very concerned. But then again – things like this did not happen all the time. Ghosts did not private message people. Spirits did not text. I did not have visions.
Though I reflected, for some people all this stuff was a way of life. I recalled Beryl Bennett. She’d seen something in my hand. Hadn’t she wondered if I’d been ill? Or was adopted? Jesus, she knew. It was unreal.
Or was I was just beginning to see the world for what it was – a gossamer cat’s cradle of different threads and connections, half-sights and shadows, cracks and hints, that had been completely invisible only weeks before?
Before Mum died, if I’d caught myself thinking this kind of stuff I would have checked straight into a psychotherapist then and there. Of course I would have been terrified I’d inherited Mum’s … Here my thought stream paused. I was thinking the word ‘illness’. But another voice had whispered a memory to me and I substituted ‘illness’ for ‘gift’. Was that what she was trying to tell me? Is this what Joe meant? The ability to see other layers, to pass through time?
It wasn’t possible was it? Time was set. It was a fixed thing. You couldn’t look back and you couldn’t look forwards. You could only be in the present. Well, that was certainly the conventional consensus. But then, Mum had always said time was a concept, not a rule, no more reliable than the stories we told.
Was it all coming together? Were there clues in everything she told me?
I sighed and wished I’d listened more carefully to everything she’d said. Soon my concentration was required at the driving wheel: a splatter of rain descended over the motorway.
My plan was to drive to Ashbolten, find Treetops. If it was a business I’d be able to talk to the staff immediately. If it was a domestic dwelling then I’d knock on the door, and probably be required to arrange an appointment for the following day. That would mean returning to the town centre, to investigate the place, have a bit of a gander. Maybe a leisurely coffee. Locate a pub or a restaurant to have dinner in. An early evening in the hotel would allow me to not only sleep in peace, but give me some time alone to try and sort my head out.
As it turned out, Ashbolten was a sleepy village nestled in a valley, surrounded on the south side by woods and copses and to the west by several large farms. I drove in from the north, climbing over the hump of a hill romantically called Tinkers Thrift, and then down into woodland.
As I came off the main road the route became twisting and arduous. I stopped thinking about anything else, killed the radio and concentrated on the bends and blind corners.
Coming through a forest-like part of the road, complete with overhanging branches and brambles reaching several feet high, Ashbolten opened up before me. It was damp and a white mist was curling up from the village, mingling, on its way skywards, with a couple of smoking chimneys. Approaching the cluster of buildings I could see that the place was chocolate-box pretty, verging on sickly; traditional thatched cottages edged round a tiny semi-circular village green, then meandered off into what was called the High Road but was more of a narrow close, ending in a t-junction with the Hen and Chickens pub. No way was there going to be a hotel here.
It was gone three-thirty and the sky was sullen. Daylight was fading, which meant I would have to review my plans significantly. If I had to return to the motorway and come off at the larger town I had passed earlier in order to secure accommodation I’d be put back a good couple of hours. I’d have to find Treetops as well. That might take me into the evening. People, even generous urbanites, resented uninvited guests turning up late and unannounced. At that time of evening it was either dinnertime or soap opera hour. Intrusions upon that ‘quality’ period, I had found in my early career, were greeted with barely restrained hostility.
Country folk, I imagined, might have a more extreme reaction. After all, they had shotguns and things didn’t they?
The pub would be the best place to start, provided it was open. So many of them were shutting up shop these days. Unless they had a thriving lunchtime service most closed during the day and opened in the evening with