Midnight is a Lonely Place

XXX

Diana had gone downstairs. Alison slid down in her bed. Beside her, out of sight under the duvet was an old, well-worn teddy bear with one ear. All the lights in the room were on.

A couple of minutes later Greg appeared in the doorway. ‘Are you awake, Allie?’

She pushed the teddy bear even further down the bed. ‘What?’

‘Look. We ought to talk.’ He came in properly and shut the door. Sitting down on the edge of her bed he folded his arms. ‘I know I said we ought to scare her off. Kate, I mean. I know I said a lot of things about her being in the way. And I meant it. She’s a pain.’ He lapsed into silence for a minute, staring thoughtfully down at his feet.

‘She was nice to me,’ Alison put in at last. There was none of the usual stridency in her voice.

‘What really happened, Allie?’ He looked at her again. ‘Out there. You weren’t just trying to scare her, were you.’

‘No.’ Her voice was very small.

‘So. What happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It can’t have been nothing.’ He put his hand for a moment on the hump of her shoulder beneath the duvet. ‘Come on. You can tell me.’

‘It’s the truth. Nothing happened. I didn’t see anything. It was just feelings.’ Her mouth began to tremble. She sat up and defiantly retrieved the teddy, hugging it tightly against her chest. In her dayglo green nightshirt, with her hair all over her face, she looked about six.

Greg was astonished by the wave of affection which swept over him. ‘What sort of feelings?’ he asked gently.

She frowned. ‘Fear. Anger. Hate. They all sort of hit me, all jumbled up inside my head in a sort of red whirl. It hurt.’ Her eyes flooded with tears.

He stared at her but he wasn’t seeing her. He was seeing a short, grey-haired woman in a pale blue puffa jacket which went ill with her high heels. ‘I saw you staggering about… I wondered if you were epileptic or something…’ the voice echoed in his head.

Under the thick layers of Viyella shirt, lambswool sweater and ancient tweed jacket he could feel the tiptoe of goose flesh up his arms. His mouth had gone dry.

‘What is it?’ Her eyes were huge and round, the pupils dilated. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong, sweetheart.’ He never called her that. The endearment frightened her even more than the strange preoccupation on his face had done.

He stood up. ‘Listen, Allie. You must get some sleep. OK? Lie down again and I’ll tuck you in.’ He leaned over as she slid down on the pillows, pulling the duvet up to her chin and patting it with awkward, unaccustomed tenderness. ‘Shall I turn out the lights?’

‘No!’

He glanced at her sharply. The muffled word, filtered through the threadbare fur of the teddy bear, held a note of real terror.

‘OK. No sweat.’ He tried to smile. ‘Sleep well, prat.’ That was more like it. More normal. Sort of.

Downstairs the others were sitting around the fire with mugs of steaming tea. Greg took up position with his back to the inglenook – a speaker addressing a meeting. ‘We have to fill in that excavation. Alison must not go up there again, and I think, personally, that Kate ought to move out of the cottage.’

‘So that you can move back in.’ Kate’s words were mild enough, but he saw a hardness in her face which spoke a great deal about her determination to stay, and did he but know it, of her increasing unease in his company.

He sighed. ‘No. As a matter of fact I have no desire to move back in at the moment. But do you really want to stay there? After everything that has happened? I can’t believe you are getting much work done if you keep being interrupted.’

‘As a matter of fact, I am working very well at the moment, thank you,’ Kate retorted. ‘And it would be very small-minded of me to resent the time I’ve spent with Alison. She’s a nice, intelligent girl. I’m getting fond of her. I don’t know why she stayed out at the dig like that – I’m sure she will explain when she feels better – but it has not put me off staying at Redall Cottage in any way. Those locks you have put on for me make me feel as though I were living in Fort Knox.’

‘I agree about filling in the excavation,’ Roger put in. He leaned back on the sofa comfortably. ‘There has been nothing but trouble since Allie found that place. I suggest we get Joe up there with a bulldozer to flatten it.’

‘No!’

Kate hadn’t realised the word came from her own mouth until she saw everyone staring at her. ‘No,’ she repeated more softly. ‘I don’t think we should do that. It’s an important site. Much better we get in touch with the local archaeological society or the museum or someone quickly and get them out here to see what is really there.’

‘I don’t think we want to know what is really there,’ Greg said abruptly. ‘Don’t you agree, Dad? Allie is upset enough as it is.’

‘She’s not upset at the idea of it being a grave,’ Kate retorted.

‘Excuse me, but I think she is. She may be a brash, tiresome kid on the outside, and she certainly has loads of guts, but inside she is hurting. This whole thing is upsetting her a lot. You’ve seen yourself how it’s stimulated her imagination. It’s bad for her. Ma,’ he appealed to his mother, ‘you must back me up.’

Diana frowned. She had been listening to the whole exchange in silence. ‘You’re both right in a way. She is obsessed by that place and I don’t think that is good for her, but I don’t think the right answer is to try and bury it. It would still be there and she would know it.’

Kate nodded. ‘Better to get it excavated properly – a rescue dig can be arranged very quickly, you know. Then we’ll all know the truth.’

‘The truth about what?’ Greg’s voice was very quiet. ‘What is it that’s so important we know? I don’t think there is anything there that we need to know about. Nothing at all.’