The Girl in the Mirror. Cathy Glass

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СКАЧАТЬ being alone. She wasn’t used to having company and making conversation for large parts of the day. Since she’d given up work she’d had solitude each day during the working week to concentrate on her painting. She’d only seen Adam in the evenings. In this at least I’ve been disciplined, she thought cynically, although she had to admit her time alone had produced very little: a few half-baked ideas, the odd sketch, but no painting. If I could just finish one painting, she thought, I’m sure it would restore my confidence and make a difference – to everything.

      She passed the driveway which led to her aunt’s closest neighbour, although the bungalow, standing in its own substantial grounds, was so far away from Evelyn’s house it hardly constituted a ‘neighbour’. Indeed, all the properties she passed had their own land and were very secluded; ‘exclusive’ was the word an estate agent would have used, she thought. And although the houses were slightly familiar from when she’d passed them in the car the day before, she had no other memory of the road despite Sarah and her often walking into the village.

      Mandy felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and quickly took it out.

      ‘Miss you,’ Adam said, as soon as she answered. ‘When are you coming home?’

      ‘Miss you too,’ she said, appreciating the sound of his voice. ‘Adam, I’ve said I’d stay and help. My aunt and uncle are exhausted.’ And grateful for the chance to off-load she told him of the dreadful pain Grandpa had been in between the shots of morphine, and the night she’d spent in the study-cum-sick room. She felt herself choking up as she described how John and she had tried to soothe away the pain. ‘He’s very poorly,’ she finished, not wanting to cry on the phone. She was about to tell him of the strange thoughts and flashbacks she’d been having since arriving at her aunt’s, but she realized how ridiculous it would sound and instead told him of the breakfast laid on the sideboard in silver tureens. Her phone began to bleep, signalling the battery was about to run out. ‘Sod it!’ she said, annoyed. ’I’ll have to phone you back later from the house.’ Quickly winding up and swapping ‘Miss you’s, she said goodbye. Before the battery went completely she texted her father, asking him to bring her phone charger, which she’d left plugged in beside her bed. Unaware she wouldn’t be returning home that evening, she hadn’t brought it with her. She now wondered how many other things she’d forgotten to ask her father to collect from her bedsit and which she would find she needed. Epilator, she thought. Never mind, I’ll buy a razor from the village shop.

      The narrow tarmac path Mandy now trod looked like many other country paths and was no more familiar. But the brilliant green of the early spring shoots, the brown earth, blue sky and picture-postcard rural tranquillity suddenly caught her artistic eye. She knew she should try and remember it, as she used to, to paint later. Whenever she’d been out, if she came across a scene that appealed she used to be able to capture it in her mind’s eye – freeze-frame it – and then transfer it to canvas when she got home. But in the last seven months, since she’d been unable to paint, the magic of the scene always faded and lost its intensity, so that all she managed were some drawings in her sketch pad. Perhaps this will be different, she thought. Try to be positive. She looked around at the beauty of the countryside and willed herself to remember what she saw.

      A house appeared through the trees to her left and then the path broke for a concealed and overgrown driveway. Mandy was about to cross the drive and then jumped back as a car suddenly appeared. As it drew level the driver nodded and she felt a sudden surge of familiarity. Hadn’t a car pulled out of one of these driveways when Sarah and she had been about to cross on one of their walks into the village? She thought it had. A Land-Rover with two large cream dogs in the back? She was sure now, for she remembered they’d been so busy chatting they hadn’t seen the Land-Rover until the last second, and had had to jump back on to the path to avoid being knocked down. Perhaps it was the shock of it nearly happening again that had triggered this memory, like the shock of suddenly bumping into John when she’d first arrived had reminded her of her schoolgirl crush. She wondered if the man in the muddy Land-Rover who’d told them off for not looking where they were going still lived in the house along here. But which one? She had no idea. She also wondered why her recollections were so piecemeal and random, and why she had no control over them. It was not only strange but disturbing. Better not to dwell on it. She concentrated on the path ahead and checked the driveways for cars.

      Coming to a halt at the end of the lane Mandy waited to cross the road. Whereas she’d only seen a couple of cars on the lane, now the cars sped by at regular intervals in intermittent rushes of air that fanned her face and blew back her hair. She spotted a gap in the traffic and crossed the road, then began towards the village. She passed a speed camera box and further up a banner announcing ‘Bypass Now’. To her right stood the early-nineteenth-century stone church with half a dozen headstones in a small, neatly tended graveyard at the front. A massive oak tree rose on the other side of the church, its branches overhanging the pavement. Beside the church was a duck pond and next to that the village pub with its original signboard of a painting of a red lion suspended from the post outside. The road gently curved away and then rose up and out of the village, finally meeting the blue horizon in the distance. Mandy focused on the village scene ahead, so unlike London, but which did seem vaguely familiar. She made her way along the narrow pavement, keeping close to the cottage walls and well away from the traffic that flashed by.

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