It took me a week to sort the jumbled assortment of thoughts in my head into cohesive action. An inquest was opened and adjourned, apparently absolutely normally, I wasn’t required to attend but did anyway, and the police kept me up to date with slightly diffident phone calls. I managed to ascertain the rough location of the Fortune House and get compassionate leave from my job – although Sheila, the office manager, did remark that ‘compassionate leave’ was being rather stretched as a term – but we had policies for spousal bereavement, which I insisted on keeping to, even though ‘spousal’ was even more stretched as a term.
I couldn’t explain, not to her, nor Malcolm, nor any of the others at Welsh’s Windows why I felt this need to see where Grant died. Maybe it was a kind of morbid curiosity, or maybe I was searching for a definite closure to our marriage, but whatever it was, I wanted to go there and find out what was so special about that bit of moorland that it had drawn my resolutely urban-dwelling husband out of town.
It was a week to the day after I’d been so abruptly woken that I found myself, rucksacked and booted, following a tiny trail on an enormous map, to try to find the Fortune House. The map had to be large in order to have the scale necessary to even locate the track, and it flapped and bent in the wind like a sail. I kept losing my place and having to sit on small clumps of damp heather to try to find myself again, tracing my route with a fingernail whilst fighting off disturbing memories of a long-ago Duke of Edinburgh expedition across similar terrain. I hadn’t liked the wide, stretched skies or the featureless curves of moorland any more twenty years ago than I did now. The knee-high growth concealed random holes and boggy patches, and I bucked and plunged my way along with my map-sheet flapping, like a schooner breasting the waves of the Atlantic.
I didn’t do walking. I didn’t go in for the waterproofed gallivanting around mountains and hills with names like Black Ghyll and other medieval barons. My hobbies tended toward the sedentary – TV, magazines, avoiding housework, things like that – not this relentless striding across featureless landscapes occasionally interrupted by faceplanting into thorny bushes or sudden knee-deep squelches into hidden bogs.
‘I am not an outdoor person,’ I breathed heavily to myself, adjusting the straps of the rucksack borrowed from Malcolm, who was our entire accounts department. ‘My natural habitat comes courtesy of Sofaworld, and the only wildlife I want to see has David Attenborough attached. Oh, bugger.’ I caught my foot in yet another snarl of skeletal growth and unseen pothole and dropped to my knees yet again. ‘But, more to the point, what the hell was Grant doing out here? And now I’m talking to myself, well, this is it now. I might as well go home and buy seventeen cats and resign myself to being a woman who mutters to herself in supermarkets.’
I pulled myself up to standing and found I was being watched. Up until now, my relentless hours of moorland walk had only been observed by inscrutable sheep or birds that I hadn’t paid any attention to because of the lack of wildlife narration accompanying them. But it seemed that my most recent lurch had brought me into someone’s eyeline and from this lower level I could see a man, hand up to shade his eyes from the light, watching me from behind a narrow clump of windswept trees halfway between me and infinite distance.
He was an outline, a sketch against the somewhat uneven horizon of burgeoning heather and gorse bushes, rocks and sky. I couldn’t make out much detail, other than dark clothing, dark hair blowing in the wind and the raised arm, which indicated he was facing my way and probably laughing himself into a hernia from watching my progress across the terrain. I felt myself blush, a sickening creep of heat from my shins to my cheeks, and I stood up again, trying to look as though I’d just dropped to my knees to examine a particularly interesting example of foliage. Maybe he was a walker, a picnicker off the beaten track, or one of the subset of ramblers that seemed to enjoy this social deprivation and sensory overload. Anyway, he wasn’t my problem.
But he didn’t move and, following my fingernail-traced line, I began to close on him. It became evident that the lip of hill where he was standing concealed my destination and I tried to work on an insouciant expression and jaunty stride so that I would look like a habitual walker by the time I reached him. There had been something about that slender dark outline against the heather that made me not want to look like someone who only went outside to fetch the milk in when I reached him.
Everything conspired against me. Roots caught at my ankles, small splashes of junior bogland soaked my socks and I was hot and sweaty and red-faced, realising that the stone and a half that I’d gradually put on almost unnoticed over the last couple of years – that stone and a half that had tipped me over the edge from ‘well rounded’ to ‘definitely plump’ – wasn’t conducive to several miles of off-road walking. Plus, the last bit of the walk was up a steep slope and the weight of my rucksack kept dragging me backwards, so I made it to the lip of the gulley where the man stood whilst giving the impression of one who was tied to an invisible companion by bungee cord. To make things worse, from the looks of it, the man had watched me every inch of my approach, because he was casually leaning against one of the gnarly stunted trees as I breasted the final rise and came face to face with him.
He wasn’t alone. There was a woman there too, sitting on a rug on a patch of grass with her knees drawn up under her chin. Sunlight, dappled to pointillism by the trees and the frequent clouds, illuminated her and made it clear that she was crying. It looked as though I had walked all those miles over the landscape only to drop in on a Wuthering Heights remake.
‘Hello.’ I tried to smile and pass on by, although where I would have passed on to, given that this site was drawn all over in highlight pen on my map, I wasn’t sure.
