we were. It was amazing to think they would grow up as countryside kids and would barely remember the years they spent living in the city.
I was finding the commute just about manageable, though having to get up ever earlier to de-ice the car in the mornings as the year wore on started to do my head in. Even then, though, being able to look up and see the sun just beginning to peek over the brow of the hill and set the frost on the peak shimmering – or just the pink glow in the fog that hung around the summit some mornings – well, it made it almost worthwhile. Thankfully Tom was happy to sort out the kids on the weekend mornings and let me lie in, then enjoy a long bath and a lazy few hours to myself. I always had grand plans for us to go on days out and long walks exploring the area, but somehow with the days drawing in we never quite managed it. We’d never even got as far as the top of the hill behind our house. A nice woman I bumped into at the village shop had told me it was an old fort and there were neolithic long barrows and standing stones up there, and that the views from the top were breathtaking. ‘Don’t worry,’ Tom told me one Sunday night when I was moaning to him about how we weren’t taking advantage of where we were for the girls’ sake. ‘We’ve got years to explore. We’re not going anywhere.’
You see, that’s the way we’d been talking. About the future. Not all the time, but regularly, whether it was his seed catalogues, or locum work picking up in the spring, or getting a dog, which was the girls’ latest obsession. All things that meant he was planning to be around for a long time. That’s what I couldn’t convince the police about. Because of course once they’d found out about the affair, and the fact I’d given him two options – new start or final end – well, you could tell by their faces that they’d made their mind up exactly what had happened and there was no point them wasting their time looking for someone who didn’t want to be found.
And I considered that too, don’t get me wrong. I spent ages going over every conversation we’d had since we moved, any signs I might have missed that he was having second thoughts or that he’d made the wrong decision. I even phoned Her. That was probably a mistake, especially having drunk most of a bottle of wine to pluck up the courage, but it was clear from her voice that he hadn’t been in touch with her and she didn’t have any idea where he was. She kept saying, ‘Missing? What do you mean missing?’, as if there was any clearer way of explaining it. She even asked me to let her know if I had any news. I told her not to hold her breath.
I’m getting ahead of myself. It happened on a Saturday morning, when I’d slept in even later than usual. The girls were sat in front of the TV when I went down, with their empty cereal bowls still on the carpet next to them, and when I looked out of the sitting room window he was there at the top of the garden, hacking away at the trunk of the old hawthorn tree. He’d been worrying away at it for days, cutting back all the branches and burning them on a damp smoky bonfire too close to the house, and slicing his hands to bits on the thorns and dripping blood all over the ground because he couldn’t be bothered to wear the perfectly good set of gloves he’d bought from the garden centre. I thought about shouting out of the back door to see if he wanted a cup of tea, but in the end I didn’t bother, just made a herbal one for myself in one of the big cups and took it back up to the bathroom for a wallow.
The bathroom’s my favourite room in the house. It’s tiny, and built in under the eaves, but the previous owners managed to fit in a proper cast-iron bathtub with lion legs – I think it’s actually Victorian – that you can stretch right out in, and we treated ourselves to fluffy new towels the girls aren’t allowed to use as a moving in present, so my Saturday morning bath is a proper treat. There’s no window, just a skylight, so you can lie in there looking straight up at the sky and the clouds passing across above you and keep topping yourself up with hot water and just let everything ebb away.
I’d been there half an hour or more – I remember I was reading one of the colour supplements, not that day’s because we hadn’t been to the shop yet, but I never get a chance to read the papers on the right day anyway – when I heard Tom talking to someone in the back garden. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I thought one of the girls must be out there with him, but a couple of minutes later I heard the sound of the back door opening – and felt it too, because it sent a gust of cold air whooshing up the stairs and made me duck down to get as much of myself under the warm water as I could. I heard him telling the girls that he had to go out and to be good and for Maisie to look after her little sister and both of them to look after Mum. And then he was gone.
‘Tom!’ I yelled down the stairs, but he’d shut the door behind him. ‘Tom?’
He wasn’t coming back. He had his coat and boots on already, so he had no need to. I sat up in the bath, sending water tsunami-ing up over the edges and onto the cork tiles we were planning to change when we got round to it.
‘Tom?’ I was bellowing now.
