Breen tried to take a case off Tozer; it seemed unmanly to let a woman carry his suitcase in front of her mother, but she ignored his outstretched left hand. “He in Alex’s room, Ma?”
“That’s right.”
She disappeared into a door to the side of the wainscoted hallway that ran like a passageway through the middle of the house. Breen stood inside the front door, blinking in the light.
“You’ll be hungry, then?” said Mrs. Tozer. “Edward?” she called, come out here.
Helen Tozer’s skinniness came from her father. He emerged from the living room which was on the opposite side to the door into which Helen had disappeared. Old corduroy trousers and a woolen shirt. Inside, an old television chattered in semi-darkness; the only other light was the pink glow of a two-bar electric fire. “Pleased to meet you,” said the man, holding out a hand.
Breen placed his palm into the leathery skin of the older man’s hand and allowed it to be shaken slowly. He smelled of tobacco and livestock.
“It’s very kind of you to put me up,” said Breen.
The man nodded silently and then went back to his television.
Mrs. Tozer led Breen back into the kitchen, a low-beamed room with a range at one end. “What’s for supper, Ma?” said Tozer, emerging down the narrowest staircase Breen had ever seen.
“Beef stew and dumplings.”
“Home,” said Tozer.
“You should try it more often,” her mother said, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
“I’m busy,” said her daughter, leaning over and dipping a finger into a pot on the range. She pulled out her finger and licked it. “I’m starved,” she said.
Breen lay that night in a narrow bed, under low eaves. A small, uneven room with a latch on the door. A Persian rug, worn but clean. His bed was warm already from the hot-water bottle Tozer’s mother had put in it, wrapped in a knitted cover, though the room was far from cold, warmed from the kitchen range below. The scent of soap and fresh bread. Cotton sheets that had been waving in clean air as they dried. A sprig of dried lavender hanging from the wall close to the head of the bed, its scent deliciously thick. A full belly and a soft pillow.
This was a house of women. He savored the unfamiliar feeling for a few seconds before he fell into a rich, enveloping void.
Sixteen
A long time later there was music. It had been in his head for some time. Plush and colorful, strange and new, it took on unexpected shapes and shades, twisting into new moods, and he rose through it slowly to consciousness.
There were words too, that made sense at first only in a dreamlike way. He lay not so much listening as absorbing, soaking in the curiosity of it, until finally he rose to a delicious lucidity in which the notes and the songs became clearer. It was about days being few and filled with tears but sung in a strangely upbeat kind of way.
A girl’s voice sang along to the music, something about it being so long since a girl had been gone.
The sun was shining through thin curtains. Helen Tozer was singing along to records in the room next door; her bedroom must have been the other side of the wooden partition.
He rose, still in his pajamas, looking for the bathroom. She was sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, LP and single covers scattered around her. In front of her was a small pink plastic record player.
“Sleepyhead,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“Gone eight.”
She was already dressed in a pair of jeans and a cotton blouse. The song ended. She carefully lifted the needle off the LP before the next track started, took the record off the player and replaced it in its sleeve, then picked up another, reading down the names of the tracks.
“I don’t remember. Do you like the Stones?” she asked, not looking up.
Breen shrugged. He yawned. Sleep was hard to shake.
She lowered the needle onto the start of another song, ignoring him, listening intently to the music, nodding her head gently in rhythm. He watched her with distant fascination, as a child might watch a bird digging for worms, then returned to his room, took his wash bag and walked to the bathroom down the hallway.
Mrs. Tozer was below in the kitchen, doing something with empty jam jars. She greeted him with a beaming face, like he was a prodigal returning. “It’s the Devon air, I expect.”
“What?”
“You sleeping so long. The air’s thicker here. It tires you out if you ain’t used to it.”
“Does it?”
“Definitely. And makes you hungry too, I expect. You eat bacon and eggs?”
“Definitely.”
She smiled at him and rubbed her hands on a towel, then pulled open the fridge door and lifted out a plate piled with bacon and set to work.
“Thank you for putting me up at such short notice.”
“It’s a pleasure. You bring our Helen back to us. She’s been away so long.”
“She brought me, really. I can’t drive at the moment.”
“Yes. I see. I heard you been in the wars.”
“Sort of.”
“Helen says your father died recently.”
“Did she?”
“Maybe she shouldn’t have said.”
“It’s OK.”
“I’m sorry. It’s terrible losing someone close.” A sheepdog poked its head into the open back door. She shooed it away. “She’s a chatterbox. She can’t help it. Always has been.”
“I know.”
She laughed. “Course you do. When she was a child she kept the milk-tanker driver waiting twenty minutes while she told him the story of Dracula and the Three Bears.”
The pan started to sizzle on the range. She laid three slices of bacon in it, one after the other. The kitchen was plain but Breen had the sense that behind the built-in cupboards, doors covered in layers of glossy cream paint, lurked provisions that could see an army through a long winter.
“Would you like two eggs, dearie?”
“One is plenty.”
“Mushrooms? Picked them this morning.”
“Lovely.”
“Was he old?”
“What?”
“Your father?”
“Sixty-seven.”
“And were you close?”
“He brought me up.”
“Was there no one to help?”
He was startled by a large shape moving past the small back window of the kitchen until he realized it was just a cow.
“No. No family here. He was a loner.”
“He must have been a great man, then, raising a fine man like you on his own.”
He nodded. “I suppose he was.”
“Would you like beans?”
“No thanks.”
“You must miss him.”
“I do. Very much.”
“The space left by the ones we love is bigger than we ever think it will be.” Her face was unsmiling.
Tozer came downstairs when Breen was finishing the plate. She took it and washed it up, and dried it. He sat watching her bending over the sink, rinsing crockery under the taps. “What are you talking about?”
“This and that,” said her mother.
“What size are your feet?” she turned and asked Breen, as she picked up a tea towel.
“Eight, why?”
“Do you want to go for a walk round the farm? We’ve got a while before we have to go.”
“That would be nice.”
There was a pile of Wellingtons in a shed at the back of the farmhouse, some single, some in pairs, some so ancient the rubber barely held together. She managed to find a pair that were only one size bigger than Breen’s feet; he sat on a bench in the backyard of the farm, watched by a beady-eyed cockerel, and put them on.
Arriving at night, he had had no idea where they were. Now he could see the land around them. The Tozers’ farm filled a small valley that ran down towards a muddy estuary below the house.
The roundness of the hills made them look like they’d been drawn by a child. Fringing the far side of the water, a long forbidding wood, leaves turning yellow and red.
“This was my kingdom,” said Tozer. She had donned an old duffel coat and wore a red scarf around her neck. “I know every inch.”