Last Walk Home

CHAPTER 1

In the front bedroom of Ivydene, on the outskirts of Cannonbridge, Lisa Schofield lay fast asleep with her long blonde hair spread out over the pillows. In the muted light her peachdown skin had a faintly golden quality and her bare shoulders gleamed against the lacy top of her trousseau nightdress.

She dreamed she was learning to ride a bicycle, laughing and squealing, falling off every few yards. Someone held the saddle as she climbed on again, a man’s hand, firm and strong.

‘Don’t let me fall, Derek!’ she cried out to her husband in the dream, although she knew without turning that it wasn’t Derek but her father who held her safe.

Beside her in the big double bed Derek gathered him­self up into a ball, tucking his head down towards his belly, trying to ward off his dream pursuers. They were gaining on him, crowding in on him, brandishing broken boughs—

Lisa turned over suddenly, flinging an arm across his face. He woke with a start of terror and leapt up with his heart pounding. ‘A-ah!’ he cried aloud.

He came wide awake and saw the shadowy outlines of the furniture, the mahogany tallboy, the bow-fronted chest of drawers. He drew a long shuddering breath – it was all right, he was safe in bed at Ivydene. He’d moved into the house on his marriage a few months ago; it had been Lisa’s home for seven years before that, she had lived there with her older sister Janet and their mother.

Ivydene didn’t yet feel like home to Derek but at least the sprigged wallpaper and chenille curtains of the bedroom greeted him as familiar acquaintances, if not old friends. His heart began to slacken its rapid beat.

The yellow sunlight of late July stole in through a gap in the curtains. He glanced at the bedside clock. Five minutes to six. If he lay down again he’d probably oversleep – and he daren’t risk being late for work, particularly not on a Monday morning. Things were already dicey enough at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company without his making the boss an outright present of an excuse for cutting down on staff.

He eased his way out from under the bedclothes, found his dressing-gown and slippers and went from the room with accustomed noiselessness; he was always up long before Lisa.

At the head of the stairs sunlight streamed in through an uncurtained stained-glass window, throwing shifting patterns of colour on to the landing, luminous pools of amber and green, rose and blue, as a wandering breeze rippled the tall trees in the garden.

He went softly down to the kitchen, comfortable and old-fashioned, he crossed to the window and drew back the flowered curtains.

‘A nice cup of tea,’ he said aloud; the words had a cosy, reassuring sound. He filled the kettle and put it on to boil. As he turned from the stove he met his own gaze in the mirror that hung to one side of the fireplace.

An unremarkable face, not bad-looking in a nineteen-thirties bandleader way. His brown eyes stared back at him, large, habitually anxious.

He was thirty-seven years old but had the air of being older. His light brown hair had a strong natural crimp that he’d fought for years to subdue, only to discover now on the verge of middle age that it had suddenly become fashionable. The growth was beginning to recede from his temples and nowadays his exploring fingers could locate a treacherous spot of thinning on the crown.

While he waited for the kettle to boil he unlocked the back door and went out into the garden. Ivydene was a solidly-built Edwardian villa standing on the edge of Hadleigh, a semi-rural suburb of Cannonbridge; until fifty years ago Hadleigh had been an independent village.

The garden was large enough to stroll about in and gave a pleasant sense of space and seclusion. He plucked a weed here and there, lifted a wayward strand of a rambler rose and draped it over a neighbouring stem – he must remember to get a ball of garden twine in the lunch-hour. A fine climbing rose, trained along a trellis and over an arch, was just coming into flower, the blooms a deep soft peach tipped with cream. He selected a bud with care, the petals just about to unfurl, free from the smallest blemish. He carried it back to the kitchen and put it in a glass of water.

He made the tea, poured himself a cup and stood at the window drinking it, looking out at the tranquil garden, thinking about Lisa and his marriage, his new life at Ivydene.

There were moments when he felt as if it was all a dream; this struck him most often at work. He sat at the same desk, followed the same routine, nothing there was changed. But it seemed to him sometimes in odd disturbing flashes that he must shortly wake to find that home was still a cramped bedsitter in a down-at-heel quarter of Cannonbridge and Lisa no more than a beguiling face glimpsed in a bus queue.

She had married him two days after her eighteenth birthday, very much against the wishes of her sister. Janet was eleven years older than Lisa and was now her only close relative; their mother, Mrs Marshall, had died some months before the marriage, leaving Janet as legal guardian to Lisa till she came of age.

‘You’re surely not going to rush into marriage with the first man who’s paid you any serious attention,’ Janet had warned Lisa. ‘It’s madness at your age.’ Particularly when the intended bridegroom was nearly twenty years older than Lisa and was possessed of assets and prospects so meagre as to be practically invisible.

Derek poured himself another cup and returned to the window. He had been overwhelmed by the dead set Lisa had made at him when they first met. She was then only a little over sixteen and had just left school. Mrs Marshall had wanted her to stay on to take a secretarial course but Lisa would have none of it – and when it came to a battle between Lisa and her mother Lisa usually won. She had been born eight months after her father’s death and Mrs Marshall had always cosseted and cherished her second daughter, regarding her as a poor fatherless child to whom the world owed a great deal.

