A Trick of the Mind Read online

  a

  trick

  of the

  mind

  Penny Hancock grew up in south-east London and then travelled extensively as a language teacher. She now lives near Cambridge with her husband. She has three children. Her first novel, Tideline, was published to rave reviews and was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick in 2012.

  Also by the same author:

  Tideline

  The Darkening Hour

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Penny Hancock, 2014

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Penny Hancock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47111-506-6

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-47111-507-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47111-509-7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text Uk Ltd

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For Andy

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  April

  What was I thinking about, as I drove down that winding country lane with its blue shadows dappling the road ahead? Of how hard it was to leave someone, I remember. Even when you knew it was right. Loving a person, while needing to get away from them, was a paradox I couldn’t explain.

  I felt an unexpected kind of sorrow, almost grief; anyway a hollow in my chest that ached, to be driving towards the sea without Finn. The image that kept coming to mind was of a limb, deliberately cleaved from my body.

  I was into deep Suffolk, with its ancient trees and lush foliage. Towering hedgerows were silhouetted against the twilit sky, topped with a haze of may blossom. Fresh green smells drifted in. The road had been empty, apart from a solitary jogger I’d avoided on the verge when I’d first turned off the A road, cursing him for not wearing something Hi-vis. They thought you could see them, these runners, even when the light was low. As it was now. It was what Finn called the magic hour, poised between day and night. A photographer’s favourite time.

  I was grateful for Pepper, my neighbour’s Norfolk terrier. He filled the Finn-shaped space next to me. I had promised the old man I’d look after the dog while he had his heart op, that I’d guard him with my life. When we’d set off I’d assumed the little dog would stay on the back seat with his chew – instead he had jumped into the front and had his paws up on the dashboard to see where we were going. Was it even legal to have a dog in the front? I ruffled Pepper’s fur. His nose shot up, his eyes reflecting the soft light, full of love.

  I’d turned the music up. Beyoncé yelled that she didn’t want to be a broken-hearted girl. I could hear Finn saying, ‘How can you?’ – leaning over, tuning the radio into something folky or traditional. Proper music. This weekend, for the first time since college I didn’t have to worry what he thought. I was taking control of my life at last. I was free of a relationship that had been holding me back for years! My mood swung upwards again – I felt the way my class of five-year-olds must do when I opened the door of the stuffy pre-fab at three thirty and they spilt out like crabs heading for the sea. Grateful for space and time to play, to stretch their limbs. To do what the hell they liked.

  ‘Ssshh, Pepper!’ He’d begun to bark when there was a clunk and a jolt and the car veered sideways.

  ‘Whoa!’ I said. ‘What was that?’

  I slowed, my pulse racing, turned down my music and looked in the mirror. I could see nothing, only a bare branch, sliced off by the storms of last week, swinging over the tarmac. A few broken twigs and thicker tree parts were strewn across the dark road. The impact had knocked Pepper onto the seat. He’d stopped yapping and now he wriggled onto his front. ‘You OK, Pepper?’ He wagged his tail.

  I glanced again in the mirror as I drove on, slowly, my heart thumping hard.

  There were only shadows on the road behind me. Nothing, just the branch, a remnant of last week’s storms. It must have caught the left-hand wing mirror and slammed it so it was flat against the door now. Yet my heartbeat quickened and the thoughts started up: ‘Turn the car round, go back, check you didn’t hit anyone.’

  I had checked. It was just a branch.

  ‘You hit a person standing on the side of the road back there. Go back.’

  Before, I’d have turned the car round. I’d have found a turning place, and I’d have driven back, my palms sweating, to the point where I believed I might have knocked someone over, and there would be nothing there, no injured person, no crushed body. Reassured, I’d turn again and drive on. I had done it, to Finn’s amusement, even when there hadn’t been a jolt – once when the wind had buffeted the car so it had rocked, another time when the lights changed to amber as I crossed a junction. The thought would enter my head that I’d hurt someone, and I had to go back to check. But not any more, not now I was casting off old ways.

  I continued, slowly. I leant forward, and scanned the road ahead for bends that were easy to miss in the near-darkness. Nothing was left of the sunset in my mirror but a smear of pink, low on the horizon. Ahead, the bright rhombus thrown by my headlights picked out trees flaunting young leaves and reassigned them to darkness. I was used to London, where it was never dark, where traffic lights and shops and streetlamps and the constant peal of police sirens kept you company. Here, there were so many bends in the road you couldn’t see round. Deep blue coppices you couldn’t see into. Tricks of the light and shadows that looked like something else. But I would not let the little jolt take hold in my mind.

