The Unseen Read Free

years old and her mother was still alive, and the whole household upped sticks for the day and went to Whitstable. It had been a blousy summer day; all diaphanous clouds, with a curling breeze that had caught the donkeys’ tails, made them stream out behind them, and made the empty deckchairs billow. The Gentleman had bought her an oyster in its shell to eat, and a strawberry ice cream cone, and she had been sick all down her best dress. Stringy little gobbets of oyster flesh in a clinging pink sauce. But it had still been the happiest day of her life. She kept the oyster shell; had it for years in a cardboard box of everyday treasures.
    As the train slows, the notion of flying evaporates, and Cat feels herself grow into flesh again, feet tied to the earth. The temptation to not alight is powerful. She could sink down in the clammy seat and keep on, keep on, until she saw the sea through the dusty window. But the train squeals to a halt, and she curls her fingers tightly, squeezes until her nails bite the palms of her hands. She’dhoped to draw strength from the gesture, but can’t quite manage it. The station at Thatcham is small and simple. She and one other person, a thin man scowling above his moustache, alight; and there is a busy scene at a freight car where several huge wooden crates are manoeuvred onto a trolley. Tall banks of young nettles and buddleia lean over the wooden fence, whispering softly. Cat draws in a steady breath. She would rather be anywhere else in the world, but at the same time she feels numb, devoid of all feeling as though it has been shaken out of her in the pain and violence of the past few months. At the far end of the platform stands a vastly fat woman. Cat pauses, seeks an alternative, and then walks slowly towards her.
    The woman is quite as wide as she is high. Her cheeks crowd her eyes, narrowing them to creases. Her chins crowd her chest, so that the line from jaw to bosom flows quite uninterrupted. A skirt of flesh hangs down from her middle, swinging slightly beneath the light cotton of her dress, bumping her thighs. Cat feels sharp grey eyes sweep her up and down. She stares back, and does not flinch.
    ‘Are you Sophie Bell?’ she asks the woman. Sophie Bell . Such a pretty, tinkling name. Cat had envisaged a tall, soft woman with cornflower eyes and amber freckles.
    ‘That’s Mrs Bell, to you. And you’ll be Cat Morley, I take it?’ the woman replies, curtly.
    ‘I am.’
    ‘God help me then, for you’ll be no use whatsoever,’ says Sophie Bell. ‘Six months I’ve been asking for help in the house and now I get this wraith, who looks fit to drop dead by Friday,’ she mutters, turning from Cat and walking away with surprising speed. Her legs swing in wide arcs, her feet strike the ground flat. Cat blinks once, grips the handles of her carry-all, and then follows her.
    Outside the station, a pony and trap is waiting. The little cart leans wildly to one side as Sophie Bell heaves herself onto the seat alongside the driver. Cat looks up at him, half thinking to proffer her bag, but the man gives her the briefest of glances before turninghis attention back to a motor car, all glossy and black, that has pulled up on the other side of the road.
    ‘Well, don’t just stand there like a dolt! Get in. I haven’t got all day,’ Mrs Bell tells her, exasperated. Awkwardly, Cat throws her bag onto the back seat and climbs up after it. Barely settled, the driver flicks the reins and the pony throws itself into the harness, pulling them away with a jolt. So it is facing backwards, with a view of the road just travelled, that Cat is towed into her new role, her new life. Something in her rejects this so strongly that her throat knots up and makes it hard to breathe.
    The village of Cold Ash Holt lies about two miles outside Thatcham, the lane winding south and east through a tangle of lakes and reed beds, water meadows so bright with spring growth they hardly look real. Young leaves