So Lisa threw her school hat in the dustbin, gave her blazer to a jumble sale and then went out and took the first job she could find. This turned out to be at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company where Derek Schofield daily bent his head over columns of figures. In a matter of days the supper-time conversation at Ivydene became peppered with Derek’s name and within another two or three weeks Lisa was declaring herself madly in love with him.

Both Mrs Marshall and Janet fervently hoped the attachment would wither and die as Lisa grew up and got some sense, but in spite of their opposition – or more probably because of it – she became unshakably determined to marry him. Her mother’s death did nothing to weaken this determination and six months after her mother’s funeral, on a fine spring morning, marry him she did – in the Cannonbridge register office with no friends or relatives present, and two cleaners called in to act as witnesses. Derek was swept up out of his poky bedsitter into the spacious comfort of Ivydene.

Janet Marshall was a schoolteacher, at that time teaching in the neighbouring village of Stanbourne, catching the bus every morning from a stop fifty yards up the road from Ivydene.

When Lisa and Derek returned from their Easter honeymoon in Tangier, Lisa was astounded to discover that Janet had moved out of Ivydene two days earlier. Not only that, but she’d given up her teaching post at Stanbourne and found herself another at Longmead, a village a few miles away. She was renting a small farm cottage close to the Longmead school, had removed a quantity of furniture, china and linen from Ivydene and was already comfortably installed in her new home.

Lisa didn’t stop to unpack her bags but at once commanded Derek to drive her over to Rose Cottage.

‘You never said a word about all this!’ she stormed at her sister. ‘You planned it all behind my back!’

‘You chose to get married against my wishes,’ Janet said calmly. ‘I saw no reason to consult you about my own intentions.’ Derek had stood by, mute and forgotten.

He stared out now at the dewy garden, brilliant in the glittering sunlight. Until Lisa came along he’d managed well enough on what he earned, he had even been able to save. There had been difficulties of course, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

And then Lisa took control of his existence. ‘You’re being exploited,’ she told him. ‘You don’t value yourself properly. You should be getting much more than they’re paying you.’ Easy enough to rectify. All he had to do was approach the boss with righteous confidence and point these matters out to him.

And, fired by Lisa’s total certainty, Derek, shortly after returning from his honeymoon, still a little drunk from the North African sunshine and the astonishing pleasures of marriage, did actually walk in through the manager’s door and put these points to him.

Unfortunately the manager didn’t share Lisa’s opinion. He informed Derek in loud clear tones that it was only by a miracle the firm was surviving at all, he was currently giving serious thought to the question of redundancies. ‘If you’re not satisfied,’ he added, ‘you’ve been here long enough to know where the door is.’

And that was that. Unemployment was high in Cannonbridge and still rising; there was certainly no massive demand for clerks approaching middle age.

Derek daren’t tell Lisa he’d failed but allowed her to believe his efforts had been successful. ‘My salary’s being raised from the beginning of next month,’ he told her, in the mad hope that something would happen to rescue him before his savings finally ran out. The greater part of these had already been swallowed up by his courtship and honeymoon, above all, by that wildly extravagant North African honeymoon; he had had no idea until then that it was possible for two people to spend so much money in fourteen days. And week by week the relentless expenses of his new life bit savagely into what was left of his nest-egg. He felt himself beset these days by problems, every one of them relating at some point to money. And in his dreams now the feet were getting closer.

Lisa had given up her job before the wedding and appeared to have no intention of ever again darkening the door of any place of employment. She was in any case now three months pregnant and as a consequence exempt in her own eyes from all but the very lightest endeavours.

He turned from the window, suddenly hungry, and made himself some toast. He sat down at the table, buttered the toast and smeared it with marmalade. He took a thoughtful bite.

Until his marriage he’d had scarcely any idea how expensive it was to run a house. Before he took to bedsits he had lived with his father in an old rented terrace house in a seedy area of Westfleet, a small town twenty-five miles from Cannonbridge; he had been born and brought up in the house.

Derek was an only child. His mother had run off with a neighbour when he was six years old and there had never been any other woman in the life of the deserted father and son.

His father – now dead – had been a labourer in the yard of a builder’s merchant in Westfleet. He was out of doors in all seasons and as time went by he became afflicted with chronic bronchitis. ‘Don’t do what I’ve done,’ he warned Derek when the time came for him to leave school. ‘Get yourself a job that’ll shelter you from the weather, one that’ll keep your hands clean.’ And that much at least Derek had managed to do. Lowly as his status was at Cannonbridge Mail Order, it had always seemed an achievement to him – until his marriage.

