The Shell House Read online

  She was sounding proprietorial now, as if she ran the whole show.

  ‘Exhibition?’

  ‘When we have open days. Next one’s the second Sunday in October. You ought to come, if you’re interested. There’ll be photos and stuff, and guided walks. They raise a lot of money for the Trust.’

  Greg didn’t answer; it didn’t sound like his sort of thing, being led round like a tourist. He preferred trespassing.

  ‘Are they here every day, those workers?’ he asked.

  ‘No, just weekends. I told you, they’re volunteers. They don’t get paid or anything.’

  Greg heard a toilet flushing. A bearded man came out of the Coach House, glanced their way, then strode across the grass towards them, looking quizzically at Greg.

  ‘My father,’ Faith said.

  The man wore shorts, walking boots and a grubby polo shirt stretched over a large belly; his legs were muscular and very hairy. He looked considerably older than Greg’s dad and, as far as Greg could see, nothing at all like Faith.

  ‘Hello!’ He held out a hand. ‘Michael Tarrant. You didn’t say you had a friend coming,’ he added to Faith.

  ‘Forgot,’ Faith said. ‘This is Greg.’

  Reluctantly, Greg held out his hand, which was wrung rather than shaken in a strong, painful grip.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Greg,’ Michael Tarrant said. Smiling teeth appeared rather unexpectedly between gingery moustache and gingery beard, as if he had no lips. ‘Good to see young people taking an interest. Actually, you’ve come along at just the right moment. Feel like lending a hand for half an hour?’

  ‘Well, I—’ Greg looked at Faith, but she offered no support. Her father, not waiting for an answer, turned to lead the way across to the main house.

  ‘We could do with some extra muscle power. We’re making a new track round the south side. It’s got to be ready for Open Day. Laying the hardcore’s a back-breaking job.’ He clapped a hand on Greg’s back. ‘We’ve got a chain gang going, but an extra pair of hands at the business end would make all the difference.’

  Oh well, he could hardly refuse . . . He allowed himself to be led towards the half-made track, where a small group of people laboured with wheelbarrows and shovels.

  ‘This is Greg,’ the man announced. ‘Friend of Faith’s. He’s offered to pitch in.’

  Offered! But there were welcoming smiles all round. The chain gang consisted of two men and three women, none of them young. A white-haired woman, straightening stiffly with a hand clamped to her side, handed him her shovel. ‘Here you are then, Greg. I’ve done enough for now. I’ll do my back in again if I’m not careful.’

  ‘How lovely to have a strong young man to help,’ said a woman with a yellow bandanna knotted over her hair.

  Feeling rather foolish, Greg took the shovel. The track they were laying was extensive; he could see the rutted outline they were filling with broken brick and clinker, presumably brought out from the cellars of the house. Half an hour’s work wasn’t going to make much impression! He’d put in a token effort, then make some excuse. Michael Tarrant set to with a grunt, up-ending a barrow that stood nearby; another man trundled up with a fresh load. Greg started scraping the stuff about. The grating of shovel on coarse brick set his teeth on edge.

  ‘You’re at Faith’s school, are you?’ Michael asked him.

  Greg hesitated, for some reason unwilling to end the pretence that he was a friend of Faith’s.

  ‘Oh, but I thought Faith went to St Ursula’s?’ called out the woman in the bandanna.

  ‘They have boys in the sixth form,’ Michael explained.

  Right. Faith was a St Ursula’s girl; he might have guessed. ‘No, I’m at Radway.’

  ‘Oh, the comprehensive?’ Michael said, as if he’d vaguely heard of such things. ‘Sixth form?’

  ‘Yes, just started.’

  St Ursula’s was a private school, an old brick mansion behind high walls. Its girls (the All Saints, Gizzard called them) wore strict uniform and generally regarded themselves as several notches above the plebs from the comprehensive. Gizzard claimed to have lost his virginity to one, last summer in Epping Forest; starved of boys till Year Twelve, he claimed, they couldn’t wait to get their hands on willing male flesh. Greg considered adapting his version of meeting Faith in the light of this new information.

  But where was Faith? Shovelling, getting hotter and hotter, he looked round for her. She was nowhere in sight; how had she managed to escape this penal servitude? She must have slipped away, back to the solitude of her lakeside grotto. She’d be laughing at him, having delivered him into the clutches of the Übergruppenführer.

