Bay of Secrets Read online

  Bay of Secrets

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 Rosanna Ley

  The moral right of Rosanna Ley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocoping, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PB ISBN 978 1 78087 506 4

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 507 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Rosanna Ley has worked as a creative tutor for over twelve years, leading workshops in the UK and abroad, and has completed an MA in creative writing. Her writing holidays and retreats take place in stunning locations in Italy and Spain. Rosanna has written numerous articles and stories for national magazines. When she is not travelling, Rosanna lives in west Dorset by the sea.

  For Ana – with love.

  PROLOGUE

  The doorbell rang – loud, insistent.

  Ruby sat up, still half-dreaming. She was in a nightclub, the lights were low and she was playing her saxophone. Someone to Watch Over Me. She rubbed her eyes.

  The doorbell rang again. More insistent still.

  Ruby groaned as the dream slipped away from her. ‘OK, OK. I’m coming.’ She blinked. Registered the early morning light. Glanced at the illuminated dial of the clock on James’s side, taking in the sight of him as she did so; fair, unshaven, arms flung out as if even in sleep he was saying, What the hell do I have to do to make you happy? (I don’t know. I don’t know. She’d always hoped it would just happen).

  They’d had another row last night. She wasn’t even sure what the rows were about any more. Only that he seemed to be travelling in one direction and that she was careering off in another. They’d been living together for two years. The question was – when would their paths coincide?

  And why would the doorbell be ringing at six in the morning? Not even the postman came this early.

  She stumbled out of bed. ‘James,’ she said. ‘Wake up. There’s someone at the door.’

  ‘Who?’ he muttered, voice slurred with sleep.

  Oh, hilarious. Ruby grabbed her bathrobe, pulled it on, shivered, padded down the hall, running her fingers through her mussed-up hair. She really shouldn’t have had that extra glass of wine last night. She’d met Jude for a drink after work and they’d ended up putting the world to rights over a whole bottle. And then when she’d got home …

  There were two people outside. She could make out their shapes through the glass; one male, one shorter female. A blurred check pattern; a darkness. Who came round visiting at this time in the morning? A sliver of foreboding slunk into her. Throat to knees.

  She pulled open the door.

  CHAPTER 1

  The house looked just the same. Red brick, white front door, sash windows, worse for wear. Ruby exchanged a glance with Mel. ‘Thanks for picking me up,’ she said. Could she have done it alone? She thought of James back in London and those different directions they seemed to be taking. Well, yes, she could have. But it would have been so much harder.

  ‘I’m not just dumping you here,’ Mel said. ‘I’m coming in to help.’

  ‘Help?’ But Mel was already getting out of the car, so Ruby followed suit. ‘You don’t have to—’ she began.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Mel opened the front gate and took Ruby’s arm as they walked up the path. The grass was overgrown, the plants were wild and untended and the garden was full of weeds. It didn’t take long.

  But Ruby felt the relief wash over her. Mel was her oldest friend and exactly what she needed right now. She was thirty-five years old and yet she felt like a child. She squeezed Mel’s arm. It had been two months. It was time. Time to tackle the past and take the first steps towards moving on.

  At the front door, Ruby closed her eyes, smelling the jasmine her mother had planted here years ago. The heady scent of the tiny white flowers seemed to wrap itself around her, shunt her forward. You can do this.

  She put her key in the door, almost heard her mother’s voice. You have to pull it out a bit and wiggle. The door eased open – reluctantly.

  Mel held back, understanding that Ruby had to go first. Ruby straightened her shoulders, stepped over the letters and circulars lying beached on the doormat. And took her first breath of parents and home since it had happened.

  *

  Of course Ruby had been back to Dorset since the accident. She and James had driven from London for her parents’ funeral. She sighed now as she remembered the journey, the expression on James’s face – his mouth thin and unsmiling, his eyes fixed on the road ahead with hardly a glance at the woman by his side. Ruby had barely noticed as the car swallowed up the miles, as the familiar green Dorset hills came into sight. Because the pleasure of coming home had turned into a terrible sort of emptiness. And she hadn’t felt able to face the house, not even with James by her side. James. How long had it been since they’d just walked hand in hand down by the river or since they’d talked – really talked, as if they wanted to hear what the other had to say? And now this. Poor James. He hadn’t known how to deal with it, how to deal with her. He’d started looking at her as if he no longer knew her. Which in a way he didn’t. It sounded a bit crazy. But she’d become someone else since she’d lost them.

  After the funeral they’d returned to London. Ruby had dealt with the awful aftermath. The sympathy cards from friends and from acquaintances of her parents’ she hardly knew, and some she did know, like Frances, her mother’s oldest friend, who had been so kind at the funeral, giving Ruby a note of her address and phone number and offering her help should she need it. There was the will and the probate; the winding up of their affairs that she’d accomplished somehow, finding a temporary and cold objectivity from some desperate corner of her grief.