The bronchitis finally carried his father off when Derek was nineteen. ‘I haven’t amounted to much,’ he said to Derek on the day before he died. ‘You’ve got your whole life before you. Watch out you don’t end up like me.’ His gaze wandered round the dismal bedroom. ‘I’ve left you everything.’ Everything amounted to forty-odd pounds in the post office, some tools, a cupboardful of cheap clothes and a few sticks of worthless furniture.

The landlady didn’t wait for the earth to settle over his grave before she marched round to the terrace house.

‘I want you out of here inside a fortnight,’ she informed Derek. ‘I’m going to do this place up and sell it.’

She knew her man; Derek moved out at once without protest, almost with apology, into the first of his bedsits.

Now he blinked away the memories with a jerk of his head. He finished his toast and went over to the dresser, pulled open a drawer and took out a handful of bills. He sat down at the table to study the figures although the amounts were accurately burned into his brain. He clenched a fist and dug it into his chin, frowning down at the papers, trying to think of some way out of his difficulties. At last he blew out a long breath and stood up. ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said aloud.

In the meantime, in the big double bed upstairs, Lisa would be beginning to stir. He made a fresh pot of tea, found a clean linen cloth and smoothed it on to a tray. He poured a cup of tea and set it on the tray beside a small plate of biscuits and the peach-coloured rosebud in its glass of water. He carried the tray carefully upstairs to Lisa.

She woke and stretched like a cat and her long blonde hair fell back against the pillows. She smiled at him and held out her cheek for a kiss.

She drank some tea and nibbled at a biscuit, then she reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table.

‘I really think you ought to try to give them up,’ Derek said apologetically. ‘You know what the doctor said.’

She pulled a face. ‘The doctor’s an old woman.’ She took out a cigarette and he lit it for her; she inhaled deeply. ‘The doctor we had in Ellenborough smoked all the time.’ The Marshalls had lived in Ellenborough, a large town forty-five miles away, before they moved to the Hadleigh suburb of Cannonbridge.

Outside there was the sound of feet on gravel, the click of the letterbox. ‘That might be a letter from Janet,’ Lisa said. ‘Do go down and see.’ There was only one post a day now in Hadleigh. Lisa had written to Janet again last week, asking her to come over as soon as the school term ended on Friday, stay as long as she liked.

Derek went downstairs to the hall. Three envelopes lay in the wire cage at the back of the door. The first was postmarked Cannonbridge, addressed to Lisa in the bold handwriting of her friend Carole Gardiner. The second was an advertising circular, and the third – he drew a long breath and ripped it open, running his eye rapidly over the sheet, biting deep into his lip as he read, unaware of any sensation of pain. He stood frowning down at the letter and then went swiftly into the sitting room and knelt by the grate.

He pushed aside the tapestry firescreen that had been worked by Mrs Marshall, struck a match and set fire to the letter and its envelope. When they were both thoroughly consumed he ground the ashes into dust with the poker and replaced the screen. He got to his feet and went back upstairs.

‘Nothing from Janet,’ he said as he entered the bedroom. On his tongue he could taste the blood from his bitten lip. ‘But Carole Gardiner’s written to you.’

‘When are we going to have the phone put in?’ Lisa said impatiently as she took the letter he held out. ‘It’s such a nuisance, all this letter-writing.’

‘There’s a waiting-list for phones,’ he said. He had no idea if this was so; he had made no application for a phone. What he did know with bleak certainty was that he could afford neither the installation fee nor the quarterly expenses.

‘You couldn’t ring Janet even if we did have a phone,’ he reminded Lisa. There was no phone at Rose Cottage and Janet didn’t intend to have one put in.

Lisa’s full red mouth looked sulky. ‘What’s your letter?’ she asked after a moment’s silence.

He glanced down at the envelope in his hand. ‘It’s only a circular,’ he said. ‘Some central heating firm.’ As soon as the words left his lips he knew his mistake.

‘We’ll have to get some kind of central heating put in before next winter,’ Lisa said with energy. ‘We must have the house nice and warm for the baby.’

‘There are gas-fires in the bedrooms.’ He drew a little sighing breath. Even the gas-fires, small and old-fashioned, would be expensive enough to run. And Lisa wasn’t by nature given to economy, she seemed to think she had only to express a wish and the means to gratify it would float in on the summer breeze.

‘If we sold this house and moved to Cannonbridge,’ she said coaxingly, ‘we could buy a lovely new bungalow with central heating already laid on. We could buy one out at Leabarrow, near Carole.’ Leabarrow was a newish development on the opposite edge of Cannonbridge.

Derek gave her a despairing look. ‘Ivydene isn’t ours to sell. Half of it belongs to Janet.’ As Lisa well knew.

‘I’m positive you could do something about that if you tried, if you went to see a solicitor. Carole says people can always get round that sort of thing if they really want to.’ Her tone now held a strong suggestion of a whine and her delicate eyebrows came together in a frown. ‘It’s so boring being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere.’

‘There’s no question of selling the house if Janet’s against it,’ he said. ‘And you know she’s against it.’ Lisa had put forward the suggestion some weeks ago and