continual planning applications. But each approach ended the same way. The Village Committee pointed out that the building was inaccessible behind other houses, and its residential use would necessitate the construction of a new road in Weldisham, which was bound to cause disruption to existing home owners. The barn was also too close to other dwellings; its use as a residential property could only cause a nuisance. So, despite the repeated efforts of the Estate and a sequence of developers who recognized its huge financial potential, the Village Committee stood firm. The planners, hyper-sensitive about press criticism of other blunders and eyesores in West Sussex, paid heed to their arguments and the barn continued its quiet decay.
Had it had a more visible profile in Weldisham, local people might have felt differently, but the barn had been built in a dip behind a row of houses and visitors to the perfect Downland village were completely unaware of its dilapidated existence.
And of the two seriously big properties, one remained in private ownership, while the other had been titivated into a ‘country house hotel’.
Carole Seddon didn’t know Weldisham well. She had been to the Hare and Hounds once, when her son, Stephen, had made one of his rare visits to the South Coast. The pub hadn’t made much impression. It was too like every other idiosyncratic country hostelry whose authenticity and individuality had been maintained by a pub chain.
But she had no friends in Weldisham and that afternoon, after parking the Renault, she’d set off very firmly in the opposite direction from the village. There was a track rippling upwards over the swell of the Downs. On summer weekends it would be dotted with family groups and serious walkers with waterproofed rectangles of map hanging about their necks. On a damp Friday afternoon in late February there was no one but Carole on the track.
With the village behind her, she could see no sign of human habitation ahead. Man had been there, fencing up the curves of the Downs into huge rectangular fields, but man did not live there. The horizon seemed infinite, as though the undulations rolled into each other for ever. Carole felt that she could walk for days before she saw another human being.
The prospect did not worry her. Carole Seddon had trained herself to be on her own, certainly after the collapse of her marriage and, according to the uncharitable view of her former husband, David, for a long time before that. Loneliness, like dependence on other people, was a luxury she did not allow herself.
But she couldn’t deny that she was missing her next-door neighbour. Jude had been away for nearly two weeks, having departed suddenly with characteristic lack of specificity as to where she was going, who she was going with or what she would be doing there. Only in Jude’s absence did Carole realize how much she had come to rely on their occasional contact, the spontaneous knocks on her door inviting her to share a bottle of wine. Though their views differed on many subjects – indeed, on most subjects – it was comforting to have someone to talk to.
Still, Jude was away from Fethering for an undefined length of time. No point in brooding about it. Carole had been brought up with the philosophy that one just got on with things. She pulled her knitted hat down over short steel-grey hair. Through rimless glasses her pale blue eyes looked determinedly at the track ahead of her. She was a thin woman, as spare in outline as a piece of cutlery, and, in her early fifties, the age when women can start to become invisible. But for the fact that she was the only person on the Downs that afternoon, no one would have given her a second glance. And that was the way Carole Seddon liked it, and the way she wanted things to stay.
The weather was sullen and threatening, truculent clouds ready to unburden themselves of more rain. Their efforts over the last week had left the ground heavy and clinging. On the higher parts of the track, strips of exposed chalk offered firmness underfoot, but in the wheel-troughs of its hollows coffee-coloured water lurked between banks of slimy mud. The sensible walking shoes Carole had bought when she took early retirement to West Sussex were quickly covered, and small commas of beige mud spattered up her Marks & Spencer’s trousers and even to the hem of her precious Burberry. She realized – too late – that, though the raincoat was eminently sensible for walking on the beach, it wasn’t suitable for the Downs. Never mind, she’d just have to take it to the dry-cleaner’s.
She walked determinedly on. Like housework in the morning and the Times crossword after lunch, a walk was a necessary division in Carole Seddon’s day. Without such disciplines and rituals, the time stretched ahead of her, unbounded and threatening. Gulliver’s injury had broken the continuity of early-morning walks on the beach; a substitute needed to be found. Not just a walk, but a walk with a goal. And the goal Carole had prescribed for herself that afternoon was a high point of the Downs from which she could look down to the sea. Once that had been achieved, she could return to her car and drive back to Fethering, to Gulliver’s enthusiastic but melancholy welcome.
The Downs, lacking the steep gradients of mountain ranges, still performed the same kind of trickery, not peaks hiding higher peaks, but mounds hiding higher mounds. Carole, after some half-hour’s walk, had reached what she thought to be a summit, from which she would be able to look down over the flat coastal plain, with its shining threads of glasshouses, to the sulky gleam of the English Channel.
But when she got there, another level shut off her sea view. In front of her, the track rolled downwards to a declivity in which trees clustered like hair in a body crevice. At the bottom stood an old flint-faced tiled barn, structurally sound but with an air of disuse. One of its doors was gone, the other hung dislocated from a single hinge. Outside an old cart lay shipwrecked in waves of grass.
Past the barn the track climbed up again to the top of the new level, from which the sea might perhaps be visible. Or from which only another prehistoric hump of Downs might be revealed.
Carole decided she’d walked enough. Forget the sea. She could see it from Fethering, if she was that desperate. When she got back to the car, she’d have been out an hour. That was quite long enough. Anything that needed to be proved would by then have been proved. She could get back to the comfort of her central heating.
Even as she made the decision and turned on her muddy heel, it began to rain. Not a rain of individual drops, but a deluge as if, in a fit of pique, some god had upturned a celestial tin bath.
Within seconds water was dripping off her woollen hat, insidiously finding a route inside the collar of her Burberry to trickle down her neck. It cascaded off the bottom of the coat, quickly seeping through the thick fabric of her trousers.
She was in the middle of the Downs, half an hour from the car. The barn offered the only possible shelter in the bleak winter landscape. She ran for it.
The inside of the building was fairly empty, though tidemarks of discoloration up the high walls bore witness to the crops that had once been housed there. And, though the roof looked in need of maintenance, it was surprisingly watertight. Here and there the shingles had slipped and water splashed down vertically into hollows made by previous rain. These irregular spatterings provided a rough melody to ride above the insistent drumming on the roof.
The thought struck Carole that she had put herself into a West Sussex minority. She was one of the few who’d actually been inside a barn, as opposed to the many who’d been inside barn conversions. The idea amused her.
She waited ten minutes before looking for somewhere to sit. But the deluge showed no signs of abating. The relentlessly sheeting water had made the day dark before its time. She checked her watch. Only quarter past three. She could give the rain half an hour to stop and still in theory get back to the Renault in daylight. Assuming of course that daylight ever returned.
So Carole sat on the pile of planks. And the pile collapsed. And the blue fertilizer bags were revealed.
Once