  But she hadn’t corrected her father when he assumed they knew each other. He couldn’t make her out; couldn’t decide whether she’d been friendly, or had simply found an easy way of getting rid of him.

  Gizzard

  Greg’s mental photograph, black-and-white: the edge of the lake. Shallow water, pierced by reeds and sedges. The surface is lightly ru fled by wind. Reflected sky is seen in the ripples, caught by fast shutter-speed; otherwise the water is in shadowy darkness.

  ‘Thought you were at Gary’s,’ Greg’s mother said when he got in. She refused to use the name Gizzard. She was frowning in concentration over her icing-nozzle, carefully marking white lines on a rectangular green cake. Looking more closely, Greg saw that it was a football pitch, meticulously proportioned, of course. Whatever his mother did, she did to perfection.

  ‘How do you know I wasn’t, then?’

  ‘He phoned. Thought you might want to go round later.’ She seemed to speak without breathing, balancing her icing-bag, squeezing it just enough to produce a steady, shining ooze. He didn’t know how she got the lines so straight.

  ‘Oh. I might. I’ll ring him back in a minute.’

  ‘So,’ she said, squinting at him, ‘where have you been?’

  With his back to her, taking a Coke out of the fridge, he said, ‘Just out and about on the bike. Nowhere in particular.’

  His mother straightened, tilting her head at the cake. ‘D’you want to get yourself some lunch? We’ve had ours. I’m not cooking till tonight.’

  ‘Had some, thanks.’

  ‘McDonald’s, I suppose. I don’t know why you spend your money on Big Macs when you can eat for nothing at home.’

  Greg didn’t put her right. ‘That looks good,’ he said, nodding at the iced football pitch.

  ‘For first thing tomorrow. Then I’ve got a mermaid to do.’ She nodded towards another pair of sponges cooling on a rack.

  Greg had liked cake, once. Now that Julie’s Party Cakes was taking off, he was used to seeing them dotted about the kitchen in various stages of completion—nude or iced, made to resemble country cottages, dinosaurs, cartoon characters or treasure chests. Sometimes there would be a traditional wedding cake, with tiers and supporting pillars. As long as he didn’t have to eat one, that was OK. The smell of them cooking was enough—sugary, laced with vanilla, cloying the air of the kitchen. The basic sponge recipe was always the same, unless it was a rich fruit mix for a wedding cake, in which case the smell was spicy and faintly alcoholic. Either way, Greg had had enough of cake. Julie’s Party Cakes had given him a taste for hot savoury food, meaty food, man food—anything but cake.

  ‘Is Dad back from golf yet?’

  ‘Yes, upstairs, on the Internet, I think.’

  ‘Right, so he’s out of circulation for the next three hours.’ Greg had been thinking of doing a bit of web-surfing himself, but his dad’s laptop was out of action and there was only one computer. Reluctantly he considered his homework, decided it could wait, and wondered whether he wanted to go round to Gizzard’s.

  ‘You’re going to miss Gary,’ his mum had been saying all through the summer holidays, and now that school had started, ‘It must be odd without Gary.’ Surprisingly, it wasn’t. Gizzard—Gary Guisborough—had been Greg’s best friend since Year Seven, but had now left Radway for the s
ixth-form college in Hunsdon, ten miles away. His course, Media Studies and Sociology, sounded more fun than school and AS levels—‘But then,’ Greg’s mum kept saying, ‘Gary’s not academic.’ According to her, Greg was academic. He wasn’t so sure, himself. His GCSE grades last month had been better than expected, provoking an outburst of champagne and congratulations and even a special cake with WELL DONE GREG! in a looped icing flourish. It was because his parents weren’t academic that they so desperately wanted Greg to be. And if his sister Katy didn’t get top results in her SATS tests this year it wouldn’t be for lack of parental pushing.

  His mother had finished marking in the lines. From a cardboard box on the worktop, she took tiny plastic goalposts and footballers.

  ‘Man United v Chelsea?’ Greg suggested.

  ‘Don’t know—they just asked for red and blue. I don’t think I’ll go as far as painting names on the shirts.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Katy’s friends are coming round with a video, so I hope you weren’t planning to watch TV.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Greg said. ‘Friends—what, Lorrie, as in face-like-the-back-of-a, and the gormless ginger one?’

