The Boat House

ELEVEN

It was dusk when Pete finally made it back up the track to the old wooden cottage. He switched on the Zodiac's headlights, for the shadows. The damaged one was still working, although it was a little way out of alignment. The rest of the afternoon had been more or less normal for the time of year except that Ted had been following Pete around for most of it, trying to pump him for details of what had happened between him and Diane Jackson. He'd been exactly the same once before when he'd found out that Pete had seen Last Tango in Paris ("Yeah, but what did they actually do?") and now, as then, Pete had taken care to fine-tune Ted's frustration to the point of obsession.

Finally, as Pete had been opening out the canvas deck cover on a relaunched Fairline Fury while Ted paced the dock alongside, he'd looked up at his employer and said, "You really want to know?"

"I really want to know."

So then Pete had told him, truthfully, word-for-word and without any embellishment; about the shotgun, and the pigeons, and the misunderstanding on the stairs. And when he'd finished, Ted had stared at him for a moment in open disbelief.

"Oh, piss off," he'd said finally, which was exactly the reaction that Pete had been expecting.

Now it was getting late.

He pulled in onto the rough ground before the house, switched off the engine, and got out. Sometimes he remembered to lock the car behind him, sometimes he didn't, and sometimes he remembered but couldn't be bothered. In all the time that he'd been living out on the Step Pete had seen only one stranger go by, and that was a hiker who'd stopped to ask the way because he'd been lost. The Zodiac was no big attraction to a thief, anyway. Most of the time he'd nothing more serious to worry about than squirrel shit on the seats if ever he left the windows open.

When he stepped up onto his porch, he saw that the front door was ajar. The windows to either side had been thrown wide as well, and the ends of the tattered old curtains had blown out to hang over the sills. It looked as if somebody had been giving the place a pretty thorough airing, and it wasn't too hard to guess who. He went inside and the kitchen scents hit him then, laying down a trail that drew him across the creaking boards and down the hall.

He paused for long enough to throw his jacket onto one of the hallway hooks, and called out, "It's me."

"Through here," Alina called from the back of the house.

He went through.

The first thing that he noticed was that the lights were out and that she'd set up candles from his emergency supply in one of the kitchen cupboards. They were on the dusty painted dresser, on the shelves, and on a tin tray before a freckled old mirror that had been hanging in the bathroom. The big pine table in the middle of the floor had been set for dinner, and on it stood a bottle of cheap wine from the village store. Pete picked it up, looked at the label, and then set it down again; and as he was doing this, Alina appeared in the doorway.

Her eyes shone in the warm tallow light.

Pete felt a stirring of apprehension then, rising like a deepwater fish to the sunlight; and although he tried not to let it show, Alina seemed to perceive it.

"Wait," she said, moving into the room. "Wait, I know what you're thinking."

"I'm not thinking anything."

She stood before him, looking up into his eyes. "Yes, you are," she said. "Look, I'm not about to invade your life. But I like this place, Peter, I like this valley. Today I got a job."

"What kind of a job?"

"A waitress job." She gestured at the table. "So, don't get the wrong idea about all this… tonight I get to practice on you, so tomorrow I don't look so stupid."

"A waitress job?" Pete said. Was this girl a fast operator, or what? She saw his expression, and grinned.

"I know," she said, "I'm shameless. You wouldn't believe what I had to do to get an introduction to the sisters. But now I'll meet more people, I'll begin to feel at home. And then as soon as I can find somewhere else, I'll move out and leave you alone. I'm nobody's charity case, and I won't be a burden to you. You've been good to me, Peter, I wouldn't want to see you hurt by having me around."

"Really, it's all right," Pete protested.

But there was a sadness in Alina's eyes now, unlike anything that he'd seen there before; a sadness not for what had been, but for what could never be.

"No," she said. "It isn't all right."

And then she turned away, and went over to check on the stove.

She was, almost without exception, the worst cook that Pete had ever come across. Worse even than Ted Hammond, who'd once closed the yard for three days with the aftereffects of a home made chili. This meal was a haphazard trawl of the village store's shelves, an unappealing source of supply at the best of times; Pete realised with a sinking feeling that he'd no choice other than to put his head down and plough on through like a pig at the trough. Alina seemed to think that everything was fine.

The alphabet pasta, that floated in a sauce of over-thickened packet soup.

The frozen peas, that she'd fried.

The…

Oh, God, he didn't even want to think about it.

Fortunately, the conversation was better. There seemed to be a sense of ease in their company that hadn't existed the night before, and she opened up a little on her background. She'd been a schoolteacher once, she told him. She'd lived in Leningrad for ten years but she'd had no work for the last two of them. Her father was dead but her mother was still alive, and had managed to hang onto the old apartment where she now used the extra space to accommodate short-stay workers who needed a bed in the city. As soon as she could, Alina planned to write to her.

He asked her about the place so much like the valley, the place where she'd been born. She said, "They moved everyone. Nobody lives there now."

It was weird. They could speak the same language, but there was almost nothing else in their past that they'd shared. She'd read Shakespeare, Pete hadn't; not unless you counted Julius Caesar at school, which he'd managed to get through with a lot of patience and a set of Coles' Notes. Alina, on the other hand, had never even heard of James Herbert.

One thing that he noticed; every now and again she'd glance at the uncurtained window, as if she was checking the progress of the oncoming darkness. Perhaps she was edgy about something, Pete wondered; but if she was, she kept it well concealed.

Finally, the conversation came back around to the subject of Alina's new job.

She told him that as soon as she had some money she wanted to buy some decent clothes, the kind that she could wear to her work in the evenings. Pete, thinking of the Venetz sisters' reputation for efficiency and attention to detail, asked her if she'd hit any problems over having no social security records or documentation; she currently had the status of an illegal immigrant, after all, and had even dumped her hot French passport as she'd walked out of the air terminal. Alina said, no, no problems… and then amended this to well, not yet. Pete suggested that in a few days' time he could take her out to the nearest big town on the coast, and there she could look for clothes in the department stores and check out the library for the addresses of any useful organisations or people to contact. The sooner she made a move to get some kind of official recognition, the better. She said that this sounded fine. But he wondered if he'd convinced her.

"That is what you want?" he said.

"Of course."

Pete was now beginning to wonder if she was feeling ill; it was almost as if, for the latter part of the evening, she'd only been keeping up a show of enjoying herself and now the strain of the charade was getting through to her.

Or maybe it was the food. That wouldn't have surprised him at all.

He asked her if she was all right and she said, "I'm fine," but it was with a weak smile and her eyes barely focussing on him. "I think I'm just tired." And then she glanced at the window; the darkness outside was complete.

"You go on," Pete said. "I'll clear away."

But Alina got to her feet, causing the candles immediately around her to dip as if in sudden fear. Some of them had burned low, and didn't recover.

"No," she said. "I think I'll take a walk."

"But it's late."

"I know. But I like to walk at night. It helps me to think. Don't worry, I lived in the country before, I know what I'm doing."

"At least take a torch."

"There's a moon. That's all I'll need. Don't wait for me."

The moon was hardly more than a pale sliver, and surely not enough to see by. Pete stood on the porch and tried to make Alina out as she climbed the path toward the highest part of the headland. From there she'd be able to go down to the lakeside if she chose, or else pick up one of the shore paths that would take her further into the valley.

It bothered him to let her go like this, but she'd insisted; for a while he couldn't see her at all, until she reached the skyline and stopped for a moment.

The silence of the valley was like the stillness that sometimes follows a hard rain. Somewhere far off a dog barked, one small sound in a vast and empty theatre.

Alina kicked off her shoes and then went on, descending from sight.