A Dedicated Man

FOUR

Later, as Penny lay in bed that night unable to sleep, the images came again, just as they had been coming ever since Harold Steadman’s death: those summers so long ago – innocent, idyllic. Or so they had seemed.

It was a time she had had neither reason nor inclination to think about over the past ten years – the kind of period, like an idealized childhood, that one looks back on when one gets older and life loses its edge. Life had been too busy, too exciting, and when she finally had crashed, she had been as far in her mind from idyllic summers as ever a person could be. It had seemed, then, that her earlier life had been lived by somebody else. Next she had come back to Helmthorpe, where they were all together again. Now Harold was dead and that wretched detective was probing, asking questions, churning up memories, like tides stir sand.

So she re-examined it. She reran the walks to Wensleydale along the Pennine Way and the drives to Richmond or the Lake District in Harold’s old Morris 1100 like old movies, and she spotted things she had never noticed at the time – little things, vague and unclear, but certainly disturbing. And the more she thought about old times, the less she liked what she was thinking.

She turned over again and tried to cast the images from her mind. They were like dreams, she told herself. She had taken the truth, in all its purity, and warped it in her imagination. That must be what had happened. The problem was that now these dreams seemed so real. She couldn’t shake them, and she wouldn’t rest until she knew what was fantasy and what was reality. How could the past, something that had really happened, become so altered, so unclear? And as she finally drifted towards sleep, she began to wonder what she should do about it.