‘He’s gone out,’ called an uninterested Maisie up the stairs.
‘Gone out where?’ I shouted back down. No answer. The village was a ten-minute drive, and the nearest neighbours weren’t much closer, not that we knew them anyway. There was nothing out the back except for the hill.
I stood up in the bath and wrapped a towel round me, managing to dip the corner in the water which made me swear even more. To see anything lower than the very peak of the hill I had to open the skylight, which involved getting out of the bath and slopping even more water all over the place. I could feel myself goosepimpling even before I got the window open and let the November air in to meet my wet hair.
I couldn’t see Tom anywhere. There was his axe, lying on the ground next to the jagged stump of the hawthorn tree up by the back wall. He’d finally managed to get it down, and I could see from here the twin circles of its pale flesh shining out brightly from the mossy bark that had enclosed it for so long. He’d made a good start on digging away all the earth around the roots too: I could see their dark writhing shapes exposed unforgivingly to the winter sunlight. There were the black ridges where he had planted his onions and kale and lamb’s lettuce, with precious little to show for them save for the labels marking the ends of the rows, and the rainbow spinning windmill Beth had insisted on buying from the garden centre even though there was nothing to scare the birds away from yet. But there was no sign of my husband. I looked all the way up the hillside beyond, still striped and contoured with frost. The sheep had all been taken in for the winter. And for all the woman at the shop said about the views, we’d never seen anyone walking there.
I leaned out of the skylight as far as I dared to look along the ridge to the east and the west. There was nothing but grass and stones all the way to the arching horizon, and nothing but cold grey sky above. The winter sun had barely crested the brow of the hill, and for a moment when I squinted up into its brightness I thought I saw the silhouettes of figures up there, but when I blinked they were gone.
When I got downstairs, still damp, the girls hadn’t moved from in front of the television and showed no interest at all in the whereabouts of their father. I pulled on wellies under my dressing gown and walked all the way to the top of the garden shouting Tom’s name – thinking all the time how embarrassed I would be if he popped up from somewhere and introduced whatever stranger he’d been talking to with me in that state – but there was no reply except for the wind. When I went back into the cottage I had to switch the TV off to get the girls to even look at me. ‘Who was in the garden with Daddy?’ I asked them both, but Beth just shook her head dumbly and Maisie, when pushed, insisted she thought he’d been talking to me. I don’t think they’d so much as turned away from the screen all morning.
So we waited. Or at least I waited, and tried not to let the girls think that anything was wrong, and when it got as late as I could possibly let it get and still make it to the supermarket – which he knew perfectly well was what we were supposed to be doing that day – I packed them both into the car and drove there and forced myself to go up and down each aisle ticking off every single thing on the list while convincing myself he would be waiting, full of apologies, when we got home. But we arrived back to an empty house, dark and cold, with my note still sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. And that’s when I decided to call the police.
Well, you know the next bit. I tried as hard as I could to keep things normal for the girls, but obviously there was nothing normal about their dad not being there and there was nothing I could do to deny it. Every night when I put her to bed Beth asked if her daddy would be back in the morning. Maisie stopped talking about him completely. I think she thought it would upset me. I tried to tell her it wouldn’t, but we both knew she was right. Often I’d find her kneeling, staring out of the low back window of their bedroom, a couple of times at night even, long after I thought they were both asleep and there was nothing but pitch blackness on the other side of the glass.
What did I feel? Mostly angry. I was embarrassed about having to rely on people I hardly knew to help me pick up the kids from school and look after them until I could get home in the evening, brilliant as their friends’ parents were about rallying round. I was angry about the fact that I had to pack them both into the car and take them with me on a twenty-mile round trip if we needed anything from the shop, or an even longer one if one of them had a play date or a music lesson, and make sure we had enough snacks and books and games to placate the other one who had to sit waiting in the car with me for an hour. I was angry about being left to cope with it all on my own. I didn’t sign up for this, I kept saying to myself. I’d put some serious consideration into life as a single parent just a few months before – I’d made lists of the pros and cons and left them out where I knew he would see them so he would realise just how serious a situation we were in – but that had been in London with my oldest friends and my whole support network around me. Not out here in the arse end of nowhere, where you had to spend half an hour scraping ice off the car before you could even get anywhere.
