Across the River

By Alison Salisbury

Set over one summer in the 1970’s, Across the River follows Fran’s emotional journey as her failure to conceive a baby makes her speculate on the future of her conventional middle class marriage. On holiday with husband Michael and friends Nicholas and Ivy, Fran encounters the secretive Foss, who is living elegantly in her dilapidated van, and Mars, who steps into her life like a Viking off a boat to seduce her. The six friends spend tranquil days by the nearby river, picnicking and drinking wine, but there are tensions under the surface. Fran begins to detach herself from her mundane London self and align herself with Foss, whose novel view of life seems simple and beautiful. She starts to take risks, and becomes obsessed with the reckless and disturbing attractions of Mars, but when Nicholas is almost lost in a boating accident things begin to unravel, and the sudden death of one of the group is the catalyst that will really change Fran.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326705213

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Across the River

ACROSS THE RIVER

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2016 by Alison Salisbury

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-326-70521-3

Zanzig Publications

Old Zanzig,

St Issey,

Wadebridge,

PL27 7RD

CHAPTER ONE

Standing beside this perfect stranger, watching as she smashes the window, I look nervously at the darkening trees, but as she brushes away the glass with her sleeve and gropes for the handle I feel oddly seduced by the situation.

Moments before, I had been standing on the front step and something had caught my eye. Through the bare branches I had followed the lurching progress of a blue van down the rough track, engineless and ghostly, until with a final plunge and cracking of sticks it came to rest against my newly acquired hedge. In the gathering dusk I became rather too aware of the desolate quiet surrounding me, and I thought of my husband, Michael, in our London flat, turning on the lamps and drawing the curtains. I heard the door of the van creak open, and then slam shut, and I could see someone walking up the track.

When she reached the entrance to Highwood she glanced in my direction, and I must have looked lost because she said, Are you okay? Tall and slender, with cropped blonde hair, wearing boots and a long black sweater with a loopy hem.

I must have left the keys… I say, as she crunches along the gravel drive towards me.

It was she who led the way to the back of the house, looking for a way in, she who sent me to my car for a newspaper. That I was so ready to be led by this stranger was a symptom of something unacknowledged. I was aware simply that for some reason I was relishing this peculiar uncharacteristic adventure. Walking back through the dark garden with The Times I felt excited, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt like that.

I began to explain about Highwood, but she was already slipping the newspaper under the back door, and pushing out the key on the other side with a piece of stick. I saw that her long fingers were tipped with black nail varnish and I heard her soft exclamation, Shit, because the key had fallen on the newspaper but was too large to slide through the gap under the door. Looking at her kneeling there in her boots I knew she belonged to a world I knew nothing about, or to some man for whom she would strip off her unravelling jumper wordlessly in a way I never could.

Of course it was she who suggested breaking the window. She said it casually, as if she did this kind of thing all the time, and although my normal self would have argued against it, I wished it had been my idea.

*

The sound of the glass bursting in the silence is sudden and shattering and I want to shout with the surge of exhilaration I feel, and yet I can’t.

Soberly, I hitch up my skirt to follow her inside. 

I know from the plans the solicitor gave me that the fuse boxes are in the front room, and that the room we have broken into is one of three bedrooms and a bathroom in a row, overlooking the back boundary. The passage is windowless and pitch black and I can hear my housebreaker breathing beside me as I feel along the wall for a handle, and open the door into the big room that overlooks the garden at the front. Here there is dim light from the windows on either side of the front door, and I see a fuse box on the wall beside me. When I push the switch and then turn on the lights, the windows blacken and the world is reduced to this bright empty space, and my housebreaker and I look at each other in the sudden glare of electricity.

Here she is, my accomplice, brightly lit and only a foot away.

The room is the width of the house, the kitchen divided only by a blue Formica-topped breakfast bar at one end, and the floor right through is pale, worn, parquet, empty of furnishings except for a three-piece suite.

