‘It’s not that I don’t want you to spend time with Kate,’ the housemistress said to me later, over tea in her office, concern in her gaze. ‘I’m very glad you’ve found friends. But remember, part of being a well-rounded young woman is having a wide variety of friends. Why not spend the weekend with one of the other girls? Or indeed stay here – it’s not as if the school is empty at weekends.’
‘So –’ I sipped my tea – ‘is there anything in the rules about the number of exeat weekends I can take?’
‘Well, nothing in the rules exactly …’
I nodded, and smiled, and drank her tea, and then signed out the following Friday to stay at Kate’s exactly as before.
And there was nothing the school could do.
Until they did.
BY THE TIME I reach the stretch of road leading into Salten village, I am hot and sweaty, and I pause under the shade of a clump of oaks by the road, feeling the sweat running down the hollow of my chest, pooling in my bra.
Freya is sleeping peacefully, her rosebud mouth just slightly open, and I stoop to kiss her, very gently, not wanting to wake her, before straightening up and pushing on, my feet a little sore now, towards the village.
I don’t turn at the sound of the car behind me, but it slows as it passes, the driver peering out, and I see who it is – Jerry Allen, the landlord of the Salten Arms, in the old flatbed truck that used to take drinks back and forth from the cash and carry. Only now it’s older and more ramshackle than ever, more rust than truck. Why is Jerry still driving a thirty-year-old rust bucket? The pub was never a gold mine, but it looks as if he has fallen on hard times.
Jerry himself is craning out of the window with frank curiosity, wondering, I expect, what kind of tourist is mad enough to be walking along the main road, alone, in the heat of the day.
He’s almost past me when his face changes, and he gives a little blast of the horn that makes me jump, and grinds to a halt on the verge, throwing up a cloud of dust that sets me coughing and choking.
‘I know you,’ he says as I draw level with the truck, its engine still running. There is a touch of sly triumph in his voice, as though he has caught me out. I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that I never tried to deny it. ‘You’re one of that crowd used to hang around with Kate Atagon – one of them girls her pa—’
Too late he realises where this conversation is leading and he clears his throat, and covers his mouth, trying to hide his confusion in a fit of smoker’s hack.
‘Yes,’ I say. I keep my voice even, refusing to let him see me react to his words. ‘I’m Isa. Isa Wilde. Hello Jerry.’
‘All growed up,’ he says, his eyes watering a little as his gaze travels over my figure. ‘And a baby, no less!’
‘Little girl,’ I say. ‘Freya.’
‘Well, well, well,’ he says meaninglessly, and he gives a gummy smile, that shows his missing teeth, and the gold tooth that always gave me a slight shudder for reasons I could never pin down. He regards me silently for a moment, taking me in from my dusty sandals to the sweat patches staining my sundress, then he jerks his head back towards the Reach. ‘Terrible news, isn’t it? They’ve fenced off half the bank, Mick White says, though you can’t see it from here. Police teams, sniffer dogs, them white tent things … though what good they think that’ll do now, I don’t know. Whatever’s buried there, it’s been out there in the wind and rain long enough, from what Judy Wallace’s old man said. Her it was that found it, and to hear Mick’s account, their dog snapped it right in half at the elbow, brittle as a stick. Between that and the salt, I don’t suppose there’s much left of it now.’
I don’t know what to say to this. A kind of sickness is rising in my throat, so I just nod, queasily, and something seems to strike him.
‘You going to the village? Hop in, and I’ll give you a lift.’
I look at him, at his red face, at the rickety old truck with the bench seat and no belts, let alone a child seat for Freya, and I remember the way you could always smell whiskey on his breath, even at lunchtime.
‘Thanks,’ I say, trying to smile. ‘But honestly, I’m enjoying the walk.’
‘Don’t be soft.’ He jerks a thumb at the back of the truck. ‘Plenty of room in there for the pram, and it’s a good mile still to the village. You’ll be roasted!’
I can’t smell whiskey, I’m too far away from the truck for that, but I smile again and shake my head.
‘Honestly, thanks, Jerry. But I’m fine, I’d rather walk.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he says with a grin, his gold tooth flashing, and puts the truck back into gear. ‘Come into the pub when you’re finished with your shopping, and have a cold one on the house, at least.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, but the word is drowned in the roar of tyres on grit and the cloud of summer dust as he pulls away, and I wipe the hair out of my eyes, and continue on down the road to the village.
Salten Village has always given me the creeps a little, in a way I can’t explain. It’s partly the nets. Salten is a fishing village, or was. It’s really only pleasure boats that go out of the port now, although there are a handful of commercial fishing boats that still use the harbour. In tribute to this, the houses in the village are festooned with nets, a decorative celebration of the town’s history, I suppose. Some people say it’s for luck, and perhaps that’s how it started out, but now it’s kept up purely for the tourists, as far as I can see.
The day trippers who pass through on their way to the sandy beaches up the coast go wild for the nets, taking photographs of the pretty little stone and half-timbered houses swathed in the webbing, as their kids buy ice creams and gaudy plastic buckets. Some of the nets look pristine, as if they were bought straight from the chandler and have never seen the sea, but others have plainly been used, with the rips that put them out of service still visible, chunks of weed and buoys knotted in the strands.
I have never liked them, not from the first moment I saw them. They’re somehow sad and predatory at the same time, like giant cobwebs, slowly engulfing the little houses. It gives the whole place a melancholy air, like those sultry southern American towns, where the Spanish moss hangs thick from the trees, swaying in the wind.
Some houses have just a modest skein of netting between the storeys, but others are festooned, with great rotting swags that drape from one side to the other, hoicked up above doorways, obscuring windows, tangling in pot plants and window latches and shutters.
I can’t bear the idea – of opening your window late at night, and feeling the cloying netting pushing back against the glass, shutting out the light, feeling it tangle in your fingers as you force the window open, the rip of the strands as you try to free the latch.
If it were me, I would sweep away every vestige of the sad relics, like someone spring-cleaning a room, chasing out the spiders.
Perhaps it’s the symbolism I don’t like. Because what are nets for, after all, but to catch things?
As I walk down the narrow high street now, they seem to have grown and spread, even as the place itself seems to have become shabbier and smaller. Every house is swathed, where ten years ago it was maybe half, if that, and the nets look to me as if they have been arranged deliberately to cover up the way that Salten is fading – draped over peeling paintwork and rotting wood. There are empty shops too, faded ‘For Sale’ signs swinging in the breeze, and a general air of dilapidation that shocks me. Salten was never smart, the divide between town and school always sharp. But now it looks like many of the tourists have disappeared to France and Spain, and I am dismayed to see that the shop on the corner that sold ice cream and was always bright with plastic buckets and spades is gone, its empty window full of dust and cobwebs.
The post office is still there, though the net above its entrance is new: a broad orange swag, with an old repaired tear still visible.
I look up as I push the door open with my back, reversing the pram into the tiny shop. Don’t drop on me, I’m praying. In my mind’s eye the tangling threads are engulfing me and Freya in their suffocating web.