Chapter Fifteen

Phinn sat in the farmhouse kitchen without switching on the big torch that Link had thoughtfully left for him. The darkness felt appropriately heavy and he stretched his arms out over the table and rested his head on them, letting its weight settle over him like snow.

Every time he thought about kissing her, enough conflicting emotions arose for a small war to break out in his chest. Had he really done it? Had it really been him? He’d kissed women recklessly before … well, all right, not recklessly, he was a physicist and physics and recklessness tend to go together like cats and explosions, but he’d kissed without due care and attention. Some of those women had even kissed him back. But Molly …

He groaned as the embarrassment flooded his face with heat, and then buried his head deeper in his arms. Whhhhhhhyyyy? Oh God, please let this all have been a terrible dream.

He’d first kissed Suze in the park on the hottest day of summer. And she’d kissed back, oh, had she ever, they’d barely made it back to his flat before … Phinn slammed a fist on the table and the sound echoed around the bare room, filling the corners with his hurt. Was that what I wanted Molly to do? Drag me home with her and strip me slowly in that little bedroom? Pull me into her bed and whisper me into making love? The squeeze in his groin was purely physical and wasn’t reaffirmed by his brain, for which he felt curiously glad. No. That’s not Molly. That was Suze, sex used to overcome the distance between us. Molly is … I don’t want it to be like that with her.

But that just begged the question, what did he want it to be like? He groaned again and banged his head on the tabletop to try to knock some sense into his brain. Nothing. I don’t want it to be like anything. I don’t want it, full stop.

* * *

I lay sleeplessly watching the moon-thrown shadows of my curtains slowly moving down the wall as the hours passed. Every so often I would fall into a doze only to be thrown back to wakefulness by the memory of Phinn’s cold hands cupping my chin and the warmth of his mouth on mine. Then I would be forced to punch the pillow until the hot, hard feeling of embarrassment went away.

What had I expected? I sat up in the bed, hugging my knees, horrible little flashbacks projected against the dark walls of me as I’d been before. I closed my eyes but they were still there, running in the back of my brain, the memories of the way I’d used my vulnerability to persuade men to help me, to comfort me, to save me.

And then, Phinn. Who looked far more in need of comfort and saving than I ever had, and yet I’d still tried the same trick on him, that old ‘I’m just a likkle girlie who needs a big, strong man’s arms around her’. Oh God.

I should cut myself some slack, I really should. I thought I’d found the right man in Tim, he’d ticked all the boxes. Older, financially stable, nice car, heading for the top of his career – not that investigative journalism really had a ‘top’ as such, simply not getting shot was usually good enough – and seemingly sufficiently fond of me to propose and start making wedding plans.

Bastard.

I punched the pillows again. Small downy feathers drifted from the pillowcase where my stress-relief methods had perforated something and I decided to get up and make tea. Anything which might distract me from this constant loop of shame and horror that I seemed to have locked myself into.

Halfway down the stairs I was once again assailed by the memory of Phinn’s face, looking slightly shell-shocked as he’d moved away from me, letting his fingers trail the length of my cheekbones before falling to his sides. His eyes, huge and full of starlight. His expression, not of pity but of understanding, as though he could somehow comprehend how utterly humiliating it had been to find that my fiancé had been having an affair with my mother; that he’d called off our wedding not because of the mythical ‘overseas job offer’ that he hadn’t been able to turn down but because he couldn’t work out how to explain things to his friends. Because, oh yes, he’d managed to run the whole double-life thing for six months, escorting me to journalistic functions, taking me around to whatever ‘do’ required the presence of his co-award winner. Whilst, at the same time, quietly dating her and, when the school at which she taught had a Christmas dinner-dance for the staff, turning out in a tuxedo and jiving the night away.

This time I kicked the wall. The pain was like a message from another world telling me to concentrate, not to let myself get sucked in to reliving that horrible, humiliating time; that Phinn wasn’t Tim. That I should just accept the kiss for what it was – sympathy and understanding portrayed in the only way that made sense at that moment – forget it and move on. The girl I’d been before … that wasn’t me any more. I should realise that just because Phinn had kissed me didn’t mean there was any obligation on either side to leap into bed, relinquish my existence to please a man for as long as it took for me to see the next best opportunity.