If I can find anything, would you like a cup of tea or something? I say. I probably would have had to book into some hotel if you hadn’t helped me. I go round the end of the breakfast bar and start opening the old-fashioned blue-painted wall cupboards, hoping. Instant coffee with a crust on it, a sagging bag of flour. Then I find packets of soup and look at my watch. There’s soup… I say doubtfully, not expecting her to take me up on it.

But she repeats, Soup! and adds, Yeah, I’d love soup.

She walks away up the long room, her boot striking a loose piece of parquet with a rattle. Whilst I fill the kettle and plug it in I watch her as she puts her nose to one of the dark windows and then return to run her fingertips over the ugly old fat-armed sofa and then flounce onto it, lying back with her legs out straight. The kettle is big and old fashioned too, the sort that electrocutes you as you struggle with the plug, and it’s going to take its time boiling. I go in search of some kind of heater, and come back from one of the bedrooms bearing a bent old electric fire with a cobbled flex, which I plug in and place incongruously in front of the large sofa and chairs. The kettle wheezes. I search in the bottom cupboards amongst cut glass and Pyrex and large breakfast bowls to find two mugs, and I glance up the room to where she is sitting, motionless, and I know I don’t want to lose her.

When I was fifteen, a young man came to dig out the floor of our cellar so that my father could show off his wine collection to better effect. I did a lot of loitering on the stairs for that young man. We talked and talked, and as the level of the floor went inexorably down I grew frantic because I knew that in some way I was connected to this young man but I didn’t have the resourcefulness to find out if he felt the same way. Sitting on the fat-armed sofa spooning soup, I feel a similar unease. At thirty-one, with a job that requires daily dealings with people, I am tongue tied, unable to say the right thing to my housebreaker and detain her so that I can get better acquainted with her.

She seems hungry and doesn’t look at me.

The electric fire smells of burning dust. She concentrates on her soup while my mind forms questions I don’t feel able to ask about her engineless van, her plans for the night.

Eventually I say, I had an aunt, Avril. This was her house. But I am inhibited by the feeling that the house is rather a dated, ugly place and that I don’t really deserve to own it anyway. I’m afraid this soup might be quite old, I say, after a silence.

No. She turns and smiles and then goes back to spooning the old soup. It tastes great. I was starving actually.

This is even more difficult to follow on from unless I ask things I don’t feel are appropriate on such short acquaintance, like, Oh? So when did you last eat? 

Her spoon is searching for the last dregs now, and she stands up, still holding her mug, to warm her legs at the electric fire. After a while she goes to put her mug on the breakfast bar and I stand too and walk up the room to the kitchen end. It seems that suddenly we both feel awkward. We thank each other vaguely, for soup and house-breaking, and she opens the door to the passage to find her way out. I lift my hand to her as she goes, and, briefly, she puts her head back into the room to say, "I think your house is great, incidentally." And then she is gone and I am left listening to the door at the back of the house closing and the sound of her boots on the gravel. She likes the house, I think, irrelevantly, wondering what exactly she would find to like.

After a suitable pause, so that I don’t appear to be pursuing her, I brace myself to fetch my suitcase from the car - being a city dweller I’m not used to the enveloping darkness of the country. The front door has a Yale lock and I put the catch up and crunch over the gravel and I can’t help glancing towards the place where I know her van is leaning against the hedge, but there is nothing to see.

The bedroom I choose to sleep in is the one I think was Aunt Avril’s because it has more than just a plain little bed in it; the bed is quaint and, although single, ample, with a headboard in pale wood with a rippling grain, shaped and curled over at the top with turned posts at each side. There is a large old-fashioned wardrobe that reaches the ceiling. A little wooden chair is pulled up to a table with a spindly mirror on it and there is a small chest of drawers on the wall opposite the wardrobe and the table. I pull open the drawers of the little chest and see clothes. The wardrobe is empty and I go out into the passage and open cupboards, finding a hot tank which I switch on. In one of the other bedrooms I discover that there are built in cupboards and I find blankets and even sheets and pillowcases as well as pillows and the sort of eiderdowns that my mother still has somewhere - real feather and covered with what is probably silk. I have brought sheets. I didn’t know what I would find, but whatever it was I imagined it might be damp. The silence presses on me as I make up the bed.

