Following his parents’ death, Daniel’s guilt had become more potent when mixed with grief. He refused to see anyone except his twin sister for weeks. Denise lived on the outskirts of London with her husband Simon and one young son at the time, a nephew Daniel had never seen due to his travelling. During his sister’s frequent visits, they’d spent hours sifting through old photographs, smiling as they remembered happier times and wiping away tears at the cruel reality of the present. She’d helped him organise personal papers and choose sentimental keepsakes. Their father’s study had been full of drawings and plans of buildings that would now never be built. Creations aborted and rolled up into cardboard tubes before being given the chance of existence in some burgeoning metropolis in the world.
They’d walked for miles across the surrounding fields, each sharing their guilt and sadness as freely as they’d shared their mother’s womb thirty-two years earlier. As family ties beckoned, Denise’s visits had grown less frequent. To help fill the seemingly endless evenings, Daniel painted and drank his father’s collection of whiskey and port. If he wasn’t daubing a canvas with dark, melancholic pigments, he was staring at the television in an alcoholic stupor. It was usually during these long evenings when Daniel thought about his parents and his estranged best friend, Sean, most vividly. He tormented himself with unresolved guilt while watching the pulsing orange embers in the hearth collapse into grey ash. He blamed his absence for his parents’ death and his wrong decision for Sean’s loss of sight.
It was on one particularly tormented evening, several months following his parents’ accident, when the number three took on a greater significance in Daniel’s life. As he sat alone listening to the grandfather clock’s unremitting ticking, he became fixated on that particular number. Two accidents. Didn’t bad things happen in threes?
As he’d stood up to go to bed, he’d stopped at the library door. His eyes had lingered on the light switch as he pondered a theory. Perhaps if he switched it three times, it would prevent the third disaster from happening.
OFF.
ON.
OFF.
Having said goodbye to Denise, Daniel picked up his sandwich and bit deeply into the soft bread, groaning with pleasure while he chewed. Goya and Gogh stared at him, licking their lips and checking the floor for any dropped crumbs. He stretched in his chair and ran his fingers vigorously backwards and forwards through his hair.
‘Okay. How about that walk I promised you?’
With the dogs on leads, Daniel opened the front door. He turned to close it before checking that it was locked. He tried the door a second time. It was still locked. Doubt tormented him, forcing him to try the door for a third time. Immediately the anxiety disappeared and he relaxed.
Since his parents’ death, six warm summers had diluted the colour of Daniel’s demons, almost as if the sun had bleached them. But an underlying anxiety persisted. On most days he still felt the need to turn light switches on or off three times and still made three repetitions of several everyday actions. He always checked three times that The Rookery was properly locked and still found himself picking up the third newspaper from a pile in Jackson’s Store or choosing a trolley from the third stacked line at the supermarket. It wasn’t an obsession that stood out in a crowd. Only he knew of his little idiosyncrasies, and although he knew these foibles weren’t common, he was thankful that they gave him some order in an unpredictable world.
He walked beneath the canopy of trees in his front garden, out of a set of iron gates and on to the cricket pitch opposite The Rookery. Although it was nearly five thirty, the sun’s heat felt good on his face and eased the ache in his temple. Insects droned overhead, drawing his eyes skyward. White contrails sliced through the sky like a giant game of noughts and crosses. Daniel inhaled deeply, relaxing his shoulders before letting his dogs off their leads, grinning as they tore off across a jigsaw of parched and cracked turf.
Chapter Two
Tess Fenton was scraping parsnips in the kitchen. She pursed her lips while considering her closest friend’s question. ‘I can’t remember,’ she told Holly.
‘You’re kidding me!’
‘I’m not. I’m being serious.’
‘Take a wild guess.’
‘Maybe a couple of months.’
Sitting on the worktop, Holly stopped swinging her legs and leaned forwards, her mouth agape. ‘Months?’
‘It’s not compulsory, you know.’
‘Maybe not – if you’re eighty!’
Tess chuckled as she patted her friend’s legs by way of asking her to move them. Holly bent her knees so that they touched her chin, giving Tess room to retrieve a serrated knife from the drawer.
‘Admit it, Tess, it’s not normal. You’re both still in your twenties, only been dating for a couple of years and already you can’t remember when you last had sex.’
‘Okay, yes! I admit things have changed over the past year.’ Tess top and tailed the sweet-smelling parsnips, blinking each time the knife hit the chopping board. ‘Blake drinks too much. He’s lazy. He’s been using pretentious words since he’s been promoted and he chats online with Star Trek forums. Hardly grounds for ending things but… we’ve both changed since we met.’
‘Wow.’
‘Well, you did ask.’
‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I was only teasing.’
Tess stopped chopping and rested her hands on the worktop. ‘But that’s just it, don’t you see? I’m not upset. It’s as if we’re two jigsaw pieces and every so often I have to chip pieces off myself to fit into our relationship. You can only adjust so many times before you’re not being true to yourself.’ She shrugged, took a roasting tin out of the oven and tentatively peeled open the steaming foil parcel with her fingertips.
‘Have you talked to him about it? He may not realise how you feel. Can’t you explain that your relationship isn’t healthy?’
‘Healthy?’ Tess leaned backwards to let the billowing steam escape from the foil. ‘I’d say there’s more life in this half-cooked bird.’ She poked the chicken and watched the oily blood ooze down its pale skin, then turned to look at her friend. ‘I think it’s time to face facts and end things with Blake. I want to change my job and bake for a living and find someone that fits my original jigsaw shape. It’s time for a new start.’
In the hallway, Blake was resting his forehead against the kitchen door surround, inhaling the bittersweet tang of waxed pine. Sliding down the wall, he sat on his heels. What was the old adage? Eavesdroppers seldom hear anything good about themselves.
A few minutes earlier, he’d let himself in to Tess’s cottage. Despite the frustrations of a hot day with a high pollen count and having run out of cigarettes, the smell of roast chicken when he’d entered had lifted his mood. As he’d removed his imitation brogues, he’d heard the soft mutterings of Tess and Holly. It was only when his name was mentioned that he crept towards the narrow gap left by the open kitchen door.
Oblivious now to their conversation, Blake held his head in his hands and was hyperventilating as quietly as he could. Tess was going to leave him. His face felt hot. Pins and needles prickled his fingertips and his eyes stung. He was horrified at the thought that he might cry. God, he hadn’t cried since… since Spock died in The Wrath of Khan.