The Catalyst Read online

  The Catalyst

  by

  Angela Jardine

  For Clarrie

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual

  persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Text Copyright © 2012 Angela Jardine

  All Right Reserved

  Michaelmas Cottage Publishing

  Prologue

  The sea, as usual, was inscrutable. It hid things, especially things that should not be beneath the sea. Before her, unseen, lay submerged homes and forests, ships and aeroplanes and deaths of many kinds but still the sea dissembled, putting on a brave show of innocence this bright morning.

  Already the sun was beginning to rise over the far headland across the bay, dancing a pathway of beaten bronze across the placid water before kissing her bare toes in homage as she stood on the edge of the rocks. It was a blessing, a sure sign that she had chosen the right time; she liked the idea of being blessed by the sun on this day of all days.

  She brushed back her hair as it clung to her cheek, oblivious of the dampness of her clothes sticking to her sweating skin, trying not to think too hard about what she had to do. She knew the water would be icy cold but she had read somewhere that drowning induced a warm sleepiness. Strangely, it was a comforting idea and she had not wanted to question the fact that no one could know this for sure.

  Moving forward she stepped into the water, resolutely keeping her chin up as the cold fingers of the sea crept up her legs. The chill struck her stomach and moved up her chest as she walked leaving her shocked and gasping for breath but still she continued to wade towards the sun. Tiny currents began to pluck playfully, soft as fish’s kisses, at her feet and legs and she felt her first tremor of fear as the water reached her throat.

  She knew the time had come to let it cover her head or turn back to the shore and safety. It was time to commit to death. With only the briefest of hesitations she closed her eyes and sank beneath the surface trying to ignore her panic as her ears filled with the sound of rushing water. It was still not too late, she could still go back to the land.

  Instantly a fleeting montage of painful emotions filled her mind bringing back to her all that had happened and she knew she would not go back. It was time to breathe in the sea and return her body to an element that so long ago had been nurturing but was now so alien.

  Giving herself up to the insistence of the current she allowed it to wrap its arms around her and sweep her off her feet, feeling herself drowning in the terrible beauty of the sea.

  Chapter 1

  Fog was beginning to settle on the coast again. Silent, stealthy as a midnight smuggler, the mist was starting to creep into the bay from the open sea as it had always done. Inland, heavy purple shadows still hung in the sky, low lit by the last upward rays of the sun as it sank behind the horizon. Pearly lights gleamed diffusely from the coastal homes that heaped themselves against the darkening land sloping down to the edge of the water which lay grey-green and glossy as sheet pewter. Everything was waiting to be covered by the creeping fret.

  Sunny Smith, driving back from her monthly duty visit to her parent’s home, slowed down to take in the scene as the road crested the low hilltop at Zarnglaze. She was not far from her own home now and she held her breath as the view slowly revealed itself to her, filled with her usual gratitude that she was lucky enough to live in this place of magic.

  Out in the bay, high and silent above the encroaching mist, on an ancient surge of granite that burst exuberantly from the sea sat Penherne Castle, preening like a solitary mermaid. If there is a fairyland it surely must look like this she thought, hardly realising that she had allowed her car to come almost to a standstill on the now deserted road.

  She felt the now-familiar rush of pride and love for the twinkling coastline below her and was thankful for this reassurance of the rightness of her choice of a place in which to live her solitary life.

  After David, her husband, had died her friends had warned her she was trying to run away from her memories and that it wouldn’t work. For her part she had been unable to explain to them why she had to leave even though she knew they were most likely right, but running away was what she did. It was what she had always done when things had got tough. Seeing other places was her distraction and it was a form of therapy that had always worked.

  Now, as she checked avidly over every inch of the view in front of her before the light failed completely, trying to absorb the scene into her very cells as if by visual osmosis, she knew instinctively that she had done the right thing. As usual she was frustrated by her inability to feel all she knew should be felt for her surroundings.

  To her it was important to worship this place with its wild contradictions between the damp valleys, full of fierce and rampant vegetation, and the rocky starkness of its scrubby, gale-swept heights. The evidence of ancient humanity’s intense love affair with these sheltered valleys and towering crags was all around her in the settlements nestling below the curving sides of moorland or squatting upon windswept skylines, secretive about their prehistoric origins.

  Peering across to the far side of the bay she could just see the steadfast silver lights of Porthcarn welcoming her back through the dark and she put her foot down on the accelerator, eager to be home.

  It was not long before the weary drift of her thoughts was interrupted by the need to concentrate on the narrow, winding streets of her adopted village. A reverie here meant grazed bumpers and dimpled metal work to her car at the very least, quite apart from the possibility of killing one of the many free-range cats that considered these streets as being there solely for their own private use.

  Once these were safely negotiated she parked, car and cats unscathed, on the quayside above the tiny harbour. Its sheltering boats were hidden now by the mist but the gentle rocking of the water sent out the familiar slapping, clinking noises that spoke of their presence and the sounds comforted her. They said that all was well and the sight of the boats bouncing gently at their moorings would greet her in the morning light.

