The Unseen(34)
If she could have got up and left right then, she would have. Talking about it made her desperate to get started, to discover what the letters’ author was so afraid of, what she could not find out. It struck Leah then that the tight despair, the desire to surrender that was captured in the letters reminded her strongly of how she felt about Ryan. She could not ease her own discomfort, but perhaps she could ease H. Canning’s. And suddenly she longed to be somewhere where there were no memories of Ryan, or of them being together; nobody who even knew Ryan existed. He was clinging to her like cobwebs, and she itched to brush them off.
Leah still lived in the flat, near Clapham Common, that she had shared with Ryan. They had lived together for four years, moved in with each other after only two months of dating. She had never been as sure about anything ever before; and she wasn’t normally an impulsive person. A love sceptic, she would have called herself, but along had come a man who could make her feel more alive just by being in the room. He didn’t even have to touch her. She had quipped to her friends that she finally understood what pop songs were all about, but really it hadn’t been a joke. She felt like her eyes had been opened – or perhaps her heart. Like she had been let in on a huge and wonderful secret. She was positively smug, for a long time; and afterwards her inner voices kept flinging cruel adages at her – about pride coming before a fall, and there being a fine line between love and hate.
She refused to move out of the flat, which she loved and had lived in for two years before she’d even met Ryan. She would go back to living in it by herself, she resolved. It was her place again, rather than theirs, that was all. But it wasn’t true. It was saturated with him, with echoes of him being there, and memories of his touch. For weeks she could still smell him, and thought she was going mad until she realised that the bedroom curtain, near where he had stood every morning to spray on his deodorant, was giving off waves of the fragrance. She laundered the curtains at once, but not before she had crouched by the open washing machine door for twenty minutes, rocking on her heels, her face screwed into the dusty fabric.
After kissing Sam goodbye, Leah went back to the flat, packed a small suitcase, slung it onto the back seat of her car and joined the traffic queuing for the M4. It only took an hour to reach junction twelve, once she got rolling, and for some reason Leah was disappointed. Her big trip out of town, her mission, seemed belittled by how small England could be. Her satnav led her away from the main road, down a narrow, winding lane between high hedgerows still winter-brown and drab. It had been raining, and she bumped through potholes full of water, squeezing into the muddy bank and lurching to a standstill three times to let huge four-by-fours plough past. When her satnav announced that she had arrived, she was sitting at a junction looking out over a small triangular green, with pretty, crooked houses fronting the lanes on each side. There was a large horse chestnut tree in the middle, a postbox at one corner and a phone box at the other, and no immediate signs of life. Over the rooftops of the furthest houses, Leah saw a church spire rising against the mottled sky, and felt a flare of excitement. If the dead soldier had been friends with the residents of The Rectory, he had almost certainly attended a service at that very church. She parked the car, and set off towards it. The quiet was profound, and she almost walked on tiptoes, unwilling to break it. A soft, damp breeze wandered through the naked conker tree, tapping its knuckled branches together.
The churchyard was scattered with snowdrops and early daffodils, and little purple crocuses. The usual array of village dead lay beneath headstones – old ones weathered and furred with lichen nearest the church wall, and then forward in time across the field to some brand new ones, the cuts in the turf plainly visible, lettering still razor sharp in the marble. For some reason Leah found it uncomfortable to look at these. Like catching somebody’s eye in a communal changing room, a tiny but definite invasion of privacy. The church itself was grey stone and flint, Victorian by the look of it. A battered iron cockerel stood on top of the modest spire, immobile in spite of the breeze. The door was firmly locked. Fliers advertising parish events on pastel-coloured paper curled and fluttered, held fast to the wood by rusty drawing pins. Leah twisted the flaking metal latch and gave it an extra hard shove, just to make sure, and then jumped when somebody spoke behind her.
‘It’s no good, love. It’s locked except at the weekends these days,’ a man told her, grey haired and with a heavy paunch poking out of an ancient donkey jacket. Leah caught her breath.