Loving Imogen

By Mari Biella

“She would know what she had lost. She would mourn the loss of his love, and regret the day she’d earned his hate. He’d pay her back with interest, and she would never be able to outrun his revenge.”

Bachelor Daniel Touchwood’s life is normal, even humdrum. He lives in a small town, teaches English at a local school, and spends his free time immersed in books. Occasionally lonely, but never really unhappy, he sees no reason why things should ever be different.

Everything changes, however, when Daniel finds two young runaways hiding in his cellar one evening. Twins Imogen and Leo are appealing, enchanting even, and it isn’t long before Daniel finds himself being drawn ever closer to Imogen. As he soon begins to suspect, however, the twins are hiding are dark secret...

A story about love and skeletons in cupboards, LOVING IMOGEN explores the nature of desire and the poisonous power of concealment.

Three short stories, THE SONG OF THE SEA, SUMMER and FRAGILE THINGS, are included in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mari Biella
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311585028

Mari Biella

Mari Biella was born in Wiltshire and grew up in Wales. She has been writing from an early age, and her mother still has some highly embarrassing poems and stories to prove it. Her published works are "The Quickening", a psychological ghost story set in the Victorian Age, and "Loving Imogen", a collection consisting of a novella and three short stories. Her free short story, "The Song of the Sea", may be downloaded at Smashwords. Mari currently lives in Northern Italy with her husband. She’ll read just about anything she can get her hands on, but particularly enjoys literary fiction, psychological horror, and crime fiction. She blogs at http://maribiella.wordpress.com/ and www.authorselectric.blogspot.com/, and tweets as @MariBiella1. Find her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/mari.biella or on Goodreads at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5817666.Mari_Biella.

Book preview

Loving Imogen

Mari Biella

Published by Mari Biella at Smashwords

Loving Imogen

Copyright 2014 Mari Biella

The Song of the Sea

Copyright 2013 Mari Biella

Summer

Copyright 2014 Mari Biella

Fragile Things

Copyright 2014 Mari Biella

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Loving Imogen

—Remembrance

—Odds, Ends and Oddballs

—"Never Give All the Heart"

The Song of the Sea

Summer

Fragile Things

Acknowledgements

Author Note

LOVING IMOGEN

REMEMBRANCE

Rosemary is for remembrance, they say, and it is true. It is unfortunate, then, that it reminds him only of his folly.

For folly it certainly was. Only a saint or a simpleton would leave his door key beneath a plant pot, and since he cannot believe himself a saint he is forced to conclude that he is a fool. He could blame his forgetfulness, his habit of losing things, and a childhood spent locking himself out of the house, but none of these excuses would allay his foolishness. It is surprising, perhaps, that nothing worse happened – the newspapers carry breathless reports of violent robberies and assaults every day – but horror, he has learned, can come in some rather beguiling forms.

He is older now, and at least marginally less foolish, and day and night he keeps the door locked, and the windows fastened. Charity collectors, political candidates and religious visitors all get equally short shrift when they call, which they rarely do – word has spread, perhaps, that the cantankerous old fellow at 10 Riverview Terrace is unreceptive to their various messages. No one, he thinks, has cause to visit him now. He has retired from his teaching job. He has no close family or friends. He holds no particular religious or political convictions. He is not without charitable instincts, but instead of making small donations during his life he has resolved to bequeath a large sum to various good causes in his will. There is no one else to whom he might leave it, after all.

And so here he is, amidst the debris of a spent life and a dead love, an ageing man for whom no one cares.

An unenviable position, he admits, standing by the kitchen door and watching the dusk gather over the hills. Most unenviable, indeed. But I must have seen it coming, mustn’t I? Even at my happiest, I must have known that it would end like this. And yet the knowledge did nothing to stop me. Stop talking to yourself, you fool, he adds, and falls silent.

Taking refuge in the past, the common consolation of old age, is not easy in his case. His life has contained little of glamour or glory; it has, on the contrary, been entirely ordinary. His early ambitions all withered, one by one, as he confronted the fact of his own mediocrity. In the end, he settled for a quiet life in a sleepy town, just as he settled for teaching the great works of English Literature rather than writing them. Love? He enjoyed a few little affairs, none of them very abiding or satisfying. They all let him down in the end, as surely as life and circumstances and his own character failed him. In short, his has been a humdrum life, led by a commonplace man.

Except for Imogen, that is. Only she ever seemed likely to temper the base metal of his life with gold, and even she proved false in the end.

He dreams of Imogen that night, as he often does. It is as if, when she left his house, she became a permanent tenant in his thoughts. Waking in the darkness, he reaches out for the other side of the bed, almost expecting to find her there. It is empty, as it always is. He sits up, his timid heart twitching, and turns on the bedside lamp. The room is in order, and it too is empty; but in these lonely hours, it is populated by ghosts.

He does not sleep again that night. He gets up, makes some coffee, and wanders idly around the house, performing small tasks and staring out of the windows at the dark countryside. When the dawn breaks, he goes to stand outside, and watches as the sun peeps above the hills. By the side of the kitchen door, the rosemary has flowered, just as it has every year since Imogen planted it there. It has proved far more enduring than she did, and he does not even know why he regrets this any more.

