Now
I woke up with a hangover. It was the second day running, and – after yesterday’s pie-fest, my body was on the verge of revolt. There was a heaviness in my limbs and a dull ache between my eyes, and I knew immediately that the only thing that would make me feel human again was to lace up my sneakers and go for a run, even if it was the last thing I wanted to do. But sweating it all out was the only way, especially since I could already hear Mrs Willocks downstairs in the kitchen, baking something that smelled decidedly like blueberry muffins.
I forced myself onto my feet and stumbled to the wardrobe, pulling on a sports bra, shorts and a vest. I bounced lightly on the balls of my feet in the hope of getting the blood flowing, but it just made me feel light headed and I had to sit back down on the bed for a minute and take a couple of deep breaths before I was finally ready to hit the road.
It was a shockingly bright morning, with only a few lazy wisps of cloud lacing their way through the bright blue. I did a few cursory stretches and clicked my iPod until I found Kanye and set off. I hooked a left down a thin dirt trail marked by a small wooden sign: TO THE SEA. The path was rough and uneven, and brambles stretched in and caught at my legs as I passed. The path climbed up a steep hill fringed with long tufts of dried beach grass, which cracked and crunched satisfyingly underfoot. I took in a lungful of air and felt the fug in my head begin to clear.
Last night’s game of charades had, predictably, ended in tears. Charlie had snapped at Piper for her inability to guess that the hand he’d placed on top of his head was meant to signify a shark fin – ‘It’s JAWS! How can you not get that?!’ – and poor Candace had frozen, dumbstruck, after pulling The Unbearable Lightness of Being out of the bowl. Ethan managed to act out Pulp Fiction in two irritatingly clever actions, causing everyone to collapse into fits of rapture and me to turn sullen. Barbara fell asleep in a Regency reproduction chair, curled like a prawn and pinked with sleep, a well-thumbed Philippa Gregory open on her knee. A bottle of whisky had been emptied and another produced. At some point – I think it was around midnight – Mrs Willocks had poked her curler-wrapped head around the door and asked politely if we wouldn’t mind being a bit quieter, but sadly for Mrs Willocks, we only got louder until the final crescendo, when Dad successfully re-enacted the Battle of Hastings using a fireplace poker (‘Props aren’t allowed,’ Bob pointed out, but he’d been roundly shouted down). We all crawled off to bed shortly thereafter.
I reached the crest of the hill and stopped, bent over, lungs bursting, cursing myself for that last dram, but then I looked up and saw the wide arc of dun-colored sand stretching out to either side of me and the blue-gray of the ocean. I’d forgotten how much I loved the ocean: the smell of salt and seaweed and, ever so slightly, something sharp and slightly rotten, the rhythm of the waves as they washed in and out, the sound of the seagulls cawing as they flew in lazy, looping circles above. I pulled off my sneakers and tied them together around my neck: I wanted the feel of the damp sand packed beneath my feet when I ran.
To my left, a great hulking castle squatted at the edge of the bay, sitting atop a ragged bunch of rocks and scrubland and looking as though it had not so much been placed there as forced itself up through the earth. It was equal parts beautiful and terrifying: you could imagine people getting killed in it, or it at least being a persistent and convincing threat to anyone who saw it. I set off in the opposite direction, down a clear stretch of empty beach, my only company the occasional crab scuttling across my path.
For the second time in two days, I was alone. It was wonderful and also sort of disorientating, this sudden access to solitude. In New York, there were people. On the streets, in the windows of the glass skyscrapers that towered above, in the gym, in the elevator . . . everywhere, people. Even in the privacy of my apartment, I was still surrounded: the man downstairs yelling at the television, the couple in the next apartment bickering over whose turn it was to take the cat to the vet, the toddler rolling his scooter along the wood floor above. And always, always, the steady tick of emails streaming into my inbox. But here, now, there was nothing. I looked up and saw only an endless arc of ocean and sand. It was kind of amazing.
Just then, a tiny speck appeared on the horizon, followed by another, smaller, speck. I ran towards the two specks, gaining ground and perspective, and soon saw that it was a man and a dog – a scruffy, shaggy giant of a dog, nearly half the height of the man. The dog ran ahead in great loping gallops, charging towards me at alarming speed. I could hear the man shouting at the dog but the dog kept on charging. I couldn’t think of anything else to do and was enjoying a rare surge of endorphins, so I kept running to meet it.
