Page 31 of Autumn at the Willow River Guesthouse
‘Well, good luck with that,’ Uncle Gus said. ‘She’s been in there for years and the only time I can remember her coming out was when we had a power cut one night and the phone line went down. And even then, it was only to complain about the lack of hot water.’
‘And she waited until it was dark before she came,’ Aunt Gert said. ‘Gave me a terrible fright to find her knocking on the restaurant window. She was dressed all in black and even had a woolly hat pulled down to her eyes. I thought it was a serial killer.’
‘I’ll see if I can encourage her to wear brighter clothes,’ Lily said.
The next morning, however, when she arrived at the annexe with Victoria’s breakfast hamper, she found a note pinned to the outside of the door:
Creation in Progress
DO NOT Disturb
(Leave the hamper, knock once,
Then come back at ten o’clock)
Lily did as she was asked, putting the hamper down, knocking loudly once, then retreating to the end of the corridor, where she hid at the top of the stairs, peering around to see what happened.
After a few seconds, the door cracked open, and a walking cane poked out, its hooked end catching under the hamper’s handle and dragging in inside. The door closed with a soft thump.
It was a much nicer day, so instead of waiting downstairs, Lily went outside and cycled along the cycle path for a couple of miles until she reached the first of three tunnels on the way to Exeter. The tunnel was beside a wider section of the river where Lily remembered going to swim with her friends in the summer, although in those days they’d had to ride along the main road because the old railway line was still a mess of brambles and hawthorn bushes. It was too cold to swim now in mid-September, but it was pleasant enough for a picnic and a little bird-watching or fishing. She remembered fondly the time a group of friends and her had decided to camp here one night, and she’d had hopes of maybe sharing a campfire kiss with her crush at the time, Mark Birt from the year above, only for Tim Johnson and Jimmy Donbury to start telling ghost stories and daring the girls to run through the tunnel in the dark. Mary had started crying, and in the end Lily had taken her to a phone box up on the main road where she had called Mary’s parents to come and pick her up. By the time Lily had got back, Mark had got cozy with a girl from the Lower Sixth Form and that was the end of that.
She sat down on a bench overlooking the river and let her thoughts drift. She felt happy in a way she hadn’t in some time, but a feeling of impermanence persisted, as though at some point soon she would have to up sticks again and move on. She had a degree, training, experience in the financial sector, connections. A life as a waitress and cleaner wasn’t what she had set out for. But it was nice, peaceful, and sometimes, she wondered, maybe that was enough. Uncle Gus and Aunt Gert certainly seemed happy, whereas all she remembered from her years in London was the stress of getting from one meeting to another, making sure she was brushed up for every client, having to mull over every word. And that was before the traffic jams, and the sirens, and the guy spilling coffee on her in the street, and the builders, and the tube delays and the—
Lily slapped a hand down on the damp wood of the bench, feeling the soft cushion of lichen growing over parts of its surface, the cracks where rain had got through the varnish, the chips where bits were starting to flake off.
‘Relax,’ she said aloud. ‘Take it easy.’
A couple of rainbow trout swam languidly through the water, the sun glinting off their backs. Lily thought about how peaceful it must be to be a fish, your only real task to sift through some silt in search of a bit of food for the day, then noticed a fisherman walking through the field on the other side of the river, a rod over his shoulder and a box of tackle in his hand, and figured that fish had their problems too.
Giving the fisherman a quick wave and a good morning, she headed off back to the annexe, secretly hoping he didn’t catch anything.
The hamper was where she had been told to collect it, the note still on the door. Lily briefly considered knocking, then thought better of it. However, the hamper’s lid wasn’t closed straight, so Lily lifted the edge to readjust the wicker hooks at the sides, and saw another slip of paper inside.
What’s the SECRET…?
The capitalisation and ellipsis suggested a sense of urgency. Lily looked at it for a moment, noticing a smudge on one corner that could have been ink, then put it in her pocket, picked up the hamper, and headed back to the guesthouse.
A couple of guests had just arrived that morning, so Lily helped her uncle and aunt get them organised, showing them the room, the common areas, explaining meal times, and answering a few questions that they had. After the new arrivals had headed out for the day, and Uncle Gus and Aunt Gert had settled down in the restaurant with a chess board between them, Lily hijacked the reception computer for a little research.
First, however, she couldn’t resist checking the social media she had been staunchly avoiding.
As before, there was even less of note, and almost nothing of any great importance. It felt as though her abstinence from posting inane pictures or pointless status updates had set her adrift, and she was slowly being forgotten. She glanced over her shoulder, through a little window in the reception door which looked into the restaurant, and saw Uncle Gus, gripping a handful of his hair like a pauper’s bunch of flowers, shaking his head while Aunt Gert chuckled.
The guesthouse had a website through which you could make reservations, as well as listings on most of the major booking websites, but otherwise her aunt and uncle had no social media presence at all. And they looked carefree, happy. The stress and trauma of the online world was something of which they were entirely unaware.
Wanting to switch off, but unable to resist, Lily brought up Steve’s profile. Since his last picture, there was only one new update: a brief status that simply said: OMG, I can’t believe it, followed by a crying face emoji. A couple of dozen people had written comments to the tune of oh no, what’s happened?, but Steve was yet to reply. Lily wondered if he’d been dumped by his new tramp, or whether something far less dramatic had happened—such as a loss of car keys, or a coffee spillage on one of the messes he called art—and he was hamming it up for the cameras. Lily thought about making a comment to that effect, then realised with a sudden sense of freedom, that she didn’t care.
Instead, she went back to her primary intention, which was to research a little more on Victoria Borton. Part of her thought it might be fun to suggest a secret that had actually come from Victoria’s own past. However, writers weren’t the gossip factories that most TV celebrities and movie stars were, and there was nothing of any great interest besides a couple of short “What happened to …” blog posts and an article from two years ago claiming a follow up to The Trainspotter’s Guide to Romance was in the works, simply titled The Trainspotter’s Guide to Messy Breakups. However, noticing the date—April 1st—seemed to suggest that the comments underneath, claiming it was a hoax, were most likely correct.
It looked like rather than building a wave of expectation among fans a la Harper Lee or George RR Martin—a few stalker-types aside—Victoria was swiftly being forgotten by the wider reading community. Eight years was a long time even for a writer.
After a brief search for “cool secrets for writers”, which uncovered such gems as “the main character has a box under his/her bed which contains the heart of his missing ex-lover, wrapped in a pink ribbon”, and “when he/she shows up at the ranch they bought online, they find it comes with a zoo … and the locks on the cages are wearing thin!”, she figured she might as well have a quick search for Victoria’s son before she decided to pull the plug on her social media forever.
Unsurprisingly, Michael Borton was a pretty common name, returning almost fifty search results. Initially overawed and on the verge of giving up, however, closer inspection of profile pictures allowed her to narrow it down to less than a dozen who either fit by rough age, or had nothing visible to rule them out.
Briefly she typed a note:
Hello! You don’t know me—or you’ve almost certainly forgotten me, because it’s possible we did in fact meet as children—my name is Lily Markham, and I work at Willow River Guesthouse in Willow River, Devon. I’m trying to find the son of the writer, Victoria Borton. If you’re him, please reply. Thanks! Lily.
