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  This is for Leslie Budewitz, in sisterhood

  Before

  Looking back, it’s tempting to say I knew from the start, as soon as Paddy said the word for the first time. I can nearly convince myself I shivered at the sound of it. Simmerton.

  But I’d be lying. Truth is, there was a while back then when everything seemed fine. Or even better than fine. Everything seemed golden. If there were worries they were the usual kind that everyone has and then remembers, laughing. If I had doubts, it was only because I was prone to be doubtful. And the odd little frights and freak-outs? They were just stories to tell the grandchildren, come the day.

  One thing’s for sure. It arrived in my life dressed up as a lottery win. Paddy came bursting in after work one night, brimming. He clattered round the flat looking for me. I was in the loo so he started telling me through the locked door, upping the volume to be heard over the flush and taps.

  ‘Partner!’ he said, when I came out. ‘I’m not even forty!’ He held up a hand. ‘I’m trying not to get ahead of myself, before you say anything. I know I haven’t even been for the first interview yet.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything,’ I told him. ‘You were invited to apply. That’s good. I didn’t even know that happened.’

  ‘Invited to apply.’ He echoed it as if the words tasted sweeter every time he repeated them.

  ‘And the commute won’t be too much?’ I asked him.

  ‘The commute’ll be a beast!’ he said. Finally he was setting down his briefcase and shrugging off his suit jacket, sliding it onto its hanger. ‘It’ll be pretty dull stuff once I get there too. Country solicitors. A bit of conveyancing and a lot of wills.’

  ‘But partner,’ I said.

  ‘Under forty!’

  * * *

  When he came home from the second interview, I was waiting at the big window in our living room, looking down along the street, and I couldn’t tell anything from his walk or the top of his head, bowed against the cold wind. When he got up to the flat, he took my hands in his. His face was so solemn – his beautiful face that I was still learning, a year into our marriage – that my pulse began to bump. He’s leaving me, I thought. He’s busted me. What else would make him look like that?

  ‘It’s not boring, Finn,’ he said. ‘It’s anything but. It’s specialised work and I’m made for it. I get now why they chose me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And that’s not all. Have you been checking online?’

  I sighed. I was supposed to be looking for a full-time post instead of what I had, which was three mornings clocked on and seventy hours of unpaid overtime. But I was too knackered and I didn’t believe the job was out there to be found. I’d been telling myself that Paddy’s good fortune would have to do for us both. I was new at being half of a whole, but I’d got that bit off.

  ‘Because look,’ Paddy said, letting go of my hands to scroll through his phone. He showed me the page on the Church of Scotland website. ‘And I’ve got you an appointment to go down and talk to them.’

  ‘Why would a town like Simmerton need a full-time deacon?’ I said, once I’d read the job advert through twice and couldn’t find any catches.

  ‘Will you go?’ was all the answer I got.

  ‘Of course, but there’s going to be a stampede. I’ve got no chance.’

  I was wrong. One stormy night in November, with the windscreen wipers smearing and squeaking and the wind rocking the car, Paddy drove me down to Simmerton Parish Church where I met the minister and some of the elders. The job offer came pinging through as soon as we got to good phone reception on the drive home. A year guaranteed and maybe more, depending on funds raised.

  Like winning the lottery. Golden.

  * * *

  Then, three weeks ago, more. Paddy came in from work so flushed and bright-eyed I thought he’d been at the pub. He had found someone who wanted to rent the flat for a year, he told me, at a price that would cover the mortgage every month with five hundred smackers to spare.

  ‘This could be our chance to get started,’ he said. ‘On the—’

  He didn’t say ‘housing ladder’. He knew I’d laugh at him. But that was what he meant. As far as I could see, we were already on the housing ladder. We owned our flat, with its high ceilings and deep skirtings. We owned our car outright. He had no student debt. This mysterious tenant was the solution to a problem we didn’t have.

  ‘And where would we live?’ I said. I put a bookmark in my paperback and set it on the arm of my chair. We had an armchair in the kitchen. That’s how already started we were.

  ‘Simmerton,’ Paddy said. ‘Where else?’

  ‘I don’t want to be so far from my mum,’ I said. ‘In case there’s a crisis.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Paddy. ‘But then I did it on the satnav.’ He was digging his phone out of his pocket, as if I wouldn’t believe him unless he showed me. ‘It takes no more time to get up from Simmerton to your mum and dad’s than it does to get all the way out there from here through the traffic. It’s not closer, but it’s quicker.’

  I could see the point of that. If I was racing to my mum in an emergency, I’d rather be belting along quiet roads than crawling behind four buses. ‘But where would we live?’ I said. ‘Even if it makes sense, it would mean house-hunting while we’re getting settled in our jobs, and all the expense.’

  ‘Well, this is the funny thing,’ Paddy said. ‘Lovatt’s wife came out for lunch with us and she said they’ve got a gate lodge at their place. And we were welcome to it.’

  ‘A gate lodge? Do they live in a stately home, like? Wait a minute, when was this?’

  Paddy shrugged. ‘Just a country house, I think. Widdershins.’