  The air was still and soft and she breathed in its peacefulness, allowing it to melt the physical tension from her long drive upcountry. She could feel the tautness leaching out of her muscles as if dissolving into the granite quayside beneath her feet closely followed by a narcotic weariness that weighted her limbs and made her eyelids heavy. This fatigue never seemed to leave her completely these days and she looked forward to her comfortable bed.

  The fact that she was alone in the bed registered briefly and she shrugged it off with well-practiced stoicism. It didn’t do to let that thought gain a foothold in her mind. Sleeping alone after years of falling asleep in someone’s arms could still feel like some sort of violent amputation if she dropped her guard too much.

  Heaving her overnight bag out of the car boot she swung it over her shoulder and walked, head down, up the narrow street to her home, almost colliding with a shadowy shape that stepped backwards out of a deep-set doorway on the quayside. She drew in a sharp breath at the unexpectedness of meeting anyone in the mist before smiling with relief as the streetlamp shone wanly onto the face of her near neighbour, Edward Hervey, closing the door of the covered alleyway that led to his back door.

  ‘Sunny … you’re back! Good trip? Your folks well?’ he said absently as he walked with her the few yards up the street to her door. She opened her mouth to reply but was given no chance. She knew he had already forgotten what he had asked and was not waiting for a reply anyway.

  ‘You’re back in the shop tomorrow I take it? I’ll see you then … ’night.’ He threw the words over his shoulder as he strode off.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes ... okay ... and ’night.’ She answered his questions to herself as he disapp
eared round the corner, then smiled and shook her head. Edward Hervey went through all the accepted routines of polite conversation without apparently ever engaging his brain. It was almost as if he knew something was expected of him when he met someone but as he was never quite sure what he kept what he felt were relevant phrases ready stored on his tongue in a ‘one size fits all’ kind of way.

  Sunny had become used to her employer’s abrupt method of communication during the time she had been working for him in his dark and dusty bookshop. He was somewhat dark and dusty himself but she had found herself vaguely touched by his permanently rumpled look. Here was a man who really believed that when a shirt was labelled non-iron, it really was non-iron and occasionally, in idle moments, she had wondered why he wasn’t married.

  He was quite good-looking, in a studious, donnish kind of way. Kindly, she had hesitated to put his solitariness down to his glaringly obvious societal ineptitude, believing that people were rarely as straightforward as they seemed.

  She unlocked the front door of her old cottage, aware that it smelt musty despite her only having been away four days but it was a small price to pay for the chance to live by the sea and she knew the smell would soon dissipate now she was home again.

  Turning on the lamp she took a moment or two to look around the room and take in the serenity of the home she had created for herself. She felt safe inside its plain white walls, loving its simple furniture, the soft lighting and the lumpy plasterwork that flaked in places.

  Her old schoolhouse clock ticked a steady reassurance and the shabby gentility of an old rug with its softly faded colours offered an ancient, threadbare comfort to the white-painted floorboards. Even so, and despite her love of it, this cottage was just another in a long line of quaint cottages for Sunny with her terminal restlessness.

  The only times she had really tried hard to stay put was as a concession to David who had needed to put down some sort of roots every now and again. The remembrance of David’s tolerance of her wandering nature brought a sudden wetness to her eyes and she nipped the bridge of her nose trying to stop the unexpected tears. Thoughts of his desperate struggle for life that last year swamped her mind and she was unable to clear the pictures fast enough for them not to register painfully in her chest.

  What the hell is wrong with me? This has just got to stop ... I have to move on ... I have to put all this behind me she thought, automatically using the easy platitudes she had heard so often from others. They did not help with her emotions at all but were now fatefully engraved on her mind.

  She scrubbed roughly at her eyes and inelegantly ran the back of her hand under her nose, sniffing vigorously and consoling herself that in the grand scheme of things just over twelve months of widowhood was probably hardly enough time to recover from a love lost, even if that love had become the tame and habitual love of many years, the sort of love that never felt it necessary to say ‘I love you’ anymore.

  Then there was always that faint taint of guilt that lurked like an enemy submarine beneath the smooth surface of her mind, the guilt she felt from being free again, at having her life totally under her own control again. That too was a thought she tried hard to stifle.

  Solemnly regarding the tired, heart-shaped face that looked back at her in the bathroom mirror, she debated whether she could be bothered to clean it at this late hour. Blankly she took in the high cheekbones and still-tight jaw line before becoming aware of the soft creases at the corners of her eyes. They hinted at her age but she could never decide if she really cared how old she looked anymore, preferring the fact that they seemed to give her face a certain warmth of character.

  Her blond hair still showed no signs of going grey and it still seemed to look all right despite her rarely having it styled professionally. Not that it really matters how I look now she thought, I can look anyway I want, I'm free. The treacherous thought was out before she could trap it.

