Starve Acre Read online

  For the pelage, skin, muscle and fat to have rotted so cleanly and for the skeleton to be so perfectly preserved the animal had to have died naturally and lain in the field for some time. Richard wondered if he’d come across a collapsed rabbit warren. Not that the hare would have dug out the tunnel itself, but if it had been sick and old then it might well have commandeered some quiet hollow under the ground in which to expire. Either that, or the animal had been interred here deliberately. It was the kind of thing his father might have done in his last manic days at Starve Acre. Perhaps he’d found the hare on the lane and laid it to rest as he’d done with any dead thing he came across: spiders, birds, mice, he’d given them all a proper burial.

  However they had come to be here, Richard couldn’t leave the remains to be nosed apart by whatever came sniffing around, and so he took off his coat, laid it down and began to pick the bones out of the hole. Each one came away cleanly from its neighbour and in his hands they felt stronger than they looked, robust enough to be carried home.

  As so few people passed Starve Acre, it was possible to tell from the tenor of an engine who was coming before they appeared. There was a subtle difference between the Drewitts’ tractor and the Burnsalls’; between the laboured shudders of the Westburys’ cattle truck and the whine and backfire of Gordon Lambwell’s Bedford. A stranger could not help but herald their own arrival.

  Just before one, Richard heard an unfamiliar car coming up the lane and eventually Juliette’s sister, Harrie, approached in her tea-coloured Austin, the headlights bright in the gloom. When she pulled into the driveway, she sat for a few moments regarding the house and the piles of snow. He knew she’d be asking herself the same questions as always. How had Juliette ended up in such a place? Was this really what she wanted?

  Having braced herself for the cold air, she got out, buttoned up a long sheepskin coat and lifted her suitcase from the boot. With her other hand, she opened one of the back doors and a little Pekinese dog jumped down on to the icy gravel. She was a haughty creature and, despite being told not to, she cocked her leg and pissed against the tyre. When she had finished, Harrie attached her lead and then yanked her over to the front steps.

  Richard waited until Harrie had rung for a third time before letting her in and found her sour-faced and shivering on the porch.

  ‘I was starting to think you weren’t actually at home,’ she said, staring at his grimy shirt and trousers as she wiped her feet on the mat.

  ‘Didn’t hear you, sorry,’ said Richard and brought her case inside, placing it by the stairs to take up later.

  Juliette had told her not to come, but of course Harrie hadn’t taken any notice and so a compromise had been reached. She would stay a few days, a week at the most. But it felt as if she’d brought enough for a month.

  ‘I did say one o’clock,’ she said over the sound of the yapping dog. ‘Didn’t Juliette tell you?’

  ‘I must have lost track of time,’ Richard replied.

  She didn’t believe him, and told him so with a flat look before taking off her scarf.

  Under her coat she wore a twin-set the same shade as her car. The blouse was a modest green. Her shoes smugly practical. She had always seemed so much older than Juliette, mostly because she was the veteran of one marriage already – a brief shackling to a wealthy, violent man called Rod who’d put her in hospital more than once. By contrast, marriage number two was happily staid and predictable. She and Graham had three children: wholesome twin boys and a little girl called Shona who was dressed like a doll and given expensive presents that generally turned out to be temporary novelties. She might well have loved and petted Cass, the Pekinese, on Christmas morning but by New Year’s Day the animal had probably been sent out to the garden. Now Cass was her mother’s responsibility.

  She barked again and Harrie picked her up.

  ‘So, how is she today?’ she said, resigned already to her sister being no better.

  ‘She’s just getting dressed,’ said Richard. He found it a pleasure to lie to her.

  ‘At this time? You know she really ought to be up and about much earlier,’ Harrie said, closing her eyes as the dog licked the underside of her chin.

  ‘She doesn’t sleep well,’ said Richard. ‘She gets tired.’

  ‘Tired? How can she be tired when she’s in bed all day? She’s lethargic. There is a difference. When was the last time she went out of the house?’