  ‘Lorrie and Sarah, that’s right.’ She gave him a teasing look. ‘The Greg Hobbs Fan Club. And don’t be unkind about Lorrie. She can’t help being a bit plain.’

  That settled it: he was going to Gizzard’s. He could have listened to his Walkman in the garden or up in his room, but the girls wouldn’t leave him in peace for long. Last Sunday morning, after he’d been out running, he’d heard them giggling on the landing while he was in the shower. That Lorrie—he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried the door; she’d have peeked through the keyhole if there had been one. Sarah, who rarely spoke, flushed fuchsia-pink whenever he appeared and, according to Katy, had written his name all over her new pencil-case, adorned with hearts. Girls! Some of them were all right, but not when they invaded his home in tittering huddles.

  That was a funny thing about Gizzard leaving, too. When Gizzard had been around, he was the one who attracted all the girls. He was easy, cheerful, popular; he did it without appearing to try. Although he had been overtaken in height by Greg, there always seemed, somehow, to be a lot more of him. And now that there was no Gizzard, there was more of Greg. Girls outnumbered boys in the sixth form, that was why. The term was only two weeks old but already Greg felt more conspicuous. It wasn’t because of anything he did; he just was.

  The Guisboroughs lived only two blocks away; hardly worth taking the bike, though Greg did. Gizzard was in the garden, sprawled on a lounger and plugged into his Walkman. He raised a can of lager at Greg, then pulled a spare one from under his seat and passed it over.

  ‘Come and sit down, Tiger.’

  ‘Tiger?’

  Gizzard mimed teeing off. ‘Woods. Thought your dad must have dragged you off to the golf course.’

  ‘No chance. He’d have me signed up as a life member if I showed my face there again. Sad, isn’t it? He’s got this fantasy about going off together every Sunday morning. You know, man-to-man chats on the fairway. Male bonding in the bar. Showing off his son and heir to his golfing buddies.’

  ‘Miss out the stuff with birdies and niblicks but show up at the bar. I would.’

  Gizzard’s mother, plump and impossibly young-looking with the same floppy hair as Gizzard, smiled vaguely from the patio and turned the page of her magazine; she wore white shorts and a halter top, showing an amount of tanned skin and cleavage that Greg would have been mortified to see displayed by his own mother. What he liked about coming to the Guisboroughs’ was that you never had to do anything other than be there. You never had to make polite conversation; you just joined in the sitting, or sunning, or watching the football, or whatever was going on. Even the dog, a fat golden Labrador, was an expert in relaxation; he raised his head from the grass and thumped his tail twice in welcome, then closed his eyes again. Greg’s family owned two neurotic cats that were always screeching when they got under his feet or sending his heart into overdrive when they rocketed out from under his bed.

  ‘So where were you, then?’ Gizzard asked.

  Sitting on the grass, Greg took a swig of lager. ‘Out on my bike.’

  For some reason he didn’t feel like explaining about Graveney Hall, nor about Faith. Gizzard would think he was a plonker for letting himself be press-ganged into what had turned out to be a couple of hours’ manual labour. Unexpectedly, though, Greg had enjoyed it—and not because of the welcoming flattery of the volunteer group. For all their references to his strong young muscles, he’d found it hard to match the older people for strength or determination. He’d been flagging long before they showed any signs of taking a break, and had to force himself to keep shovelling. But it had been rewarding, seeing the trail of hardcore extending towards the garden entrance, imagining it as a proper finished track.

  Sprawled on the grass next to Gizzard, Greg flexed his arms. He was going to be stiff tomorrow. Definitely not as fit as he thought, not in the upper body, anyway. When the workers finally downed tools, they had invited him to share their lunch, a huge picnic over in the Coach House, set out on trestle tables. Everyone, it seemed, had contributed something—sausage rolls, pork pies, salads, fruit, fudge brownies. With a little encouragement, Greg had tucked in. People emerged from all over the gardens, some two dozen of them. ‘Oh, you’re Faith’s young man?’ one of the men said, with a quaintly old-fashioned turn of phrase. Why did everyone think he must have something to do with Faith? Presumably because they were the only two people under forty. But there had been no sign of her.

