Spider Light(4)
‘You can’t help me,’ said the boy. ‘I’ve found out something absolutely appalling, and I don’t want to be in a world where things like that can happen.’
He had turned to look at her then. His eyes were a very vivid blue; the pupils were still pinpoints from the sleeping pills, but they were perfectly sensible. He had reached in a questing, uncoordinated way for Antonia’s hand and without thinking much about it, she had taken his hand and held it hard.
Setting the nightmare in motion.
The blue car turned along a narrow lane winding off to the left, and was swallowed up by the trees and farmlands. Antonia discovered that she was shaking so violently she could barely grip the steering wheel. Half a mile on she came to a small village pub with a placard advertising bar food, and remembered that she could quite openly walk inside and order food and sit at a table to eat it. Parking as close to the door as she could manage, she locked the car and went thankfully into the dim cool interior.
One of the things that had improved in the almost forgotten world was pub food. Antonia was directed to a small table near an inglenook, and served hot soup with a twist of fresh warm bread, a plateful of delicious home-cured ham with a crisp salad, and a large cup of fragrant coffee.
Three quarters of an hour later, feeling able to face all the demons in hell’s legions, she got back in her car, consulted the map carefully, and drove on to Amberwood and Charity Cottage.
CHAPTER TWO
Over the last five years Antonia had visualized doing quite a lot of things out in the world–some of them had been quite possible and sensible, and some of them had been so bizarre as to be wild daydream stuff–but none of them had included renting a former almshouse tucked into a remote sliver of the Cheshire countryside. As she drove away from the little pub the sky was overcast, and there was a feeling that even at three o’clock in the afternoon night was poised to sweep in. She managed to find her way back to the motorway and, although she kept glancing in the driving mirror, there was no sign of any dark blue hatchback tailing her.
Amberwood, when she finally reached it, was much nicer than she had expected. It was a small market town that looked as if it had not progressed much beyond the early years of the twentieth century. It did not appear to have reached the twenty-first century at all. Antonia found this rather endearing.
Driving along, the agent’s sketch map propped up on the dashboard, she passed what looked like an old watermill. It was low roofed and ancient-looking, and Antonia slowed down to take a better look. Yes, it was an old mill, built up against a reservoir. It was clearly disused but by no means derelict, and there was what appeared to be some kind of memorial clock set into one of the gable-end walls.
She pulled on the handbrake and sat in the car for a moment considering the mill, wondering if it was a remnant of Victorian paternalism, or whether it might have been one of the dark satanic mills of Milton and Blake’s visions. No, it was too small for that, and probably in the wrong county as well. This was clearly a local affair, used to grind corn for the farmers and, despite its look of extreme age, it might only be eighty or so years since it had stopped working.
How must it have been to live in those days? Never travelling far but belonging to a close-knit group of people who knew one another’s histories and who stuck loyally by each other and shared the good and the bad equally: celebrations of births and weddings; mingled tears when there was death or sickness or hardship. It sounded very attractive. Oh sure, thought Antonia cynically, and I suppose the child-mortality rate sounds attractive as well, does it, and being carted off to the workhouse if you couldn’t pay your way, or the barbarism of surgery without anaesthetic…?
She drove on. The main street was pleasing: shops and tiny coffee places, and a small hotel at one end. There was a square with a war memorial–Amberwood had sent its share of young men to both world wars it seemed–and a number of the buildings had the unmistakably wavy look of extreme age and the straight chimneys beloved by the Tudors. Either the place came under the aegis of town planners with an unusual vein of municipal aestheticism, or the residents of Amberwood were militant about preserving their history, because there were no converted plate-glass-fronted monstrosities blurring Elizabethan or Queen Anne fa?ades, and everywhere was immaculate. There was certainly a small supermarket, but it was tucked discreetly away in a side street, politely self-effacing amidst a couple of picture galleries, and craft shops of the dried-flowers and raffia-mat type.
I’ll still hate being here, thought Antonia but I can’t really hate any of this. I’ll come into the high street for shopping, and look at the paintings, (I’ll manage to stay out for long enough to collect shopping and have a cup of coffee, surely to goodness!), and it’ll all become familiar and ordinary.
Quire House was efficiently signposted. It turned out to be a couple of miles outside the town centre, which was further than Antonia had been expecting. It was annoying to experience a fresh stab of panic at leaving the friendly cluster of streets and embark on a stretch of open road. She flipped the radio on, and voices instantly filled the car–a trailer for an afternoon play and a preview for a gardening programme.
Quire House itself was not visible from the road. There were double gates with stone pillars on each side and a neat sign pointed along a wide curving carriageway, proclaiming this was Amberwood’s ‘Museum and Craft Centre’, and that it was, ‘Open from 11.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. each day.’ Antonia glanced at the agent’s directions: once inside the gates she should turn immediately right and fifty yards on she would see an old brick wall, at which point she should turn sharp left and she would be there.