And then, in a great tangle of limbs and damp fur and muddy paws, we met.
‘Archie, no!’ the man shouted as he ran over to us. ‘Archie! Get off her!’
I was pinned beneath the dog’s weight (considerable) and fell into a fit of hysterical laughter as the dog lapped at my face. ‘It’s okay! It’s okay!’ I called up to the man. ‘It’s fine!’ I managed to sit up and scratched the giant dog’s head, at which point he collapsed in a heap onto my lap and nearly knocked the wind out of me.
‘Christ, sorry about that!’ the man said, reaching down to catch Archie’s collar. ‘He’s a bloody nightmare, this one.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, rubbing the dog’s sandy belly. ‘He’s a good boy, aren’t y—’ I looked up and found myself face to face with the paperback man from the pub. ‘Oh,’ I said, not very enthusiastically. ‘It’s you.’
‘Well, if it isn’t my new American friend!’ He held out his hand and pulled me onto my feet, the dog shifting and flopping heavily onto the sand next to us. ‘I didn’t recognize you from underneath six stone of dog. What the hell are you doing out here at this hour of the morning?’
I shrugged. ‘Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get a run in. It’s incredible here.’
He followed my gaze and nodded. ‘It’s magic, especially when you’ve got it to yourself. That’s why I like to come out with him early, before I go to the surgery.’
‘You’re a surgeon?’ With his wind-ruffled hair, faded board shorts and paint-splattered parka, I couldn’t really picture him with a scalpel in hand, performing a delicate operation.
‘No, nothing as glamorous as that. I’m just a regular old GP – old people’s dodgy knees and the occasional bout of tonsillitis, that’s my lot.’
‘Oh. Well, it’s still a . . . a very noble profession.’ I don’t know why I said that. I mean, I do think it’s a noble profession, helping people and everything, but who says things like ‘noble profession’ other than a 1950s school marm? Me, that’s who.
He let out a booming laugh. ‘Yes, very noble – that’s me! I’m Chris, by the way.’ He stuck out an enormous hand and I shook it, feeling the rough callouses on his fingers as they touched mine. He couldn’t have been much older than me, but his knuckles were thick and the tips of his fingers blunted and scuffed. He had the hands of a dockworker, not a doctor, and I felt momentarily sorry for anyone whose tricky knees needed fondling.
‘Ruby,’ I said, shaking his hand. I looked down at Archie, who was now rolling happily around in the sand, tongue lolling to one side. ‘He’s incredible. What a dog! What kind is he?’
‘Irish wolfhound,’ he said, leaning down to give him a scratch.
‘He looks . . . primeval.’
‘Excuse me! I’ll have you know that he’s a highly intelligent beast who only very occasionally eats his own sick. Aren’t you, boy?’ The dog looked up at him mournfully before scooting past to chase off a pair of seagulls. ‘You see? A genius.’
‘Obviously. So do you live near here?’
‘Bit early to be inviting yourself round, isn’t it?’ he said, flashing a wicked grin.
‘I’m not . . . I was just . . .’ I stumbled and spluttered. It was too early for this sort of banter.
‘Relax, I’m only joking. I live on the other side of those dunes there,’ he said, pointing towards a few scrub-covered hills a half-mile away. ‘Little cottagey thing. Nothing special, but it’s quiet out there and there’s no one around, so it suits me to the ground. You’re at Bugle Hall, aren’t you?’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘How does everyone know that?’
‘Come on, love. A group of strange Americans turn up, everyone knows where they are and what they’re doing on a moment by moment basis. That’s the village way.’
‘We’re not that strange.’
Now it was his turn to raise an eyebrow. ‘I saw that tweedy couple haranguing the town drunk at the pub the other day, asking about his lineage,’ he said. ‘You can’t fool me. A bunch of loonies.’
I held up my hands in admission. ‘You’re right, I can’t defend it: we’re all nuts. And yes, we’re at Bugle Hall. It’s . . . nice.’
‘Come off it, it’s like a bloody mausoleum there! I went there as a boy a few times: gave me the creeps. She still got all those animal figurines everywhere?’
‘Like, thousands of them! And all of these commemorative plates with Princess Diana’s face on them. It’s kind of weird.’
‘That’s the English for you, love! Some of us, at least. Poor Mrs Willocks, still in mourning for our Diana. Never fully recovered from the loss.’
