Letting Go
Penny Feeny
Email: cfnw41328@blueyonder.co.uk
Some things are
easy to give up. They haven’t become a habit; they don’t carry a weight of
memories. The old hunting lodge was not one of those things. The lodge was
filled with the ghosts of childhood holidays, of young romance, of a marriage
that had once been happy. To push open the stubborn oak door and duck beneath
the overhanging lintel was to rekindle the shadows of past summers: stalking
deer in the early morning mist or watching the sun set over the loch while
gutted perch blistered on the barbecue.
The For Sale sign was an
abomination. It was also pointless, because what casual motorist would drive up
the long barren track? He kicked at the pole but it wouldn’t budge. He thought
of taking an axe to it – he’d honed and polished the one in the woodshed – but
he resisted the temptation. He didn’t want Ursula to find him flailing about
with a weapon. Besides, he wasn’t supposed to be there; they had agreed he
would arrive the following day. Those were her terms. She said she didn’t want
him breathing down her neck while she went through their possessions.
‘You are coming alone,
aren’t you?’ he’d said.
‘Why?’
‘You’re not coming with him?’
‘His name’s Joel.’
‘I don’t care what his
bloody name is.’ He wanted no intruders.
‘Joel gives me space. He
doesn’t try to suffocate me.’ But after a pause, she added, ‘Don’t worry, I’m
not bringing him. I know how you feel about the goddamn place.’
He’d always had a fear of
losing her to someone else. He’d even been jealous of his father in the old
days, teaching her to cast a line. When he saw him embrace her from behind,
close his hands over hers on the rod, he’d wanted to prise them painfully
apart, finger by finger. It didn’t help that Ursula was provocative and
careless, leaving buttons undone and the bathroom door ajar. She was like a
fish, silvery and slippery, teasing him with her quick darting movements, wriggling
through his grasp.
The lodge had a chill musty
air from being shut up for so long. He opened all the doors and tried to fan
summer warmth into the rooms. It was a house where love had died, that’s what
Ursula would say. You couldn’t bring it back. From the sitting room he crossed
the hallway to the kitchen, avoiding the rag rug. Beneath the rug the
floorboards were rotten. The sickly scent of decay rose and lingered. Ursula
had spotted the rot five years ago, not long after Evie was born, and goaded
him to do something about it. Motherhood had changed her, made her pernickety
where before she’d been a free spirit. Not that he loved her any the less –
because she had given him Evie – but it remained awkward to get a joiner out to
renew the floor and at that stage it had not been too bad. It took last
summer’s flash floods – torrents of water running off the burns and down the
mountainside – followed by a prolonged warm spell for the wood to start
crumbling like stale sponge cake.
‘An accident waiting to
happen’ was the phrase she’d used. ‘Someone could fall through to the cellar
and break their neck.’ The cellar was laid with stone slabs, hard and
unforgiving. Although there was access from the outside they had sealed it up
and the space was never used. He was hoping that with the rug in place she
wouldn’t notice he hadn’t fixed the problem.
She’d already accused him
of trying to sabotage the sale. She’d agreed to meet him on site as much to
plan ways of marketing the property as to divide its contents. She wanted her
half of the money. The fact that it was not her house, her inheritance, was
somehow deemed irrelevant by the judge in the family courts. And the fact that
she’d taken Evie away from him, to the other end of the country, was considered
perfectly acceptable. He could hear his father’s voice in his head, shouting at
him to assert himself. He started to see Ursula as a fish again, an eel
perhaps, dark slinky and devious: a creature with no soul. And he began to dream
of the kind of accident she’d described, one that would see her immobilised so
that he could take charge of his daughter and care for her as he had once cared
for his wife: brushing her hair, cooking her choice delicacies, buying her
pretty underwear.
Off the kitchen, at the
back of the lodge, was the pantry. It had slate shelves and a small window
covered with a metal grille. Iron hooks that had dangled a brace of pheasant, a
haunch of venison, the stiff corpse of a hare, swung redundant from the
ceiling. On Ursula’s first visit they’d made love there, while his parents were
sleeping. She had dipped her finger in a pot of raspberry jam and smeared it on
her mouth. His need for her was so urgent he’d sent jars and tins flying. He
remembered being terrified that at any moment his father would fling open the
door and snatch Ursula for himself, raspberry sweet lips and all.
The pantry was now empty,
except for the shotgun. Ursula used to be full of enthusiasm for country life,
especially boating and fishing, but she’d always been nervous of the gun. She
didn’t like the way it bucked against her shoulder when she pulled the trigger
and she’d only once hit a moving object: a fleeing rabbit which had blundered
into the path of the cartridge. She’d blown its head off. She didn’t trust
herself to shoot again.
