The Retreat(5)

Wherever. That caught my attention. Although Sweetmeat was set in an invented community, it was very much based on the place where I grew up in North Wales. The green, empty landscape, the relentless rain. Dark woods and low mountains; the river where a boy from our school drowned. And boredom – that was a vital ingredient. There was nothing to do, so I’d made stuff up. I started off by drawing and writing comics, then moved on to short stories. I invented whole worlds to entertain myself.

In London, where I’d lived since my early twenties, there was too much to stimulate me on the surface but not enough to stir my deeper imagination. I needed darkness, but lived in a city where lights always shone.

It was time to go back into the dark.

‘What are you thinking?’ Jamie had asked.

‘That it’s time to go home,’ I replied.



After dinner, while Max and Suzi went upstairs to ‘work on her novel’, Karen gave me a tour of the house. I didn’t know where Julia had gone.

‘The rooms are all named after prominent Welsh writers,’ Karen pointed out. ‘The dining room is the Roberts Room, after Kate Roberts.’

On the opposite side of the hallway to the dining room and kitchen was a decent-sized sitting room, called the Thomas Room, presumably after Dylan. The room was dark and cosy, stuffed full of books, with a library ladder attached to the highest book shelf. There was a utility room, and another large room – the Follett Room – that contained a number of desks with chairs but which appeared unfinished. One wall was only half-painted white and there were no curtains at the window.

Most of the rooms had open fires or log burners, so the smell of woodsmoke permeated the house. It threw me back in time to my childhood, to long, drowsy Sunday afternoons, a black-and-white film on TV, listening to the top forty on the radio, finger poised on the record button. I didn’t miss those days but the memory stimulated a nostalgia gland, the sense that life was hurtling by too fast.

‘Fancy a ciggie?’ Karen asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

‘Oh, go on then.’

We went out front – I noticed that she winced slightly as she walked – and she passed me a cigarette. I was strictly a social smoker, but it tasted delicious.

‘Max is a terrible literary snob,’ she said. ‘And a huge narcissist. But he’s quite good company.’

‘Suzi seems to think so.’

‘Good for her.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Though she is a little weird . . . She asked me to read a few pages. I mean, I’m a woman of the world, I write pretty strong stuff myself. But hers was disturbing. A couple smearing each other with animal blood, using it as a sexual lubricant. Gross, actually. And there’s this horrible bit in it with a dead baby in a freezer.’ She shuddered.

‘Wow.’

‘And as for our literary friend, I heard him on the phone to his wife the other day, arguing about money. About whether he should be frittering the last of their cash away on a writing retreat. I think he’s going through a sticky patch.’

‘His patch is going to get stickier if his wife finds out about him and Suzi.’ I frowned. ‘Some people just don’t appreciate what they’ve got.’

Karen raised an eyebrow.

I stubbed out my cigarette and reminded myself I’d just met this woman. ‘Ignore me. I don’t want to come across as judgemental.’

‘Oh, me neither.’ She gestured at the land around us. ‘You know this place used to be a slate mine, a hundred years ago?’

‘Interesting.’

She smiled. ‘You sound like my daughter when I try to tell her about my youth.’

Back inside, we passed a closed door. Karen noticed how my gaze snagged on it.

‘That’s the basement,’ she said. She leaned forward and whispered in a mock-spooky voice. ‘We’re not allowed down there.’

‘Yes, Julia told me. Something about the stairs being unsafe.’

Karen checked over her shoulder and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I heard a guest strayed down there once and Julia flipped and chucked them out.’

‘Really?’

‘Uh-huh. She is a little intense. I like her, but I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. Now, fancy joining me for a small gin?’

I checked my watch. It was only quarter past nine. But I needed to be disciplined if I had any hope of getting this book written, so I said goodnight to Karen and went to my room.

I paused outside the second door along in the hallway, noticing that unlike the other rooms it bore no number. There was Room 5, by the stairs, then this door, then Room 6, which was mine. Standing in the silence, I heard a noise come from inside the numberless room, like a radio turned down low. Looking around to ensure no one was coming, I gently pressed my ear against the painted wood.

Inside the room, someone was singing. A female voice, soft and melodious. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like a child’s song, a nursery rhyme or lullaby.

I shifted my position and the floorboards creaked beneath me. Abruptly, the singing stopped, and I hurried to my room, hot with guilt, like a Peeping Tom caught in the act.





Chapter 3

I woke up early the next morning, after the best night’s sleep I’d had in a long time. It might have been the country air, or the lack of alcohol. After showering in the bathroom along the hallway, I headed to my desk, opening my laptop. Normally, I would spend an hour catching up with Facebook and Twitter, reading the headlines, answering emails from readers. But I had binned the sheet of paper with the Wi-Fi password. I wanted to remain isolated, to go grey. No social media, no email, no Internet till I got this book written. If anyone needed me urgently, they could call.