Getting ready for bed, going to the bathroom, I open the wrong door onto yet another cupboard and an ironing board falls out on me like a standing corpse, making me muffle a shout. I don’t think I like this place.

The silence bothers me. I hadn’t thought about the noise of London being the sound that lulls me to sleep when I’m at home with Michael. I’ve had holidays in the country, but always with other people; childhood holidays with family, holidays with Michael in France and Italy. Now I have to force myself to go back to the kitchen and put the kettle on again to make a hot bottle, which I brought anticipating antiquated domestic arrangements. This is the seventies, but my aunt was an eccentric woman, according to my father. Highwood was built in the thirties, and it would seem nothing much has changed in it since then.

In the morning when I wake in a grey light to the continuing silence I think of Michael getting up in his silk dressing gown and going off on carpet to our warm bathroom in his bare feet. Avril’s bed is higher than my bed at home and I lie on my side studying my surroundings in daylight, the high handles and long panels on the white-painted doors, and then turning my head to the window the print on the curtains, elongated figures, women with scarves carrying jars on their heads, small boys in shorts, improbable trees. I sit up, and as I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and start to dress I remember that there is no ‘phone. I could go home, I tell myself, if it were not for the broken window, but even as I say it I know that it is not the window that is keeping me here.

I go straight to the front of the house. The van is still there and even as I stand looking I hear the door slam and see her walking off up the track. I lean back from the window, puzzled, then after a few minutes I go out to the lane, checking that she is out of sight, and walk down to the van - an Astra, in a very dilapidated state. Cupping my hands on the glass I see in the back two bulging bin liners, a box of books, a pottery bowl full of fruit, a pair of jeans, a photo album, and a plate rack, the sort that became trendy in the sixties only this one is genuine old pine with dips worn in the bars from years of leaning plates.

Intrigued by this collection I walk thoughtfully back to the house. I haven’t even looked in a mirror yet so I fetch my makeup and sit at the little table that has the spindly mirror on it. Over years of dressing to go to work, my routine has eliminated most of what I see in the mirror and been whittled down to hair and  eyes. My hair is thick and dark brown, and when the hairdresser first cut it off squarely in line with my jaw I saw that this was how it looked its best, with the angled cut showing the solid thickness of the hair and making my neck seem elegant. My eyes are dark brown too. I lean forward to coat my lashes with mascara and then I turn sideways and hang my head to brush my hair upwards before righting myself and smoothing down the outer layer with both hands. Then, with my stomach groaning, I go off in search of a glazier and lots of decent, strong coffee.

I ask in the village about finding a glazier. The nearest glazier is not very near, and when I finally track him down he takes some persuading to come at short notice. Good coffee is almost impossible to find and I have to drive beyond the small local village to find a supermarket. Bumping down the track again at last I look ahead to where her van is slumped against the hedge, and there she is sitting between the open back doors bent over a bin liner, delving into it with jerky frustration and dropping things on the ground. As I watch, the bin liner splits like an over-ripe fruit and spews its contents onto the track. I drive past my entrance and wind down my window, smiling. Hello!

She looks preoccupied. I can’t find my bloody passport...

Are you… I hesitate, planning a trip?

She straightens up, letting out her breath, but not quite smiling. I thought I might go to France.

She is wearing different clothes, a short skirt with sequins and tassels and a wide-necked jumper that shows her slender neck down to her collarbones. Sitting in the dilapidated van, her feet amongst the strewn contents of the bag, she looks exotic except for the boots, a butterfly that has landed on a rubbish tip.

I can’t help looking past her, wondering if there is a house nearby. I say, I think I saw some bin liners in one of the cupboards in Highwood. Would you like one? You could come and have some coffee; I just bought some proper grounds.

I feel relieved as I plug in the lethal kettle again and look towards the sofa as I did last night. There she is, sprawled - I haven’t lost her. She is tall and slender and rather beautiful, and beauty is attractive, but I don’t think that is why I didn’t want to lose her. What I am reminded of, as I look at her, is that gleeful feeling when we broke the window, the liberation I would have felt had I been able to shout into the darkness.

