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“No but smells sometimes feel like colours.” I give him a helpless and apologetic grin. “I’m not insane, really I’m not.”
This time he laughs.
“So, why were you walking with your eyes shut?”
His face grows slowly serious. “I was trying to imagine myself in Scotland.”
I can’t help laughing. “Are you Scottish?”
He shakes his head, and for some reason, the tentative ease of a moment ago feels heavier. Unless it’s me getting tongue tied. Really tongue-tied, after all that waffle about the air and the colours, my words have dried up.
His hand goes to the bag under his arm. “Excuse me.” He fiddles with the papers. “Erm… I’d better get this lot inside and cleaned up.” he says, looking away.
Could it be the sudden gust of cold air that reminded him of his wet clothes? He bends down to right his fallen suitcase, then pulls up the handle.
“It was nice to meet you.” he gives me a very quick polite smile and turns to go. He hasn’t told me his name, but it seems too late for that now.
I resist the temptation to watch him walk away, to find out where he’s going. He must be a neighbour because Catcher Lane doesn’t lead anywhere else unless it’s the edge of the hill overlooking the sea. And it’s not swimming weather, so he must be going to the last house on the lane, the big one, even bigger than ours, also grey in stone but three stories high.
Chapter Five
Hal
I never thought I’d be back on La Canette. When the letter came, inviting all ‘absentee lease-holders’ to attend a public meeting with the seigneur, my mother insisted we should just ignore it.
What have the seigneurs of La Canette ever done for us? Where were they when we needed help? She fumed.
True, we owe the island nothing.
Don’t go. There’s nothing for us there, your poor father’s dead, now, and that whole sorry chapter is finished.
Also true. But the invitation made a lightbulb come on in my head. We’ve never had financial security. Not that we’re poor, now. I have a good job and a flat in the centre of Milton Keynes. My mother bought a small house in one of the villages nearby. And my sister is married to a tax inspector. But we are all teetering on the edge and one step in the wrong direction would put us back on the breadline. Mum is sixty but will have to work another ten years to pay off her mortgage. I am stuck in a job I don’t really like because I need the higher income, and my sister... she is the biggest reason I’m here.
Haneen would never admit she needed help, but any fool with eyes can see her marriage is awful. I don’t want her to stay with that man only because she has no options, or because she’s too afraid of condemning her little daughter to the same life we had to endure.
So, here I am, back on La Canette, to sleep for the last time in our family house and tomorrow I’ll go to that public meeting and tell the seigneur that we are going to sell.
And then the chapter will finally be closed.
Of course, I don’t expect Low Catch house to look the same, after all, it’s been standing empty for a couple of years.
Even so, as I turn off the lane and into our front garden, it saddens me to see the peeling paint. One of the shutters on the upper floor hangs off its hinges, overgrown weeds and dead leaves clog the path, and the wooden gate is swollen shut with the rain and needs a very big shove to open.
The real shock, though, is inside. I don’t remember our entry hall looking like a barn. It used to have a beautiful antique console table, a rug, two chandeliers, paintings on the walls. And it used to smell of beeswax and polish. Now it smells of dust and old age. It’s also cold and draughty thanks to the broken window. The same window that caused us to leave the island twenty-two years ago.
A beautiful Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass semicircle above the front door.
I close my eyes and hear my mother’s voice that night.I’m not raising my kids where villagers throw stones at us, she wept, hurrying from bedroom to bedroom collecting our clothes and packing them.
“I’m not letting them drive me out.” My father’s hands shook with anger as he collected the shards of broken stained glass and gaffer-taped them together. “This is my home. The Hemingways have lived here for three-hundred years.”
It seems he never got round to changing the window. Probably, because he wanted to hold on to the fragments of blue and red glass like he tried to hold on to the fragments of his family.
My proud stubborn father.
Taking the wooden stairs two at a time, I dump my things on the floor at the top. The landing is empty too, the polished table with a Crown Derby porcelain vase is gone. I open the bedroom doors. Bare, all of them except for my parents’ room, and that’s even worse than bare. There’s a bed, not my parents’ four poster, but a cheap single. Someone has stripped all the linen and left it folded on a small bedside chest. I can’t recognise anything here. Either Dad put everything in storage, or someone pillaged the house after the funeral.
A draught whistles up the stairs and knifes under my wet clothes. My teeth actually chatter. I strip on the way to the bathroom and drop my wet muddy things on the floor before going in. Then I stop and look around unable to believe my eyes.
