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Blackthorn Winter

St. Martin's Press

It was Star Bishop, on her way to work at The Bugle, who witnessed the accident. It was a beautiful June morning and the narrow lanes were hedged high on either side by the banks of blackthorn, the vivid green woven with pink and golden honeysuckle and dog roses. She had been following the car all the way from Sharston and thought the woman was driving too fast. 'You can't see nothing round them bends and going like the bloody clappers, she was,' she told Monica, the landlady. 'She hadn't got a hope of stopping. Went slap into the tractor on that corner outside the village. Bloody lucky she weren't killed.'

Star had pulled up behind and got out to survey the damage while Greg Whittle jumped down from the cab of the tractor. 'Livid, he was,' said Star. 'Bloody effing idiot, he called her. Bloody maniac! Do you want to get killed or something, he said. And she just sat there, staring.'

'It would be the shock,' said Monica, knowledgeably. 'Shock can take you like that.'

Star nodded and went on, important in her role as storyteller. 'She came to, like, and got out and looked at the front of her car. All smashed up, it was, into the tractor. She doesn't say nothing, just stands there, looking. Greg's still carrying on at her but it's as if she isn't listening, and then she goes to the car, gets her bag out of the back, writes her name and address on a piece of paper and hands it to him.

'"Was it my fault?" she says. "I don't know what happened. Was it my fault?" Almost like it wasn't her that was driving. "I'm terribly sorry," she says. "I'm ever so sorry." You'd think she was born yesterday. Everyone knows you don't say sorry. Not after an accident. Your insurance tells you that. Shaking and white as a sheet, she was. "I don't feel too good," she says. "I think I'd better go home. You won't call the police, will you?" she says. "Not for a little thing like this."

'"We'll have to get her shifted," says Greg, pointing at her car. "Get her off the road."

'"Could you do that for me?" she says. "I'd be ever so grateful," and then she just walks off. Just like that. Walks off and leaves it there.'

'She never!' exclaimed Monica, suitably shocked. 'Who was her then? You didn't know her?'

'Never seen her before. Greg and me looked at the address and he says she's the woman who's got the Major's old place, up next to Mrs Durnford.'

'I heard someone had moved in there last week. Betty saw the van outside. What sort of woman was she, then?'

'Thin, tall. One of those beanpole types. No make-up. Middle-aged. Round the bloody bend, I'd say. I had to get in her car – rusting old heap it was – and Greg got it shunted back into the gateway. That's where we left it. Then I come on here.'

'Perhaps we should call the police, whatever she said,' suggested Monica, who liked a drama.

'Not bloody likely,' said Star, remembering her out-of-date tax disc. 'Don't want them snooping about. Greg said he'd tell Brewer. Get him to see to it.' She shifted her ample behind on the bar stool. 'Here, Monica,' she said. 'Give us a brandy, love. To steady me nerves.' She lit a cigarette. 'He's not half bad, that Greg,' she added. 'Got a nice little arse on him.'

Monica laughed. 'Give over, Star. He's only just out of school. Not much older than your Rosco. That's baby-snatching, that is!'

'Catch them young, I say. While they've still got a bit of go in them!' Star sniggered and took the glass Monica slid across the bar to her. 'I'll just have this and then I'll make a start. Shall I begin in here, Mon?'

'Anywhere you like, love. It won't go away, none of it.'

'Claudia Knight,' said Star later, pausing on her way to collect mop and bucket. 'That was her name. Claudia Knight.'

* * *

Not far away, at the top of the village, in an ugly yellow stone bungalow optimistically called Garden Cottage, Claudia stared at her pale face in the bathroom mirror. She saw the stain of blood from the cut on her forehead and relived the clutch of terror as she saw the tractor bearing down on her, her car brakes screaming and what seemed a slow-motion slide across the lane. The inevitable collision had been followed by a peaceful lull, both engines silent and the sound of birdsong from the open window. Claudia had opened her eyes and found she was still alive and also unhurt and felt nothing very much. The fright had made her hands tremble and she could feel her heart thumping. A stocky young woman with bright red hair had appeared from somewhere and was staring at her as a man in a baseball cap and green overalls jumped down from the cab of the tractor and started to shout. He was quite young, in his early twenties, blue-eyed, suntanned. Claudia remembered studying his angry face and seeing little bubbles of white spittle at the corners of his mouth. He's foaming at the mouth, she had thought, interested. She had never realised that one actually could. She watched him shouting without listening to what he was saying but then growing tired of his tirade, tired of the whole incident, she had opened the car door and got out. The surface of the lane glittered in the morning sun and she had smelled the hot rankness of the long grass. She walked to the front of her car where the bonnet was crumpled into the maws of the tractor and stood looking at the damage.