The police didn’t start taking it seriously until a fortnight had passed and his bank card and mobile hadn’t been used (I’d told them he’d left his phone sitting on the kitchen dresser and even showed it to them, but they said there were still procedures they had to follow). I’d been complaining to Beth’s teacher how they hadn’t been doing anything at all to look for him and then the very next day on the way to school we drove past a line of police picking their way through the copse near the junction with the main road and a man in a frogman suit stepping down into the dark pond beneath the trees, and it suddenly hit me that this was really happening. I managed to keep things together until I’d dropped the girls off, but I’d hardly got the car out of sight of the school gates before I had to pull over and spend five minutes dry-heaving into the hedge.
I was saved by the nice lady from the village, the same one who’d told me about the history of the hill. She stopped alongside, took one look at me and put me straight in her 4x4 and drove me back to her kitchen where she made me a strong coffee and insisted I have a tot of something in it, and then she sat down on the other side of the big oak table and ordered me to tell her all about it. Well, it all ended up coming out, about the affair and why we’d moved here and how worried I was about what it was doing to the kids and how terrified I was about what had happened to Tom – all to this woman I barely knew, in fact I’d only found out her name, Vivienne, that very morning – and she just kept handing me tissues and patting my arm, and her dog kept licking my other hand like she was trying to comfort me too, with Vivienne apologising and saying, ‘She’s too familiar,’ and me reassuring her that it didn’t matter at all, it was sweet, and by the end of it I felt better than I had in weeks.
It was funny because she couldn’t have been less like my mum – Vivienne’s country through and through, all gilets and Barbour jackets and sensible boots, and her kitchen was the sort Mum used to be really snobby about, with quarry tiles and an Aga and all these bunches of different herbs, some of which I didn’t even recognise, drying above it, and open shelves full of things she had pickled, but right at that moment it felt like just where I needed to be and I’ve never felt more cared for.
When I’d let it all out she just sat there watching me stroke the dog, and she looked like she was coming to a decision, and then she told me to follow her through to her utility room, which was rigged out with a whelping box full of twelve boisterous springer spaniel puppies that started yapping deafeningly as soon as we opened the door and jumping up at us for attention. Vivienne picked out one – a gorgeous boy with a patch over one eye and a tail going ten to the dozen – and handed him over to me. She told me that she’d heard in the village how my girls had been pushing us for a dog and she thought he might be exactly what we needed right now. And she wouldn’t take any money for him, although she did say I could pay her for the sack of food and the bowls and blanket she gave me as well and she’d pass it on to the RSPCA. And as she helped me load it all into the car she said something about ‘getting you out with my ladies on one of our nights soon’, which was both lovely and slightly frightening – like I say, she was closer to my mum’s age than mine – but delivered vaguely enough for the kindness of the offer to take the edge off the actual prospect of it. ‘We look after each other here,’ she told me as she waved me off. ‘You’re a part of the community now.’
Well, that sort of restored my faith in humanity and gave me something to go on for. You can imagine how delighted the girls were when they got home and were introduced to the dog, and I told them that yes, we really were going to keep him. And from that day on life felt a bit more manageable and less like we were living on hold, waiting for Tom to walk back in through the door. And Kipper – Maisie let Beth name him, which was really good of her – kept us busy, and cheerful for each other, even when the police liaison officer came to tell me they had drawn a blank on their search of the local area and would be switching over to ‘secondary investigation techniques’, which as far as I could tell just involved waiting to see if Tom turned up.
Maisie’s friend Sarah’s parents – it’s ridiculous me calling them that, Angela and Julian – were brilliant too, having the girls for the day when I had to go into town and look through the unidentified persons records with the liaison officer to see if Tom was in there, because they knew how upsetting I would find it. They got back at four o’clock absolutely delighted because Angela had taken the three of them out pony-trekking along the ridge. ‘We saw our house and we saw you in the garden, and we waved but you didn’t see us!’ Beth told me, which was confusing, because I’d been at the police station all morning, but Angela just shook her head and told her they had been a very long way away. Apparently they had planned to go right to the top of the hill and take a photo of themselves with the cottage in the background, but Fidget, Sarah’s pony, had gone all skittish so they’d had to turn back before they’d got there. It seemed like the girls had had quite enough excitement for one day anyway. They both went up to bed straight after tea and were out like lights, although Maisie murmured something weird as I was kissing her goodnight, asking who the other people she saw in the garden were and saying she had wished for one of them to be Daddy even though they didn’t look like him.
