The Hollow Places: Old Wounds

The green paint on Nell Pendergast's front door had blistered into curling islands of varnish, each one flaking at its own pace until the bare wood beneath showed through in patches of grey and silver. Vivienne counted seven distinct shades of decay before the door opened.

Nell Pendergast stood shorter than her file suggested, bird-boned inside a cardigan the colour of weak tea. White hair, cropped close, framed a face that had been handsome once and was now interesting: deep lines bracketing a mouth that twitched toward amusement even at rest. Her eyes were the pale blue of a winter sky and twice as uncompromising.

"You'd be Vivienne," Nell said. Not a question.

"I would. And you must be Mrs Pendergast."

"Must I? Sit down anyway. There's tea in the pot and questions in your eyes, and I expect you'll want both before this is over."

Vivienne followed her into a narrow hallway where the floorboards protested each step with the querulous complaint of old timber. The walls held framed photographs in serried ranks, some faces repeated across decades, others absent and represented only by a nail hole or a pale rectangle where the paper had resisted the sun. The smell of lavender sachets competed with something older, sharper: dust and paper and the faint musk of a cat. Beneath both, the mineral tang of a house that had stood against Atlantic weather for the better part of a century.

The front parlour was small and bright despite the grey afternoon pressing at the windows. A grey cat regarded Vivienne from a wingback chair and declined to vacate it. The mantelpiece held a clock with a crack across its face, a small bone china shepherd, and a framed photograph turned to the wall. Vivienne noted its absence of display and said nothing.

Nell poured tea into two cups that did not match, handing Vivienne the sturdier one. The tea was strong and faintly stewed, the colour of tarnished brass.

"Now then," Nell said, settling into the opposite chair with her own cup balanced on her knee. "Ask what you came to ask. But I'll save you the trouble of one particular line of questioning. I won't talk about Theo."

Vivienne paused with the cup halfway to her lips. "I wasn't going to ask about Theo."

"Were you not?"

"No. I came to talk about Lucy."

Nell sipped her tea. Her gaze did not waver, but something behind it shifted, the way a door moves when the latch is lifted but the wood has not yet swung open.

"All right then," she said at last. "Ask about Lucy."

"You knew her."

"I knew her."

"And you believe she's alive."

Nell set her cup down with the decisive clink of someone closing a topic. "I don't believe anything of the kind. I know it. She's alive. She lives in Portland."

"Mrs Pendergast, the records indicate that Lucy disappeared from a place called Saltwick in 1974. She was twenty-three years old. No body was recovered, but the police at the time concluded she had drowned."

"The police," Nell said, with the particular inflection reserved for people who have outlasted institutions, "concluded a great many convenient things."

Vivienne set her cup on the side table. The saucer rattled faintly against a stack of paperbacks. The grey cat stretched, resettled, and resumed its unblinking appraisal.

"Can you tell me when you last saw her?"

"I can. In 1994, in a post office on Congress Street, buying stamps. She had a child on her hip and a man at her elbow who looked at her as though she were the answer to a question he had stopped asking."

"How did you know it was her?"

"Because I would have known her anywhere. Because she turned and looked at me, and she smiled, and she walked on."

"Did she speak to you?"

"No."

"And you did not approach her."

"No."

"Why not?"

Nell's mouth tightened. The amusement drained from her face, and what remained was something Vivienne could not yet name. "Because she asked me not to. Twenty years before that, on the night she left Saltwick, she made me promise. She said, if I ever saw her again, I was to walk past. I was to pretend I had forgotten her face. And I have honoured that promise for thirty years, Mrs Ashworth, and I will go on honouring it until I am in a box."

The kettle in the kitchen had begun to whistle, a thin reedy note that climbed and then fell silent, ignored. Vivienne became aware of the rain against the window, the smell of damp wool rising from Nell's cardigan, the warmth of the cup against her palm. She let the silence hold for a moment, because rushing it would break something she could not yet see.

"What was she running from?" Vivienne asked at last.

Nell did not answer at once. She rose, crossed to the mantelpiece, and straightened the bone china shepherd with fingers that trembled only slightly. The clock ticked on, indifferent.

"That," she said quietly, "is the question I have refused to answer for thirty years."

"To whom?"

"To everyone. To Theo. To Aldric. To the inspector who came down from York and sat in that very chair and asked me the same thing you are asking now, in that very tone of voice, with that very look upon his face."

"And what did you tell him?"

"I told him the truth. That I didn't know. That Lucy never told me, and I never asked, and that there are doors in this world it is wiser not to open."