It is madness, he thinks, to be in thrall to any one person, still less someone who does not return your love, but reason is a puny thing. Had it been otherwise, he might have averted all of this years ago. It is too late now. Twenty years too late, to be precise.

ODDS, ENDS AND ODDBALLS

Twenty years change many things, but by a certain age the character is fixed, and any alterations it undergoes thereafter tend to be minor. Such, at least, was Daniel Touchwood’s experience; and one of the facets of his character, along with his forgetfulness, was that, despite his name, he had never been an especially superstitious man. He did indeed touch wood on occasion and once, finding a rusty old horseshoe buried in the garden, had nailed it above the front door. That, however, was the limit of his folly. He did not throw salt over his shoulder, quail at the sight of a solitary magpie, draw up astrological charts or consult Tarot cards. He did, though, have a fondness for superstitions as the relics of older, less debased, and probably irrecoverable folk beliefs; and it was for this reason that he made his way down into his cellar that night. Amongst the things he stored there were the books that would not fit onto the shelves upstairs, including several volumes on folklore. He suffered from insomnia, and thought that an hour or so spent reading about black cats and bogles might send him to sleep. It was one of those random twists and turns that life takes, and that no number of lucky pennies or shamrocks could either entice or avert.

Another arbitrary factor was the existence of this cellar. His house, standing neatly at the end of a row of Victorian cottages, predated central heating, and the cellar had once provided a storage space for coal. Touchwood was accustomed to meeting spiders and beetles down there, but had never imagined encountering another person amidst its dusty recesses. We can imagine his surprise, then, at what he saw that evening, when he flicked on the dull overhead light and walked down the steps.

A foot was in the middle of the cellar floor, sticking out from behind a pile of boxes.

He was halfway down the steps when he saw it, and at first he thought it was an illusion. It had been a long day, after all, and the light from the solitary bulb was dim. He paused on the stair, blinked, and looked again. The foot was still there.

He crept down the remainder of the steps, until the foot was just a few yards away. It was sheathed in a scruffy sports shoe, he saw, and covered at the ankle by a frayed denim hem. It looked small – fragile, even – and belonged, he deduced, to a woman, or even a child: to someone, at any rate, who could present little in the way of an actual threat. The fear that had been bubbling up in his stomach lessened; but his bewilderment remained.

He stood still for a moment, with confused thoughts tumbling through his mind. Another aspect of his character, it seemed, was that he was far too trusting of his fellow beings. People had been warning him for years about the imprudence of leaving his key beneath a plant pot – the very first place, they assured him, where thieves and intruders tend to look. He had always been dismissive of this, reasoning that its very obviousness made it a perfect hiding-place. His unease was thus mingled with a sense of dismay at having been proved wrong. Still, he thought, this intruder could hardly have been a burglar or murderer, or even a teenaged prankster; had she been so, she would hardly have been lying down on the cellar floor like this. Was she asleep? Ill? Dead, even? Was she a vagrant, looking for somewhere warm and dry to spend the night? He stepped forward, and peered around the edge of the boxes.

The light that leaked out of the overhead bulb was just enough for him to make out the shape of a young woman – little more than a girl, it seemed – who lay asleep on the floor, resting her head on a folded coat and hugging a rucksack. Her mouth was slightly open, and her breath was slow and deep. Greasy fair hair hung around her face in limp strands, and she looked dirty and unkempt. Her right eye was swollen, and surrounded by purple and yellow bruising. Nor was she alone: a boy was curled up next to her, a boy who looked every bit as young and dirty as she did. As Daniel watched, the boy moved slightly, and gave a light snore.

Another facet of Daniel Touchwood’s personality was that he hated conflict, and avoided confrontation whenever possible. A more belligerent man would have shouted, sworn, or driven these uninvited guests out of the house by force. Daniel simply stood looking down at them, unwilling to wake them and risk a scene. He hoped, perhaps, that they were just two harmless drifters who would leave of their own accord when they woke up. And perhaps – and this is another possible outcome that he would later consider – perhaps, that is exactly what would have happened. But he would never know for sure, because just then a car alarm began to wail in the street, sounding very loud in the still night, and the girl stirred and sighed, and her eyelids flickered.

Two sleepy, unfocussed eyes opened, peered out across the dusty cellar floor, and then closed again. For a moment Daniel hoped she might simply drift back off to sleep; but then she mumbled something, and turned over onto her back. Her eyes opened wide as she saw him. Her lips parted, and a strangled little yelp emerged. She sat up with a jolt, and scrambled backwards over the boy’s sleeping body. The boy grunted, rolled over, and opened his eyes. Seeing Daniel, he gave a squeak that might have been comical in other circumstances, and scuttled back into the shadows.

For a long moment the boy and girl crouched on the floor, staring up at him: two pale faces, two pairs of glittering eyes. He saw dirty hair, dirt-blackened hands, worn and dirty clothing; and then these separate impressions came together, and he saw them in their entirety: a pair of kids, younger even than he had thought, kids who looked like they hadn’t eaten or taken a bath for days.

He made a sound of annoyance, a sort of sharp release of his breath, and felt his shoulders slacken.

What the hell are you two doing down here? he asked.

The kids – teenagers, really, almost adults – stared back at him. The boy shrank further back into the shadows, looking not so much afraid as desperately, horribly embarrassed. The