I remembered Mrs Willocks’s kindly face and felt a crippling sense of guilt. ‘God, I feel terrible. She’s so nice!’ I said hastily. ‘And she’s been such a good hostess!’
‘I expect she’s nice to you, making you pay through the nose to sleep with a bunch of creepy ceramic animals.’ He caught the look on my face and looked sheepish. ‘You’re right, you’re right – she’s a lovely woman. I’m afraid that if you live in a small town long enough, you start to focus on people’s . . . eccentricities.’
‘No need to apologize,’ I said. ‘I live in New York – I silently wish at least three people dead on my commute every morning.’
‘People, eh?’ he said with a grin.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I should get back. Mrs Willocks cooks a mean breakfast, and if I don’t get there early, my dad will have polished the whole thing off.’
‘Mrs Willocks a great cook?’ he marveled. ‘Well, you learn something new every day. Now, what are you planning to do with the rest of your day, once you’ve finished stuffing yourself full of Mrs Willocks’s wares? I’m assuming you won’t be wearing your shoes around your neck at the table, by the way. You don’t need me to tell you that Mrs Willocks won’t stand for sand in her doilies.’
I reached up and touched one of the sandy sneakers dangling by my shoulder and laughed. I was suddenly aware of what I must look like, and started tucking stray strands of salt-crusted hair behind my ears. ‘I like the feel of the sand between my toes,’ I said with an embarrassed shrug.
‘Don’t feel you need to explain on my behalf,’ he said. ‘I’d be out here naked as a jaybird if it wouldn’t get me arrested.’
‘And you think I’m the lunatic.’
‘Tell you what: get on home and get yourself decent. I’ll pick you up around noon and show you around this beautiful countryside of ours.’
The offer took me by surprise, and for a moment I was tempted to accept. I was desperate to see more of the place, and Chris seemed like a nice enough guy. Sure, I didn’t know him at all, but what were the chances of this tiny village harboring a psychopath? A psychopath with a dog, no less? But then I thought about the look on Piper’s face if I were to tell her that I’m abandoning my wedding duties to go joy-riding with a random northerner, and saw the folly of my thinking. ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I’ve got all this wedding stuff to sort out for my sister, and loads of the other guests are arriving today . . .’
‘Tomorrow, then. I’ll take you for a spin in the morning.’
I let out a laugh that was more like a bark. ‘My sister would absolutely kill me if I left her side the day of the wedding, even for second. Sorry, it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just . . .’
‘Say no more. You’ve left me a heartbroken shell of a man, of course, but I trust I’ll recover in time.’
‘You can always send me the therapist bill, if it comes to that.’
‘This is England, pet! We don’t have therapists, we have pubs.’ He let out a whistle and Archie bounded towards us. ‘First time he’s ever responded to that,’ he said. ‘He must have taken a shine to you. Wants to impress.’
‘I’m flattered,’ I replied, giving Archie a goodbye scratch behind the ear.
‘Right, good luck with the wedding, hope no one falls off a turret.’
‘It’s pretty much inevitable,’ I said. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you. Good luck with the tricky knees!’ I started to jog away when I heard him call my name. I stopped and circled back to him.
‘Here,’ he said, thrusting a scrap of paper into my hand. ‘Just in case you get a couple of minutes free before you go.’ I looked down and saw that it was a slightly tattered business card. CHRIS DIXON: PHYSICIAN/MUSICIAN. ‘Bit cheesy, I know,’ he said, scuffing the sand with his foot. Archie the dog stared up at me expectantly.
‘You’re a musician?’ I asked. I had always had a soft spot for musicians.
‘Musician feels a bit strong,’ he said. ‘I play a bit of guitar in the Craster with my mates on a Saturday night, that sort of thing.’
‘That’s so cool!’
‘I don’t know if I’d describe us as cool,’ he smiled. ‘We specialize in Billy Joel’s lesser-known work.’
I tucked the card into my sports bra. ‘I’ll give you a call if I get any free time,’ I said. ‘Or if I have any sudden Billy Joel cravings.’
‘Careful,’ he said with a grin. ‘They can creep up on you. Give my regards to Mrs Willocks, by the way. And tell her my mam wants her Crock-Pot back!’
I could feel him watching me as I ran away, and heard Archie the dog give a mournful bark right before I slipped out of sight. There was a dull ache in my breastbone that felt something like regret.