As I hopped down the rest of the stairs and into the kitchen, holding my injured toe and swearing slightly, I made up my mind. Yes, I kind of fancied Phinn, but that was all it was. A physical attraction to someone with a good body, a cute face and a nice smile. That was all. It was allowed. It didn’t have to be acted upon. We barely knew one another, and as far as I could tell, the only thing we had in common was a preoccupation with the mysterious lights. Hardly even a basis for a flat-share, let alone the exchange of bodily fluids.

I fetched a packet of frozen peas from the freezer and stuck them on my foot while I staggered about making the tea. The big hot flushes of shame were dying down now, probably because it’s hard to overheat with three pounds of petit pois on your instep, although I was still getting the occasional memory-rush that made me sweat … Daniel driving me to work every morning and waiting to drive me home; Simon, who took me for a week to the South of France where he got tired of my flirting with his friends; Marcus who owned the polo ponies and let me ride his best horses whenever I liked … I’d used every one of them. Slept with them for what I could get, and never really cared a damn about anyone. Had I really cared about Tim? Or did I care more about what he’d done to me?

I made the tea, took it back upstairs, and was asleep before I’d taken a single sip.

* * **

Next morning I got back in from raking another six inches of hair off Stan, who was either losing his winter coat or attempting to grow himself a friend, then sat down to chill my now throbbing foot and grab another densely-packed chapter of folklore. It was fascinating. There had been a sighting of a giant black dog outside the building that was now the pub. It had followed a man all the way along the street only to vanish into the wall of my cottage. I stared at the wall for a few moments, almost as if I expected it to reappear, then read on. There was an entire chapter based on the well-known-in-the-village fact that the hill I regularly rode over supposedly housed a dragon nursing its hoard of gold. I gave a little shiver and the bag of frozen peas fell off my foot.

I carefully rebalanced them and read on, a short and rather thin-on-detail paragraph about a ghostly white hare which haunted the village fringe where Riverdale adjoined the moorland. My pleasurable frisson of fear was curtailed by the ringing of the phone.

‘Hi, Mike.’

‘’Ow did you know it was me, babe?’

‘I’ve got caller display. What’s up?’

There was a rasping sound, which was probably Mike scratching his cheek with his pencil. ‘’Ow’re you goin’ on the folklore thing? Can you run to a long piece or shall I just shove some more pictures in?’

‘It’ll be fine. I’ve got lots of material.’ I looked at the thin book lying on my chair. ‘Well, quite a bit anyway. Don’t worry. It’s not like you to start badgering me; you know I’m good for coming in before deadline. What’s up?’

‘It’s not so much you this time, love. That guy you asked about a column for? The one in the YouTube clip? ’Ow well do you know ’im?’

And all the carefully structured arguments came rushing back into my brain on a tide of blood which heated my face to near-ignition point. ‘Why? What does it matter? I mean, we’re just friends, of course, there’s nothing more in it than that, in fact I’d hardly even say “friends”, more like casual acquaintances. If that. Barely know the guy.’

‘Oh.’ Mike sniffed. ‘Okay.’

‘Why?’ If I sounded suspicious it was with good reason. How could Mike possibly know anything about Phinn and me? Had someone been spying on us? Had the kiss reached as far as London?

‘You know I works for the Beeb sometimes? Nature programme stuff? Well, I’ve got a mate makin’ this kind of real-world look at sci-fi,’ which Mike pretentiously pronounced ‘skiffy’. ‘’E’d got some guy lined up to front it all, cheap version of Brian Cox or summin’, guy’s only gone and fallen down some bloody mountain or another, six months in a specialist unit they reckon. My bloke came to me and I showed ’im that clip you sent me … d’you reckon your man would be up for it?’

‘What, Phinn?’

‘’E’s got the “look”. Apparently. ’Ee don’t look no different to any other bloke to me, but then I’m not some steamin’ poofter from Production. Get ’im to give us a ring, love, will ya? I can put the two of them in touch. Hey, your man there could be lookin’ at fame, fortune and beatin’ ’ot girlies off with a stick!’

