Barbara Erskine - Hiding From the Light

The house was silent. The only sound came from the sudden piping calls of the young swallows in their nests hanging under the untidy thatch.

She ran up the stairs, feeling suddenly anxious, and peered round the room. The small box bed was empty, the patchwork cover neatly spread across it. A coffer chest in the corner was the only other furniture.

‘Liza?’ She ran downstairs again, very conscious of the emptiness of the house. ‘Liza, where are you?’

Outside there wasn’t a breath of wind. The heat was overwhelming. Humid. Uncomfortable. The swallows were silent now. Nothing moved. She tiptoed along the path and peered round the corner to the patch where Liza grew some of her herbs. She had thyme there, and rosemary. Vervain. Cinquefoil. St John’s Wort. Elecampane. Horehound. A basket lay on the ground nearby and a pair of silver scissors. Emma bent and picked them up. ‘Liza?’ Her voice sounded strangely muted out here. And it echoed as if coming from a long way away. There was a piece of green ribbon tied around the mulberry tree. She stared at it for a long time, then slowly she turned back towards the gate. From the lane she could see down towards the blue waters of the estuary in the distance. The tide was in. Two boats were sailing in towards the shore. She stopped to watch them for a moment; only when she raised her hand to her face to brush away a tear did she realise she was crying.

When Emma woke, wondering where she was, she found her cheeks still wet with tears. By the time she had fallen asleep again her mind was made up. She would go and see the cottage in the morning and if Piers didn’t want to go with her then she would go alone.

Saturday

Mike Sinclair, dressed in an open-necked shirt and jeans, was standing in the kitchen of his rectory gazing down at the toaster, watching the red elements slowly browning the flabby white slices he had extracted from the bag of Co-op bread his cleaning lady had bought for him two days before. He sighed. He must make time to do his own shopping from time to time. In vain he wrote brown bread on the list, sometimes wholemeal, underlined. White and flabby was what he always got.

The two slices of toast leaped in the air and fell back into their slots. He whisked them out onto a plate and, picking up his mug of coffee carried both over to the table. Butter, still in its paper and already liberally anointed with yesterday’s toast crumbs, stood there waiting together with a jar of Oxford Marmalade. He grinned to himself. In spite of the bread it was still his favourite breakfast and it was going to be another glorious day. He had to spend most of it in his study catching up on paperwork and going over his sermon one more time, but it was still very early and there was going to be time for a walk.

He had only been in the parish a few months and he was still feeling his way with both congregation and geography. The best time to explore, he had discovered, was the early morning when the streets and lanes were comparatively empty and he could wander round without being accosted by his parishioners. So, he would allow himself a couple of hours to eat and walk before coming back inside and facing the pile of papers in his study.

Breakfast complete, headlines from the paper which had appeared on his doormat scanned – he had been amused to see when he had first arrived that the lady from the paper shop had assumed he would read the Telegraph , so he had gone in to thank her, congratulate her on her business acumen in snaring a new customer and tactfully amended the order to The Times – it was time to set out.

The rectory stood back in its garden down a long gravel drive at the end of Church Street. It was not the old rectory, of course – that had burned down a hundred years before – but an old house none the less, acquired by the church in the 1920s as a fit home for a parson and his then large family. It was a big house for one man, but Mike had been enormously pleased to find his new parish was not one of those which had decided a characterless modern bungalow was a fitting habitation for its rector.

It was a pleasant Georgian-fronted building, painted a pale Suffolk pink, the interior probably Elizabethan and heavily beamed. He would try and find out about some of its earlier history one day when he was not so busy. The garden, he had noted sadly, was, apart from a few lovely trees, more or less devoid of interest. It was not very big, which was probably just as well, given the fact that he suspected he would have little time to give to it and there would be no money from either his own pocket or the diocese for a gardener. Wonderfully, he had managed to secure the services of a cleaning lady two mornings a week. Probably not for long. He doubted if he could afford her forever. It had been a shock when he realised just how small in real terms his stipend would be as a country parson. He gazed at the grass. It was as always neatly mown and as always he wondered who on earth had done it. One of the PCC perhaps, choosing a moment when they knew he would be out, or one of the other kind people who had offered him their services when he had first arrived in the parish. Many had offered help. The two food baskets – to stave off starvation, he supposed – which had greeted his arrival, had from time to time been discreetly replaced and two ladies had offered to cook him the occasional meal.

He grinned to himself. Several people, including the bishop, had warned him about the ladies. An unmarried, good-looking rector in his early forties – Mike was broad-shouldered, fair-haired, blue-eyed – would be a major target once they had decided amongst themselves that he wasn’t gay!

Slamming the door, he headed for the gate. Church Street was, up here at the top, actually more of a lane. Beyond his house, the church itself sat serenely in its churchyard sheltered by three huge yew trees, a surprisingly rural setting when one considered that Manningtree was actually a small town – the smallest town in England, so someone had told him – and that over the hedge he could see lines of old roofs rising gently up the hillside.

This early, the road was deserted. He strode down it purposefully, passing between houses much like his own, except that where it descended into the centre of the town they were terraced and what gardens they had were hidden by high walls. Down on the corner where Church Street met the High Street the last two houses had been converted into double-fronted shops, but a glance at the roofs showed that they too were as old as the rest of the street. One of them, he had noticed, had been empty since he moved in.

In the High Street he turned east, round the corner and down to the River Stour to walk along the road which bordered the narrow strip of salt marsh and the mudflats which were such a characteristic of the river at this point. He passed a solitary dog walker who acknowledged him with a raised hand and continued on his way. He loved this walk. Strolling along under the sycamores which lined the road to Mistley, the second half of his parish, he followed the pavement which on his right ran parallel to the long wall which once had bounded the great Rigby estates, a feature which had given the road its name, ‘The Walls’, whilst on his left lay breathtaking views of water, mud and sky. He stopped and stared for several minutes. The tide was out, the river estuary mostly mud, the low Suffolk coast on the far side hidden in the early morning mist. The shore was blue and mauve with sea lavender and tiny yellow-centred asters and as he walked slowly on he became aware of multitudes of birds running about on the mud. He wasn’t very good at bird identification but he could recognise a seagull when he saw one, and swans, and what he thought might be oystercatchers, with their smart black-and-white plumage and red bills.