  ‘Monday,’ said Richard. That was also untrue. Juliette hadn’t been out for months.

  ‘Well, that’s one thing I can do,’ said Harrie. ‘Make sure she gets plenty of fresh air. I mean, that is why you moved here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Look, don’t expect too much of her,’ Richard said. ‘She won’t be any different just because you’ve come.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harrie, arranging her hair in the mirror. ‘It seems to me that if Juliette’s going to get better then a change is exactly what she needs.’

  ‘You’re not going to talk her out of it,’ Richard insisted. ‘She’s made up her mind about this Mrs Forde coming over.’

  Harrie plainly thought otherwise and moved past him to the stairs with the dog under her arm.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Richard said.

  ‘She must be dressed by now,’ replied Harrie. ‘That was what you said, wasn’t it? That she was awake and getting dressed?’

  ‘I’ll go. Let me bring her down,’ said Richard and Harrie stepped aside with a smile, her first skirmish won.

  Outside what had been Ewan’s room Richard could hear Juliette’s soft breathing. She had evidently cried herself back to sleep and he stepped in quietly.

  From a neutral white nursery, the room had become an honouring of all things boyish as Ewan got older. Racing cars circuited the walls in a frieze that Richard had spent a day trying to level and still wasn’t quite right. Juliette had decorated the gable end with a cartoon of a smiling dragon and on the ceiling a spiral galaxy spun around the lampshade. The shelves that Richard had built were full of books about castles and knights, tenacious dogs and witless giants. Under the window, next to the rocking chair in which Juliette had fed Ewan the breast and the bottle, a wooden train track lay in an ampersand of curves and bridges with a little red steam engine waiting at the station.

  It was all as Ewan had left it. Even his bedsheets hadn’t been changed. Richard hated coming in here and often didn’t, preferring to communicate with Juliette through the wood of the door, or to leave her alone altogether if she were being as hurtful as she’d been that morning.

  Having another child wouldn’t be a replacement. He hadn’t meant that at all. Of course he missed Ewan. How could she think that he didn’t? What did she want to see? His broken heart on a platter?

  But that wasn’t what they’d actually been arguing about. Juliette was simply angry that he’d asked the same question again: ‘Is this really what you want? For this woman to come?’

  ‘You don’t need to say it with such contempt.’

  ‘But is it?’

  ‘More than anything,’ she replied.

  There’d been an urgency to her voice. Richard knew that she was desperate not to slip back to how she’d been in the first few weeks after Ewan’s death. She’d gone about in physical pain. She’d moved from one room to another with uncertainty, as though she were lost in her own home. It had been the same for him too. Each day he felt disorientated and nauseous, oddly disconnected from what was happening in the land of the unbereaved. He found himself shaking for no particular reason. He drank too much and ate too little. He couldn’t sit still. His dreams were barbaric.

  The new term hadn’t come quickly enough.

  Months had passed since then, but time felt too insubstantial to be a buffer against a return to those feelings. Still, the problem was his own. This Mrs Forde and her friends certainly wouldn’t provide the solution.

  ‘What if nothing happens when she comes?’ he’d said. ‘Where will that leave you
?’

  ‘You don’t have to be there,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’d rather you kept away, if you’re determined to ruin it for me.’

  ‘I’ve already organised with Gordon to take the test,’ Richard told her. ‘I’m going to see him tonight.’

  Expecting her to be angry with him for making the arrangement behind her back, he’d got in first with, ‘I thought you’d be pleased, Juliette.’

  ‘I might have been, if you weren’t intent on treating me like a child, Richard.’

  ‘Can’t I be concerned for you?’

  ‘I don’t want you there just because you think I need protecting.’

  ‘But you know nothing about these people.’

  ‘I know Gordon. I trust him. Don’t you?’

  ‘I trust the man, certainly,’ Richard answered. ‘His ideas, no.’

  ‘Then you stay in your study when they come.’

  ‘I’m not letting you see them on your own.’