Nell returned to her chair. The cat, sensing perhaps a shift in the room's weather, rose at last and stalked from the parlour with the slow dignity of something that owned the house rather than lived in it.

"You have come a long way," Nell said, "to be told no."

"I have."

"And you will go on asking."

"I will."

"Then ask somewhere else first. Ask Edmund Vale what he knows. Ask him why he wrote to you at all, when he had refused my letters for twenty years. Ask him what is in that manila folder he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk, the one with the salt stain on the corner."

Vivienne felt the floor of the conversation tilt beneath her. She had prepared herself for grief, for the careful evasions of an old woman guarding old grief. She had not prepared herself for an old woman pointing her toward a solicitor with a stained folder.

"Edmund Vale is handling my aunt's estate."

"Yes."

"You know him."

"I know what he carries. There is a difference."

Nell finished her tea and set the cup down with the finality of someone closing a door. Vivienne recognised the gesture. She had seen it in her aunt, in the last months before the end: the small decisive acts that announced an interview was over.

"Mrs Pendergast," Vivienne said carefully. "If Lucy is alive in Portland, why does no one else know?"

"Because no one else has looked. Because no one else wanted to find her. Because some disappearances are a kindness to everyone concerned."

"That sounds rehearsed."

"It sounds true. There is a difference."

Nell rose and crossed to the window, drawing the curtain back an inch. The rain had thickened. Beyond the glass, the street was empty, the parked cars beaded with water, the gutters running.

"You'll want to go," Nell said, without turning. "Before it gets worse. The lane floods when the rain holds."

Vivienne did not move. "One more question."

"Make it quick."

"The photograph on the mantelpiece, turned to the wall. Whose is it?"

Nell's hand stilled on the curtain. For a long moment she did not speak, and the only sound was the clock and the rain and the faint complaint of the house settling into its bones.

"Lucy's," Nell said at last. "On her wedding day. Before any of it."

"Before any of what?"

Nell released the curtain and turned. Her face had closed again, the amusement and the grief both withdrawn behind whatever door she kept inside her.

"You'll have to ask Edmund," she said. "Or Theo. Or the dead, if you can find one willing to talk. I have said as much as I am going to say, and I said it once already in 1974, and I have regretted it most nights since."

She walked Vivienne to the door. The hallway smelled of lavender and damp wood. The grey cat sat at the foot of the stairs and watched them pass.

Vivienne stepped out onto the porch. The rain struck her face, cold and fine. Behind her, she heard the door close, and then the bolt drawn, and then the small precise click of a chain being fastened.

She stood for a moment in the weather, holding the image of that turned photograph against the wall, and the post office on Congress Street in 1994, and an old woman who had kept a promise for thirty years because a girl she loved had asked her to.

Then she turned up her collar and walked toward the car, where a single yellow envelope lay on the passenger seat where she had left it, and where, she now saw, a second envelope had been slid beneath the windscreen wiper, white, unmarked, and dry despite the rain.

Vivienne stood in the rain for a moment, her hand on the car door, looking at the white envelope. The paper was thick, good quality, the kind sold in stationers rather than newsagents. It was completely dry. The rain had been falling steadily since she had parked, and yet this envelope showed no water damage at all.

She glanced back toward the cottage. The door was still closed. The porch light was off. She could not see anyone watching from the windows, but the curtains in the front room had been drawn when she left, and she had no way of knowing if a face had been there since.

She got into the car, bringing the envelope with her. The yellow one she had brought from the solicitor's office sat on the passenger seat, still sealed. She set the white one on top of it, then sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, breathing the smell of wet upholstery and the lavender that still clung to her coat from the hallway.

The envelope was not sealed. She slid her finger under the flap and eased it open.

Inside was a single object: a small silver key on a thin chain, and a folded square of paper. The paper was lined, torn from a notebook, and written on in pencil in a hand she did not recognise. The handwriting was old-fashioned, the loops elongated, the pressure uneven as though the writer had been tired or unwell.

The note read: "For the escritoire. The drawer sticks. Pull it toward you and lift. P."

Vivienne turned the key over in her palm. It was tarnished, the bow plain, the bit worn. It looked like it had been carried in a pocket or a purse for many years. She did not recognise the initial. Not N for Nell. Not L for Lucy. P.

She thought of Theo Pendergast, the man who had been working on the estate grounds when she arrived, the father of the girl who had just shown her a turned photograph and refused to answer her questions. P for Pendergast. P for the family that had lived in these cottages for three generations.

Or P for someone else entirely.