I was determined to make Christmas as normal as possible for them. The one thing Vivienne had insisted on was that Kipper shouldn’t be a Christmas present – a dog is for life, etc. – so I’d got them both a Wii between them as their big present and plenty of other stuff for their stockings and we’d bought Daddy a Top Gear book – it was Maisie’s idea – and wrapped it up and we had a nice moment putting it on the mantelpiece for him ‘ready for when he comes back’. After breakfast I let them plug in their new toy and I got on with the dinner. I even checked Tom’s veg patch to see if there was anything I could salvage for us to have with the turkey, but it was all looking pretty barren. I’d probably failed to do all sorts of things I was supposed to over the past few weeks, like watering and fertilising, what with everything. I think it was the first time any of us had been up that end of the garden since he disappeared, to tell the truth. Even Kipper tended to skulk round the back of the house to do his wees and poos, helpfully where we were most likely to tread in them. I think he doesn’t like the cold, the big wuss. The few times I put him on the lead and took him towards the back of the garden to try to train him to use the big patch of clear earth where the hawthorn’s trunk was still lying, he started whining and half throttling himself trying to pull off his collar so he could run back into the house. And I know this makes me a terrible dog owner, but it was too cold to persist for long.
The first Wii argument kicked in after about an hour, and by that time the dinner was at a point where it could look after itself, so I announced that we were all going out for a walk. There was the usual shrieking and wailing, but I silenced that with a reminder of the promises they had made when we got Kipper, and we eventually managed to get ourselves togged out in coats, scarves, hats, mittens and wellies without too much fuss.
To be honest, I didn’t blame them when we got out into the weather. It was very much a grey Christmas rather than a white one, with the mist hanging heavy in the valley, but I was fired up by now and I said that rather than take the dog along the lane as usual we were going to walk up the hill. I had an idea that we might be able to get above the fog and see those beautiful views that Vivienne had talked about. She had said she was often up there with her gang, as she called them. But as we trudged up the footpath with the girls discussing their new favourite Mario characters and Kipper doing his best to both strangle himself and trip me up with the lead the fog only got thicker. The footpath was slippy with mud. Beth had a couple of near misses that left her grizzling and complaining, and Kipper nearly had me flat on my face a couple of times, so after a bit I decided we should just strike out across the grass – so long as we were going upwards, we knew we were going in the right direction, after all. The hedgerow soon faded away behind us, and then it was just us trudging across grass stiff and crackly with frost, just the four of us, three girls and a dog, on our own in a world of wet greyness. The girls had stopped talking to save their breath for climbing, and even Kipper seemed to quieten down and settle close to my side in a way that made me think maybe we were getting somewhere with his training after all. He had his ears pressed back hard against his head and he kept darting these quick glances around him. Maybe it was rabbits he could sense out there in the fog.
The hill was higher than it looked. I kept thinking we must be getting close to the top, but then we would suddenly reach an even steeper bit, and I realised we must have got to the fort that Vivienne had talked about. I wished I’d thought to bring a flask out with us, because the air was so cold up here it felt sharp in the back of your throat, and I was surprised the girls weren’t moaning more, but they seemed to have been struck by the same mood as the dog, just huddling into their coats and peering around at the blankness. There was a strange feeling, as if everything – not just us, but the fog and the hill and all the countryside around us – was waiting.
Finally we reached a point where the ground flattened out, and I announced that we had reached the top, although I could see the faint shape of an even higher bit of ground jutting up ahead of us. I had thought to put a couple of mince pies into the pocket of my fleece as a reward, and I was just taking them out and trying with my gloves still on to disentangle the tinfoil I’d wrapped them in when Kipper took fright at something. I saw the hackles bristle all along his little back, and he let out a low growling noise I’d never heard him make before – and then somehow he’d managed to slip the loop of the lead off my wrist and streak off into the whiteness before I could do anything.
Maisie gave a scream. I was shouting his name too, but the racket we were making seemed somehow to dissipate into the mist around us. Beth slipped a small mittened hand into mine, and when I saw her frightened eyes looking up at me, I tried to give it a reassuring squeeze, but my heart was thumping away in my chest and the bloody dog was nowhere to be seen.
