The Perfect Sinner. Will Davenport

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СКАЧАТЬ her grandmother’s cottage, and it had served the younger Beth as an escape route many times before. There was nobody around in the lane, but she imagined eyes inside every window, looking at her, matching her to the stories in their morning papers, and it was a relief to leave the houses behind.

      But Slapton wouldn’t leave her behind. It was coming back at her from the closed cupboards of memory, the stony surface of the path, the gate she used to sit on when she had somehow got annoyed with both parent and grandparent at once, and the fence where the dog had cornered her. In the first field, she saw the bushes where she used to make her camp and where, on her tenth birthday, she had buried a tin filled with the toys she decided she had outgrown, vowing to herself that she would never dig them up again.

      The path led downhill between two more fields, then up into trees and by the stile she took the old branch to the right that led to Quarry Cottage. This was the spot, she had always felt, where you started to feel Eliza’s presence spreading out through the countryside around her house. She was going to take the familiar short cut straight through the deserted quarry, but something had changed. It was no longer deserted. New gates closed the gap between the trees. The roofs of the old sheds beyond had been repaired, the brambles had gone and a truck was parked on fresh gravel where the big puddle always used to be.

      Eliza’s path ran around the far side of the quarry between the trees and Beth intended to take it but, out of mild curiosity and more from an unexpressed wish to delay her arrival at the old woman’s house, she walked towards the new gate, opened it an inch or two and looked in, straight up into the face of the man who had been walking quietly towards it from the other side. He wore overalls and he was pulling off a pair of heavy leather gloves. His face was painted with matt grey dust which accentuated the sharp planes of his cheeks. He was smiling at some private joke and his eyes shone. What was even more surprising was that he stopped, looked at her calmly and said ‘Hello Beth, I heard you were back,’ and for a moment, she had no idea who he was.

      ‘Lewis?’ she said, after a giveaway pause. ‘Is it you?’ For just one absurd moment, she had taken him for Lewis’s older brother, but Lewis didn’t have an older brother. Seven years had filled him out and toughened him. She knew it was seven years because the last time she had seen him, they were each home from university and she had given him the cold shoulder. Then they’d both moved away.

      ‘You went off somewhere,’ she said. ‘Scotland?’

      ‘Ireland. I came back. What about you?’

      ‘I…seem to be back too. Just for a day or two.’ She looked in through the gate. ‘What’s going on here?’

      ‘Hasn’t Eliza told you? I reopened the old place.’

      ‘As a quarry? I thought it died on its feet years ago.’

      ‘Come in and see,’ he suggested, ‘if you’re not in too much of a rush.’

      ‘I ought to go on.’

      ‘It’ll only take a minute. I can’t be too long myself. I’ve got to be in Dartmouth in half an hour. It would be handy because I’ve got a bag of Eliza’s shopping in the shed. You could save me time by taking it with you. That’s if you don’t mind?’

      Seven years on, and they were talking about Eliza’s shopping. She didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

      Inside, the tall face of the quarry loomed out of the trees to their left. Rows of rough-cut stone slabs were laid out on the ground. He took her to the larger of the two sheds.

      ‘You remember, this whole place was my granddad’s?’ he said as he unlocked the door. ‘He never worked the stone, not after the war anyway. When he died he left it to me, so I decided I’d have a go.’

      ‘By yourself?’

      ‘Me and Rob. He’s here part-time.’

      ‘Who’s Rob?’

      ‘You must remember Rob. Robin Watson? He was in primary with us. He went to the comprehensive.’

      For a moment Beth rejected the very idea that she might remember someone from junior school, that even more connections might be waiting in this place, ready to trap her and wind her back in, but all the same she had a vague memory of a large, shambling boy. The comprehensive? She and Lewis had both gone on to the grammar school, the only ones from Slap ton who did. Seven years of that long bus ride together, twice every day.

      ‘You make a living out of this?’ she asked, looking around.

      ‘You mean is it just a hobby? No, it’s a job.’

      She bit back her words. She wanted to say, you were bright, you could have done anything. Why are you wearing dirty overalls with stone dust in your hair? Why are you wasting time in Slapton? You got away, why did you come back?

      His eyes changed as if he remembered her capacity for scorn. ‘It’s a little gem, this place.’ He checked his watch, ‘Do you know anything about geology?’ he asked.

      She shook her head.

      ‘Have you ever been to Purbeck?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘On the Dorset coast? Maybe, oh I don’t know, sixty miles east of here. The Isle of Purbeck? It’s not really an island. They just call it that. It’s this side of Weymouth.’

      ‘I haven’t been there, no.’ He talked as if he could persuade her she had.

      ‘Well, it was always famous for Purbeck marble. There’s not much left to be had now. Come in and have a quick look, I’ll show you.’

      On a bench inside was a carved and fluted column in a stone so dark green it was almost black. It glistened.

      ‘It’s not really marble,’ he said, running one hand over it. ‘That’s just what they call it. It’s a sandstone, you see, but it’s packed full of tiny, hard shells and when you cut it clean you can get a real shine on it. Beautiful, isn’t it? They always used it for the fine work in churches and places like that.’ His voice had an unexpected reverence in it.

      Despite herself, the stone drew her attention and she traced the path of his fingers with her own. ‘So you get it from Purbeck and you carve it here?’

      ‘Oh no, no. This came from here. That’s the whole point. This is a geological oddity, you see, our very own little outcrop of the marble on the south-west, north-east line. The only place you find it west of Purbeck itself.’

      ‘So people still want it?’

      ‘Oh yes.’

      ‘What’s this bit for?’

      ‘Restoration work for a church in Winchester.’

      ‘And they come all the way here for it?’

      ‘Beth, this is where they came originally when they were building that same church. The marble looks just a little bit different in every seam, you see, the colour, the shade. You want to match it, you got to come back to the same place.’ He had always had enthusiasm and she could remember how much that had annoyed her when enthusiasm in any form was the last thing she admired. He bent down and pulled out a section of a column from the floor СКАЧАТЬ