  She smiled with a quiet assurance. ‘Yes, well, I don’t think you’ll have much choice. You won’t pass the test. You’re too cynical.’

  ‘What’s wrong with wanting some proof?’

  ‘This is proof,’ she said, brandishing her notebook at him. ‘I’m not mad, Richard, despite what you think.’

  The pages were filled with lists of all the moments of contact she’d had with Ewan since the funeral. Lists that had become much shorter in the last few weeks, sending her into an even deeper despondency. Hoping to pick up the faintest traces of Ewan that she believed were still left in his room, she used Richard’s portable Sony to make recordings each evening and had filled the place with mirrors. They sat on the window ledge and the chest of drawers, on the bedside table and against the walls, so that wherever Richard looked one reflected another and the room fell away into infinity.

  When she was asleep under the covers he could sometimes pretend that there was nothing wrong with her at all. It didn’t seem impossible that she might wake up one morning restored, her mind settled by simple rest. Yet rest was hard to come by, not only because her senses were so alert all the time but because of what she slept on. Since Ewan had gone, she’d spent every night here on a mattress she’d dragged up from one of the other bedrooms. She’d kept it from her days at nursing college and the fabric had turned so threadbare that the spirals of the springs were showing through. It got cold in Ewan’s room too and during the night she’d taken the patchwork throw off the rocking chair and added it to the layers of blankets that were pulled tight to her body.

  Kneeling down, Richard put his hand on her shoulder. She stirred and blinked at him, recoiling from his touch.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s just me.’

  She glanced around the room, looking, as always, for Ewan.

  ‘Harrie’s here,’ he said.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘It is one.’

  ‘I can’t see her now,’ Juliette said. ‘Tell her I’m tired.’

  He watched the thin muscles in her neck moving under her skin as she rolled away from him. Given all that had happened, it was hardly strange that she’d lost weight but lately he thought that the bone of her clavicle looked even more prominent and her cheeks sharper. If he could hold her body against his, he would no doubt be shocked at how slight she was, but they hadn’t shared a bed for months now. It had been his suggestion – if Juliette could only find rest in Ewan’s room, then so be it. Yet he lay awake most nights in the hope that she might slip in beside him. She never did. She would only ever wake him if she thought Ewan was in the house.

  ‘Stop staring,’ she said, her mouth against the pillow. ‘I can feel you looking at me.’

  ‘You’d better get up,’ said Richard. ‘You know what Harrie’s like. She’ll only come and fetch you herself.’

  ‘So?’ said Juliette. ‘Let her. Then I can tell her to piss off in person.’

  ‘You’d say that to her, would you?’

  ‘She’s wasting her time,’ Juliette said. ‘I’m not changing my mind. I’ve waited too long.’

  Richard went down to the kitchen and while he was making tea and listening to Harrie talk about Graham and the children, Juliette appeared in a black turtleneck and the jeans she wore day in, day out.

  Harrie left her cigarette in the ashtray and got up to hug her.

  ‘You look thinner,’ she said as the dog who’d been removed from her knee pined for attention.

  ‘What have you brought that thing for?’ said Juliette.

  Harrie scooped the animal into her arms and sat down again. ‘They’d all ignore you at home, wouldn’t they?’ she said. ‘Poor Cass. Aren’t you eat-ing, Jules?’

  ‘I’m eating,’ said Juliette. ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘But are you eating enough?’ said Harrie, looking her over. ‘You’re nothing but bones, girl.’

  Juliette took a seat on the other side of the table.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I told you on the phone you didn’t need to come.’

  ‘I thought you might want to see your family,’ said Harrie. ‘Or is that too ridiculous?’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ said Juliette.

  ‘It’s not just about you. What about Mum and Dad?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘You can’t keep telling them not to come or ignoring their phone calls. It’s unfair. I hate the fact that I’ve had to keep this secret from them.’

  Since Christmas, Juliette had been finding various ways to prevent anyone from visiting. She’d only given in to her sister on the proviso she came to Starve Acre alone.