She looked at the key again. The silver had a dull, almost black patina in the creases. There was a scratch across the bow, deep enough to catch her thumbnail. She thought of the writing desk in the upstairs bedroom of Ashworth Manor, the one she had not yet opened, the one whose drawers had refused to move when she had tried them on her first day. She had assumed they were swollen with damp or warped by age. Pull it toward you and lift.

Vivienne got out of the car. The rain had not let up. She closed the door quietly, pocketed the key and the note, and walked back up the path to Nell's cottage.

She did not knock. She stood on the porch, in the thin shelter of the overhang, and waited.

For a long time nothing happened at all. She could hear the clock inside, the same steady tick. She could hear the rain on the roof. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of someone moving in a room at the back of the house, a chair scraping, a cupboard closing.

Then the bolt drew back. The chain rattled. The door opened a few inches, and Nell's face appeared in the gap, grey in the grey light, her eyes narrowing.

"You," Nell said.

"Me," Vivienne agreed. "I found your envelope."

Nell's expression did not change. She looked at Vivienne for a long moment, then at the rain, and then at something over Vivienne's shoulder that Vivienne could not see.

"Come in then," Nell said at last, and opened the door wider.

The hallway smelled the same, lavender and damp wood. The grey cat had disappeared. Nell led Vivienne not back into the front room but toward the back of the house, into a small kitchen that smelled of boiled cabbage and paraffin. A single bulb burned over a deal table. A kettle sat on the stove, not yet lit. A calendar on the wall showed a photograph of a lake in autumn, the leaves red and gold, the date six months past.

Nell did not ask Vivienne to sit. She leaned against the counter and folded her arms. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and Vivienne could see the blue veins standing out on her forearms, the thin white scars of old burns along the inside of her wrists.

"The key," Nell said.

"The key," Vivienne repeated. She took it from her pocket and held it up. "The escritoire. The drawer that sticks."

"You opened it?"

"I haven't had the chance. I came straight back."

Nell nodded slowly, as though this answer satisfied something in her.

"Good," she said. "Then I haven't lost my nerve for nothing."

She was quiet for a moment, looking at the key in Vivienne's hand. Then she said, very softly:

"I have carried that key since the autumn of 1974. I have never used it. It was given to me by a girl who trusted me more than I deserved, and I have kept it because she asked me to keep it, and because I have spent every day since wishing I had done something different with it."

Vivienne did not speak. The clock ticked in the hallway. The rain drummed on the window above the sink, where a single geranium sat in a cracked pot, its leaves dark and wet.

"Lucy was pregnant," Nell said.

The words fell into the kitchen like stones into still water.

Vivienne's hand had closed around the key. The metal was cold. She could feel the scratch across the bow pressing into her palm.

"Ten weeks," Nell continued. "She told me in the back garden of the manor, the night before she disappeared. We were sitting on the stone bench under the apple tree, and she was crying, and she told me she was ten weeks gone and she had not told anyone, not her mother, not her father, not Edmund, not the man himself. She refused to name him. She said it was hers to carry and hers to decide, and she would decide when she was ready, and not before."

Vivienne found her voice. It came out smaller than she expected.

"Did she say why she wouldn't name him?"

"She said she didn't know yet," Nell said. "She said she needed to be sure, and that being sure meant looking him in the face and asking him what he intended to do. She said she would do it after the wedding. She said she would do it when she came back from the honeymoon."

"She never came back from the honeymoon," Vivienne said.

"No," Nell said. "She never came back from anything."

She pushed off the counter and went to the stove. She lit the gas with a match, and the blue flame hissed and then settled. She set the kettle on it without asking if Vivienne wanted any.

"I have thought about that night every day for twenty-five years," Nell said, her back to Vivienne. "I have thought about what I should have said. I should have asked her who the father was. I should have insisted. I should have made her tell me, so that if anything happened to her, there would be someone who knew. But she begged me not to ask, and I was young, and I thought she was being brave, and I let her be brave, and three days later she was gone."

She turned around. Her face was the same grey it had been before, but her eyes were wet.

"I don't know who the father was," she said. "I never knew. I have spent twenty-five years not knowing, and I have spent twenty-five years wondering if the not-knowing is what killed her. If someone knew she was carrying his child and could not afford to let her speak, or could not afford to let the child be born. I don't know. I will never know. But I have carried it, and the key, and the promise, and I am tired of carrying it."

She looked at Vivienne.

"Open the drawer," she said. "Find what she left. And when you find it, you will have a piece of her that I could never give you. But I am warning you now, Miss Ashworth: what you find will not be what you expect, and it will not bring you peace. It will only bring you closer to the question I have been too afraid to answer, and it will not answer it for you."

Vivienne pocketed the key.

"I understand," she said.