He was unlocking the pantry
door when he heard the sound of a car engine and the spurt of gravel beneath
its tyres. His hand gripped the slim cold shaft of the rifle. If he walked
outdoors with it this minute, levelling the sights at her cruel tormenting
face, would she be scared? Or would she tell him not to be so silly? Maybe
she’d try and wrestle it away from him, maybe she’d squeeze the trigger by
mistake, maybe… He peered through the kitchen window. Closing the car door,
shielding her eyes against the low sun, Ursula looked around. She took a few
steps towards the lodge, hesitated and then turned, making her way to the loch.
He was surprised how much
this moved him – to find that, instead of opting for a brisk and business-like
dissection of the past, she was drawn, as he had always been, to the eternal
soothing qualities of the water. Propping the rifle against the wall, leaving
the door open, he went outside to join her. She stood with her back to him, her
hands in her pockets, a chiffon scarf fluttering around her neck. She must have
heard his footsteps. He caught a husky murmur that sent shivers down his spine:
‘I’d forgotten how beautiful it all was.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Isn’t
it?’
There was shock in her face
when she wheeled around. ‘I thought you weren’t coming till tomorrow!’
He shrugged.
‘I should have known I
couldn’t trust you.’
He wanted to touch her, to
stroke her pale skin, but she hadn’t let him near her for two years. His
fingers twitched. She edged away and stumbled against the little boat they used
to take out fishing. It was beached, upside down, on a hummock of dry ground.
‘We could go rowing,’ he
said. ‘There’s plenty of light left.’ Beyond the shoreline the water was
tranquil, smooth as silk. ‘It’s relaxing, boating. You always used to love it.’
He heaved the small fibreglass dinghy the right way up.
‘Isn’t that a crack on the
bottom?’
‘No,’ he assured her.
‘It’s fine.’ He pushed it through the reeds and a pair of moorhens, black
ruffled fathers and scarlet beaks, squawked forth. It would be like the old
days, just the two of them drifting across the glassy surface of the loch,
waiting for a fish to bite. The dinghy rocked and bobbed and he tugged its rope
taut as if it were a horse impatient to be mounted.
Ursula didn’t move, not a
step forward or back. Then she laughed. ‘If you think I’m getting into a boat
with you,’ she said. ‘If you think I’d let you take me right out there
so far from… from land… after all you’ve put me through…’
‘I think you’ll find,’ he
said, ‘That I was the innocent party.’
‘No-one is innocent,’
she sneered. ‘And especially not you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well, you’ve lied about me
to everyone we know.’ Her eyes flared with hostility. ‘And then there were
those letters you wrote.’
He flinched. ‘They were
love letters.’
‘Joel didn’t think they
sounded like love letters.’
‘You showed them to him?’
His voice cracked.
‘I was overwhelmed. You
wanted so much from me.’
‘No Ursula. You wanted
everything from me. My money, my daughter, my house, my family inheritance, my
fucking soul.’
He could feel his muscles
tensing. He coiled the rope around his hand until it bit into the flesh between
his thumb and forefinger. He pictured it sinking into the tender column of her
throat, the choking noises she would make. The ground here on the shore was
uneven. Anyone could trip; anyone could get concussion from the hard prow of a
fibreglass boat and drown in a few inches of water. There again, an unconscious
body fallen overboard in the central depths of the loch would be almost
impossible to recover.
Her mouth was opening in
protest. He imagined a barb inside it, catching in the soft tissue of her
cheek. He imagined reeling her in to land, straddling her as she lay gasping,
offering her the choice between oblivion and the chance to live again – on his
terms. The sharp sound of a car door slamming interrupted his reverie. He spun
around. ‘You promised to come alone.’ There was a weal of red now on his palm
from the bite of the rope. ‘You agreed not to bring him.’
‘And you promised to leave
me in peace until tomorrow. You agreed I could sort my stuff out by myself.’
‘That’s not the same thing
at all.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No.’ He was beginning to
tremble. ‘In my case it’s just a change of plan. In yours, it’s another…
betrayal.’
He didn’t like the way she
was looking at him, her head on one side, as if he were a curious unknown
species. ‘As it happens,’ she said finally, ‘I didn’t bring Joel. But at the
last minute, because my mother was ill and couldn’t look after her and she’s
young enough to miss a couple of days of school, I brought Evie.’
His heart leapt. He
couldn’t believe his good fortune: that he might, after all, be able to take
possession of the two things in the world he held dearest, that both were
within his grasp.
‘Evie’s here?’
‘She fell asleep in the car
and I didn’t have the heart to wake her. I guess she’s looking for me.’ She
turned away, calling, ‘Evie! Evie!’
The child was on the other
side of the tall 4x4. She didn’t seem to know where her mother’s voice was
coming from. They caught the flash of her tartan skirt and her crimson tights
as she ran straight for the open door of the hunting lodge, but they couldn’t see
her jumping over the threshold, skidding across the entrance hall.
The scream and the crash
were followed by silence.
©2009 Penny Feeny
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