The Wife Before Me(69)
‘It’s on the postmark.’ She shows him the envelope. ‘A friend told me she’s living on a peninsula called after a horse. Is there anywhere like that around here?’
‘The nearest peninsula is Magdalen’s Head. Nothing horsy about that.’ He puffs vigorously on his pipe and observes her through a pall of smoke.
‘Is there a riding stable nearby?’ She can’t give up on Leanne Rossiter yet. ‘Could there be a farm or a pub with a horsy name?’
‘Not to my mind, there isn’t. But, wait a minute, now.’ He removes the pipe from his mouth and studies the bowl. ‘We call it Mag’s Head for short. Your friend wouldn’t have got it wrong and called it Nag’s Head, by any chance?’
‘I’ve no idea. How far away is it?’
‘About twenty miles out the road. It’s a lovely spot but lonely, I always think. Now that I remember, there’s a woman living there called Annie Ross, if that’s any help to you. The only reason I know her name is because she came to me once looking for a soldering iron. I used to run the hardware store here. Retired since then. It’s been turned into a Chinese, so it has. I didn’t have what she wanted and that was the only time I’d any contact with her.’
Leanne Rossiter… Anne… Annie Ross. It’s too vague to be taken seriously, yet Elena is filled with a tingling elation. That sense, again, that she is being guided by Amelia. ‘I’ll check her out. How can I get there?’
He checks his watch. ‘There’s a bus leaving here in about an hour. It runs by the foot of the headland. Most of the houses on Mag’s Head are deserted. Too much wind and too little to do for the young ones. You should have no bother finding her place. That’s if she’s still there.’ He lifts his cap to her and prepares to move on. ‘Good luck with your search.’
Below them, the heron opens its wings with a languid flap and flies away. The dog, rising, scratches his belly with a back foot before ambling on.
* * *
Elena’s stomach lurches when the bus driver turns another corner. She is the only person left on the bus. The surging rim of the Atlantic weaves in and out of view along the corkscrew road before finally disappearing behind a soaring headland.
A few shabby buildings crouch at the foot of Mag’s Head. A small pub with boarded-up windows and a padlock on the front door suggests that the locals once gathered there. Two rusting petrol pumps stand in the shell of a one-time forecourt. This is the village that time forgot. Elena almost expects to see a bale of tumbleweed wheeling towards her. The only shop, Lily Howe’s Grocery Provisions, although open and lit by a fluorescent tube, is empty of both customers and staff. She coughs loudly to attract attention. The shop is too small to be called a supermarket, yet its cramped interior contains everything from waders, hardware and groceries, with sacks of turf and coal stacked outside.
An elderly woman in dungarees and a grey topknot puts her head round a wooden partition. ‘Looking for directions, are you?’ she asks in the resigned tone of someone who has had to give out the same information too many times.
‘Yes.’ Elena moves closer to the counter. ‘I’m looking for a woman called Annie Ross. I believe she lives around here.’
‘She does and she doesn’t.’ The woman has a high, rolling timbre to her voice, as if she is only a note away from breaking into song. ‘I haven’t seen her for a while so she could be abroad. She does that, sometimes.’
‘Is her house easy to find?’
‘It is, if you’re an eagle.’ She juts her thumb towards the headland, which is visible from the window. ‘For us mere mortals, it’s a different matter. Are you on foot?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I hope you’ve got your walking clogs on.’ She nods approvingly when she sees Elena’s mountain boots. ‘She lives near the summit. You’ll see a windbreak of trees and her gate is just beyond.’ She waves her hand around the counter, where a display of sweets and buns are on display. ‘Can I get anything for you?’
The buns look surprisingly fresh considering the fusty atmosphere in the shop, and the smell of baking wafting from behind the partition suggests that home baking is another service the place provides.
Elena’s mouth waters. She had not eaten since breakfast and it is now after one o’clock. She buys two buns and orders coffee. The coffee maker with its shining pipes looks incongruous among the shelves of fly spray and rat poison. ‘Are there many people living around here?’ she asks.
‘You’d be surprised,’ the woman replies. ‘There’s a few locals close to the village and the headland will always attract them hippie types. They come here to paint the scenery or write a poem about the bright, blue ocean but hightail it out of here after one winter. Not her, though. She’s sat out a few winters up there with her kid. If you see her, tell her I have the coffee she likes. Ordered it in especially for her.’
The climb up Mag’s Head is easy at first. Slight inclines give way to plateaus where the gable walls of abandoned cottages rise like pyramids through the overgrowth of decades. She imagines families living here once. Sons and daughters marrying and building a new home beside their parents. They would have toiled in the shade of the massive boulders that protrude from the landscape and remind Elena of standing stones. They look as though they could be toppled over by a finger push but they are welded to this rugged headland, as are the sheep clinging to its hazardous clefts. As she climbs higher, the wind, sweeping in from the Atlantic, forces her to stop to catch her breath. Down below, the ocean lurches towards the steep side of Mag’s Head. The rising spray reminds her of Australia. The thrill of riding those waves. The tumbling freedom she took for granted and, now, seems as ephemeral as a dream.