The thought of Phinn being faced with hot girlies made the bag of peas fall off my foot again. ‘I’ll pass the message on,’ I said, my voice a little on the quiet side. ‘I can’t promise anything though.’

‘’S fine, babe. Look after yourself.’ And Mike was gone, leaving me with a supernaturally red face, a swollen foot, and the need to call round at Howe End. I debated various other methods of contacting Phinn which didn’t involve facing him, but eventually had to concede that none of them would work and limped down the road in a pair of sandals, my toe being too sore to accommodate my usual boots.

When I got there Link was sitting outside with a spiral bound notebook on his lap and his mobile on the grass beside him.

‘Morning.’ He looked up at me, narrowing his eyes against the sun. ‘Bax has just gone down to the shop, ran out of milk. You haven’t got any more bacon on you, have you?’

‘Sorry, no.’ I looked down at the notebook where he’d been working, lines in pencil scored through, overwritten, circled around and with additional words written in the marginated edges of the page. ‘What are you writing?’

Link rummaged a hand through his hair. ‘You’re not going to laugh, are you?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it depends. I mean, if you’re writing love letters to Nigella Lawson or something, then I might snigger a bit.’ I crouched down beside him, carefully propping my foot to one side. ‘But if it’s the creative outpourings of a mind filled with angst, then no I won’t. Probably.’

‘Well, I’m not. Writing to Nigella, that is. Although, phwoar, I wouldn’t say no to a bite of her ravioli … okay. No, this is my job, only it’s not exactly the most macho of earners so I tend to keep it all a bit quiet. I write greeting card verses.’

‘What, that “roses are red, violets are blue, you are a nutjob and I smell of pooh”? That sort of thing?’ I was trying to read his compositions upside down but the combination of terrible handwriting and faint pencil was defeating me.

‘Almost exactly nothing like that. Why is there no mobile signal in the village?’ He changed the subject with an adroitness that told me the subject of his creative talents was closed. ‘It’s ridiculous. I can’t even text. No Snapchat, nothing.’

‘You see that hill up there?’ I pointed. ‘It’s supposed to have a dragon living under it, sitting on a huge pot of gold.’

Link’s eyebrows shot up. ‘And that stops the signal?’

‘I think it’s more that it’s four hundred and fifty metres high that does it. Not much gets over that.’

‘How the hell do you all live?’ He shook the phone to emphasise our technological poverty. ‘It’s barbaric! Not even texts.’

‘We’re used to it. And we live in the same way as people lived for hundreds of years before mobiles were invented – we talk to one another. Ow.’ My foot bent underneath me and my toe was subjected to more pressure than it could accommodate.

‘What did you do?’ Link looked down at my unpedicured feet in the sandals, ridiculously summery for March. My unpainted nails stared back. ‘Looks sore.’

‘I kicked something. It’s all right, it’s only bruised, when you work with horses you learn to recognise a broken toe just by the shading, and this isn’t that bad. It’ll just hurt for a day or so.’

Link reached out and lightly touched my rapidly blackening nail. ‘I’ve got some Arnica cream you could put on it.’

There was a commotion of disturbed blackbird in front of us and then Phinn appeared. He stared for a second and then dropped the four-pint plastic container of milk he’d been carrying. It hit the stone path and split, sending a fountain of white liquid spraying up over Phinn’s legs which he didn’t even acknowledge, he just kept staring at Link and me. Then, paying no attention to the lactic accident pooling around his feet, he walked past us, keeping his eyes on the front door until he’d gone through it. It slammed behind him with such force that the windows sang in their loose frames.

‘What the hell was that about?’ I stood up, wincing.

Link shrugged. ‘Dunno. Think he’s off on one. He’s been really odd with me. Can’t speak, doesn’t want to go out, can’t even drag him to the pub for a meal and, considering all we’ve got in is tinned macaroni cheese which tastes like Play-Doh, must mean there’s something up with the man.’

‘Have you tried talking to him?’

