AFTER RICK DRIVES away, we look at each other, each unaccountably tongue-tied, feeling the hot sun beating down on the top of our heads. I want to ask Kate about the message, but something is stopping me.
Before I have made up my mind to speak, Kate turns and opens the gate, closing it behind us, as I make my way down towards the short wooden walkway that joins the Tide Mill to the shore.
The Mill itself sits on a little spit of sand, barely bigger than the building itself, which I suppose was once joined to the bank. At some point, when the Mill was being constructed, a narrow channel was dug away, severing the Mill from the land and funnelling the rising and falling tide past the water wheel that used to sit in the channel. The wheel is long gone, only a stump of blackened wood sticking out at right angles from the wall shows where it once stood, and in its place is the wooden walkway, bridging the ten feet of water that separates the Mill from the shore. Seventeen years ago I remember running across it, all four of us at once sometimes, but now I can’t quite believe we trusted our weight to it.
It is narrower than I remember, the slats salt-bleached and rotten in places, and no handrail has been installed in the years since I last saw it, but Kate starts across it fearlessly, carrying my bag. I take a deep breath, trying to ignore the images in my head (slats giving way, the pram falling into the salt water), and I follow, my heart in my throat as I bounce the wheels across the treacherous gaps, only exhaling when we reach the comparative safety of the other side.
The door is unlocked, as it always is, always was. Kate turns the handle and stands back, letting me pass – and I wheel Freya up the wooden step and inside.
It’s seven years since I last saw Kate, but I have not been back to Salten for more than twice that. For a moment it is like I have stepped back in time, and I am fifteen, the ramshackle beauty of the place washing over me for the first time. I see again the long, asymmetrical windows with their cracked panes, overlooking the estuary, the vaulted roof that goes up and up to the blackened beams above, the staircase drunkenly twisting around the space, hopping from landing to rickety landing, past the bedrooms, until it reaches the attic lodged high in the rafters. I see the smoke-blacked stove with its snaking pipe, and the low sofa with its broken springs, and most of all the paintings, paintings everywhere. Some I don’t recognise, they must be Kate’s, but intermingled are a hundred that are like old friends or half-remembered names.
There, above the rust-stained sink in a gilt frame is Kate as a baby, her face round with chub, her concentration fierce as she reaches for something just out of view.
There, hanging between the two long windows is the unfinished canvas of the Reach on a winter’s morning, crackling with frost, and a single heron swooping low above the water.
Beside the door that leads to the outside toilet is a water-colour of Thea, her features dissolving at the edges of the rough paper.
And over the desk I catch sight of a pencil sketch of me and Fatima, arms entwined in a makeshift hammock, laughing, laughing, like there is nothing to fear in all the world.
It’s like a thousand memories assault me all at once, each of them with clutching fingers pulling me back into the past – and then I hear a loud bark, and I look down to see Shadow, bounding up to me, a flurry of white and grey. I fend him off, patting his head as he butts it against my leg, but he is not part of the past, and the spell is broken.
‘It hasn’t changed!’ I say, knowing I sound foolish. Kate shrugs, and begins to unbuckle Freya from her pram.
‘It has a bit. I had to replace the fridge.’ She nods at one in the corner, which looks if anything older and more disreputable than its predecessor. ‘And I had to sell a lot of Dad’s best paintings of course. I filled the gaps with mine, but they’re not the same. I had to sell some of my favourites – the plover’s skeleton, and the one of the greyhound on the sands … but the rest, I couldn’t bear to let these go.’
She looks over the top of Freya’s head at the pictures that remain, and her gaze caresses each one.
I take Freya from her arms, and bounce her over my shoulder, not saying what I am thinking, which is that the place feels like a museum, like those rooms in the houses of famous men, frozen at the moment they left it. Marcel Proust’s bedroom, faithfully reconstructed in the Musée Carnavalet. Kipling’s study preserved in aspic at Bateman’s.
Only here there are no ropes to hold the viewer back, only Kate, living on, in this memorial to her father.
To hide my thoughts I walk to the window, patting Freya’s warm, firm back, more to soothe myself than her, and I stare out over the Reach. The tide is low, but the wooden jetty overlooking the bay is only a few feet above the lapping waves, and I turn back to Kate, surprised.
‘Has the jetty sunk?’
‘Not just the jetty,’ Kate says ruefully. ‘That’s the problem. The whole place is sinking. I had a surveyor come and look at it, he said there’s no proper foundations, and that if I were applying for a mortgage today I’d never get one.’
‘But – wait, hang on, what do you mean? Sinking? Can’t you repin it? – underpin, that’s what I mean. Can’t you do that?’
‘Not really. The problem is it’s just sand underneath us. There’s nothing for the underpinning to rest on. You could postpone the inevitable, but eventually it’s just going to wash away.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Not really. I mean, yes, it’s causing some movement in the upper storeys, which is making the floor a bit uneven, but it’s not going to disappear tonight if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s more stuff like the electrics.’
‘What?’ I stare at the light switch on the wall, as if expecting sparks to start flying at any moment. Kate laughs.
‘Don’t worry, I had a massive fuck-off circuit-breaker installed when things started getting dicey. If anything starts to fizz it just trips. But it does mean that the lights have a tendency to go off at high tide.’
‘This place can’t possibly be insured.’
‘Insured?’ She looks at me like I’ve said something quaint and eccentric. ‘What the hell would I do with insurance?’
I shake my head, wondering.
‘What are you doing here? Kate, this is mad. You can’t live like this.’
‘Isa,’ she says patiently, ‘I can’t leave. How could I? It’s completely unsaleable.’
‘So don’t sell it – walk away. Give the keys to the bank. Declare yourself bankrupt if that’s what it takes.’
‘I can’t leave,’ she says stubbornly, and goes across to the stove to turn the handle on the gas bottle and light the little burner. The kettle on top starts to hiss quietly as she gets out two mugs, and a battered canister of tea. ‘You know why.’
And I can’t answer that because I do. I know exactly why. And it’s the very reason I’ve come back here myself.
‘Kate,’ I say, feeling my insides tighten queasily. ‘Kate – that message …’
‘Not now,’ she says. Her back is towards me, and I can’t see her face. ‘I’m sorry, Isa, I just – it wouldn’t be fair. We need to wait, until the others are here.’
‘OK,’ I say quietly. But suddenly, I’m not. Not really.