  Somehow too, she finished the feature she was in the middle of writing – an exposé of a certain hotel chain and the recycling of house wine – and then she’d thrown herself into the next project and then the next. She’d hardly seen any of her friends. She hadn’t gone to the gym or had one of those occasional girlie evenings with Jude, Annie and the rest of them that always somehow made her feel better about everything. She simply worked. It was as if all the time she was writing, all the time she was interviewing people and investigating their stories, Ruby didn’t need to think about her own life, about what had happened to them, to her. She was functioning on autopilot. And in there somewhere was James and their foundering relationship.

  But Ruby wasn’t sure she could let it go – not yet. She knew she had to go back to the house in Dorset, had to sort through her parents’ things, had to decide what to do with the place now that they were gone. But how could she? If she did that it would be like admitting … That it was true. That they had really left her.

  Last night the situation had reached a head. Ruby had finished the story she was working on. She had a long bath. She felt as if her head was bursting. Afterwards, she sat on the sofa with her notebook, her sax and her guitar and waited for inspiration, but nothin
g came. She hardly played her saxophone, she hadn’t written a song for months. It wasn’t just her parents’ death. Something else was wrong in her life. Very wrong.

  James came back late from drinks after work, tired and irritable and not even wanting the supper she’d cooked for him. He ran his fingers through his fair hair and let out a long sigh. ‘May as well get off to bed,’ he said. He didn’t touch her.

  A final thread snapped. She couldn’t hold back. ‘What’s the point of us staying together, James?’ Ruby asked him. ‘We seem to want such different things. We hardly even spend any time together any more.’ She half wanted him to disagree, to fling her doubts aside, to take her in his arms. She didn’t want to keep having these arguments with him. But how could they go on living separate lives? Something had to change.

  But he didn’t disagree. ‘I don’t know what you want, Ruby,’ he said instead. ‘I just don’t know any more.’ His hands were in his pockets now. Ruby wondered what he was trying to stop them from doing. Reaching out to her, maybe?

  What did she want? What did he want, come to that? James loved living in London. He liked going out to crowded bars and restaurants and taking city breaks in Prague or Amsterdam – preferably with a few mates in tow. Apart from her occasional nights out with the girls, Ruby wanted a bit more peace and solitude these days. She’d rather tramp along the cliffs at Chesil Beach than shop in Oxford Street. He liked Chinese food, she preferred Italian. He was into hip hop, she loved jazz. He watched telly, she read books. He played football, she liked to dance. The list in her head went on. She couldn’t even remember how or why she had fallen in love with James in the first place. They used to do things with one another. They used to have fun. What was the matter with her?

  She realised that she was crying.

  He had his back to her though and he didn’t even see.

  And that’s when Ruby knew what she had to do. She had to take some time off – she had worked as a freelance journalist for over five years, her parents had left her a small inheritance as well as the house, so at least she had some breathing space – and she had to come back here to Dorset. She had to face up to what had happened. She was strong enough now to deal with it. She had to be.

  *

  The house, though, wasn’t easy.

  Ruby went into the living room first. Stopped in her tracks as she surveyed the scene. It was awful. It was as if they had just popped out for an hour or two. She went over to the table. Ran a fingertip over the stiff sheet of pale green water-colour paper. Her mother had been in the middle of a painting; her brushes still stood in a jar of murky water, her watercolour paints thrown into the old tin, her mixing palette on the table, the wilted flowers in a jug. Ruby touched them and they crumbled like dust in her fingers. There were two mugs on the table crusted with long-ago dried-up dregs of tea. And her father’s green sweater – slung on the back of the armchair. Ruby picked it up, buried her face in it – just for a moment – smelt the Dad-smell of the citrus aftershave she’d bought him last Christmas, mixed in with waxy wood polish and pine. They were so young. It wasn’t fair …

  What had he said to her? ‘Fancy a quick spin on the bike? Fancy a ride down to the waterfront? Go on. What d’you reckon? Shall we give it a whirl?’

  And her mother would have been busy painting but she would have smiled and sighed at the same time in that way she had, and pushed her work to one side. ‘Go on then, love,’ she’d have said. ‘Just for an hour. It’ll probably do me good to take a break.’

  For a moment Ruby pictured her, dark greying hair falling over her face as she painted, eyes narrowing to better capture her subject, silver earrings catching the light … No. It wasn’t fair.

  Mel put a comforting arm around her. ‘I’ve got some milk in the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch it and make us a nice cup of tea. And then we’ll make a start, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Ruby sniffed and nodded. That was what they were here for. But there was so much stuff and it all meant so much to her. A lifetime of memories.

  *

  ‘What I reckon,’ Mel said, over tea, ‘is that you need to clear away some of the personal things so that you can see more clearly.’

