Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

“Have you ever been to the Whistlestop in Paddington station?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Have you made any purchases?”

“I bought wine on my way to Rachel’s sometimes. Why?”

“Just a loose end,” he says.

RACHEL SAID THERE WAS something wrong with the town. I still don’t know what she meant. I’ve hardly left its center, and today I walk north away from the lanes and the high street toward the tennis court, a strange empty box in the pines. The gate is padlocked, and cracks splinter across the court. There are still names from last season on the clipboard hanging from the fence. I walk closer. The paper has turned stiff and crinkled, and the black ink is now burnt umber. I run my finger down the page until I land on her handwriting, then stumble away from the fence.

We played tennis in August. Rachel wrote our names and we waited for the court to be free. We watched other people play, and the balls arcing back and forth over the net. The court is set in chalk, surrounded by scrub pines. I felt like we were at the beach. A turquoise sky arched above the court and the pines had squiggly tips, like cypresses.

I hurry away. The track curves so when I turn around again the court is hidden. No one has driven here recently. Weeds have sprouted from the road, and down its center they form a hedge of thistle, campion, bloody cranesbill.

Rachel borrowed the rackets, I remember. She went to get them while I waited by the Hunters. It was hot and the white canvas umbrellas were open alongside the inn.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

“Keith,” she said. I didn’t ask who that was. My stomach turns, and I can’t believe I didn’t remember until now.

She went down the high street and came back with two rackets. I sat at one of the wooden tables outside the inn and waited for her.

He told me he barely knew her. By the time I reach the common, it’s raining. I can see one of the twins inside the hardware shop. I turn down Bray Lane and stop in front of the shingled house. I wonder if Rachel ever went inside it.

His van is in the drive, but the house is dark. There is a fireman’s decal in an upstairs window, in one of the children’s rooms. I wait, but I don’t want to talk to him in front of them or his wife.

I can’t remember what Rachel said about returning the rackets. I don’t remember her returning them that day, which would imply she was going to see him later. I have no idea. I remember what we ate that afternoon. Runny cheese and bread and swing-top bottles of dandelion and burdock.

This was the sort of thing she hated me for.

• • •

The Duck and Cover is full for the Arsenal and Chelsea match, and I push through the crowd until I find Keith. “Can I speak to you outside? It won’t take a minute.”

His eyes are glassy. He wants to tell me to fuck off, but people around us are listening, and he follows me outside. The painted-wood buildings creak in the wind, and the hanging sign of the pub rocks back and forth.

“She borrowed tennis rackets from you,” I say.

“Did she?” He wears the same long coat as before and a rolled orange hat.

“This past summer.”

“I never knew if she ended up using them. I left them out by the back door for her.”

“Why?”

“She said she wanted to play and I said she could borrow them anytime.”

“Where? Where were you when she said that?”

“Her house. She wanted an estimate on external piping.”

“What for?”

“An outdoor shower,” he says. “She said it was a birthday present for you.”

I laugh. The dark street seems to slip and keel.

“She needed rackets, and I told her we always have that sort of thing lying around.”

The rackets were new. I remember the smell of them and the tacky rectangle where a label had recently been scraped away.

I PULLED LAST NIGHT. There was a man alone at the bar at the Mitre in Oxford, and I chose him. As a precaution, I told myself, to distract me from doing something stupid. We drank gin and tonics and talked at the bar, and I remembered how to turn the lights on, how to dispense the right amount of warmth and cruelty. On the bar were silver bowls filled with ice and bottles of cava with horned yellow labels. He was handsome, and the encounter was surreal, and jolly, as they can be sometimes, as though we had a snow day when everyone else had work. He was in town from London for a wedding, the first of his friends to arrive. They had rented a house for the weekend near Somerville College. We fucked on the stairs and in the bedroom. Because I’d had enough to drink and because the sex went on for long enough, I was able to lose where I was.

In the morning, he said, “Do you want to come to the wedding tomorrow night?”

I laughed, and he said, “No, I’m serious.”

“I have work,” I said.

AT THE HOLIDAY MARKET on the common, the residents of Marlow tread muddy paths in the snow. Above the yews, the sky is gray. The stalls are all open, their Dutch doors flung wide. I move down the row. Soap and candles, mostly. A banner on the village hall announces the holiday fund-raiser.

“What are they raising money for?” I ask a woman selling cups of pear cider.

“The bridge.”

“What’s wrong with the bridge?”

“It’s falling down.”

People can’t possibly use as many soaps and candles as they buy, yet here they are, buying soaps and candles. At least there are food stalls. The first one sells pies. The second sells preserves and clary wine from a farm in Cirencester.

The next stall sells taper candles made by nuns in France, and I imagine a nun dipping the wick into a cauldron of hot wax. How do the monastic orders decide what to make or train? Saint-Émilion, Chartreuse, Saint Bernards. At the monastery in Valais, the dogs are trained to perform rescues in pairs. I am thinking of the Saint Bernards, and trying to do this without also thinking of Fenno, when a woman pats my arm.

“Rachel was truly a beauty,” she says, and then she looks at me to see how I will take it. I sigh. I was jealous of her, but not for the reason everyone assumes. The woman is still watching me with that look, curious and a little mean, familiar to every sister of an exceptionally appealing woman. I can’t think what to say. The yew branches lift and stream in the wind.

“She’d rather be alive.”

The woman looks at me with disapproval, like I’ve cheated at a game. I move away from her and the taper candles.

The priest has propped open the church doors, hopefully, in case the crowd might spill over. It must be very cold inside.

I buy a paper cup of glügg. This is why people move to small towns, I think. To gossip and raise money for the bridge.

Across the common, Keith Denton speaks with a small boy. From their interaction, I think the boy is his son and that he is a good father, loving and lighthearted. The boy runs to join the pack of children playing behind the stalls, and Keith puts his arm around a woman. He looks across the common, and when he faces in my direction, he pretends not to see me and turns so the woman under his arm rotates away.

My stomach hollows. I keep watching but Keith doesn’t look over again. After a while, his wife kisses him on the cheek and slips out from under his arm to join two other women. She doesn’t know about me, he hasn’t confided in her. Keith stays to talk with the owner of the hardware shop, then he walks over to say something to his wife and leaves. I watch him walk down the high street until the bend in the road.

I go in the opposite direction, onto Redgate. Keith was at her house that day. He doesn’t have an alibi. He offered to help me with the arrangements. He bought the tennis rackets for us to use. Rachel said she would never have an affair with a married man, which means that if she did, she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think she would tell Helen either, since her husband slept with someone else when she was pregnant with Daisy, but I call her anyway.