  We were going through a village now, its houses lit up, the last one before we got to Southwold. I pref
erred being among houses. My heart rate slowed and I returned to my reverie.

  ‘You can’t plan your life the way you plan a lesson,’ Finn had said.

  ‘This is just a feeling, there is no plan, Finn.’

  ‘I love you, Ellie. What’s the point in destroying what we have?’

  ‘I need to move on. We were just kids when we got together. Things have changed . . .’

  ‘Is it this exhibition?’

  ‘Not just that.’

  ‘What? I need to know.’

  I couldn’t say it. That his love, his tolerance, had begun to rein me back. I had to free myself if I was ever to change, become the person I was capable of being. We were almost through our twenties, it would be too late, other people had established themselves in their careers, won prizes, got there. I’d been coasting – accepting a status quo I knew didn’t make me happy – for too long.

  Now things were happening for me at last.

  A gallery in May’s town was holding a show of artists in aid of the charity Mind and the paintings I had submitted had been accepted. It was an up-market gallery that only accepted high-calibre artists. I felt a frisson of excitement again at what all this meant for me. And so I’d invited friends, we were going to spend the weekend in my Aunty May’s house by the sea, walking, eating, going to the Private View on Saturday night.

  The air coming in the window had changed texture now to something sharper as we entered the town and drove past the familiar shop fronts – the fish and chip shop, George’s antiques, Adnams wine cellar – and I was turning off down a lane where flint-walled cottages lined the pavements, and the faint waft of wood smoke mixed with the tang of the sea.

  I turned right and the buildings fell away and I drove over the golf course, the wind buffeting the car.

  ‘Nearly there, Peps.’

  Past the water tower, a solitary circular building black against the sky, and at last over the humpback bridge. Left on the unmade track past the Harbour Inn and the black ramshackle fishing huts and jetties along the estuary, bumping over things on the track: rope, or nets, and stones. I looked past the tilted black masts of boats. Nothing beyond but the North Sea and the vast sky that symbolised my future – open, limitless.

  Left at the end, and then I turned sharply right onto the shingle track, rattling over rough ground, finally pulling up outside my Aunty May’s cottage, so familiar, the sight of it sent me plummeting back into my childhood.

  It was like coming home.

  The house was in darkness, of course. It stood, its back to the road, its broad low form staring across the dunes and further out, to the sea. I sat, wanting to relish the moment. The first time I’d come here alone since my aunt died. Without Finn, I was able to sense everything.

  The past within the present.

  Appreciation that Aunty May had left me her house.

  The strong bond my aunt and I had always shared.

  It all gathered around me, filling me with warmth, and a sense of completeness. This was where I belonged. I knew at last what it meant that my aunt had left me her house, it was the passing of the baton – she wanted me to take the house forward, to bring life back into it, to fill it.

  I clipped on Pepper’s lead and we got out. Silver breakers were just visible smashing on the sand a couple of hundred metres down the beach. The wind slammed into me as I came round the car. I stumbled against the bonnet, bruising my hip.

  ‘Shit!’

  Pepper was tugging at the lead, begging me to let him run about. His fur blew upright so he yelped in surprise. I picked him up and kissed his ears. ‘Sorry, Peps, I can’t let you off the lead. Do a wee and we’ll go indoors.’

  I adjusted the wing mirror, congratulating myself again for resisting the urge to turn back after the tree caught the car. And I was buoyed by the same sense of joyful anticipation I’d felt when I arrived here as a child.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I tapped the gatepost three times without thinking, a lifetime’s habit. A second’s apprehension as I slotted the huge key into the lock and pushed open the door onto the darkness inside. The house smelt, as usual, of mildew, and my feet slipped on the sand that always coated the floors with a fine gritty layer. It got in somehow, even when the house was locked, through minute cracks, or under the door. I flicked on the lights. I went through to the kitchen, dumped my bags, Pepper at my heels. I turned on the immersion heater, switched on the fridge. I would warm up the place, turn it back into a home.

  Upstairs the mattresses were cold under my palm. I ran back down and filled the kettle. The hot-water bottles gave off a familiar old smell of warm rubber, winter nights, childhood. I tucked one under a scratchy blanket on each mattress. I’d asked my friends to bring their own bed linen. May’s was a bit random, a few thin duvet covers, some crumpled sheets.

  I put on May’s old Roberts radio for company and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ tinkled in the background.

  Pepper followed me, as if he couldn’t bear to be a foot from me, and I chatted to him, glad of his company. ‘We’ll light the fire, put out flowers, candles, chill the fizz. The place is going to be warm and beautiful by the time they arrive.’

