Spider Light(57)
At last he said, in a voice stripped of the hurtful jeering note, ‘What did you do? Donna, for God’s sake, tell me what you did that day.’
Donna turned to look at him at last. In a cold tight little voice, she said, ‘Don’t pretend. You know perfectly well what I did.’ And saw with sick horror that he had not been pretending at all; he had genuinely not known what she had done that last summer at Amberwood.
On that last day, Donna had woken up with a headache, just as she had told the police. A queer, clawing headache, it had been.
Unable to bear the confines of the cottage Donna had walked along Quire’s main driveway and through the gates. She told the police she walked all the way to the shop on the village’s outskirts; in reality she simply sat on the grass verge outside the grounds, fighting the clawing images inside her head.
Very faintly she heard the church clock striking twelve, and although the chimes had come to her fuzzily, as if the clock were under water, the sound seemed to mark something hugely important–the crossing of some kind of line, the giving up of a struggle. With the sound had come the sudden slotting into place of half memories, of things seen and unconsciously stored away: local knowledge absorbed–Amberwood’s history and its industry and the workings of Twygrist, and of how they could all be put together. It would work, thought Donna, hugging her bent knees against her chest, her mind seething. Oh God, I believe it would work.
She got up, dusting bits of grass from her skirt, and went back to the cottage. Her headache had vanished, although she felt a bit odd: remote and over-calm, in the way you sometimes felt when you had taken a hefty dose of paracetamol.
Her mother was making sandwiches for lunch in the kitchen. She accorded Donna a brief nod–they were not really speaking to one another at this stage–and Donna poured herself a glass of fruit juice from the fridge, and looked out of the window while she drank it. To say it? To say it now?
It seemed, much later, that she was still trying to make up her mind when she heard her own voice saying, quite casually, ‘I’ve just been down to the village shop–I heard something there about Twygrist that might interest you.’ Pause there, Donna, remember the value of a pause at what’s called the psychological moment.
The name Twygrist acted as a hook, as Donna had known it would. Her mother looked up from slicing ham. ‘Yes?’
‘That old clock on the side of the mill,’ said Donna, sounding disinterested, sounding very nearly bored. ‘Apparently it’s a memorial clock—’
‘Yes, I know it is. They have a clock-winder–it’s an appointment that gets handed down—’
‘Well, somebody in the shop was telling me that when the clock was put up, a stone tablet was put inside the mill at the same time. Sunk into the floor or the wall or something. It’s engraved with the date and the name of the person whose memory it’s for, and something about the clock-winder tradition as well.’
She had her mother’s full attention now; it was almost as if the ugly scenes of the last few days had not happened. ‘What sort of stone tablet? What does the engraving say?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Donna moodily. ‘For all I know it’s the life and times of the Amberwood miller. Or just one of those Kilroy-was-here things.’
‘Oh, I think it would be worth seeing,’ said Donna’s mother at once. She cut the sandwiches into quarters and heaped them on a plate, not speaking. Donna thought she would give it a count of twenty, and then say, in the same bored voice, that she supposed it might pass an afternoon to go out there and take a look. But it would be better if the idea came from her mother. Start counting, Donna. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…Damn, she’s not going to say it. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…
She had reached eleven when Maria said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder if your father would drive us out there after lunch. I don’t see why he can’t; he’s been glooming over sheets of figures for most of the morning, some fresh air will do him good.’
‘He likes glooming over sheets of figures,’ said Donna. ‘Are we having some of that quiche with the sandwiches? I’ll take Don’s out to him; he’s not likely to come in.’ She tipped some of the sandwiches onto a smaller plate.
‘Well, come straight back—’
‘Why? Were you thinking we might have a quick shag on the lawn?’
‘Don’t use words like that, Donna!’
‘Oh, join the modern age,’ said Donna, and went out to the garden.
She gave Don his lunch in an offhand way–he was plugged into his music, and barely acknowledged her–and went back to the kitchen, walking slowly as if it was too much effort to do anything else. Her parents were seated at the kitchen table eating the sandwiches, and Maria was talking animatedly about the stone tablet and the memorial clock, saying how interesting it was and that she might as well see if they could find it. She did not suppose any of them would want to come back to Amberwood again, but she had found the old watermill very interesting and would like to have another look inside it before they left.
‘You won’t mind driving down there, will you, Jim? It isn’t as if you had anything else to do.’
Donna’s father said something about a quarterly forecast to prepare, but this was swept aside on the grounds that nobody could be expected to prepare forecasts on holiday. It might rain tonight–the television had said it might–so they should do this while the sunshine lasted. They would take torches and the camera; it was only a quarter past one now. They could set off sharp at a quarter to two and have a good couple of hours. ‘Donna, you and Don had better come with us.’