Peach Stone Cave

THE ROOM IS small and low-ceilinged. Its walls are like a polished peach stone, the floor is soft underfoot. It smells of pine and it is dark – so dark that Penny should be afraid. But she never is. She is sure that this blackness will pass, and that somewhere in this tiny cramped place is a doorway, a wormhole that leads to something greater. She feels around blindly, certain the entrance is hereabouts. Sometimes in the dream she imagines she’s searching for a cork lodged in the wall which needs unstoppering. Sometimes it’s a small doorway leading to a minuscule passageway that she will be able to squeeze into. Other times it’s a plug on a chain. Tugging at the chain will open the hole – it will ignite stars and suns and whole solar systems.

The dream always fizzles and dies at the moment she believes she is about to find the gateway. The image peels away, winds race by, and then it’s just plain Penny – lying on her back, blinking at the ceiling in her bedroom at the Old Mill. Her heart thumping loudly.

Instinctively she puts her hand out, reaching for Suki on the other side of the bed. And then she remembers. Ah yes. That part of her life is over. All gone. She lets her hand trail across the quilt, sure there is a faint warmth – as if something living has been there. But it’s her wishful thinking. Her ghost dog.

Again she notices how ragtag the quilt is. There’s a piece missing, she sees – a piece from a dress she used to wear – she remembers it well: a purple, flower-sprigged design with twined leaves. Bell sleeves and an asymmetrical hem. The piece has come unstitched and disappeared. It makes her think of a boy – a boy she knew years and years ago. He used to steal people’s clothes. Tiny scraps: a snip of a blouse here, a thread from a coat there. Poor boy. Poor sick boy. So dangerous and so sad. Penny puts the quilt down and gets out of bed. There’s no time for self-pity –no time to mourn and complain, to cry and regret. This is her busiest time of year, and after two days of nursing Suki the work has piled up.

She throws open the shutters, quickly showers, dresses and pads down the stairs to the ground floor. Her business, Forager’s Fayre – which has been going since before the divorce, before the affair with Graham – operates from this floor. There are two huge industrial cookers at the far end and the brick walls are covered with shelves on which are stacked the tools of her trade. Jam jars, chutney jars, boxes of labels, files containing details of all her customers. The mill was built in the early nineteenth century when the area was thriving on the profits from the wool industry – there’s a whole additional lower storey that has never been modernized; the stream racing down there was harnessed to drive the mill, wash the fleece. She could expand into it, but Forager’s Fayre has worn itself into a comfortable groove in this room. She hasn’t the energy or the desire to make it bigger.

Breakfast is a hunk of bread dipped into the cooled, jellied froth she skims from the tops of her jam vats. Most people throw it away; she saves it in little earthenware bowls in the fridge. Things in this house get reused, recycled.

She goes into the prepping room. Three days ago she took delivery of twenty kilos of medlars. Already semi-bletted, they will need to be turned this morning to rot them thoroughly, ready for jam making. Then there are two dozen straining muslins to be boiled, labels to be printed. She’s not in the mood – not without Suki to keep her company. Nevertheless she ties on her apron, fixes her hair up in a cap, and sets to work.

It’s the muslins that jolt the memory. She has boiled them and is hanging them out in the drying room when a memory of what happened at Upton Farm comes back to her in such a rush it makes her legs weak. It’s something to do with the smell and the distinctive ginger-wine colour on the strainers. She realizes then that this was exactly what she was doing that morning fifteen years ago. The medlars are early this year, just like that year – and that day they were bletting in the drying room, just like they are now. There were muslin strainers hanging out to dry too. It’s the stained cotton and the whispery scent of iron that gets to her. Like dried blood.

She has to go back into the kitchen. She stands there in shock, conscious of how similar it all is – the jars piled up, the lids, the circular discs of wax paper standing by until it’s time to set them on the surface of the jam. In the boot room she can see the steaming mash of seeds she’s dumped ready to take to the compost heap. The same sugar and bubbling-syrup smell is in the air.

On a far shelf, in a gap between the stacks of ‘Penny’s Christmas Chutney’ and the ‘Four-Lane Forgotten Crab-apple Jelly’ is a calendar. She hand-made it one cold December weekend when she’d no orders to fill, no one to see, and nothing better to do – carefully colouring the top panel in the colours of that month, using an old calligraphy pen to hand-letter the days of the week. She crosses to it now and frowns. It’s October. October, the month to collect crab apple and sloe. To start her gin infusions. She goes to it, lifts the page and looks at November – just a few days away. The second of November is All Souls’. The day human beings truly understand the pointlessness of their bodies, and recognize where they really exist – in their spirit. The ancient and mystical day of the dead.

It is fifteen years – almost to the day, since Isaac Handel killed his parents.