Seizure extract
Farther north, the road narrowed. It still had the same name, but there were fewer cars, and instead of ploughing furrows through the land – cutting through hills, making severe, geometrical valleys – it curved around it, drawing her in, drawing her up. She has edged toward the sea, though it was not in sight, but still the sky seemed broader, paler, the horizon more distant with the prospect of open water. The earth had flattened itself; gusts slapped the side of the car and the thorn trees she could glimpse just beyond the verge were bent back with the weight of the wind.
With twenty miles to go, Janet pulled off the road in a market town. She had to cross a little bridge on which stone lions stood guard, their tails stiff as swords. The road dipped and took her through tight winding streets where neat terraced houses shouldered up to each other as if huddling for warmth. She parked in the square where the old market had been; there were coffee shops now, a fruit and vegetable store, a butcher, a newsagent’s. Up past the end of the square she could see a fine old building with flags hung over its awning: a hotel. She felt for the key of the house in her pocket. A single brass key, not unlike the key to the London house, but its very ordinariness was peculiar to her. Ernest Jackson had handed it to her in an envelope, along with a little map, photocopied from a road atlas, with the location of the house marked with a neat red X. What had she expected? A great iron key; or perhaps something tiny, graven gold.
There was no telling, of course, what state the house would be in. Ernest Jackson couldn’t possibly say, and when she’d asked she saw his expression close: he knew the limits of his business, and had built a fine fence at the border – she knew right away that she’d crossed it and stepped back. Now, with a breath of wind running down her collar – it was colder up here than down south – she wondered if she oughtn’t to check into the hotel, just in case. She had brought bedding with her, a duvet, sheets, a pillow; candles and matches too. She had packed it all into the car with a kind of abandon: it hadn’t seemed real, it was like something she had read in a book, an adventure, a sleepover. But she was not the adventurous type. Not that kind of adventure, anyway. She liked comfort and certainty in a place to lay her head, and now, standing out in the early afternoon of a strange town hundreds of miles from home she was less sure about the sheets, the stumps of wax that had seen service on her dining room table and no other place, the box of matches from an expensive restaurant.
Janet opened the boot of the car, retrieved her jacket, locked the doors. She looked at the faces of the people walking past her on the street this Saturday lunchtime: women, men, children, tracksuits, sneakers, bags from chainstores, pushchairs, hairnets, a rolled umbrella in case of rain. She could have been invisible: she wove a path through them, or they around her, and she heard their talk, their laughter – the swooping, upward curve of their voices; an optimistic accent, she decided. Janet did not consider that she herself had an accent, though of course others did; it had stuck somewhere mid-ocean and made her hard to place, which had been useful to her in the past. Now she heard her own voice in her head, set against these voices, and felt far away: no wonder they didn’t see her. Their lives shot away from her in all directions, contained and complete. She was an emptiness, a mystery, at the centre. Don’t be silly, she told herself. You just don’t know it here. Adventure, she reminded herself, her hand shoved in her pocket, clutching the key, clutching at the memory of packing the car, of leaving, of shutting out Stephen’s questions – and worse, his quiet. She turned into the door of the hotel.
It was called The White Swan. The inside was all dark wood and thick patterned carpet. The smell of hotels – never different, anywhere she went, anywhere in the country, a composite of distant bacon, furniture polish, old pipes and the faintest breath of damp – was almost a second door. She pushed herself through. There was no one at the front desk. The visitors’ book was open but a fresh page had been turned and gazed blankly up at her. She rang the bell. Nothing.
“Hello?” She didn’t like to ring again; though why not, she couldn’t have said. “Hello?” A little louder. Nothing, still. So she walked further into the building, which appeared to be entirely deserted. She passed the toilets; she passed the door to the bar; then she turned into the dining room and stopped. It was empty, still; but there was something odd about it, watery light through arched, filigreed windows. Columns, seemingly of wrought iron, which supported a ceiling that did not appear to be in need of support. Tables set with stiff white cloths, fanned napkins, heavy and scratched stainless steel, the same dark carpet, a bruised blue. But the room did not belong in this room. She could not put her finger on what was wrong.
“It’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?”
A voice behind her. Janet’s heart jumped, and she only just stopped her body jumping too. A pale blond girl with hair scraped back from her face, a white blouse, black skirt, plain and sensible shoes. A little gold cross round her neck.