The man moved away from the trees and towards the crying woman, putting a protective arm around her shoulders as though I was about to go for her. ‘It’s all right,’ I heard him say softly. ‘Jen, please don’t cry again.’
It looked like a stage set or a magazine shoot; slivers of sunlight falling on the tartan picnic rug and the blonde-haired woman in her cute dungarees, and highlighting the dark-haired man who bent over her in such a concerned way. Only a slight haze in the air and a faint smell reminiscent of kilns spoiled the illusion of emotional turmoil in nature. The woman dropped her head further onto her knees and sobbed harder.
The man straightened away, with a squeeze of her shoulder, and came over to me. He was dark and slender and had a pleasing arrangement of features, stubble and cheekbones that made me feel even bigger and pinker and plainer. ‘Are you lost?’
‘I’m looking for the Fortune House.’ I waved my map as though to indicate my inability to become mislaid.
The man raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve found it.’ He pointed to somewhere slightly further up the dip. ‘Well, what’s left of it. There was a fire a couple of weeks ago so there’s not much to see now.’ He looked me up and down. ‘Professional interest?’
What an odd phrase. Or maybe he thought I was a fire investigator? I assumed anyone trying to look into the explosion and fire would have at least had an iPad. All I had was a Ford Fiesta parked on the road three miles away, borrowed gear and a lot of sweat.
‘No. My… someone I knew died in the fire. I came to…’ To what? Pay my respects to a man who’d dumped me, leaving me with a house we were supposed to be renovating and a diminished sense of self-esteem? Why had I come? Really? ‘To see where he died,’ I finished, rather lamely.
The man waved a hand again. ‘It’s this way.’
The woman had looked up, finally. Her face was tracked with tears, and she looked genuinely distraught. ‘You knew Grant?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He was… I mean, we were married. But a long time ago.’
The woman got to her feet. Despite the dungarees’ best attempts, I could see she was slim, as fine-boned and attractive as the dark man still hovering around beneath the trees. ‘You’re Alice? Grant talked a lot about you. My name’s Jenna Allbright.’
She didn’t clarify her relationship with Grant, but she didn’t need to. Her tears and the fact that she was exactly his type, blonde and girlish and long-legged, told me everything I needed to know. I looked at the man and my look must have held a question.
‘I’m Max Allbright. I’m Jenna’s brother. This was my site.’
‘Your…?’
‘This place has a reputation for being haunted and I’ve been conducting research into the psychology of ghost hunting here.’ He looked behind him, as though the ghosts might be hiding somewhere among the rocks and trees. ‘It’s a fascinating place.’
I couldn’t see anything fascinating about it. Boulders, tufts of sprouting bracken uncurling like cautious snails from their shells, those finger-like trees.
‘This is the place that I really feel could prove something.’ He didn’t seem to be talking to me any more, it was as if he was muttering to himself. ‘I’ve been trying to get evidence – I’m writing a book. Grant was getting interested too, and he’d started to come along. Sometimes.’
I felt myself gaping and forced myself to close my mouth. ‘Grant actually went on ghost hunts? With you? Out here?’
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t square the memory of my husband, whose entire view of the supernatural could have been contained in the phrase ‘never really thought about it, but Buffy was hot’, sitting out here in this forsaken wilderness waiting for spectral activity. It just didn’t compute, like trying to imagine Marie Kondo in a chip shop.
‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘You wanted to see the house?’
Wanted was a strong word for the emotion I had. But I hadn’t trudged three miles off road out of mild curiosity, something had driven me out here, even if it was a feeling I still didn’t really want to analyse. Loss? The absolute ending of something? But that something had ended six years ago, when Grant had given me the ‘I need to explore, find myself, do other things.’ I had retorted that he was so beige he could find himself perfectly well using a magnolia paint chart and how had I ever stopped him doing anything he’d wanted to, when all he seemingly wanted to do was sit and watch TV, eat whatever meal I put in front of him and have no opinion on anything, ever?
It hadn’t occurred to me then, and it had only struck me later, that what he’d really meant was that he’d met someone else, someone who’d found his vacillations and his lack of definition as charming as I had before I’d been married to it. And when the pain of rejection and the fear of having to manage on one income had faded, I had silently wished her well, whoever she was. It wouldn’t have been this leggy blonde, who was still crying; tears making her skin shimmer and bringing her into even sharper contrast with my ruddy cheeks and damp hair. Even my eyebrows were sweating. Six years ago, she would have been, by the looks of it, still at school.
‘I came…’ I tailed off. ‘I’m not sure why,’ I finished, honesty winning out under the man’s gaze. ‘It all sounds so unlike Grant – so unlike the Grant I knew,’ I corrected myself. After all, people change. But could Grant really have changed that much?
Neither of them answered me. We all stood, a tableau of confused misery, with the breeze drying the sweat on my face and down my back and whipping Jenna’s hair behind her in a stream of gold. My hair, of course, was blowing into my face and getting stuck to my damp forehead, making it look as though I was under attack from my own head.