"No," Nell said. "You don't. But you will."

She went to the door and opened it. The rain was still falling. The grey cat was sitting on the porch step, watching the weather, its ears pricked forward.

"Goodbye, Miss Ashworth," Nell said. "I have said as much as I can say, and I have given you what I was given, and now the rest is yours. Don't come back to this house. Don't ask me again. I have given you twenty-five years in a silver key and a stuck drawer, and that is all I have to give."

Vivienne stepped out into the rain. The door closed behind her. The bolt drew. The chain rattled.

She walked back to the car, the key heavy in her pocket, the weight of it strange and specific, and she sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, looking at the white envelope on the passenger seat, and the yellow one beside it, and the rain coming down on the windscreen in waves.

The lane back to the manor was quiet. The hedgerows were bowed with water. Somewhere in the field behind the cottages, a sheep called once and was silent. Vivienne drove slowly, her wipers beating a steady rhythm, and she thought about a girl sitting on a stone bench under an apple tree, telling her friend a secret she had never told anyone else, and asking to be allowed to keep it a little longer.

She thought about the key in her pocket, and the drawer that stuck, and the twenty-five years between the telling and the opening. She thought about what it meant to carry a secret for a quarter of a century, and what it meant to hand it on.

She turned into the drive of Ashworth Manor. The house rose up through the rain, its windows dark, its chimneys streaming. She parked where she had parked that morning, cut the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the rain on the roof and the ticking of the engine as it cooled.

Then she took the key from her pocket, looked at it once more in the grey light, and got out of the car.

She did not go to the front door. She went around the side of the house, to the stone steps that led up to the kitchen garden, and from there to the door that opened onto the back staircase, and up the narrow treads to the bedroom where the escritoire stood against the wall.

The room smelled of dust and old paper. The rain was tapping at the window. Vivienne crossed to the desk, knelt, and fitted the key into the lock of the central drawer.

It turned without resistance.

drawer slid open on well-oiled runners, with the soft oily smell of tallow and the whisper of felt against felt. The interior was not deep. Vivienne knelt there in the rainlight, her hands steady, her breath held, and looked at what lay inside.

A leather wallet, small and dark, held together with a narrow strap. A folded letter. A pressed sprig of something that might once have been heather, the colour gone to a pale papery brown. And beneath these, flat against the back of the drawer, a photograph in a cardboard frame of the kind that came from a chemist's shop in the early nineteen sixties.

She lifted the photograph out first.

It showed two young women sitting on a low stone wall with the sea behind them, their hair blown sideways, both laughing at something out of frame. The taller of the two was Vivienne's aunt, she could see that immediately, the same lean face, the same wide mouth, though here the mouth was given over to mirth and not to the careful, closed expression Vivienne remembered from her childhood. The other girl was dark, dark-haired and darker-eyed, with a fine-boned face that the wind had whipped pink across the cheekbones. She was holding a sketchbook in her lap, and her thumb, Vivienne noticed, was smudged with charcoal.

On the back of the frame, in her aunt's slanting hand, two lines: "E and M, July 1962. The last summer."

Vivienne set the photograph down and unfolded the letter.

It was dated some three weeks before her aunt's death, and it was written in a hand she did not recognise, small and fussy, with the letters crowded close together as though they were afraid of being read. It began without salutation.

"I have done what you asked. The papers are filed under my own name and may be drawn out only with the key you now hold. I have instructed no one at the firm, and will instruct no one, save yourself. For the rest, I must beg you to allow the matter to rest where we agreed it should rest. I have not spoken of it, and I shall not. But I cannot in conscience permit you to raise the question with Mr Halloran, whose health is not what it was, and whose grief for his son has, if anything, deepened with the years. Let the dead lie. Let the living have what peace is left to them."

It was not signed.

Vivienne read it twice. Then she lifted the leather wallet and opened the strap. Inside were three envelopes, each of them addressed in the same fussy hand, each bearing the words "To be opened after my death." None of them had been opened. None of them had been sent.

The rain was louder now on the window. She sat back on her heels and looked at the things laid out on the floor around her, and she thought about the key with its monogram of E.V., and the fussy hand that was not signed, and the phrase "Let the dead lie," and she understood, with a small cold certainty, that Edmund Vale had been waiting twenty-five years for this drawer to be opened, and that he had known, when he gave her the key, that she would open it within the week.

She gathered the things together, slid them into the leather wallet, buttoned her coat, and went down the narrow stairs and out through the kitchen door into the rain.