What do I do now? she had thought. She cast around in her mind for guidance and then went back to her car and got her bag.

'This is where I live,' she said finally, finding a Biro and a piece of paper and scribbling down her new address and handing it to him. 'I'm terribly sorry. I accept it was my fault. I wasn't concentrating, I suppose. Just for a moment. What happens now? I don't know anything about accidents. There's no need to call the police, is there?'

The young man had stood holding the piece of paper, looking at it. His hands were cracked and dirty. The woman with red hair, her thighs heavy in her tight jeans, looked over his shoulder.

'That's where the Major lived,' he said to Claudia, almost as an accusation. He looked up at her and, noticing how pale she was, said in a different tone, 'Are you all right?'

'Actually, I don't feel very well. I think I should go home.' Claudia had felt a tremor in her voice and held a hand to her forehead. 'Could you possibly see to my car? I'd be so grateful.' She supposed he had agreed, she wasn't sure now, but she had to get away and it was close enough to walk back. It had sounded strange to call the bungalow 'home'. It did not feel like home. Not yet. The sun was unexpectedly hot on her face as she stood in the quiet lane and then, turning away from the smashed car and the looming bulk of the tractor, she had set off towards Court Barton.

It was running away, she thought now as she looked in the mirror. Stupid, because he was only a young man. Probably not much older than Jerome. He was shouting because she'd given him a fright. The truth was that she just couldn't face a conversation. That was it. An interrogation. Questions. Having to find answers, with that girl listening.

The lane ahead had wound round another bend and she had felt relieved to be out of sight of the vehicles left behind. She was just able to see the square grey of the church tower through the trees in the distance. A lark throbbed out its song from the glistening blue sky. She had squinted up, but the little bird was invisible in the high, shining air. On either side, the edges of the lane were deep and dense with pink campion and Herb Robert and thick with the cream froth of cow parsley. Biscuit-coloured cow pats, rolled flat by tyres, were crisping in the sun and black beetles scuttled away from her sandalled feet as she walked. In front, over the flat green top of the hedge, as wide as a table, she could see the blue hills, darkened by patches of woodland, rolling into the shimmering distance, and beneath the song of the lark the whole valley seemed to tremble with the contralto voices of the sheep and the plaintive bleating of their lambs.

It was a beautiful morning. As Claudia walked, she stretched her legs and swung her arms, feeling her muscles lengthen and her lungs fill with the clean air. The hot sun prickled on her bare skin and she breathed a rush of sweetness as she crushed a stem of honeysuckle in her fingers, plucked from the hedge as she passed. It seemed, she thought, inappropriate that it should be on such a particularly fine morning that her husband, Roger Barron, be taken away in a police van to begin his prison sentence.

Several months earlier when she had first found this village, tucked into a secretive fold in the gentle Dorset hills, she had loved its isolation and the radiating, meandering lanes which, apart from the road to Sharston, seemed to wander off to nowhere in particular. A row of council houses with pretty front gardens led the way into the village. Passing them, as she walked away from the accident, Claudia remembered that when she was searching for somewhere to live she had said to her sister-in-law, Minna, 'One of those would do. Look, lovely gardens and what a view!' This morning the street was quiet, children all in school, mothers and fathers at work, dogs shut up. Only an elderly face, waxy pale and grey-haired, peered from between the curtains of a living-room window as she went by.

She walked on, past an untidy breaker's yard where chickens scratched amongst the nettles and rusting wrecks, and then four or five substantial stone houses with mullioned windows and stone lintels standing behind low walls with beautiful and carefully tended gardens. The parish church was round the next bend, its yew trees darkening the lane. Claudia noticed the list of names on the war memorial as she went by. Three Winsor boys lost in the Great War, two young Roberts, two Gilberts. What sorrow, she thought, must have descended on this little green village so far away from the mud of Flanders where its young men had fallen.

Hastening on, hurrying to get home, she passed two farms, the first right on the village street, its yard a mixture of old barns with sagging tiled roofs like sway-backed cows, and modern units and machinery. Claudia could hear a tractor working somewhere but otherwise there was no sign of life. The other was Manor Farm, a handsome old stone house with a roof covered in golden lichen and set back across a small paddock in a stand of beech trees. Three black and white cows, each with a spindly-legged calf, were lying in the long grass by the gate, the tassels of their tails flicking at the flies which bothered their flanks.

Claudia was glad it was so quiet. She wiped her forehead and saw a bright smear on the side of her hand and felt alarmed. A stranger, walking up the street with blood on her face, was sure to be noticed. A car approached slowly from the other way and she ducked her head as it passed. Then all had been silent again. Cottages turned blank faces to the street and the neatly tended gardens were empty and still. A fat golden and white cat strolled from a gate and lay in the road ahead, twitching the tip of its tail. A bright pink rose with an egg-yolk yellow centre reared in great clusters over a porch next to the lane and a deep red and gold honeysuckle scrambled along a fence, climbing in and out of the posts and reaching waving tendrils up into the sky. The air was sweet with the toilet water scent of orange blossom and lime flowers, with a whiff of fried bacon from an open kitchen window where a radio played softly.