  Widdershins. I’m not looking back through cracked glasses this time. ‘That’s an unlucky name to give a house,’ I said.

  ‘Probably old,’ said Paddy. ‘Not their choice.’ He shucked off his jacket and threw it through the kitchen door towards the coat pegs. It slid to the floor, crumpled on top of my shoes.

  ‘And when was this?’ I said, trying to make sense of it.

  ‘When I went down to sign things. Couple of weeks back. Want a cuppa?’

  ‘Couple of weeks back, your boss’s wife offered you a house,’ I said. ‘And you said to her we were keeping our flat in Edinburgh?’

  ‘The conversation moved on before I had a chance.’ He was facing the other way, filling the kettle. I stared at his back. ‘I didn’t want to be rude so I sort of just said that was very kind and I’d let her know.’

  I watched him carefully when he turned round to face me again. ‘Right,’ I said eventually. ‘Lovatt Dudgeon’s wife offered you cheap digs in the arse end of nowhere and you left it hanging and then someone just happened to ask if they could rent our flat?’

  ‘That’s pretty much the size of it.’

  If one of my
repeat clients at work was telling me all this, in that voice, not meeting my eye, I’d know what to think: he had accepted the offer of the lodge and scouted round for a tenant without telling me.

  ‘It’s like something from a fairytale, Finnie,’ he said. ‘A little cottage in a wood. Latticed windows and crooked chimneys.’

  ‘So you’ve been to see it, then?’

  Paddy cleared his throat. ‘We drove past it on the way to the house for lunch, like I said.’

  ‘Actually, you said you’d gone “out for lunch” and you said you “thought” Lovatt Dudgeon had a country house.’

  He was watching me now, chewing at the inside of his cheek. ‘You’re always telling me I don’t take charge,’ he said. ‘Make your mind up.’

  After one beat, I laughed. It was true. I loved Paddy, had loved him – or fancied him at least – from the moment I first clapped eyes on him across a crowded pub, but he did drive me nuts, with the watchfulness and the careful planning before any step, big or small. Once I’d met his mum it wasn’t a mystery any more, but it was still annoying.

  ‘Tell me this,’ I said. ‘Have you signed anything?’

  ‘No way. Not without your say-so. If you want to stay here, driving two hours a day, that’s what we’ll do. But if you want to have a house practically free and be right there where you need to be, for your job…’

  ‘My job’s only for a year,’ I said.

  ‘So’s the lease,’ said Paddy. ‘So’s the tenant. It’s perfect.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘It all fits. It’s golden.’

  ‘Golden,’ Paddy repeated, and he laughed. I’d never heard him laugh like that before. He laughed at jokes and mean little videos online, but that was the first time I heard him laugh like a child, from delight. It was irresistible.

  * * *

  The day we moved in, he was as high as a kite. He loved the place. Loved it. I’d had no idea this waxed-jacket, black-Labrador stranger was lurking inside the taxi-taker I’d married. He didn’t seem to notice I wasn’t as giddy as him and I was glad of that. I didn’t like being the drag suddenly.

  Maybe if we’d driven down together, I’d have caught his excitement or he’d have caught my apprehension and we’d have settled in the middle. But Paddy had driven the hire van – half full of a fraction of our furniture, since the gate lodge had only two rooms – and I followed in the car with the back seats flat, clothes and bedding piled so high I couldn’t use the mirror. Our pal Tony brought up the rear in his Jeep, ferrying the patio set that was a combined leaving and house-warming present from both our old jobs.

  And so, as I crossed the bypass and the road went down to two lanes, as I passed a permanent car-boot-sale site, a steading development, and a flipping farm-machinery showroom for crying out loud, my mood darkened and darkened.

  As I draw nearer to Simmerton, the hills rose on either side and crept close. I turned my headlights on. Pine trees loomed over me, dizzying when I looked up at their dwindling tips and black as death when I looked straight out at the solid bulk of their trunks in the deep shadow.

  The town itself was tucked into the narrowest slit you could ever call a valley. Just one main street and a struggle of lanes on either side, clutching at the hills, soon enough giving up and petering out into those miles of pine trees.

  ‘It’s a bit gloomy,’ I’d said on that first visit in November, in the rain.

  ‘I think it’s cosy,’ Paddy had replied.

  ‘Cosy,’ I repeated to myself on moving day, when I was alone in the cottage for the first time. Paddy and Tony had gone into Lanark to return the van and scare up a pizza. I abandoned the two damp rooms full of boxes and went outside. Saturday night, I thought. And there wasn’t a sound to be heard. There wasn’t a prick of light to be seen. Just the black to either side, and the sliver of sky a denser shade of black between them. The gateposts were two smudges and the drive no more than a wet glint as it curled away and threaded into the forest. Not a forest, Paddy had said. A planting. I didn’t know the difference, but the company who leased the land for all those trees were his clients now.

  I turned and looked at the gate lodge instead. It was squat and squint, with one bulbous bay window, like a toad’s eye, lumpy harling the colour of mud. Cottages, I reckoned, should be whitewashed with thatched roofs and you should live in them for a week, then go home. Still, I’d agreed to a year of this so I tried to find a bright side.