I told them both to hush so we could all listen for where he was, and then we could hear him rushing about somewhere, letting out these funny excited yaps and whimpers. But the strange thing was that none of us could agree on where the noises were coming from. I thought he was somewhere on the far side of the hill; Maisie swore blind he had doubled round behind us, and when I asked Beth, all she did was stretch out a shaking arm to point ahead at the place where, now my eyes were getting used to it, there was definitely a higher outcrop rising up out of the mist. It seemed better to be moving in some direction than none at all, so I took both their hands firmly in mine and we started to walk that way.
And that’s when we saw Vivienne. This time it was my turn to let out a little scream, because she was standing so still in the gloom I’d thought she was one of the standing stones I was expecting to find up there, and it wasn’t until the three of us were practically on top of her that she suddenly stepped forward and said something festive like ‘Many happy returns!’
I was so flustered I couldn’t think straight, and I blurted out something like ‘You’re here!’
‘We’re all here,’ she said with that same cheery smile, and I suddenly wondered if it was her dogs that had been making the noises all around us, although I still couldn’t see any of them.
‘The puppy ran off,’ I confessed, feeling like the biggest failure in the world. ‘I’ve lost him.’
‘That’s boys for you,’ she said, in that same strange, detached way that made me think she might have started early on the Christmas sherry. ‘They always stray.’
The girls had both gone uncharacteristically shy and were pushing themselves into the back of my coat like they used to when they were tiny. Vivienne squatted down so she was on the same level as them. ‘You’ll learn that in time, both of you,’ she told them solemnly.
‘Do you think you can get him to come back?’ I asked, trying to ignore how weirdly she was acting. She was, at least, a dog person.
She looked up at me, gave a lopsided smile as if I’d said something funny, and then, with difficulty, straightened up. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want.’ And with that she stuck two fingers in her mouth to let out a whistle so piercing it made all three of us flinch.
Seconds later, up trotted Kipper out of the mist, his ears back and his tail tucked between his legs.
‘Thank you,’ I gasped as the girls fell on the dog and buried their faces in his damp fur, making affectionate noises that were little more than whimpers. ‘How do you do that?’
‘Magic,’ she said, and I started laughing until I realised she wasn’t.
The silence grew as thick as the fog surrounding us.
‘Now,’ said Vivienne finally, clapping her gloved hands together. ‘What about Daddy?’
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked tremulously. But instead of replying to me, Vivienne turned to the girls, who had got a firm hold of Kipper’s lead and were standing waiting patiently on either side of him. ‘Would you like to see your daddy?’
I wanted to protest, to point out that what she was saying was downright cruel, but the cold seemed to have stolen my voice. So instead I just watched as Maisie, and then Beth, silently nodded.
‘Good. Come on then.’ Vivienne held out two hands, clad in leather gloves, and the girls slowly reached out to take them and let themselves be led away.
‘Where are you taking them?’ I croaked as I stumbled along after them, trying to keep them in sight. The close-cropped, wiry grass was icy and slippery underfoot.
‘We’re going where Daddy was taken,’ Vivienne’s voice came back through the fog.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ I protested, hating the weak voice that was all I could summon up. ‘We can’t!’
The old woman stopped and turned to face me, her smile radiant. ‘Oh, but we can,’ she told me, as the girls looked trustingly up at her. ‘The old ways are open. Your husband saw to that. And finally we can put the world to rights again.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I whimpered. But even as I said it, I knew. I was thinking back to those pale twin circles, infinitely ringed, rent apart and broken after so many years. The tree that had stood guardian over our cottage, and over our lives. The only one for miles around.
We were at the very top of the bare hill. And the fog was finally beginning to clear enough for me to make out that what I had thought was just a last outcrop of rock was actually a long barrow, an ancient tomb, just as I had been told I would find up here. And at its nearest end a stone doorway stood open, and there among the pale figures crowded inside—
And then the girls were gone, Maisie hurtling away from us and her little sister stumbling after her as fast as her short legs would carry her, out of Vivienne’s grasp and out of my reach and into the white that closed around both of them, crying, ‘Daddy, my Daddy!’