Valentina Read online

  Table of Contents

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  VALENTINA

  S. E. Lynes

  DEDICATION

  For Jean

  ***

  She always loved fairy stories: Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood – tales of misadventure and revenge and cottages hidden in the deep dark wood. At night, when she wanted to lull herself to sleep, she would close her eyes and conjure up one of those imaginary cottages. It was white, in her mind’s eye, with a low roof and wisps of blue smoke curling up from a pink brick chimney. It was in a clearing, covered in vines and lit by a million blinking stars. So when she saw this place, she knew it was hers.

  And here she is. Can you see her at the clearing edge, in the dark and the silence that are so absolute? Impossible not to be seduced by a silence like that, she’s thinking, watching from the shadows, waiting. Here, no one bothers you. Here, all that happens between one day and the next is the slow stretch of black sky over fields. No stars tonight. Tonight, the sky is lagged with cloud, insulation so thick it would guarantee anyone the deepest of sleeps. They’re sleeping now, inside, tucked up in their warm bed, while outside her teeth chatter, her toes freeze.

  And it is freezing. It is bone-penetrating, lip-chapping, bollock-tightening freezing. Look at the ice, hanging in frosted pendants from the low window ledges, the short white walls hunkering down against the cold. Feel the cold, pushing its wet, frozen fingers down the back of your neck. Enough to make you tremble in your boots – so why? Why is this woman standing out here alone, shivering away at this God-forsaken hour on a Scottish winter’s night? You probably think it’s all a bit strange, probably think she’s not quite herself. And you’d be right.

  Forty-eight hours ago, she would have said the same.

  Now, the air has changed. From under the lazy arm of the sycamore she smells bitterness. If she looks closely, she can see the glimmer on the roof giving way to patches of matt lead grey. That’s the ice melting. Heat pushing through slate. Any time now, the living room curtains will recoil: crisp cotton transformed to gothic lace. At a certain temperature, the flames will break the windows. They will pull at the sky, beg for escape with their long ragged wings only to give up, recede, reach out again.

  Fire is a fascinating spectacle. It’s hypnotic. She should get away now, really, before she becomes too transfixed to move.

  ***

  PART I

  ONE

  I remember the day we moved here, back when the two of us thought only happiness lay ahead, how the tyres crunched on the gravel, how the tree branches knocked against the roof of the jeep. The pair of us were leaning so far forward we practically had our noses squished against the windscreen. I remember running into the hall, clambering upstairs and back down again, dashing into the garden and out onto the vast lawn. Honestly, I was so excited about our new home, about our new life straight from a magazine, I even laid a fire for us that first day. We didn’t need one – it was late May – but I laid one anyway.

  We didn’t light the fire that first night. It was the second night, I think, and the funny thing was, instead of going up the chimney, the smoke billowed back the way, right into the lounge. Next thing, the smoke alarm goes off. What a laugh. See us, all aren’t-we-brilliant one minute, the next, we’re running around like turkeys at Christmas trying to find the damn thing. We found it, of course. It was on the ceiling by the living room door.

  “Push the button,” I shout up at Mikey. “It’ll wake the baby.”

  Mikey’s standing on a chair by this point, jabbing with a kitchen knife at this white plastic saucer thing with its flashing red light and all the while the screaming racket’s setting our teeth on edge.

  “I am pushing it,” he shouts back. “I keep pushing it but it doesn’t do anything!”

  “Mikey! Let me try!”

  He steps down, hands me the knife. “Listen, you’re more practical. You try.”

  But I couldn’t reach it – I’m too short. In the end we had to bring the stepladder from the barn and I had to go round taking the batteries out of every single smoke alarm in the house. It was only supposed to be a short-term measure, until I changed them for something less sensitive. But I suppose I never got around to it.

  And then, on the Saturday, Mikey had to go. He’d got a job offshore, you see, that’s why we moved up to Aberdeenshire. It meant that he’d be away to the rig two weeks out of every four. I knew it was going to happen, don’t get me wrong. I’d psyched myself up for it, knowing the first week or two would be the trickiest. And so that morning, I had to wave him off from the front step, Isla’s head hiding my tears. I had to watch the taxi disappear down the lane, clouds of exhaust lingering in the air, like things we meant to say but never did.

