Chapter Six

It was a tiny, hidden valley in the depths of the moors. Great grey drifts of heather heaped themselves like breaking seas at the base of dry stone walls. The walls combed up the sides of the valley, dividing it into small squares, each of which held about half a dozen huddled sheep.

‘Come on.’ Ash propped the bike up on its stand and began to lead the way down a tiny lane between two of the walls, carefully stepping over the scatterings of sheep dung.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see.’

Down the trackway we filed, it being too narrow to walk side-by-side. I followed Ash gloomily, wondering exactly what I’d let myself in for. The whole place had an ominous air. Trees overhung the path, making it spookily dark, although I couldn’t imagine any ghost being desperate enough to hang around here. Except possibly the earthbound spirit of some recalcitrant farm animal.

‘Ash?’

‘Shh. Nearly there.’

‘Oh. Wow.’ The way suddenly widened, throwing up the view of a small whitewashed house perched on the bank of a stream which was tickling its unassuming way between the green rise of the hills. Meadows dotted with early white flowers surrounded the house and a goat was grazing, tied to an apple tree outside a shed.

‘Who the hell are we visiting? Heidi?’

‘Cute, isn’t it? Come on.’ Ash grabbed my hand and we ran down across the fields towards the dinky dwelling, me suppressing a desire to yodel. Around the back we raced, through a little cobbled yard, and on, through a door standing open, into the house itself.

It was hideously dark in contrast to the daylight outside and I stopped dead. ‘It smells funny.’

‘Yeah,’ said a voice I didn’t recognise. ‘What do you reckon?’

I sniffed. ‘Mushrooms?’

‘Dry rot,’ the voice said glumly. ‘Or possibly wet rot. Some kind of fungal thing. Knowing my luck the place will probably turn out to have athlete’s foot as well.’

‘Willow. This is Cal.’ Ash moved away so that a little more light filtered in through the doorway.

There was a strange note in his voice that I didn’t recognise. Pride and a touch of warning, plus a warmth that was usually lacking in my twin. Oh God, was Ash in love?

‘Hi, Cal.’ Outside, the sunset suddenly broke through the clouds and bounced off the internal whitewash, revealing the owner of the glum voice in a halo of reflected light. I widened my eyes.

‘Hello, Willow.’

Certainly a very definite step up from Ash’s usual muscle-bound types, I thought. The initial impression was of eyes – huge, brown eyes in a pale face, unshaven and a bit hollowed around the cheeks. The second impression – as he moved forward to shake my hand – was ‘phwoar’. He had the looks of a poet who’s spent too long staring into the abyss; long dark hair and lines of stress around the mouth. Luckily, as ever when meeting my brother’s boyfriends, I had no inclination to vomit on him. Dunno why, but something inside tells me that, however gorgeous, it’s not for me and my stomach remains steady. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’

‘It could be. Would you like a tour?’

‘Go ahead, show Will round. I’ll make some tea, yeah?’

What, my ludicrously undomesticated brother making tea?

‘Boiling water. From a kettle,’ I called as Ash disappeared into the recesses of the dark.

‘Ha. Bitch.’

Cal stood smiling curiously at me. ‘You’re very pretty,’ he said disarmingly. ‘Ash has told me a lot about you, but he didn’t tell me that.’

‘Um, thank you,’ I stammered. I actually felt a bit windswept from the journey over and kept catching sight of a wayward piece of hair sticking out at right angles above my left ear. ‘I’m not sure he’s noticed, actually. Have you known Ash long?’

‘’Bout three years.’ Cal moved forward towards a door which he threw open to reveal a large room, and I could see properly. See, for example, that he was using a stick. See also that he moved in a lurch as though one leg was longer than the other. I bit my lip.

‘Living room. Dining room at the back. Over that side of the house is the kitchen and study, which is actually the old walk-in larder. Upstairs’ – the stick gestured at the ceiling – ‘there’s two bedrooms and a bathroom so disgusting I’d advise you to pee in the field. I haven’t found out where it flushes to, but I bet that’s not going to be good news.’

I half-smiled but was finding it hard to tell whether this man was joking or not. He kept a straight face and delivered his words sharply, as though he wasn’t used to talking to strangers.

‘Cal.’

‘Willow.’

‘Why am I here?’

‘Ash wanted to bring you. He thought we should meet.’ Cal shuffled himself around to face me. ‘And I’m glad we have.’

Okay, I had to get this question out of the way, whilst we were still relative strangers. It would be a lot more awkward if his relationship with Ash really took off and I was still skirting around the topic. ‘What’s the matter with your leg?’

Cal tipped his head on one side. ‘War wound,’ he said, deadpan. ‘Got shot up in ’45, had to put the old crate down behind enemy lines. All very hush-hush, donchaknow.’ Still no trace of humour, but a slight brittleness which told me this was his standard reply, a running gag to keep people from intruding. It made me wince on his behalf.

‘You don’t look old enough to have fought in the war,’ I replied in kind. If he wanted his privacy, he had nothing to fear from me.

‘Oil of Olay, m’dear. Fantastic stuff. I’m actually a hundred and three.’ I couldn’t help myself, and snorted back a laugh. Cal’s face brightened. ‘That’s better. You shouldn’t take me seriously. And you’re even prettier when you smile.’

