was so worried, Sadie. Though I could tell there was something she wasn’t telling me.’
I nearly cried at the mention of her and the absurdity of it all. ‘You’re in hospital and Mum’s passed over. I don’t think it was me you both had to worry about.’
‘But she’s come to you. Rebecca.’
‘Yes,’ I said, realising that I had let my scepticism go. That sitting here in the hospital, talking to a man who had just been sectioned, I was finally accepting that it wasn’t madness or grief that I had experienced but an actual external manifestation.
‘Mum said, just before, you know, she passed, to expect a gift. She said I should speak to you. Is this …’ I stumbled over the words, unwilling to articulate what was becoming a solid conviction. ‘Is this it?’
‘Didn’t she tell you what it was?’ Dan asked simply.
‘No.’
‘Have you asked her?’
I nearly laughed. ‘No. Of course not. I can’t now.’
‘You’ll see. That’s it.’ He said it quickly – we both heard footsteps coming down the corridor. ‘Like us,’ he said.
The atmosphere was changing: the unseen mist receding into the corners of the room: the clock returning to its regular tick tock. Time was running out.
‘Look,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve got to get off. To Manningtree. And Mistley. I need to scout out the place for the book. But I need to contact Rebecca. I want her to know that I’m going to get her a pardon. I’ve got some people at the magazine starting a campaign. Do you know how I can call her up, Dan?’
Dan’s gaze darted to the door. ‘I don’t think it’s up to you.’
‘I will stop back here after Manningtree. And see how you are, okay?
He nodded quickly. ‘Okay.’
Then as the door finally opened wide the weird magic in the air was sucked out and I found myself back over the other side, looking at Dan. His jaw slacked, the neck muscles had lost their tension. He was looking down, in a lolling sort of way, at his lap.
‘How is he?’ said the nurse.
‘Really good,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you, mate?’
The nurse helped Dan to his feet. He gave me a lopsided grin, which spilled a thread of saliva onto his chin. He didn’t wipe it. ‘Bye Sadie,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Be good.’ It came out in a kind of weird E.T. voice. He heard it and stuck out his finger like the little alien.
I frowned. Had he relapsed or was he playing along?
‘Bye bye Dan.’
‘Be good,’ he repeated and stared at his finger.
I dug my own fingernails into my hands and told myself not to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Away from the buzz of Basildon, the fake tan and stilettos, under the grass and soil, the twisting roots, loam, chalk and clay, beneath the minerals transported from the north by the majestic glaciers that thawed eons ago, the ancient soul of Essex was waiting for me.
Mistley, allegedly ‘the pasture of the Mistletoe’, was situated on the south bank of the River Stour, with views over the mud flats and creeks to Suffolk and the village of Brantham.
The main road wound round the riverside and past the front window of my hotel room. If I twisted my neck I could glimpse a couple of cranes on the quay by the old malt house. Numbers of elegant white swans glided along the Stour. They didn’t make a sound and lent a mute eeriness to the atmosphere.
Apart from the occasional car it was very quiet.
Directly outside the Inn was a fountain-like structure, described as the ‘Swan Basin’, which looked like a giant
ornamental flower bowl with a painted statue of a swan in the middle. The guidebooks referenced it as the work of eighteenth-century neoclassical architect Robert Adam and described it variously as ‘elegant’ and ‘picturesque’. But it reminded me of something you might find in a fairground. You can take the girl out of Southend …
I could never work out why Essex got the flack that it did. The county wasn’t flat and uninteresting. It was simply full of sky, usually of the pale blue and white kind. Today it was bruised and wounded-looking, hanging low over the horizon.
It matched my mood.
I was sitting in my room in the Thorn Inn, on the site where Hopkins had his quarters. I could feel a pregnant tension in the air; if I reach back to that afternoon, it was like I knew something was going to happen.
I imagined the pub to be a historic Tudor dwelling, but