Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

Bluebell Cottage. That was the name of the place she was staying in. A made-up name obviously. Used to be a farm worker’s cottage. Poor peasants, all mud and blood and up at dawn with the beasts in the field. She’d done a Hardy, oh years ago, for the BBC, learned a lot about agricultural labourers in the course of it.

We’ve got you a lovely cottage , they said, usually rented out to holiday-makers . They had cast and crew stashed everywhere – B and Bs, cheap hotels in Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, rental houses, even caravans. They would have been better off just building a Travelodge on set. Tilly would have liked a nice hotel, three-star would have done her. What they didn’t tell her was that she would be sharing the cottage with Saskia. Didn’t tell Saskia either by the look on her face. Not that she had anything against Saskia per se. All skin and bone, far too thin, lived on fresh air and fags – the Dame Phoebe March diet. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she said to Tilly the first time she produced a packet of Silk Cut. ‘I mean I’ll only smoke in my own room, or outside.’

‘Oh, go ahead, dear,’ Tilly said, ‘I’ve been around smokers all my life.’ (It was a miracle she wasn’t dead.) She wouldn’t want to fall out with her. Tilly hated falling out with people. It was funny because Saskia was such a clean girl (obsessively so, obviously had a problem, conducting germ warfare single-handedly) and smoking was such a filthy habit. Ballet dancers were the worst, of course, lighting up like chimneys the second they came out of class. Lungs like lampblack. Tilly used to live with a ballet dancer. That was after Phoebe left the Soho flat (1960 – turned out to be quite a decade for both of them), moving on and up to live with a director in Kensington. Douglas. He had belonged to Tilly first but Phoebe couldn’t abide Tilly having something that she didn’t. Very handsome man. Batted for the other side as well, of course. Nowt so queer as folk, as they said in the north. Phoebe used him up and left him behind after a year or so. Tilly and Douglas had remained fond of each other to the end. His end anyway.

Saskia played Vince Collier’s sidekick, DS Charlotte (‘Charlie’) Lambert. Keep it under your hat but she wasn’t the world’s greatest actress. She only seemed to have two expressions. One was ‘worried’ (with the variation ‘very worried’) and the other was ‘grumpy’. Very limited range, poor girl, although, like a lot of them, she looked good on the telly. Tilly had seen her in a play at the National. She was awful, just awful, but no one seemed to notice. Emperor’s new clothes. (Shades of Dame Phoebe again.)

Now that she had her new specs and could actually see , it was terrifying. Wednesday used to be half-day closing. Her father pulled the shutters down on the shop in the Land of Green Ginger and went off to live his mysterious other life with his fellow Rotarians. He spent a lot of time on the allotment as well, although there were never many vegetables to show for it. No more half-day closing, everything open all the time now, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. And where had all the money gone? You go to sleep living in a prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen? Where had the money gone, and why couldn’t they just get it back?

She had to get out of this God-forsaken place, make her way to the car park. Should you still be driving? an AD had asked her after she’d failed several times to reverse into her allotted parking space in the car park on set and he’d had to take over from her. Ruddy cheek! And anyway parking wasn’t the same as driving . She was still in her seventies, plenty of life left in the old bird yet.

Up above the world so high! She was a coward. How could anyone be so horrible to a child? A little scrap of a thing. Poor little mite. It broke Tilly’s wheezy old heart. If Tilly had had a child she would have wrapped it in lamb’s wool and treated it like an egg, fragile and perfect. She’d lost a baby, back in the Soho days. A miscarriage but she never told anyone. Well, Phoebe. Phoebe who had tried to persuade her to get rid of it, said she knew a man in Harley Street. It would be like going to the dentist, she said. Tilly wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that. The baby had lived for nearly five months inside her, a dormouse nesting, before she lost it. It was a proper baby. Nowadays they might have been able to save it. ‘It was for the best,’ Phoebe said.

It never happened again and Tilly supposed that she had avoided it. Perhaps if she had married or found the right man, if she hadn’t been so concerned with her career. She might have a family around her skirts now, a strapping son or a friendly daughter, grandchildren. She would have a life , instead of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. Although Tilly was from the north (such a long time ago) the place scared her now, both town and country. From the north , like a wind, like a winter queen.

Tilly could understand why the first people had trekked out of Africa but why they continued on, north of the Home Counties, was beyond her. She was an idiot, she should have gone to Harrogate instead. A little tootle around the dress shops and lunch in Betty’s. Should have known better. No sign now of the tattooed woman and the poor child. You didn’t like to think what kind of home life she had. She should have done something, she really should. Weep, weep, Tilly.

In a newsagent she bought a Telegraph , a packet of Halls Mentho-Lyptus throat tablets (to keep the old pipes going) and a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut for a treat. Days off meant no set catering. Tilly loved set catering – big fried breakfasts, proper puddings with custard. She was a terrible cook herself, lived off cheese on toast at home.

She didn’t have enough coins so she gave the girl behind the counter a twenty-pound note but the girl gave her the change on ten.

‘Excuse me,’ Tilly said hesitantly, because she hated this kind of thing, ‘but I gave you a twenty.’ The girl looked at her indifferently and said, ‘It was a ten.’

‘No, no, I’m sorry, it wasn’t,’ Tilly said. Confrontation tied her up in knots inside. That came from Dad, all those years ago. He was never wrong. A big, blustery man, slapping cod fillets down on his marble counter as if he was teaching them a lesson. Tilly had had to learn a few lessons from him. Ran away in the end, never went back to the Land of Green Ginger, reinvented herself in Soho, like many a girl before her. ‘It was a twenty,’ Tilly persisted gently. She could feel herself getting upset. Calm, calm, she said to herself. Breathe, Matilda!

The girl behind the counter held up a ten-pound note that she’d taken from the till as if it was incontrovertible proof. But it could have been any ten-pound note! Tilly’s heart was thudding uncomfortably in her chest. ‘It was a twenty,’Tilly said again. She could hear herself sounding less certain. She’d been to the cashline and it had given her twenties. She’d had nothing else in her purse, that was why she had given the girl the twenty in the first place. She could hear a mutter of discontent behind her in the queue, heard a gruff voice say, ‘Get a move on.’ You would think that after all these years in the profession she would be able to slip into a role, she was, after all, most comfortable in someone else’s skin. An imperious, commanding character, Lady Bracknell, Lady Macbeth, would know how to deal with the girl but when Tilly searched inside all she could find was herself.

The girl was staring at her as if she was nobody, nothing. Invisible.

‘You’re a thief,’ Tilly heard herself suddenly say, too shrilly. ‘A common thief.’