  Ruby nodded. She knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘Because you’re going to sell the house, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Even if … Well, she hadn’t come to a decision either way. But on the train to Axminster she’d been thinking. What held her to London – really? There was her job – but being freelance meant she could work just about anywhere she had her laptop. It had been a huge jump after working for the local rag in Pridehaven and then the glossy Women in Health in London. But she’d made it after a year of juggling nine to five on the magazine with the freelance articles she really wanted to write – articles that gave her the freedom to research and choose her own remit. And she made a living – though admittedly things were tight sometimes.

  It was handy living in the city for editorial meetings and what have you, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. She had to be ready to drop everything and go wherever the next story or article might be, but provided she was within reach of a decent airport or railway station, what difference did it make so long as she could email through her copy? There were her friends – she’d miss Jude in particular and their grumpy-women rants over a bottle of wine. And there was James, of course. She thought of him as she’d seen him last, as the taxi took her to the station; framed in the doorway, tall and fair, his blue eyes still sleepy and confused. But was there still James? She really didn’t know.

  ‘So we’ll do one room at a time. Three piles, darling.’ Mel tucked a strand of bright auburn hair behind one ear. ‘One for you to keep, one for anything you want to sell and one to give away to charity shops.’

  Fair enough.

  And by the time they stopped for a beer and a cheese and pickle sandwich at lunchtime, Ruby really felt they were getting somewhere. She’d shed plenty of tears, but she was doing what she’d spent two months plucking up the courage to do. She was at last sweeping the decks. It was hard – but therapeutic.

  She looked around. It was warm enough to sit outside at the garden table and good to get some fresh air. The old-fashioned sweet peas her mother had loved were blooming in wild abandon on the worn trellis by the back wall and their scent drifted in the breeze. Her mother used to cut bundles of them for the house. ‘To make sure everyone knows it’s summer,’ she used to say. Ruby decided that this afternoon she’d do the same.

  ‘I suppose you’ll want to get back to London as soon as you can?’ Mel was munching her sandwich. She pulled a sad face. Mel had missed her vocation in life; she should have been an actress. But she’d met Stuart when she was eighteen and fallen dramatically and irrevocably in love. Stuart was an accountant and Mel had her own business she’d started ten years ago; the hat shop in Pridehaven High Street, which had become a thriving concern. It had branched out to include fancy accessories – quirky ties, screen-painted silk scarves, hand-crafted leather purses and belts. But its speciality hadn’t altered. The town even had its own hat festival now, she’d informed Ruby earlier. Forget about London, darling, this is where it’s all happening these days.

  And perhaps she was right. ‘I’m not sure about going back.’ Ruby lifted her face up to the sun. She’d missed this garden, missed having outside space. And she’d missed not living near the sea.

  Ruby had left Dorset ten years ago when she was twenty-five. She’d wanted to be independent, to see somewhere new, to experience a different kind of life. She was bored with following up local stories for the Gazette, with interviewing local minor celebrities and with her weekly health file problem page. She applied for the job at Women in Health because it sounded glamorous and exciting, and because it was an escape from what had come to seem parochial. When she met James she’d thought for a while that everything had slotted neatly into place. He was attractive, intelligent and good company. They both had jobs they enjoyed a
nd the city was their oyster. It was all happening in London – theatre, music, film, galleries, everything you could want. But … It had turned out that Women in Health had its limitations and that Ruby wasn’t really a city girl after all. She’d lived the life and she’d enjoyed it. But home was where it was real. And although her parents were no longer here, somewhere in her heart this was still home and this was where she wanted to be – at least for now.

  Mel’s eyes widened. ‘What about James?’

  Ruby traced a pattern on the tabletop with her fingertip.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mel.

  ‘Exactly.’ Ruby sighed.

  ‘You haven’t split up?’

  ‘No.’ At least not yet, she thought. I’ll call you, was the last thing he’d said to her when she left for the station this morning. But when he did – what would she say? He hadn’t made any objection to her coming here. But he’d assumed it was just for a week or two – not for ever.

  ‘What then?’ Mel asked.

  Good question. ‘I suppose you could say we’re taking a break.’

  Mel knew her so well – she didn’t have to say more. But whether she stayed for a week or two or whether she stayed for ever, Ruby wouldn’t be staying in this house. It was far too big for her and it held way too many memories. Her parents’ ghosts would be haunting her every move.

  *

  After lunch, Ruby tackled her parents’ bedroom. She’d already pulled out all the clothes, put them in their designated piles. And at the bottom of the wardrobe, tucked behind assorted handbags, she’d found a shoebox. It had some writing – maybe Spanish – on the lid and a thick rubber band around it, but otherwise it appeared ordinary enough.

  Ruby sat back on her haunches. Downstairs, she could hear Mel vacuuming. The woman was an angel. Because this was so difficult; harder than she’d ever imagined it would be.

  When it happened to you – when the doorbell rang early in the morning and you opened the door to see two police officers standing there, about to tell you that your parents were dead – it didn’t feel like you could ever have imagined. She’d noticed silly and insignificant things. Like the fact that the female PC was wearing a padded body-warmer and had dark circles under her eyes. And that it was 21 March, the first day of spring.