I’m Fran, by the way, I say, spooning coffee grounds into a jug.

She gets up and wanders to the window, and leans her black-tipped fingers on the sill, looking out. You know, this garden is going to be lovely soon. Those are rugosa roses all along the hedge, and I’m pretty sure those are bearded irises along the side there, and I think those are astrantia leaves. She points to somewhere in the garden I can’t see and turns to smile and walk over the bumpy parquet to where I am pouring the coffee.  Mmm.. She inhales. I’m Foss. She places three black-tipped fingers on the edge of the pale blue breakfast bar and says,  D’you know what astrantias are like? They have little greeny-white flowers with ethereal stamens. They make me think of fairies, fairy land...

I’m not very good on plants, I say. I know Michaelmas daisies, my mother used to do those for Harvest festival every year, and I know some of the obvious things like roses and chrysanthemums, but my husband and I live in a flat in London.  Do you have a garden? In daylight I can see that her blonde hair is bleached and that darker hair is growing underneath.

She passes over my question. I’ve always been interested in things that grow. This garden will be a picture in summer.

Well, I don’t know if I’ll be here for summer. I might just put it straight on the market.

She is aghast. Her eyes widen as her hand reaches for the mug I am proffering.  "You’re going to sell it? She turns to the rest of the room, sweeping her free hand.  It’s wonderful, a period piece, untouched, full of atmosphere. I just love that amazing furniture, the fireplace... She looks at my face and pauses, Not your kind of thing then..." and sips her coffee, looking at me over the rim of the mug.

I shrug. I don’t know. I suppose not. I mean I can’t see myself... Her passion has undermined me, and in any case I find I don’t want to disagree with her until I have had time to decide what I do think.

Composed again she says, I’ve always liked thirties stuff, the art deco influence. It’s kind of solid and confident and ugly in a nice way. I like the era. Everything was done properly. She walks to the sofa and strokes its arm. "This’ll last forever. Even if the edges wear it has such good bones. It’s indestructible!" Some of her passion has edged in again. She sits down on the fat-armed sofa looking at her upturned boots in a sea of golden parquet. I want to ask her where she lives but something holds me back. Outside the day is clearing, and a washy blue sky has appeared, with drifts of wispy clouds floating by. A patch of sun spreads on the floor round Foss and something creaks in the warming silence.

It’s ideally situated too, she says, getting up again. South facing… shall I open the door?

It is barely warm enough on the front step, where I sit as she explores my late Aunt’s garden. My garden.

"Clematis, but you won’t know what sort ‘till it flowers. Any sort is nice though. She squats and probes. I think those are the tips of... bending closer,  peonies, wow, and dicentra just peeking. She wanders further away. Honeysuckle all over the garage, and all those roses. Your aunt had good taste. So many nice smells. I bet there’s a philadelphus somewhere... Hey, I think you’ve got a paved bit here but it’s got pretty overgrown."

I descend to the path and turn to look at the house, seeing it differently in the sunlight. The ground slopes a little and the front of the house appears raised above its garden and seems to gaze towards the view over the hedge. The two windows are large, divided by glazing bars to make three sections and a strip that is non-opening along the top. There are three panels of stained glass in this unopening strip, one for each window below. The stained glass is in pale blue and yellow, diamond shapes that remind me of something I can’t place. Last night the glass looked blank and black, but now the windows reflect the sky and the top of the hedge behind me. Strictly speaking, I should call it a bungalow, but I hate that description, and in any case, it somehow doesn’t seem like a bungalow. Perhaps it has something to do with it’s raised position that gives an illusion of height.

The four shallow steps to the dark wood front door are cut stone. The roof is what I believe is called hipped, made of weathered red tiles in four equal sections.