She drove the short distance to the head of the cove path and left the car in the lay-by where the fishermen usually parked, at the foot of the lane that ran down to the slip. From there the cliff path climbed away to the east in a long scrawl of pale grass and brackeny gully, with the gulls working the wind above it and the sea a steady grey-green far below. The rain had eased to a fine persistent mist that clung to her coat and gathered in the hollows of the bracken. She could see the path for perhaps a hundred yards ahead. Beyond that it blurred into the weather.

Edmund Vale's cottage stood at the head of the cove itself, where the cliff path dropped down to a strip of shingle and a single wooden hut on stilts that had once been a coastguard lookout. It was not a long walk, perhaps a mile and a half along the cliff, but the path was narrow and wet, and she took her time, her boots finding the firmer ground at the edge of the worn track.

She heard him before she saw him. A small precise voice, raised in conversation with the wind, the sort of half talk of a man who had been alone too long and had begun to keep his own company aloud. Then the easel came into view, set up on the flat shoulder of the path just above where the cliff fell away to the sea, and behind it Edmund Vale, in a vast green sou'wester and a knitted scarf the colour of old mustard, his paint box open on the stool beside him, his brush moving in short considered strokes across the canvas.

He did not hear her at first. She stood for a moment and watched him work. The painting was of the cove itself, the way the light lay on the water that morning, the long curve of the beach, the line of the cliffs to the west. It was careful and accurate and quite without life. She thought of the photograph in her pocket, of the dark-haired girl with the smudge of charcoal on her thumb, and she understood why the painting was so careful and so lifeless.

"Mr Vale," she said.

He turned with a small startled motion, his brush raised, a fleck of green paint on the cuff of his coat.

"Miss Ashworth. Good heavens. In this weather. I had not thought." He set down his brush with great care on the edge of the paint box and took a step towards her, then stopped, as though uncertain whether a handshake was in order.

"I hoped I might have a word," Vivienne said.

"Yes. Yes, of course. Though I am at a slight disadvantage, as you see, in my painting things. If you would care to come up to the cottage, I could make a pot of tea, and we could speak properly."

He gathered his materials with fussy nervous precision, the brushes into the tin, the tin into the canvas bag, the canvas propped under his arm. He did not look at her as he did it. He kept his eyes on his hands, on the small tasks, the way a man does when he is not yet ready to look at what is in front of him.

The cottage was close, set back from the path behind a low stone wall and a single twisted hawthorn. The door opened directly into a small low room that smelt of linseed oil and cold ash and, faintly, of yesterday's tobacco. The easel stood by the window, with a half finished canvas on it, and around the walls were hung perhaps a dozen more paintings, all of them of this coast, all of them careful and accurate and without life.

He put the kettle on the small stove and set out two cups with great deliberation. Vivienne sat in the wooden chair by the window and waited.

"I have come," she said, when he had sat down opposite her, "to ask you about the night my aunt died."

He looked at her then, directly, for the first time since she had come up the path. His eyes were pale and a little too bright, and there was a small muscle working in the side of his jaw.

"I was alone in my studio that night," he said. "I have said so before, and I shall say so again. I was here. I painted. I ate my supper at half past seven. I went to bed at eleven. I heard nothing. I saw nothing."

"Mr Vale," she said. "I have in my pocket a letter in your hand."

He did not move. He sat very still, his hands on his knees, his mouth a thin line.

"I must ask you to leave," he said. "I cannot help you. I have said all that I have to say, and I have asked you, very civilly, to go."

He stood up. The chair scraped back against the stone floor.

"The kettle," he said, "has not yet boiled. I think it will not boil now. I am sorry."

Vivienne stood also. She looked at him for a long moment, this small precise frightened man, with his careful paintings and his letter that was not signed and his key that he had given her knowing what she would find.

"You knew her," Vivienne said. "You knew her very well."

"I knew her," he said, "as a client. Nothing more. Nothing less."

He opened the cottage door for her. The mist came in, cold and salt, and with it the cry of a gull, very near, very sharp, out over the water.

"Miss Ashworth," he said, and his voice was thin and precise and quite empty of hope, "I must ask you, for the second and last time, to leave my house."

She walked out past him into the rain, and she heard the door close softly behind her, and the latch fall, and then nothing at all but the wind and the sea.

She stood for a long while on the cliff path above the cove, with the mist on her face and the key in her pocket and the letter folded against it, and she thought about a man who had painted the same stretch of coast for thirty years because he could not bear to paint anywhere else, and who had carried a secret so carefully and for so long that the carrying had become the whole of his life.

Then she turned, and began the long walk back along the cliff to where she had left the car, and she thought that, for now, she had been told all she had been told, and that it would have to be enough.