Despite knowing he was Ash’s, despite his clearly doing his best to keep me at arm’s length as far as personal questions were concerned, and despite the fact that I’d only just met him, I blushed. As I was about to say something witty and snappy and devastating, Ash bounced back into the room with three mugs of something which looked almost like tea.

‘Ash, you’re going to make someone a wonderful wife.’ Cal, still deadpan, took his mug. ‘Can you iron?’

Now it was Ash’s turn to blush. I looked over my tea at the pair of them: Ash skinny in his leathers, hair ruthlessly spiked into a bleached Number 2, and Cal unkempt in a check shirt and jeans, tall, thin and dark, dark, dark. Talk about an odd couple.

‘Look, I really should be getting back.’ I swallowed my scalding tea.

‘Are you still having trouble with your laptop?’ Cal asked out of nowhere.

‘What? Laptop? Oh, yeah, loose connection or something. Bloody stupid machines. Better off with a piece of paper and a slide rule.’

Cal looked at Ash. ‘Well, that’s me Luddite-ed out of a job.’

‘Cal’s a computer consultant,’ Ash explained, whilst I watched Cal being quietly amused. ‘That’s why I told him about your laptop. Thought you might want him to take a look at it for you.’

‘Oh. Sorry. About the slide rule thing. Obviously. Couldn’t, um, do spreadsheets with a slide rule.’

‘Only I could pick it up from you and drop it round to Cal’s tomorrow.’ Ash’s voice had a pleading tone. Oh-ho, I thought, still at the looking-for-every-opportunity-to-drop-in stage, eh?

‘No, it’s too far to bike all the way over here again just for my laptop.’

‘No, it’s fine. Cal lives in York. Works from home.’ Normally if I’d asked Ash for a favour such as, say, picking up my dry-cleaning you’d have thought I’d asked him to mud-wrestle Madonna, but now it seemed he couldn’t do enough.

‘I just inherited this place,’ Cal said calmly, as though the intimated early-morning presence of a sex-crazed Ash was a well-known occupational hazard to computer consultants. Perhaps he was looking forward to it. ‘My great-aunt died. Well, obviously. Inheriting from the living is something of an extreme sport, I should imagine. I used to spend summer holidays here and she knew I loved the place, so …’ A twist of his head and a small shrug. Again, that touch of vulnerability, quickly glossed over. I was beginning to see what Ash saw in Cal – apart from his total shaggability, of course.

‘My grandfather died, too,’ I found myself saying. ‘He left me his nose.’ And then I realised that this was the first time I’d actually said it aloud. ‘My grandfather died,’ I said again. I hadn’t even managed to say it to Luke. It was almost as though if I didn’t say it, it hadn’t happened.

Cal nodded. ‘Takes a while to get used to, doesn’t it? Almost like they’ve been around so long, they can’t just stop being. Maybe they have to, kind of, wear away in our heads.’

On the ride home, tucked down low to avoid the pull of the wind, I thought about this. Had Ganda left me his bodily remnant to ensure that he never ‘wore away in my head’? Or as a good luck charm? He’d always sworn that, after the accident which had removed said nose, his luck had changed. Nothing that made his fortune, but enough to pay for materials, workspace, horrible baggy tartan trousers – all the sort of things that are necessary to mad inventors. All right, yes, I had to admit it. Much as I had loved … still loved Ganda, much as I had enjoyed being his favoured grandchild and helping him with his creations, I had known all the time that he was completely barking. And look at his legacies. An embalmed nose, a ton of dusty books, a pile of mouldering rubber boots, half an acre of sandy soil and two spaniels?

Once home, I fetched the matchbox from the cupboard and pulled open the inner tray. There lay the nose in question; I remembered Ganda pulling the box from the back pocket of his trousers and making me blow on it for luck whenever he’d finished a new project, but I hadn’t seen the actual nose for a long time. It was a small, dried up raisin-looking thing, round with a dividing crease like Tom Thumb’s backside.

‘Honestly, Ganda,’ I said. ‘What were you thinking?’ My grandfather had known he was dying, had a few weeks warning to get his affairs in order, so leaving it to me hadn’t been a mad whim. I closed the tray up. The nose was padded in place with a wad of paper so it barely moved. ‘Maybe I’m supposed to wish on it. Like a star.’ I was speaking aloud, glad that there was no one to overhear. Wishing on a star is pathetic enough, wishing on your dead grandfather’s nasal organ has to border on the pathological.

‘All right.’ I blew on the box and shook it again. ‘I wish … I wish …’ A mistimed snatch of my fingers and the inner tray of the matchbox flew free, sailed across the kitchen and deposited Ganda’s nose deftly into the plughole of the sink. It caught on the trap for a moment before my careful attempt to pry it free with my fingernails sent it plunging into the cabbage-scented depths of the U-bend.

I unscrewed the pipe and was hit in the face with a splurge of cold, greasy water accompanying the nose onto the floor. As I mopped up, I found the paper wadding from the matchbox tray. It was thicker than the tissue paper I had thought stuffed the box, and its flight had caused it to spread half-open revealing the lettering which covered one side. I wiped my hands on my legs and ironed the paper down on the floor. The words I read sent me flying to the phone to call Katie, all thoughts of the renegade nose forgotten.