her briefs on the bed.
She stared at them blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t understand?’ Nick threw her dress and bra down as well. ‘How strange. I should have thought it was obvious. It is no doubt part of that precious professional relationship Sam is so keen to preserve. He takes off your clothes perhaps to take your pulse, then hides them under the pillow for tidiness’ sake! Or was it because I arrived unexpectedly? Not that it’s any of my business, of course.’
‘No, it isn’t any of your business!’ Jo flared angrily. She picked up her dress and shook out the creases. She felt suddenly very sick. ‘I must have left them there earlier. I don’t know … perhaps last night. I felt so strange last night. I was drinking, and I took the last of the pills –’
‘Jo, for God’s sake!’
‘There is nothing between Sam and me, Nick. Nothing. If it’s any of your business.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘I’m not so sure this boat thing is such a good idea after all!’
‘We’re going, Jo.’ Nick picked up her bag. ‘Forget Sam for now. We’ll talk about him later. Get a jacket. It might be cold on the water.’
She hesitated. ‘Nick, this is stupid. We can’t do it. To go away together would be crazy.’
‘Then it’s a kind of craziness we both need.’ His tone was becoming threatening. ‘I’m prepared to carry you to that car, Jo.’
She was too tired to argue any more. She swallowed the automatic flareup of rebellion and followed him downstairs, thankful only when the front door was closed without her hearing again the echoing wail of baby William’s hungry cries.
Two and a half hours later, Jo clutched Nick’s arm. ‘Nick stop! Go back!’
The Porsche screamed to a standstill on the dusty road. ‘For God’s sake, what’s wrong?’
‘That signpost! Did you see it?’
‘Jo, you could have caused an accident. Christ! What is wrong with you? What signpost?’
Turning in his seat he reversed up the empty road, past the narrow turning to which Jo had pointed.
‘There.’ She was pale and excited. ‘Look. It points to Bramber!’
‘So?’ Nick glanced in the rear-view mirror and waved a lorry past, then he pulled the car into the grass verge. ‘What’s so special about Bramber, suddenly?’
‘It was William’s home. It was where I went after I was married!’
Nick’s hand tightened on the wheel. ‘After Matilda was married, I suppose you mean?’
‘That’s what I said. Oh Nick, can we go there? Please?’
A car slowed behind them, hooted and overtook, the driver gesturing rudely as he disappeared around the curve of the road.
‘Jo, we’ve come to forget all that.’
‘Oh please, Nick. I’ll never rest until I’ve been there now. Just for a few minutes. It’s research for the article amongst other things. I can see how much it’s changed. Nick, don’t you see? I’ll be able to compare. It might prove that everything has been in my imagination –’ Sadness showed in her eyes suddenly. ‘If I recognise nothing at all, at least we’ll know then. The Downs can’t have changed all that much, or the river. Please, Nick?’
With a sigh Nick engaged gear. He turned up the narrow road, glancing at the countryside round them. ‘We’ve been round here half a hundred times before, Jo. Every time we’ve left the boat at Shoreham we’ve explored the Downs to find pubs and restaurants –’
‘But we’ve never turned off here.’ She was peering through the windscreen, her hand on the dash. ‘I don’t recognise anything, Nick. Not the countryside, the Downs are so naked – so small.’ He could hear the disappointment in her voice.
‘They are the same as they were the last time you and I came down to the boat,’ he said gently. ‘Look –’ He slowed the car. ‘It says “To the Castle”. Shall I turn up there?’
She nodded. Her mouth had gone dry.
Nick swung the car up the steep lane between two small modern flint turrets and into a muddy car park. Above them rose a wooded hill with a squat little church nestling into its side. Jo pushed the car door open and stood up, her eyes fixed on the church. Nick hadn’t moved. He was leaning across, watching her.
She looked down at him unhappily. ‘Nick, I have to do this alone. Do you mind?’
‘Are you sure?’
She nodded.
‘And you’ll be all right?’
She looked round. ‘I’ll be all right. Go and find one of those pubs you were talking about. Come back in an hour.’ She pushed the door shut.
Nick watched her walk towards the church. Only when she had disappeared inside did he turn the car and drive back down the lane.
Jo opened the door into the nave and stared round. The church was completely empty. She stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind her, her eyes on the huge arch of pale stone which spanned the roof before the altar. In her hand was a copy of the little tenpenny guide. This was William’s chapel – and before him the chapel of his father, and his grandfather. It had been dedicated, the guide book said, in the year 1073.
Slowly she walked towards the altar. If it were anywhere, his ghost would be here, in the very walls where he had knelt and prayed. She felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle as she stood staring up at the simple wooden cross with the pale ochre curtain behind it. No lighted candles, no incense. The bell was silent. But there was a sense of prayer. A presence.
‘I should be praying for their souls,’ she thought. ‘Their souls – our souls – which are not at rest.’ With a shiver of something like defiance she made the sign of the cross and knelt before the altar, but the prayers would not come. The faith and burning trust which Matilda had felt before the twelfth-century statue of the Virgin were not for the twentieth-century Jo Clifford, kneeling in her shirt and jeans on the cold soap-scented flagstones. She felt nothing.
She was suddenly conscious of how quiet the church was, and how empty. Raising her eyes to the three small, arched windows above the altar she felt very cold. The air around her had become oppressive; the silence so intense she could hear it beating inside her head. Overwhelmed with panic, she scrambled to her feet and fled down the aisle, letting herself out of the door to stand in the vestibule, breathing deeply. Two women walked in past her and she felt them staring at her. They too bought a copy of the little guide, then they disappeared inside the church.
She stood in the graveyard shivering, feeling the warmth of the evening sun sinking through her shirt and into her bones. The air was glorious. It smelled of honeysuckle and woodsmoke from a bonfire below the churchyard, and of wild thyme from the Downs which ringed Bramber, bare and dusty beneath the hot evening sky. Immediately below her around the foot of the hill clustered the uneven, ancient roofs of the village of Bramber. Above, like a reproving finger, stood a huge pillar of masonry – part of the now ruined castle.
Taking a deep breath, Jo left the churchyard and began to walk up the shallow steps cut in the side of the castle hill, across the overgrown depths of the defensive ditch and on towards the ruins.
The top of the hill was a broad flat area of mown grass in the centre of which rose another steep-sided hillock, the motte on which the first William de Braose’s wooden keep had been raised in the days of the Conqueror. It was shrouded now by trees, guarded by ancient yews. Very little of the castle remained. A few areas of crumbling wall around the perimeter of the hill where the only invaders were ash and sycamore, hung with the greenish, scented flowers of wild clematis. Only the one tall finger of wall remained rearing into the sky to remind the visitor of the castle’s former glory.
Jo