  ‘All they do is fuss,’ said Juliette. ‘It’s not helpful.’

  ‘But you need people around you, Jules.’

  ‘I’ve got people around me already. People who understand.’

  ‘Aye, so I hear,’ said Harrie, picking her cigarette out of the ashtray.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That you’re still determined to welcome these headcases into your house. And I don’t know what that look’s for. Time was you’d have called them worse than that yourself.’

  ‘Well, I was as ignorant then as you are now.’

  ‘You don’t believe in all this crap, do you, Richard?’ said Harrie.

  ‘Juliette and I have already had this conversation,’ he replied.

  ‘And you’re still letting her have them over?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Juliette. ‘He’s not letting me do anything. I don’t need anyone’s permission.’

  ‘Take some advice then,’ said Harrie. ‘Tell them not to come. This isn’t the way to get over what happened to Ewan.’

  ‘And you’d know, would you?’

  Richard could see that Harrie was on the verge of losing her temper. She exhaled and clipped the ash off the end of her cigarette.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s not just me. Mum and Dad would say the same. Especially Mum. You know what she’s like about this kind of thing.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Ouija boards and table tapping.’

  ‘That’s not what the Beacons do,’ Juliette replied. ‘They’re not that kind of group.’

  ‘The Beacons?’ said Harrie. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ said Juliette. ‘You know nothing about it.’

  ‘I know they’ll fill your head with all kinds of nonsense,’ Harrie said. ‘And that’s the last thing you need at the moment.’

  ‘And what do I need?’

  ‘To come back to the real world, Jules. You won’t get better by locking yourself away.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Please,’ said Harrie. ‘I know for a fact you haven’t set foot outside that front door since the last time I came to see you.’

  Juliette said nothing. Harrie sent the dog away and moved closer.

  ‘Look, no one’s insisting that you go back to work tomorrow,’ she went on. ‘But you do need to get out of this house. Not for long. Just a wee walk somew
here. See how it is.’

  ‘I have been out,’ said Juliette.

  Harrie shook her head. ‘Jules, you know that I’ve always been able to tell when you’re lying.’

  The hierarchy reaffirmed, Juliette’s belligerence fell away and she looked at her sister as she might have done when they were children. She could only plead for Harrie to understand.

  ‘He’s still here in the house, Harriet,’ she said. ‘I know he is.’

  ‘Oh, Jules, come on,’ said Harrie, docking her cigarette. ‘Whatever you think you’ve seen or heard, it’s not real. Ewan’s dead, love.’

  Juliette began to cry and Harrie embraced her, looking at Richard as if to excuse him from the table.

  He took Harrie’s case up to the spare bedroom and then went to the study, hoping to shut himself away and examine the hare’s bones more closely. But Harrie being in the house had brought Ewan back to the forefront of his mind. He could see the boy sitting across the kitchen table from his auntie, staring at the scar Rod had given her. A white, three-inch tick from the time he’d shattered her cheekbone with his heel. Ewan had no idea where the injury had come from but with a child’s intuition he seemed to associate it with Harrie’s terseness. To him, she carried her unpleasant past with her like a scent and he always kept his distance whenever she visited.

  Once, Richard caught him putting the final touches to a portrait of a heavily built woman dressed in brown, her eyes manic, her teeth like a shark’s. Richard censured him about it because he had to, really, and told him to keep it under his bed so that Auntie Harriet wouldn’t see. Ewan did as he was told but Richard couldn’t work out if he was embarrassed, angry or pleased with himself. He had a thousand different expressions. Richard remembered them all. And yet he never once thought that he could read the boy.

  Thoughts of Ewan crowded in, rapidly growing large and loud as they’d done that morning. Trying without success to will them away, Richard turned his attention to the shelves instead and searched for the volume on mammal anatomy that he remembered seeing some while ago. Somewhere.

  The study was overrun with his father’s books. Richard had started trying to catalogue them years before and was still doing so now, in what felt like a Herculean labour. The mess continued to astound him, not least how quickly it had been achieved.