“Spooky?” Janet couldn’t think what else to say.
The girl tapped the panelling with her finger. “Because of the other ship. You know, The Titanic.” Her voice with its sing-song up-and-down.
“Sorry?” Janet was now entirely perplexed.
The girl narrowed her eyes, as if Janet had suddenly got much farther away. “The Titanic? The sister ship --?”
Janet shook her head.
“Sorry,” the girl laughed. “I thought that was why you’d come in here. It’s why most people do. This dining room was from the sister ship of The Titanic. When they broke up the ship. They put in here.”
Janet looked around the room again, at the pillars, the creamy windows, the gleaming wood, the tablecloths. A room holding itself in readiness for something, a room on its best behaviour, a room in a shadow no chandelier could burn off.
“Why?” Janet asked.
“Why what?” The girl picked at a nail, fingered her collar.
“Why put it in here?”
“Tourist attraction, I guess.” The girl said. “I don’t know. It’s worked. Especially since the movie.”
If an entirely deserted hotel meant that the tourist draw had worked, Janet had no wish to think what things had been like before.
The girl seemed to collect herself then, realising that Janet had not come in just to see the dining room. “Can I – can I help you? Sorry, do you need a room?”
Janet considered staying here in a tidy box with a kettle on the bureau, packets of long-life milk, teabags, instant coffee, a trouser press, and this room down below calling to its lost sister two and a half miles below the ocean’s surface, a parallel chamber whose fine wood was made into lace by seaworms, whose iron wept rust, whose walls had watched the last smokers, the last drinkers, fight the tilt of the floor on a clear, icy night.
“No thank you,” Janet said quickly. “Thanks very much, all the same.”
“Okay,” said the girl.
Janet tried hard not to feel that she was rising from the depths when she came back into the air, but the sensation stuck with her. She had felt the same depths coming out of Jackson’s office into the street of a city she knew, where there was no echo of historic tragedy to drum against her brain – nothing except her own, and she’d never thought of that as tragedy.
She bought a watery coffee from a baker’s; her Thermos had run dry a few hours back. In the car, she got out her atlas, the little map in her pocket and compared the two. A straightforward route. And so she set off again, towards the very edge of the land where her new possession lay. The streaks of blue in the sky had disappeared; it had closed over to white now, as if she were looking up through a bowl of fine porcelain. At the perimeter of the town was the library, a little hospital, a war memorial; after that the road narrowed again and then rose over a green hill: a leap in her gut as the car crested and dipped.
Coastal route. She waited to turn, indicated, swept into a lane banked high on either side with brambles. Oncoming vehicles in middle of road, said the sign: what was she meant to do? She slowed down, craning her neck over the wheel to see farther ahead, if only a few inches; the empty feeling in her belly from the hill had not gone. She knew she was tired and she rolled down the window, listened to the road as well as watched it. It was easy to imagine, some local barrelling down a road he drove every day, hardly expecting some stranger’s car –
She had not asked Ernest Jackson how her mother had died. Would he have known? He had volunteered almost nothing. He knew the price of information; it was his currency. He would not give it away freely, and his interests were not necessarily her own. She knew that now, and knew too that at the time, anyway, she had been far too startled to ask for detail. All the questions had come to her mind later, streaming silently out her mouth as breath as she had turned towards home, as she had slept and dreamt and woke and walked. Now they bundled together, those questions, into a certainty: that this was how her mother had died, driving along a lane, perhaps this very lane, turning a blind corner and meeting her end: a smash of metal on metal, a black scrawl of rubber left on the Tarmac, leaking oil. The other driver: alive, in shock. She could find him. What would he know?
Janet became aware she wasn’t watching the road. She pulled over onto the verge, let the car idle, dropped her head to the steering wheel, closed her eyes. She held tight to the wheel to keep her hands from shaking. She could turn back. She could forget everything she had learnt. Well, it would be easy enough to forget: she knew hardly anything at all. She had one house, she did not need another. Whatever this place was, it could go to ruin – she need not even see it, need not care, need not disrupt what was certain, what she had, what was true. There was no need.
And yet the need rose in her. The need was what made her heart beat: not only with wildness, the way it was now, but made it beat to keep her alive. With one hand she eased off the handbrake, looked in her wing mirror, and pulled back on to the lane. In the wind on her face she caught the scent of the sea.