Link pulled a face and pointed to his groin. ‘In possession of a full set, which I’d rather like to keep. Anyway, testosterone exempts me from all that “touchy feely” stuff, that’s your department.’

‘Great. Thanks.’ Now resigned to having to have some kind of conversation with Phinn I levered open the door and went into the house, where there was no sign of him. I wandered through the downstairs rooms which mazed around a central passageway, making me realise that the door we all used wasn’t the main front door to the house but the side kitchen door. The real main door lay to the west, where the old driveway used to run and it opened into the impressive entrance hall, tiled and panelled, with a huge oak staircase ascending from it into the dark heavens. My failure to find Phinn on these lower levels drove me up the stairs, which creaked and muttered with each footstep, as though I walked through a field of ghosts.

The upper landing was equally darkly panelled. All the doors were shut so no light penetrated and I had to grope my way around using the handrail. ‘Phinn? Are you up here?’ I called softly. There were shadows here, things which moved independent of light sources, creaks and groans that reminded me of skulls that screamed. Somewhere above my head a door slammed and I jumped. All I could think of now was the Thing That Moaned, and I ran until I found myself at the foot of another staircase, pine this time, cheaply made and installed to give access to the attics. I shot up the stairs and past an internal balcony towards the door at the far end of the house, which must have been the one that slammed, although it was standing open now.

And on the other side of it, resting his forehead against an almost impenetrably dusty window, stood Phinn. He had his eyes shut and his arms wrapped tightly around his ribcage. As I stood just inside the doorway, panting and trying to quiet my heartbeat, my footsteps silenced by the dust, I saw him raise a hand and scrub at his cheek, then flick his fingers across his eyelids as though chasing away tears. ‘Phinn?’

He jumped so hard that his head bounced off the windowpane. ‘Molly? Ow, what the hell are you doing up here?’

He was trying for composure, trying to pretend everything was normal but I could see the tracks of moisture down his face and the clumpiness of his eyelashes. His eyes looked like walkways into hell.

‘I came to see if you were all right. You looked … if this is about last night then it’s stupid. Unnecessary. That was just a … a nothing.’

He went back to resting his face against the window. ‘No. It’s complicated, Moll. I’ve got no right, no claim, nothing.’ A deep breath in made the cobwebs dance. ‘Just one question though. Did it have to be him?’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’ I walked right into the little room now. It looked as though it had once been a nursery or a maid’s room; bare boards showed a pale square where a rug had once stood in front of a rusty iron firegrate and there was just room for a small bed or a cot against the wall. The dust lay thick and stifling, but the cold was like something solid.

‘You and Link. I shouldn’t be surprised, I know. I mean he’s worth, what, two mill a year? Enough to turn any girl’s head, and most of her other parts as well, but I thought, well, with last night …’

I’d finished the extended limp that had taken me right across the floor and now I stood behind him. Watching his reflection in the dirty window. ‘Writing greetings card rhymes is worth two million pounds a year? I am so in the wrong job.’

A half snort of laughter misted a single pane. ‘No. Writing poetry is just what he does to make him look sensitive. He’s a Trust Fund boy, our Link. I’m surprised you didn’t know, it’s usually the first thing he tells women. And if you know the second thing he tells them, I’m surprised you’re still here.’

‘Is it groin-related?’

Now he turned round completely to let me see the devastation on his face. ‘I’m just thick, Molly, that’s all,’ he said wearily. ‘Thick and ignorant and tired. You’re welcome to him, course you are. Best of luck.’ And he waved a hand which then fell heavily by his side.

‘Why are you being like this? I’m nothing to do with Link. Bloody hell, he’s still stuck somewhere around the Stone Age where women are concerned, isn’t he?’ Cautiously I touched his shoulder. ‘What’s this really about?’

Another huge breath in which I could feel by the way his shoulders moved. ‘Jealousy, betrayal, guilt, oh, you name it I’ve got it. I’m like a walking psychological diagnosis, Molly.’ And now he sighed that breath out. ‘Yesterday Link said something. He didn’t even realise what he’d said, he just carried on as if … it was something Suze told him. Something about me.’