  That afternoon I couldn’t settle. I tidied up, sorted through some of the packing boxes, even made soup, for God’s sake. When I coaxed Isla to eat her mushed up greens, my voice trembled with a kind of simmering hysteria. That’s what comes from trying too hard to pretend everything’s OK. Your real feelings do nothing but knock at the surface of you. You know you can’t let them out. You know that if you do, you might never get them back in.

  And then I was up half the night – pacing, shushing, pleading with Isla to go to sleep. Then, when she finally did sleep, I was scared, way more scared than I’d thought I’d be. The black of night out in the countryside has this way of chasing reason into the darkest corners of the rooms, bringing its shifting shapes and throwing them against the walls. I hadn’t figured on how frightening the nights would be without Mikey, out here, so far away from the city, and now I lay awake and alone, primed for every noise. What was that scratch at the door? Was that a figure I could see at the window? Was that creak a foot on the stairs?

  At 4am I heard a car outside and opened my eyes to see an amber beam slide across the bedroom ceiling. I shot out of bed and ran to the front window. A little way into the lane, a car had parked. The headlights died for a moment then relit. The car pulled out of the mouth of the lane and crawled past the front of the cottage, away up towards the big house at the end of the track. I waited, straining to see through the trees, but saw nothing. I opened the window a crack. The freezing air shot down the front of my nightie, sending me swearing through chattering teeth as I dashed to get my dressing gown. As I returned, the car passed by the cottage in the opposite direction and headed back up the lane. Slowly, the red tail-lights receded to nothing.

  Someone must have taken a wrong turn. And at this hour of the night. Maybe someone had had too much to drink and lost his way home. That was the logical conclusion, the one I used to talk myself down from the crazy ledge as I crawled back under the covers, dressing gown still wrapped tight for comfort, to stop me from shaking.

  The next morning at 6am, I staggered down to the kitchen, made tea and sat cradling Isla in the half-light. And from there I saw it: an entire fortnight without him stretching ahead of me. The day was too long. There were too many hours in it. And there were thirteen more days like this until he came back. As I said, I’d known it would be tough, of course I had. I’m not stupid. But in all the excitement, all the novelty, I hadn’t reckoned on this: my own intolerance for solitude. Stands to reason. I grew up in a flat with three brothers. I worked in news. I lived for other people.

  So that was the problem, you see. Loneliness. If I hadn’t got so lonely, I would never have met her. I know that now. I’m fucking well blessed with knowledge now. But it’d be easy to start beating myself up, blaming myself for everything, so I hold on to that loneliness and how it felt, otherwise I’d go mad. And as with most outcomes, there’s a chain of events, isn’t there? This happened and because of it, that
happened: simple cause and effect.

  I must have left the cottage a little after 7:45am. Ridiculous o’clock, for crying out loud; the dawn chorus were barely getting around to clearing their throats. I was pretty sure I’d seen a supermarket on my side of town, over the River Dee, so I thought I may as well drive there, pick up a few messages while I was at it. And so, two hours out of my bed, there’s me, a grey-faced zombie woman pushing her baby girl up and down fluorescent aisles. I must have looked like a poster girl for postnatal depression but I wasn’t depressed, at least I don’t think I was. I was just plain done in.

  Still keyed up from the spooked out night I’d had, I popped into the hardware store next door and bought some locks for the cottage windows and two thick bolts for the front and back doors. After that, I headed for the beach. Fresh air was always my mother’s cure-all so I thought it might blow away my heebie-jeebies.

  I found my way to the coast. It was blowing a hoolie there, right enough, a real hold onto your eyebrows job. Let me make a wee point about the weather here: it has these mood swings like you wouldn’t believe – but, as the saying goes, if you don’t like it, wait five minutes. So, with the wind howling round my ears, I put Isla in her sling, put on her wee gloves and hat and, after grabbing a coffee and croissant from a café, made my way down to the wet sands.