  We had a garden. There was that. I’d never had a garden before. I’d never dried washing anywhere except over radiators or on a clothes horse out on my mum and dad’s balcony. I made my way round the side, the clenched side of the house without the bay window, round to the square of slabs where our house-warming present had been dumped. The cushion farted in its plastic wrapping as I threw myself down onto one of the steamer chairs, put my feet up on one of the little teak tables, and looked out across the drying green into the blackness, listening to the crackle of my eustachian tubes as I strained to hear something, anything. I stuffed my hands into my parka pockets and headbanged until my hood flopped over to cover my hair. I lit an imaginary cigarette and lay back. Actually, I hadn’t smoked since the wedding, but I still found myself rolling up till receipts and dreaming, whenever I was alone. I even tapped to trim imaginary ash. Ironic if I gave myself cancer from fakesmoking receipts and inhaling the BPA.

  One year, I told myself. I knew I could do a year. It wouldn’t be the first time. I would get used to the quiet. And the trees. I would stop seeing them out of the corner of my eye and thinking someone was there. If only they looked a bit less like a silent army of strangers standing dead still and watching me. Or if only the ones at the edge didn’t wave as the wind stirred them, looking as if they were shuffling their feet, just about to speak. If only there weren’t faces etched into the swirl of the bark, knot-hole mouths wide open and black eyes weeping resin tears.

  The first scream split the dark without warning. Starting pure and ending ragged, it echoed round the valley. I leaped up as a second came right on its heels, even longer and more piercing.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I shouted. ‘Are you okay?’

  But it didn’t sound like someone in trouble. It didn’t sound anything like that girl in the underpass that time when I’d pelted forward to help her, only later thinking about what could have happened to me. This sounded like rage. Inhuman, maniacal rage.

  My phone was in the house. I had nothing to use as a weapon. I couldn’t even tell where the screams were coming from, couldn’t plan where to lash out, if I’d had something to lash out with.

  It was getting closer, though. I knew that much. I crouched behind the recliner, feeling my throat start to close. This couldn’t be happening. It was the first night. The city was supposed to be dangerous, not the countryside.

  Then I saw a sickly light sweep along the side of the house and rake across the trees, and I heard the Jeep engine. Paddy and Tony were coming back. I turned towards the drive just as a bundle of white tumbled out of the shadows and blew towards me. Ducked down with my arms over my head, I didn’t even know I was screaming until I heard Paddy answering me.

  ‘Finn?’ He was charging towards me, skidding on moss and leaves. ‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’ He was down beside me now, feeling my arms and shoulders all over as if I might be broken.

  ‘Someone screamed in the trees and threw a carrier bag at me.’

  ‘Threw a carrier bag?’ Tony said. Paddy sat back on his heels and frowned. Tony had gone over to where the trees began and was squinting into the darkness.

  ‘It could have been a pillow case,’ I said. ‘I shut my eyes.’

  ‘Why would anyone—’ Paddy had got out when a new scream came rolling down from the treetops.

  ‘How’s it so high?’ I said. I knew I was whimpering, but the vision in my head was of someone scuttling away and scaling a tree, still screeching. ‘I want to go home, Paddy. It’s not safe here. Take me home.’

  ‘
It’s a barn owl,’ Tony said. ‘It’s high because it can fly. It flew at you because you frightened it.’

  I opened my mouth to argue but the sense of it hit me in time.

  ‘That’s an owl?’ I said. ‘That noise is an owl? And aren’t owls brown?’

  ‘They’re pale underneath,’ said Tony. He was trying not to laugh at me. Not Paddy, though: his face was stark white, as if he’d had the shock and I should comfort him.

  ‘Did you get a pizza?’ I said.

  They had but I was still too flooded with adrenalin to swallow and Paddy only picked at his too. Tony ate one slice and left.

  * * *

  Later, I stood at the bedroom window, looking out into that blackness again.

  ‘It’s not ideal, is it?’ I said. Because the bedroom looked right out at the gateposts. In fact, because the window was bowed, it looked out at the lane on one side of the gateposts and the drive on the other. ‘If anyone comes along, they’ll see in. Same with the living room.’

  ‘Well, duh,’ Paddy said, ‘it’s a gate lodge. That’s the whole point. The lodge-keeper was supposed to watch for carriages and go scampering out to open the gates and close them again.’

  ‘They stay open all the time now, though, right?’ I said. ‘I mean we’re not “scampering” instead of paying rent, are we?’

  ‘Give it a chance, Finnie!’

  ‘I’m giving it a chance. Look where I am. I’ve moved in, in case you haven’t noticed. I ate that God-awful pizza, didn’t I?’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ Paddy said.

  ‘I didn’t complain about it.’

  ‘Till now.’ He had a point. ‘We can make our own pizza,’ he said. ‘Think about it: a partnership, a full-time deaconship and a free cottage? We’ve won the—’

  ‘Lottery,’ I said. ‘Yeah. You do know, don’t you, what the usual explanation is, when things look too good to be true?’