‘I’ll show you the site.’ The man, Max, finally broke our increasingly embarrassed deadlock with a sweep of his arm in the direction of the head of the tiny valley. ‘Leave your rucksack here, it’s a bit of a scramble.’
I hesitated again. The rucksack was concealing the sweaty streak that my T-shirt had become, and its overloaded heftiness at least gave me an excuse for my inelegant perambulations thus far. But Max was holding a hand out in a way that indicated he might forcibly strip it from my back if I didn’t take it off, and so I reluctantly shrugged my way clear of the straps to let it fall heavily onto the grass.
‘Were you going to camp?’ Jenna asked curiously, as the bag failed to crumple but stood upright like a scarecrow’s torso, teetering on the rutted edge of the gulley.
‘No, I just brought a few things I thought I might need,’ I answered in as dignified way as I could, following her brother as he began to lead the way along the side of the hill. I definitely wasn’t going to admit to being so ill-prepared for this jaunt into the wilderness that I’d brought a large wool duffel coat, an umbrella and a thick jumper, all of which were currently giving my rucksack its paunch. I hadn’t thought to pack any food, or water, and my body was letting me know how foolish this particular oversight had been with little stomach gurgles and an incipient headache.
Max had vanished around a bend, hidden by a clump of weedy-looking trees with thin trunks scraping and waving against the pale sky. Their roots looked horribly veiny and gristly, clinging on to the thin soil and winding around the grey rocks that broke the ground as though the earth were bringing its bones to the surface. I stumbled, scraped my knee on shattered stone and had to use my arms to balance myself as, following the distant shape, I scrambled and slid down and around, until I stopped, horrified.
It wasn’t a house any more. In fact, it was hard to tell it had ever been a house, it looked more like a demolition site after a run in with a hurricane; bricks littered the ground in a huge circle around a confused mass of crater, ash, dust, the odd skeletal piece of wooden beam reaching out to the sky, and shattered tiles. There was still a vague feeling of heat, but that could have been me after the exertion of clambering around the ghyll.
Shadows gathered around the base of the ruins, ebbing and flowing with the light as clouds scudded across the sun. The little scoop of valley felt a million miles from any town or civilisation, and I found myself shivering a bit, despite the warmth.
‘Oh.’ It was all I could say. ‘Oh.’
Grant had died here. Blown to smithereens with the walls, roof and furniture. Anything left of him was buried under the remnants of the house, although it was hard to tell what had actually been the house and what had been thrown by the force of the explosion. But this narrow little pleat in the hillside, these anaemic trees and their accompanying whippy branches and forelimb protuberances grasping at the ground would have been the last things he saw.
For one over-imaginative moment, the place felt haunted.
I tried again to imagine Grant here. Small, unremarkable man, nondescript hair, clothes that always just were, nothing trendy but nothing old-fashioned, as though he were a time traveller that absolutely must not be noticed. Eyes a vague colour somewhere between brown and green, hair neither blond nor dark. A man with, I’d always believed, no thoughts, no original ideas. Here. In this maelstrom of life, with the wind flattening the ground cover and random examples of wildlife peeping and fluttering all over. A sky that stretched like a bucket of spilled milk over the top, white and featureless and serving only to trap the weather underneath it. Grant. Here?
‘Are you all right?’ The unasked-for concern in Max’s voice made my eyes prickle.
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ I kept my gaze on the gently smoking ruins so that the tears that threatened to surprise me didn’t fall. ‘I can’t imagine why the hell Grant would be out here, of all places. I mean,’ I started to gabble, to justify my frozen face, ‘I know people change but it’s only six years, not six decades, can anyone change that much in such a short space of time? Without, like, masses of therapy and introspection and self-analysis and Grant didn’t do introspection. He didn’t do extrospection either, come to that. Is that a word? Extrospection? Well, he didn’t do it, whatever it was. Life happened to Grant, he didn’t do anything.’
I ran out of breath and stopped on a gasp with that wrecked, tumbled building burning itself onto my retinas.
There was a light touch on my shoulder. ‘It’s still a shock.’ The voice was soft now. ‘You cared, once. That doesn’t just go away.’
I sighed and turned around. Without the weight of the rucksack, to which I had become accustomed, and with the gradient of the little valley, I spun faster and more clumsily than I’d intended and almost whipped myself into Max’s arms. I had to grab at his wrist to stop myself stumbling against him and precipitating the pair of us over the brick-strewn ground. He braced us both.
‘There’s a flask of tea back with Jenna,’ he said, without commenting on my gracelessness. ‘Would you like some? You probably need to sit down after seeing this.’ He nodded behind him. ‘And I think Jenna might like to talk to you about your husband.’ His tone was kind, and I felt my eyes prickle again.
I didn’t want to talk about Grant. I didn’t even want to think about Grant. I was pink with embarrassment at my clumsiness, sweaty and moist, and comparing myself unfavourably with the blonde slenderness of Jenna and her sardonic, good-looking brother. I wanted to go home, have a hot bath and forget this place of ear-splitting silence and smouldering ruin.
But instead, I followed the dark, assured Max back along the vertiginous gulley to the picnic rug and a lot of questions.