I felt my stomach flip as though the feel of him moving under my hand had closed some circuit around my body. I wanted to clutch at it, to stop it betraying me like this, to reassure myself that it was only hunger or anxiety or even pity making me feel as though my innards were falling into a bottomless pit dragging my heart with them.

‘So Suze talked to Link about you, so what?’ I heard myself say, whilst my brain fought to push my organs back to their rightful places.

‘No. You don’t understand. Suze and Link … he was my best man, course he was, who else would I choose but … they didn’t talk, him and her, not really. Not like that. But he still knew. He quoted her, like what she’d said was important enough to remember. And it made me think and … you know what I think?’

‘You think your wife and Link were having an affair?’

He raised an arm and, with his forearm he rubbed a clear stretch of window. Dust scraped along his skin like a bruise. ‘I’ve been wondering for a while … when she left me, she went to someone. I knew Suze, she’d have got an escape route all lined up before she ran out on our marriage, some guy she’d been running as a second string all along in case things went bad.’

‘I’m sorry, Phinn.’ I gave his shoulder a quick pat. ‘But you might be wrong, you know. You should talk to him.’

He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘Would you? You won’t even answer the phone … talking to Link won’t make it better, it’ll just make me want to curl up and die even more than I do now.’ He turned away from the window and caught at my hand as it slipped from his shoulder. ‘I can feel my whole life sliding away from underneath me, Molly. Everything I was ever certain of, everything I worked for, that I wanted, it’s all moving under my feet so that I can’t tell which way I’m facing any more.’

I looked at his hand where it held mine in a loose grasp. ‘There’s still your work,’ I said tentatively.

‘No. There really isn’t. I walked out on them. Oh, I know I said it was a sabbatical and all that rubbish but … look, I was drunk, I chucked it all in. Wasn’t thinking straight, wasn’t thinking at all, all I knew was that I didn’t want to be there, staring at yet another download from the space telescope and trying to get a bunch of students interested in dark energy measurements. I couldn’t keep doing it, and that’s the truth. So now, here I am, no money, no job and a house that’s so full of ghosts and memories that I can’t tell which decade I’m in.’

He used his sleeve to wipe his eyes as I stood mesmerised, held rigid by the feel of his cold fingers and the soft brush of his sweater sleeve against my arm.

He was half turned towards me, our bodies touching down one side. I could sense the rise and fall of his breathing and see each fine hair where his overlong stubble was struggling to turn to beard against his cheeks. I wanted to step right in, to let his arms close around me. It felt as though I was poised on the edge of some terrible precipice, safe for the moment but at any second and with any movement I would fall. As my heart already had.

‘I need a friend, Molly,’ I heard him say distantly, as though he already lay at the bottom of that immense drop. ‘I just need someone … something right now.’ The grip on my hand tightened.

Various scenarios played through my head. Did I let him know how I felt? Did I tell him that I was afraid that I was falling in love here? Or did I let my body do the talking for me, slide myself inside that dark zone around him until he couldn’t mistake my intentions? And then his words trickled through that pink hazy mind-set, slowed my heartbeat and cooled my brain. That’s how you worked it, not him. You were the one who did the ‘save me, save me’s’, don’t put your MO onto him. He wants a friend. Not a lover. Just a friend. Be told.

‘Mike rang me.’ I let those words blurt out, safe in the knowledge that they’d stop anything else coming through, anything I might regret. ‘He wants you to call him back. Something about, maybe, a job with the BBC?’

Phinn let my hand drop. ‘You are joking.’

‘Nope. A show about science fiction? Something like that. They need a presenter, stat.’ I told him about my sending the YouTube clip and Mike’s Beeb connections and all the while I watched as Phinn’s head came up, his spine straightened and he became the man who’d stood up on that moor with the wind in his hair and the stars in his eyes.

‘Wow. No, really, Molly. Wow.’

‘Yes, wow. Good timing or what?’ I hooked my hair back behind my ears and turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see the slightly desperate look that I was sure must be radiating out of my eyes. ‘You can use my house phone. Better do it soon, I think they’re pretty worried at that end.’

And I limped my way out determined that Phinn would never find out the extent of the way things had suddenly changed for me in that tiny room.