  ‘How’s the old slave-ship, then?’ Gizzard asked.

  Greg shrugged. ‘OK. We’ve got a couple of new teachers—Art and Physics.’

  ‘Young? Female?’ Gizzard’s eyebrows rose suggestively.

  ‘No. Both male.’

  Greg hadn’t seen Faith again before he left. He hadn’t felt like searching for her. With all that work to be done, how did she get away with not helping? He got the impression that her dad couldn’t bear to see anyone without a pickaxe or shovel in their hand. As soon as lunch was eaten, people started to drift back to their jobs; Greg found Michael and said, untruthfully, that he had to go.

  ‘Well, thanks for your help,’ Michael said. ‘See you next weekend, if you like? We’re always here Saturdays and Sundays.’ Not bloody likely, Greg thought, cycling down the rough drive; you’re not getting more free labour out of me. Anyway, he had his Saturday job. But now he found that Graveney Hall was on his mind: the burnt-out shell on its shoulder of land, the austere lines, the contrast between ruined building and fertile fields all round like a tide lapping at a shipwreck. He’d taken only five or six photographs, having been so successfully hijacked. Next weekend, or maybe one evening, he’d go back for a proper exploration, keeping well clear of Faith’s dad.

  ‘Who d’you go around with now, then?’ Gizzard asked.

  ‘Jordan, mostly. You know? Jordan McAuliffe. We’re in the same tutor group now.’

  Gizzard frowned. ‘Dark hair? Hardly ever speaks?’

  ‘He’s OK when you get to know him. He’s a brilliant swimmer, did you know? Butterfly and freestyle.’

  ‘How would I? He’s never said more than two words to me.’

  ‘No. Well.’ Greg didn’t find this surprising. Jordan McAuliffe had been in a different form throughout school, and was in any case a reserved, self-contained boy—the opposite of Gizzard. ‘He trains at the pool. He was there a lot over the summer.’

  Gizzard grinned. ‘While you were doing your Baywatch bit? Cor, I’d have swapped my holiday job for yours like a shot!’ Being pool guard, in Gizzard’s view, gave endless opportunities for eyeing semi-naked girls. In fact, it was more a case of watching mesmerized while the fitness fanatics ploughed up and down, or warning kids not to dive-bomb each other in the paths of struggling infant doggypaddlers.

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy being rescued by you,’ Greg said. ‘You nearly drowne
d me, that time in life-saving practice.’

  ‘Don’t s’pose I’d bother. You can look after yourself.’ Gizzard yawned. ‘We’re getting the barbecue out later. Want to stay? Mum, it’s OK if Greg troughs with us, yeah?’

  ‘No problem,’ his mum said, not looking up.

  ‘I’ve got my homework still to do,’ Greg said.

  Gizzard grinned. ‘Keep forgetting you’re still a schoolboy. Don’t worry about it—what are Monday mornings for?’

  Next weekend, Greg thought with the doomed sense of a resolution that would never be kept, he was going to get it out of the way on Saturday before starting at the pool, not leave it till Monday morning. ‘I’ll have to ring Mum, or she’ll cook dinner for me.’

  ‘Fine.’ Gizzard swung his legs round to one side and glanced at his mother to see if she was still listening. ‘There’s this girl in my Media Studies group, right?’ he began, confidingly man-to-man. ‘You ought to see her . . .’

  Only half-listening, Greg lay back on the grass. There always was some girl. Sherry, this one was called, or maybe it was Cherie like Mrs Blair, but he’d given up bothering to remember their names. Supplying enough mms and uhhs to satisfy Gizzard, he narrowed his eyes against the brightness of sky. Again, Graveney Hall came back to him, filling his mind. He thought of the way the trees opened up suddenly to reveal the glint of water, deep-shadowed on the far side; the stir of rushes as the air sighed through the stalky mass. It was in his mind, more real and vivid than the images stowed safely in his camera. Some of his mental snapshots would be translated into real ones for his art project, if he got the chance. Close-ups, he thought: the ripple of water, the spear-thrust of rush, black-and-white to bring out pattern and light. And the grotto—yes, colour for that, the swirl of blues and whites . . . He might tell Jordan; he was more likely to be interested than Gizzard, who would dismiss the place as a dismal old ruin.