  The shoreline was deserted, save for a couple of windsurf nuts scooting over the grey spikes of a frigid North Sea. Oh, and the seagulls of course, screeching and scrapping overhead, bunching and swooping. On the groyne post, a fat gull perched, a bloated coastal overlord, eyeing me up, twitching, blinking: I’m watching you, incomer. Along the shoreline, about a mile away, were what looked like cooling towers or something, to the right, the harbour wall, and a white lighthouse perspective had shrunk to no bigger than my thumb. Far out, flat against the horizon: tankers, trawlers maybe, out for the day’s catch.

  I turned a slow circle, took in the parade of cafés, the rickety-looking rollercoaster and beyond, about half a mile away, the impregnable blocks and turrets of the granite city. This city was like any other, I thought: full of people. Except, unlike Glasgow, here I didn’t know any of those people and they didn’t know me. So far conversation had been no more than transaction: a coffee, a paper, a bag of groceries. Here’s your change. Will that be all? Goodbye now. It was as if everyone I’d seen or spoken to was behind a screen. I felt that if I reached out, my fingertips would only press against glass.

  A sharp snatch at my hand. The rustle and tear of a paper bag. I cried out, covered Isla’s head with my arm, staggered back and fell. My coffee dropped to the ground, pooled, and was sucked away by the sand. Immediately above me, like shears sharpening against a blade, came the jealous scream of the gulls. Still trying to figure out what the hell had happened, I looked up and saw my breakfast in the greedy beak of one as it flew away, hanging and limp as dead prey.

  “I can never go back to Govan now, Isla,” I said, chafing my hands together to clear off the wet, gritty sand. “I’ve just been mugged by a seagull.”

  The first few days run together in my memory, to be honest. I know I found the pool pretty quickly, being a bit of a water-baby myself, and took Isla there. I know I tried to make eye contact with the other mothers, all as sleep deprived and bedraggled as me, that I tried to communicate through a roll of the eyes that here we all were, getting through the day. We were colleagues, weren’t we, floating and distant in the world’s biggest office? Surely we could talk to one another? But as their cubicle doors closed behind them with a bang I realised that, no, we couldn’t.

  I drove up to Beechgrove Terrace. I wanted to find the BBC, thinking I might look for work there. I found it, made a mental note of where it was and resolved to drop off my CV in a couple of months’ time. I found a park nearby and, thinking I might find a friendly face, went in. A woman about my age was pushing her boy on the swing so I carried Isla over on my hip. Bear in mind, won’t you, that at this point I’m still smiling away like I’m on Prozac or something. Looking back I must’ve looked like an axe murderer but I was only trying my best.

  “How old is he?” I said, nodding at her wee one.

  “Eighteen months.” She did not take her eyes from her child.

  “This is Isla,” I said, swinging her forward a little. “She’s four months now.”

  She glanced at Isla but said nothing so I added, “We’ve just moved here actually. From Glasgow.”

  It appeared to be killing her to turn her head in my direction. Maybe she had a stiff neck. She almost smiled before she moved away, before she strapped her son into his buggy and made for home. I felt like shouting after her: don’t flatter yourself, Doll. I only wanted a wee blether, for fuck’s sake, not lifelong fucking friendship.

  But that’s not exactly the way to meet people either, is it?

  I fed Isla on the bench, my face by now set in a rictus grin. I burped her and stood her on my lap, felt her push against my thighs with her tiny feet. I made faces, asked her who was a lovely girl and all the daft things you say to a baby until I realised my hands were growing numb. My nose, too, felt almost damp with a wintery cold and, when I looked up, I saw the sun had gone. Wait – the sky had gone. In its place a thick white mist had descended all around me like dry ice.

  So this was the Aberdeen haar, I thought, the famous sea fret that lowered its dank weight onto the city without appointment, without warning. And here I was, right in the middle.

  By the time I got Isla to the car, I was shivering, the fog even thicker than before. I set the GPS for home, turned the heater on full blast to take off the chill. Even once I’d put on my sweater, I was still trembling, my hands spread against the fan. Outside, the haar pushed against the car windows, swallowed whole the end of the car bonnet. Headlights on full beam, I hooked myself over the steering wheel and set off.

