SIX

Daybreak tended to steal up gently on the valley, re-inventing a fresh landscape out of the leftover mists of the night; lake breezes would then strip away the shrouds one by one to uncover the forests and the shores and the mountains behind. Three Oaks Bay was a small resort town on the lake's eastern side, busy in the season and almost dead outside of it. The Bay had a square, two pubs, a promenade walk overlooked by three medium sized Victorian hotels, and a restaurant with a terrace that stood out over the water. It rated one resident policeman and a mention in the Shell Guide. People came in the summer to walk and to sail and, if development plans succeeded and the roads could be kept clear, they'd soon be coming in the winter to ski.

Pete had seen a fair number of valley mornings, although not so many had been as early as this. He shivered a little, and turned up the collar of his suit jacket.

It didn't make much of a difference. He was standing on the exposed rocks at the highest point of the headland; the ground fell away steeply from here, mostly bare rock and scrub, with just a narrow shelf of land that was almost a beach down at the water's edge. He could see the upturned hulls of a few boats drawn up onto the shore, mostly of fibreglass but some of varnished timber, all of them de-rigged and tied down against the weather. Out across the water, the end of the lake had not yet emerged from the mist, and the mountains above it were no more than a delicate shadow of grey against a deep grey sky.

Alina was still in the car. Still, as far as Pete could tell, asleep. He'd covered her over with a coat and taken her few possessions inside, and she'd slept on; she'd been the same way for the last couple of hours of the journey, ever since they'd made their final stop at a twenty-four hour garage so that he could fill the Zodiac's tank and buy some tape for a running repair to the headlamp that he'd broken when, lights doused to escape notice, he'd clipped the corner of the garage block on their way out of the parking area. The repair didn't look much, but it would keep the rain out.

A sound came from behind him. He didn't turn.

Alina scrambled up alongside, and found herself a rock just a couple of feet lower than his own. She'd brought his coat from the car, and she wore it around her shoulders against the cold.

They stood in silence for a minute or more.

And then she said, "This is where you live?"

He looked at her then. "You like it?"

"It's…" She searched for the words. "I do like it. I like it a lot."

"Actually, the house is a dump, but the boss lets me have it cheap. It belongs to his sister's family."

"I think it's fine," Alina said, and Pete watched her for a moment longer, almost as if he was checking her score on a test.

"Yes," he said finally. "It's fine." And he turned again to the view. The mist over the northern end of the lake had now begun to clear, uncovering a part of the Liston Estate. A piece of land that had held no particular interest for him at all until the arrival of its new estate manager.

"This isn't going to work," Alina said despondently. The silver dawn was turning into plain old daylight now, its magic fading and taking her momentary confidence with it.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"Because I'll mess up your life. I poison everyone I touch. Look what I already did to your car."

"Forget the car."

"I can't even pay you rent."

"I don't want anything from you. You think that's using me, forget it. You're a guest." Pete stepped down. "Come on," he said, offering his hand. "We'll put your stuff in your room."

Alina accepted, and he helped her along. "I get a room?" she said.

"You even get a bed, until you decide exactly what it is you want to do from here. There's more space than I can use. I'll clear it with Ted, but nobody's going to mind."

They descended to the gingerbread house; Rosedale, the cabin in the high woodland, paint flaking, boards weathered silver, the place that Pete called home.

She didn't look like someone who could poison what she touched, whatever she might think. Nobody could blame her for taking life as seriously as she'd had to, but the way to some kind of peace and personal balance would surely lie in the opportunity to stop running and relax a little. She could lose herself in a place like this; if not in the valley itself, then in some other part of the region. Tourists passed through here in their thousands, and the face of a stranger would be nothing to remark upon in the approaching season. Even her accent wouldn't give her away; all kinds of nationalities came to take up casual work in the restaurants and hotels. Endless human variety, but on a manageable scale. It would probably be just what she needed in order to find herself again.

And she certainly needed to unwind, at least a little. He couldn't help thinking of something that she'd said in all seriousness when they'd left the apartment building behind and a lack of any interest from a passing night patrol on the motorway had told him that no, the police didn't seem to be keeping an active watch for his car; she'd looked at him and she'd said, Promise me, Peter. Don't ever try to get too close to me. Don't even think of it. And I promise that I'll try never to hurt you. Is that a deal? And Pete, who hadn't been entirely unaware of some of the paths that such a newly founded relationship might follow, suddenly found himself shifting into back-off mode. Helping her was one thing. But even to consider getting involved with someone who could talk in such a way… well, that would be to enter dangerous waters indeed.

The room that he'd given her was smaller than his own, but she got a bigger wardrobe. Not that she had much to put in it… the only other pieces of furniture were the bed and an old dressing table with a cracked mirror. Her window looked out of the back of the house, onto what had once been a small garden.

She sat on the bed, next to her bags. Pete stood in the doorway and watched as she bounced a little and made the mattress creak. When she looked up at him and smiled, he could see that the dangerous edge of last night's exhaustion had been blunted.

He said, "I only wish I could help you more. But I wouldn't know how."

"You are helping me."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know what you mean," she said. "Please don't worry."

"There's tinned stuff in the kitchen if you wake up and I'm not around. If I'm not here, I'll probably be down at the boatyard. When I get the chance, I'll show you the sights."

"I'll manage," she assured him.

And so he made a gesture as if to say, It's all yours. And then he withdrew, closing the door after him, and went to his own room to stretch out for a while.


Alina stayed where she was, her eyes closed, almost as if she was listening to the silence. Pete must have dropped onto his bed without undressing, he made so little sound. Then she turned to the much-travelled carrier bag on the bed beside her.

From it she took a book, which she carried over to the dressing table. It was a cheap scrapbook, coarse paper between cardboard covers, so well used that some of the pages were starting to fall out. She laid it flat and opened it up.

The book was filled with photographs. A few of them would have been a serious giveaway in any frontier search, but these she'd covered over with postcard views bought from the Europiskaya Hotel.

She began to take out the postcards, revealing the snapshots underneath. When she reached a particular one, she stopped.

It was a group view, slightly blurred, a dozen friends on a day in the country. They were in rows like a football team, the people in the front row all kneeling on the ground.

Old times, sad times, a million miles away. For a while Alina sat looking at her younger, unmarked self. She was in the back row, lifted higher than anybody by the boys on either side of her.

That was how she'd been, back then. Open, smiling, everything before her.

Lifted on the arm of a boy named Pavel.

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