Claudia hastened on past the pub, festooned with hanging baskets, where back in April she and Minna had shivered over the coal fire as they ate sandwiches and drank half pints of potent cider in the little bar. It had been a bitterly cold day then, with a bone chilling wind and leaden skies. Even the sheep had looked miserable in the bleached fields, huddled round feeding troughs with tiny new lambs folded into little white scraps on the frozen ground. The lanes had been bright with daffodils and primroses and the hedges, still black and leafless, were wreathed with starry white blossom. An old man, nursing a pint in the corner had heard them complaining and called over, 'Blackthorn winter. That's what this is. Get a cold snap when the blackthorn's out and folks reckon it's colder than the winter proper. Won't be spring till the blossom's finished.' He'd been right, too, Claudia remembered. She'd been house-hunting then, looking for somewhere to live after the London house had been sold and things had been at their most grim.

Beyond the pub was the little triangle of green with the village noticeboard and the bench where she had never yet seen anyone sit. A flyer had been stapled to a telegraph pole announcing a missing spaniel bitch named Nutty. Owners desperate, she read as she passed. Especially Beth, aged eight. Claudia could not bear to think about it.

As she walked up the hill she passed the Old Schoolhouse, the Old Post Office, the Old Bakery, the Old Vicarage and the Old Forge – 'You should call your place the Old Lag,' Minna had suggested – then some pleasant modern houses in a close, more council houses, a scramble of thatched and tiled cottages, and then where the lane divided at the top end, two substantial houses behind high walls on the right-hand side. Nearly home now.

When Julia Durnford, her neighbour, called out to her from her drive, Claudia merely waved a hand and bolted on, towards the horrid leylandii, a tree she loathed, and the iron gate to the bungalow. It sat there squarely, back off the road, an uncompromising box of yellowy pink stone with two blank windows on either side of a frosted-glass front door. Sheltered behind a chestnut paling fence, it was further screened by overgrown trees and shrubs. The patch of lawn at the front was long and neglected and on it two black crows, which had been squabbling viciously over something dead, flapped into the air.

Claudia reached her front door at a run and fumbled in her bag for the unfamiliar key, the estate agent's label still attached. In a moment she would be inside and safe. Where was the bloody thing? Ah, here in her trouser pocket. The frosted-glass door slammed behind her and she had stood in the hall amongst the packing cases and covered her face with her hands. Thank God, she thought. Safety. Somewhere to hide. Nobody would follow her here.

Now as she leaned over the basin to bathe her forehead, Claudia wondered how she had received the cut above her eyebrow. Perhaps she had not been wearing her seat belt. She could not remember. Thinking back, she was surprised instead by a sudden flashback to a vision of a bold black and white horse, sharp against the green field across which it moved. Was it this that had distracted her just before the accident? She clearly remembered seeing the horse in the distance, galloping and jumping the hedges, but it seemed unlikely, an unreliable recollection. Recently she had found she could not trust the images her mind threw up. 'I'm losing my grip on reality,' she had complained to Minna, who was a doctor. 'It's stress,' Minna had reassured her. 'Stress does that. Gets things out of synch. You'll get over it when things calm down a bit.'

The cut was not deep and had stopped bleeding. Claudia let the red-stained water out of the basin and considered her face in the bathroom glass. She knew she had changed over the last nightmare months. She was thinner and had not bothered to maintain her haircut, which had lost its shape and now the roots were threaded with silver. Her London hairdresser was out of the question. She lifted the heavy dark locks from both sides of her neck. She should have it off. She used to be proud of it, so thick and glossy and subtly coloured in shades of chestnut and tangerine and mahogany. Now she thought, 'I'm too old for long hair. I've reached that watershed. My face can't take it any more.' Her brown eyes looked more deep-set, ringed with dark shadows, and there was a new tautness about her mouth. Not much to look at any more, she thought. Not much left in the looks department.

Thinking again about the accident, she regretted having been so feeble. She should have taken responsibility, said her insurance company would deal with the repairs, exchanged addresses, done the thing properly. Damn. Now she could expect a visit from an angry farmer. She dreaded the sound of steps on the drive, past where she would cower in the kitchen, the knock on the door, having to answer it, to face a stranger, act a part, remember that in this new life she was Claudia Knight, divorcee, and not Claudia Barron, whose husband had gone to prison.

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Excerpted from Blackthorn Winter by Sarah Challis. Copyright © 2003 Sarah Challis. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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