  On the road, I could see no more than the tail-lights of the car in front. On the other side, the other cars bloomed from the fog, headlamps like police searchlights. In the rear view mirror, Isla’s baby blue eyes stared out, as if she’d been alarmed by a sudden psychic event which, to be honest, is what it felt like. I crept in second gear back towards the river. At the Brig O’Dee roundabout, I took a right towards Banchory. I drove on, tight-shouldered, vigilant. The haar seemed to dissolve a little. Two cars ahead had formed now as if born from the ghostly mass, now the houses at the side of the road stepped from the dissipating white, clumps of woodland, fences, gateposts.

  And then the air cleared. Completely. Just like that.

  I sat back from the steering wheel, turned off the headlights and eased my foot down on the accelerator. But when I checked my rear view, I saw the cloud had not, in fact, gone. It had simply not followed me. It had waited at the edge of the city and had shaped itself into what looked to me like a monstrous paw, the thick swollen hand of an ogre, grasping but not moving forward, as if thwarted not by any physical boundary but by fear of what lay ahead.

  More than a wee bit creeped out, I pushed on. Before me, the landscape spread and to my relief I recognised where I was. The road narrowed and I knew I had to take a left. No houses now, only the lone horse in the field – the signpost that I was not far from home. I slowed the car and took in the tender dip of the horse’s long back, the slide of its neck as it tore at the grass in a chaos of quivering lips. I thought of Gulliver’s Travels, which I’d read when I was about thirteen, of how the Houyhnhnms had blown my teenage mind. I’d always wished I’d known how to pronounce the damn word, even to myself. Whiminims? Hooeyhunhums? Whatever, what I remember most is that those magical horses had to say the thing which is not because, in their world, there was no word for lie.

  After tea, I put extra locks on three of the downstairs windows with the battery-powered screwdriver my dad had bought me for my twenty-first birthday. While Isla kicked about under her mobile, I even managed to screw the bolt onto the front door and still have time to stand back and admire my handiwork.
r />   “No one,” I said to Isla, “not even the Big Bad Wolf could get through that.”

  I never did put the bolt on the back door. Which is a blessing, now I think about it.

  The hour came for Mikey to return home from work, to kiss my neck and reach into the fridge for a beer. Hey Shone, what’s for dinner?

  “Three jumps at the cupboard door for you, pal,” I answered aloud, watched him laugh in my mind’s eye.

  I switched on the radio, twiddled the tuner until Adele came crackling through like some spooky chanteuse from the afterlife. I sang along at the top of my lungs but when the song finished, I felt even more bereft. I wanted so badly to call my mum or Jeanie but I didn’t want to sound sorry for myself. This was the life I’d chosen. This was the dream.

  At 7:30pm I was about to try Isla in her cot when the landline rang.

  I lunged for it. “Hello?”

  “That was quick.” It was Mikey. “How’s it going?”

  “Ach, we’re fine.” I jiggled Isla about to stop her from whining. “I’ve got my wee pal, haven’t I? How’s the rig?”

  There was a pause. I listened for the sea.

  “So,” he said. “Seen anyone today?”

  “I spoke to the cashier in the supermarket. She was nice.”

  He never asked if I was lonely. Probably afraid of what I’d say. Maybe I was afraid. If he’d asked, I might have said, maybe should have said yes, I am lonely. I’m going off my head here. But I kept it in when I spoke to him and saved the tears for when I was on my own. Nothing major, just eyes filling here and there, the odd shoe thrown across the room.

  There was one time I really went for it though – shaking, snotters, the works. It was that very first trip. I was washing up the breakfast things, staring through the low, square back window out over the lawn to the leylandii at the far end. Hands in the suds, I was giving myself another sink-side pep talk: It’ll get easier, Shone. Early days are always tough. If anyone can make this work, it’s you. But no sooner had I said the words when I burst into tears. Funny, how one minute you’ve got your colleagues in hysterics with some joke you’re telling by the coffee machine and the next you’re in a cottage in the middle of nowhere talking rubbish to yourself.