I go back and sit on the second step, and look out onto the garden, trying to imagine the aunt I barely knew standing where Foss is, moving around as Foss is, examining the plants that have slept through the winter and are about to emerge and come into leaf and flower. I imagine the whole process speeded up, tendrils uncurling, leaves unfurling, buds forming and opening as I watch, the smell as the sun draws moisture from the earth, the softening of the bare branches and the lines of the path with cushions of foliage, a million new tender leaves. I have a sudden memory of a garden, myself as a child, my father standing with my mother at a distance and someone showing me a plant. Lavender? Whoever it was plucks at the plants grey leaves and holds a pinch out to me. Lavender, surely, for me to smell. A feeling of peace creeps into me and I shut my eyes. Foss chats on and I listen from behind rose coloured eyelids, my face tilted to the sun, aware of my own gentle breath.

I am returned to earth by her shadow crossing me and a sound that makes my eyes fly open. "What was that?"

She looks over her shoulder. I don’t know! It sounded... did it sound like a dog?

The sound comes again, a distant intermittent howl and an almost rhythmic dull clang.

God knows!

We walk out onto the track, perhaps hoping to hear better, but the air is still and quiet. I want to say, ‘Is there a house down there?’ but Foss’s lack of explanation as to why she is living in her broken van makes me say nothing. I don’t know if she knows what is at the end of the track and I feel I might be prying if I ask her.

After a moment of standing listening to the silence Foss turns to me and shrugs, and hands me her mug. Better let you get on. Thanks for the coffee.

I run to the house for a bin liner.

*

Mr Knight is mending the bedroom window and I am making a list. I have to admit to a liking of lists; this one is an inventory but its actual purpose is to occupy me because I feel I shouldn’t be wasting my weekend. Standing on a rickety wooden stool in one of the spare bedrooms, pulling ribbon-edged blankets and slippery eiderdowns from a top cupboard, I come across a shoebox. When I take off the lid I find it is full of letters. Still standing on my stool I recognise my father’s handwriting and I climb down and take the box to the fat-armed sofa in the front room. I entirely forget Mr Knight, who after half an hour startles me with his announcement that he has finished the window. Distractedly I fumble for notes in my bag, quicker than writing a cheque and I want him gone, and as he departs I sit back into the letters strewn on the sofa and gasp for breath. I feel as if I’ve run from something. I look over the mess of letters and the offending one jumps out at me, declaring itself. ‘Dear Avril,’ it begins, ‘I hope you will forgive me...’

If Avril forgave him, I certainly will not. My first instinct was to go to the ‘phone and tell him at once, but of course there is no ‘phone. How did my aunt live without a ‘phone? Then as I read other letters, get a picture, I wonder what I could say. I feel as if I don’t know him any more, that he has betrayed me, the steadfast, honourable father I grew up with cannot be the man in the letters writing to his sister about someone called Stella. I stand up abruptly. Letters fall to the floor but I leave them and walk briskly out to the track. The van’s windows stare blankly in the settled silence, but even so I peer in to ascertain that she is not there. I can see two apple cores on the passenger seat and a book face down on the dashboard, open to mark the page. I straighten up and walk off down the track.

The track has an ancient surface of small stones, and tall hedges flanking it on either side. My town shoes are flat, but the leather is soft and the soles thin and give my feet little protection or support on the uneven surface as I try to walk quickly. A small brown bird nips in and out of the hedge keeping pace with me as if it is interested in my progress. At a gateway I stop to look over the view, but the view is just a field of rough grass with a distant border of trees and hedge that obscures anything more distant. I set off again, but when I turn the next corner I see the track stretching away ahead of me, downhill, into the distance with its bed of rough stones and its walls of tall hedge, and I sigh and clench my fists. What am I doing? I am tramping about with the vague notion that I will discover something about Foss, which I patently will not on this endless track. Why would she sleep in her van if she knew someone who had a house down here? I remember the peculiar noise we heard the day before, and I turn and start to retrace my steps feeling slightly uneasy and even a little disorientated. I shouldn’t be wandering aimlessly about. I should be making lists and checking power points or the soundness of the roof or whatever one checks when leaving a place empty, but I no longer feel efficient. I feel in limbo, as if I have left my normal world but failed to connect with the one I am in now. I want to see Foss.

Struggling with the kettle plug my heart pumps suddenly as I think of my father’s affair. I feel outraged, duped. In my mind’s