Sara Foster - Beneath the Shadows

It had just wound down, she told herself. But somehow the hush was disorientating. She closed her eyes again, but she couldn’t relax. After a while, her ears began to ring from the effort of straining when there was nothing to hear.

My grandfather used to call it the heartbeat of the cottage .

She rolled over and snapped on the light. For a second her vision quavered, the walls shifting slightly before settling. Then the room was there before her, just as it always was… why had she expected it to be different somehow? She peered round from behind the covers, but nothing moved, yet the atmosphere felt full of energy, a living current swirling around her, willing her to get up and go downstairs.

She opened the door to the landing. She snapped the light on and edged along to the next bedroom, to see Millie soundly asleep, face to the wall.

She looked down the stairs, thought fleetingly of the cellar two storeys below her. She decided she would go and turn the television on again, find some company that way, and so she made her way down to the lounge and switched on both the fire and the TV. Then she went and closed the curtains so that not a tiny crack of darkness could peek through. She needed to fortify her surroundings, to make believe that she was in a different room, somewhere else. London at night sprang into her mind. The brilliant neon glow of it, the electrifying bustle. People always passing by. Sometimes she felt that this place was the dream, and soon she would wake up and find herself in their old flat, listening to the distant thumps of music, the regular rumble of traffic, and she would only need to turn over to see Adam asleep beside her.

There it was – the familiar spasm of pain at the thought of him. She shook off the fantasy and flicked through the channels until she came across a late-night music programme. She tried to concentrate on the soothing rhythm and blues, but found that she kept turning the sound down on the remote, checking to see if she could hear anything. Finally, she stomped back into the hallway in frustration, and stood before the grandfather clock, their faces level, its pendulum still. The air around her was so chilly she could see her breath. It hadn’t been that cold before, surely?

She had imagined that it would be a blessing once the clock stopped, but now she knew what Adam’s grandfather had meant. Without the incessant ticking, the cottage was too quiet; too still. She sighed. And as though in reply, the pendulum suddenly moved and the clock gave a loud tock .

She jumped backwards in shock, disbelieving, holding her breath. But when the noise came a second time, she fled upstairs, crawling rapidly under the bedclothes and clamping a pillow over her head.

The next morning, when Grace looked out the window she saw snatches of blue beyond the sheet of bright white cloud. Instead of frost, the hedgerow was covered with shimmering crystals of fresh dew. A robin perched on the garden gate. It bounced this way and that, flicking its tail, before it sensed her watching, was frozen for a moment and then took flight.

Despite the fact her sleep had come in stolen, shallow snatches, nothing looked terrifying today. Rather, the small garden, with its trellis arch and flagstones, sundial and pond, was a picture-postcard image of country life.

She heard Millie stirring and went to get her, walking past the grandfather clock, which was now keeping up a steady beat as though nothing had happened. When they’d had breakfast Grace decided that the washing-up could wait: it would be good to get outdoors while they had the opportunity, to give Millie some fresh air without snow or rain to impede them. So she put Millie into her sturdy pushchair and set off up the hill.

She found herself slowing as they approached the redbrick house where Ben lived. Grace studied it from the opposite side of the road as she drew closer, remembering what Meredith had said, and trying to imagine what Ben’s wife would be like. She hurriedly put her head down as the front door opened, but she couldn’t help a few sidelong glances in that direction. At the far end of the garden path, a woman with long red hair in a thick woollen coat had emerged through the front door. Ben was behind her, and she turned back to pull him into an embrace. As Grace looked on, Ben wrapped his arms around the woman for a brief moment, before she walked down the path with Bess trotting behind her.

Grace hurried away to avoid being spotted, and continued up the hill. A few moments later a large estate car roared past.

They followed the road, Grace enjoying the fresh air as it rushed into her lungs. As she walked, she found herself relishing the peace and quiet. There was little movement around her, just a few wet sheep huddled together next to a low stone wall. She leaned over the top of the pushchair to see Millie sitting forward, surveying the surroundings. It was nice to be just the two of them, tackling the next phase of their life, striking out together. She couldn’t wait until her daughter started to talk, but Millie only made strange sounds at present, and hadn’t really begun to babble. Grace didn’t know whether to be worried about this or not, since she had no benchmark by which to compare Millie’s progress. As soon as they were settled, they could join a playgroup, so that Millie could meet children of a similar age and grow in confidence. Grace had heard her friends refer to such things, where people talked endlessly about their children’s developments. It sounded exhausting, and while Grace had been pregnant she had imagined all the playdates and coffee mornings she’d be going on with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation. However, it seemed all those emotions had been a waste of time, since in the end life hadn’t worked out that way.

Grace kept up a steady pace as her thoughts flitted from one thing to another, and when she eventually refocused on her surroundings she found they were some distance from the cottage. The day was beginning to lose its colour as the clouds swelled and darkened. ‘I guess we should go back,’ she said, leaning over the pushchair again to find that Millie had fallen asleep. She smiled at the sight, and headed for home.

When the row of dwellings came into view, she saw that Ben was leaning over the open bonnet of the Land Rover. He glanced up at her approach, an oily rag in his hand, and then bent over the car again. For a moment Grace thought he was going to ignore her, but as she got closer he stood up, using another cloth to wipe his hands clean.

‘Grace! I’m glad I’ve seen you.’ His voice was loud and deep against the silence of the morning. ‘I did some work on those plans last night. Come in for a moment and I’ll show you how far I’ve got.’

He held the gate open for her, and she wheeled the pushchair down the path. ‘Do you want to leave her here?’ he asked as they reached the porch. He began to open the front door, saying, ‘No, Bess,’ as a large black nose poked eagerly through the gap.

Grace looked behind them at the empty road and felt her nerves clench at the idea of Millie out here alone. ‘I’d rather she was inside,’ she said. ‘Can we lift the pushchair in?’

Ben helped Grace carry Millie’s pushchair into the hallway. Grace checked her daughter was still asleep, then followed Ben, as he gripped Bess’s collar and led them both through to the kitchen. The countertops looked scrupulously clean – unlike the cottage right now, she thought, with its scattered crumbs and half-empty mugs. Bess settled herself on a large square pillow in one corner, while Ben went across to a drawer, pulled out some papers and laid them on the bench in the centre of the room.