  I could do this on my own! Play the hostess, run a house.

  I filled one of May’s old pans with water ready for the pasta. Chiara, my flatmate in London and best friend, had said she’d bring a pudding. I’d asked Louise, who we’d flat-shared with at art college, to make a salad. I’d brought the pasta, two sauces and a block of fresh, crumbly Parmesan. Bread and Parma ham, melon and artichoke hearts. We were going to eat – those of us who ate at all, Chiara barely did – at May’s beautiful, circular kitchen table. A proper dinner table. You couldn’t play the hostess in our cramped London flat. It was a novelty to do it here.

  I grated the Parmesan, unwrapped the antipasti and put them on plates. I went up to the room I was going to sleep in – May’s old bedroom at the front – and unfolded the dress I’d bought for the Private View party. I’d fallen in love with it, in a vintage store in Bethnal Green. It had a silk underdress and the rest was green lace, and when I put it on I felt ridiculously pleased with myself, as if I was stepping into a new skin. I hadn’t worn feminine clothes with Finn, he preferred me in my painting overalls.

  This room wasn’t musty like the others; it still smelt how it smelt when May was here, of clean air, windswept washing, and wide horizons. Yes, I thought, the sense of possibility, of being different.

  The others should be here soon. It was almost ten. Chiara, I knew, had had a meeting after work and Louise was picking up her new boyfriend from the airport, so I didn’t expect them much earlier. The voice of the newsreader on the radio chattered in the background as I busied myself, placing the dress on a hanger so I could gaze at it from the bed, and organising my underwear into May’s empty drawers, arranging my spare jeans and jumpers in colours on a chair. I was filling the spaces May’s death had left, rekindling the life in the house. I refused to feel sad any more. She wouldn’t have wanted that.

  As I moved from the front bedroom, which overlooked the dark dunes, to the back one, overlooking the road and the marshes, the thoughts were emerging slowly like an old film developing in my unconscious. I felt slightly light-headed; I put it down to impatience for my friends to roll up. My palms were damp – I assumed it was due to excitement about seeing Louise after all this time, sharing our news, talking about our art, wondering whether she’d changed.

  My heart raced as I heard the crunch of tyre on shingle, and a beam of light swung across the room through the window. Someone was arriving. Pepper bounded down the stairs, yapping.

  Chiara and her boyfriend Liam came in, dumping their bags, kissing me on the cheek, carrying bottles into the kitchen.

  ‘Sorry we’ve been so long. There was a diversion on the road back there. This is amazing, Ellie, you didn’t say it was actually on the beach. Wow! What a perfect spot!’

  ‘I know!’ I was brimming with pride as I
hugged them. ‘I’ll show you around.’

  They followed me upstairs, making appreciative noises at the three bedrooms, the low-ceilinged bathroom with its claw-footed bath, then down again – exclaiming at the long sitting room with its wood-burning stove. I still couldn’t believe all this was mine. They wandered to the picture window at the front, peered through though there was nothing to see now but tiny lights far away on an expanse of darkness.

  Chiara put her arm round me.

  ‘It’s just beautiful.’

  ‘I feel so privileged.’

  ‘Doesn’t it feel sad though?’

  ‘It did, at first.’ I didn’t want to burden my friends with the grief I had experienced when I’d heard the news. All that was six months ago now. ‘But you know Aunty May would have loved the thought of us here this weekend,’ I said.

  ‘Ellie’s aunt was a painter too,’ Chiara told Liam. ‘And she fostered kids, didn’t she? Talking of which . . . look at this!’

  She pulled a photo from her purse and waved it under my nose.

  ‘Oh, Chiara!’

  Shadowy limbs and etched sinews not unlike the clouds smudged against the sky in my rear-view mirror on the way here. A tiny head with a turned-up nose. It hit me in an unexpected way, the reality of the new life within my friend. I crushed a second’s panic; I was going to be left behind, my friends were settling down, starting families – the feeling again that there was so little time to get it right.

  Liam put his arm about Chiara and they gazed at the scan picture of their baby together – a vision of perfect happiness.

  ‘I tell you what though,’ Chiara said, slipping the photo away again. ‘It must have been nerve-wracking for your aunt, watching kids so close to the sea. There’s no fence between the house and the beach, is there?’

  ‘Get you! Already thinking like a mum!’ I said. ‘People didn’t worry so much about health and safety in those days. Kids looked out for each other.’

  ‘Well anyway, I love it,’ said Chiara. ‘It suits you, Ellie. All these beautiful paintings!’ There was one of May’s landscapes on every wall, a cluster of them on the stairs. ‘Now, can I take our stuff up? Before we relax?’