  Even her body was still reasonably neat and youthful, the grieving process having been strangely cathartic physically. The constant exercise she had needed to stop herself from dwelling on the horror of David’s last year alive had translated itself into long, fast, solitary walks which had made her body lean and firm.

  She supposed she didn't really look her age but that was just a fact, it did not comfort her in any meaningful way. More often, in the unguarded glimpses she caught of herself in a mirror, all she saw was her own haunted soul staring back at her. That was when she really thought of the long years ahead with a spasm of some emotion she knew was very close to fear.

  Now, face dutifully cleaned and hugging a hot water bottle to her stomach to help with any lingering aches from her long journey, she took a last look at the mist gathering in the street outside her bedroom window before easing her body into bed and falling asleep to the sound of the sea tumbling pebbles on the harbour beach.

  As usual there was little peace for her in sleep and she was beset by vivid dreams. It was still dark as she clawed her way awake to escape them, putting out a frantic hand before she was fully awake to turn on the lamp. Her heart blundered about alarmingly inside her like a drunk in a dark alley as she struggled upright, trying to slow her uneven breathing and wondering despondently why these episodes were getting more frequent.

  Why weren’t things getting easier? Perhaps she was not dealing as well as she thought she was with being alone? Anyway, how did you deal with it? Just how did you keep the lid on the confusion of emotions bereavement threw up?

  She stayed awake for a long time churning these thoughts round and round before falling back to sleep just as the usual early morning squabbles of the gulls started, fighting like feathered fishwives on her roof.

  Work next day was difficult after such a night and her air of fragile lassitude was obvious even to the apparently vague Edward Hervey that morning in the bookshop. He had instantly noticed the heaviness of her eyelids with their delicate amethyst colouring and the weary, languid movements of her body. It gave her the air of a 1920’s film vamp that sat incongruously with the appalling vulnerability he felt emanating from her.

  He disliked the effect intensely. It inspired in him a distinctly alarming response to protect and comfort. It was a feeling he had never felt before, even for his ex-wife, Francesca, but then Francesca had always considered herself more of a man than he had ever been.

  Now he was experiencing a new and alien emotion for a woman he hardly knew and he was terrified in case his own vulnerability showed, in case this unasked-for, and frankly vastly unwelcome, feeling escaped from the box inside him where he had locked away any stray tendencies for tenderness. He was beginning to wish he had never taken the woman on to work in his shop, it was raising far too many difficulties.

  If he were honest with himself, he had to admit he had felt sorry for her. She had seemed so alone when she first came to the village and her air of desolation had struck him as he watched her sitting on the quayside looking at the boats in the harbour. Now he was beginning to think he had shot himself in the foot by playing the Good Samaritan.

  Even after working with her all through the spring and summer months he still did not know many of the details of her past, only sure of the fact that she was a widow. He had muttered the obligatory condolences when he hired her but had not felt he needed to go further. Surely that was an irrelevance, he was only her employer after all, not her counsellor. Only now he had been severely shaken by the rush of responsibility he had come to feel towards her.

  Perhaps it was just that she seemed too young to be a widow, to have to live with such loss so early on. Edward had always thought of widows, if he thought of them at all, as being elderly women that went on bus trips together. They had tight, white perms and comfy sandals bulging with bunions like onions in a net. It was a comfortable, reassuring image of widows. He felt you knew where you were with those sorts of widows.

  What he did not feel comfortable with was a woman of almost his own age with an unexpectedly graceful bod
y, disconcertingly warm smile and eyes the colour of jade. How on earth could she be called a widow he wondered petulantly, even if she was one technically.

  Now here he was, steering a faltering course through a fast and rocky channel of inexplicable emotions and feeling a genuine element of concern for himself and the turbulence of his feeling towards Sunny. He just wanted to swim back to the reassuring oblivion of the deep, murky water in which he usually hid.

  One thing he was sure of, he was never getting romantically involved with another woman, the scars left by Francesca still ran too deeply for that.

  ‘You really should go back home, Sunny. You look awful.’ His words came out somehow more abruptly than he had meant them to and she looked up at him, startled by his bluntness.

  ‘Really? Do I look that bad? I didn’t sleep very well when I got back. I think maybe I was too tired ... if that’s possible. Perhaps I could lurk about in the horror section pretending to be something scary out of a book ... a vampire maybe.’ She grinned at him as she said it but realised that, as usual, her flippancy had been lost on him as he turned away and busied himself with shuffling the interminable papers of business.

  The truth was that meeting her unexpectedly in the street the previous evening had already shaken loose his composure and now her attempt at humorous self-deprecation only served to make her seem even more heroic to him. He was unsure what this feeling was that he felt for Sunny but he was going to have to send her home to rest so he could his regain his equilibrium.

  ‘Sunny … Sunita.’ He cleared his throat, using her full name to emphasise the gravity of what he was about to say. She looked up at him but it was not tiredness he saw in the face below him and he paused, fumbling now for words. He knew her gentle nature and saw the easy smile but he was not taken in by such a mask. He had hidden behind just such a mask for many years and he recognised the signs.