The House on the Cliff, page 1
THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF
VICTORIA SCOTT
For Raphie and Ella: Remembering many wonderful holidays together in beautiful Cornwall, and my shrieks when you persuaded me to join you in the sea.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part II
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part III
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Thank you!
More from Victoria Scott
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Victoria Scott
Letters From the Past
About Boldwood Books
PROLOGUE
JOHN
21 July 1966
It’s several hours after lights out when John’s bare feet meet the cold lino beneath his bed. He pulls on his wool dressing gown and a pair of darned socks and tiptoes past the blanket-ensnared forms of the three other boys who share his dorm. They might have surrendered to sleep, he thinks, but he hasn’t. His guilt won’t let him.
It’s almost midnight. The moon is shining brightly through the narrow room’s towering windows, which have no curtains to ward off the light or the dark. The glass panelled door of their dormitory, scarred at its wooden edges with scrapes worthy of a wild animal, creaks in protest as he pulls it open inch by inch. He turns around to check for movement in the beds, because he doesn’t want anyone to know where he’s going. None of them have stirred. He’d like to say they’re sleeping the sleep of the righteous, but that, he thinks, would be entirely incorrect.
Seconds later, John is standing in the hallway outside. It’s almost pitch black, save for the light of a solitary, bare bulb hanging down from the ceiling at one end of the corridor, and moonlight filtering through a small sash window at the other. He’s relieved, but not surprised, to find it quiet. At this time of night the monks will all be in their cells, including Father Crispin, their headmaster; the Amadeus house matron, Mrs Turner-Smith, will be in her room on the floor below; and even though he’s heard that their housemaster Mr Lee regularly drinks whisky until the BBC closes down for the night, he should be safely locked away in his private quarters, not roaming the halls looking for sleepwalkers and errant boys.
John walks down the corridor towards the middle of the wing, where there’s a winding staircase which spans the whole height of the creaking Victorian building, from its basement full of storerooms to the top floor. It once provided rooms for servants but now houses poky single rooms for sixth-formers instead. He walks down the stairs and pauses for a moment in front of a huge window, which is left open at least an inch all year round. The staff at Hallows Abbey seem to believe there is something magical about fresh air, even if it’s both damp and freezing, as it is for most of the winter. Tonight, however, it’s a warm breeze that’s blowing through the gap at the bottom of the window, and John stops to inhale the combined scent of salt, seaweed and algae. There are many things he dislikes about Hallows, but its location, perched on the cliffs on Cornwall’s windswept northern coast, is definitely not one of them. The sea might lash both the school and its inhabitants, but to him, it feels like home.
He continues his journey downwards, stopping at the ground floor, which is well lit, with rows of bulbs blazing. From here, he knows he has the riskiest part of his journey to contend with. To get to where he needs to be, he has to walk past the door to the housemaster’s rooms. If he is indeed up drinking late, there’s a chance he might hear him. John holds his breath as he passes the door. He’s glad he decided to do this journey only in socks.
Once this hurdle is overcome, however, he relaxes. Now he only has to open the heavy door in front of him – click, clunk, goes the hinge, but it’s only a little noise, so it shouldn’t wake anyone – rush through the covered walkway that connects the main school building and the abbey, and then push another wooden door, which he is relieved to find open. He walks through it and pushes it shut behind him.
He stands for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness of the cavernous abbey, the spiritual centre of both the monastery and the school. Ahead of him, there is a solitary candle lit in a jar by the altar, and John walks towards it, passing row upon row of upright wooden pews and walking on stones marking the resting place of generations of Hallows Abbey monks. There are quite literally bones beneath his feet, in the crypt. The thought of this usually gives him pause, but not tonight. Tonight, he has other things to consider.
He arrives at the altar and immediately falls down on his knees. For this is where he knew he’d needed to come, when he’d realised he was unable to find an answer just lying there in bed, so pathetic, so irrelevant. He’d known at that moment that it was God, and only God, who could help him now.
He lowers his head, places his hands together, and begins to pray. His prayer isn’t one he knows by heart or one prescribed by the church, but instead a reel of questions, questions to which he does not know the answer. They emerge with surprising force.
‘Can I help you?’
John is wrenched out of his trance-like state in an instant.
He’s not alone here after all, then. This is bad, he thinks. Really bad. They’ll expel me for this. Students aren’t allowed to wander into the abbey after dark. He turns around and can just about make out that there’s a monk standing next to him. It’s not one of the teaching monks, though, so he doesn’t know his name. But he’s clearly part of the order, because he’s dressed in their robes.
‘Oh, hello… Sir.’
‘Hello.’
The monk doesn’t sound angry, and John is relieved. He tries to examine his face, to see if he looks cross. The solitary candle’s light is too weak, however, and it’s only really illuminating one side of his face. It’s impossible to make out the details.
‘I’m sorry. I wanted to come here to… pray. I needed to do it here. I’m sorry, I’m not explaining myself very well.’ John realises he’s gabbling.
‘I see.’
There’s an awkward silence.
‘I’ll go now. I… I’m sorry.’
John decides the best approach is to leave, before he has to give the monk his name. Perhaps he can’t see me properly either, he thinks. Maybe the light is so bad, I’ll get away with it.
‘No, don’t go.’
‘Why? I know I’m not supposed to…’
‘This is God’s house. Everyone who needs to be here should be here. Who are we to try to impose our own rules on how it is run? Please do not let me interrupt you.’
John nods, but in reality he just feels incredibly awkward. He can’t run off now, can he? But the monk is still standing beside him, and it feels strange to pray with someone else there, someone else listening, even if the questions he’s asking are only in his head. He decides to pretend to pray for half a minute and then head for the exit. This is all too awkward for words. He closes his eyes, places his hands together and does exactly this. He counts to thirty in his head, opens them and turns to leave.
But there is no monk beside him when he turns.
‘Hello?’ he calls out, tentatively, quietly. ‘Hello? I’m going now.’
There is no reply.
The old monk couldn’t have walked very far in thirty seconds, John reasons. And he’d have made a noise moving off, certainly. And even if he had walked away, why hadn’t he answered him when he’d called out?
And then, as he’s pondering where the monk could possibly have gone and what on earth has just happened, the candle on the altar flickers – once, twice, three times – and then it is extinguished. The church is plunged into absolute darkness.
And then fear rips into John’s soul, because the candle is sitting in a tall jar. It can’t possibly have been blown out naturally, by a breeze.
In that moment, he is absolutely certain he has just communicated with something supernatural. Something evil. In God’s church.
And so he runs, no longer caring if he’s heard, not caring at all if he collides with pews or trips over flagstones, absolutely determined that he needs to get out of this place, out of the abbey and into the corridor and back up the stairs, and then back into his dormitory.
Finally, he returns to his bed with huge relief, his chest heaving, his body shaking, and his brain wired. Astonishingly, none of his room-mates wake. He is unusually pleased to be in their presence. As he yanks his sheets over his shaking body, he closes his eyes, willing oblivion to come and take him. Because he cannot begin to think about what the encounter he’s just had might mean for his soul, for his future, for his decision.
Help me, God, he thinks. Help me. What on earth am I to do now?
PART I
1
AMANDA
August 2024
‘I knew we shouldn’t have taken the A303.’
It’s almost thirty degrees, and their car’s air conditioning has given up trying to keep the heat at bay. They’ve had to lower the windows for fresh air, but it’s not working because they’re in stationary traffic and the road surface is a sufficient temperature to cook bacon. Amanda is sweating so much that her legs have stuck to the car’s fake leather upholstery and there are semicircles soaked into the cotton beneath her breasts.
‘The M4–M5 junction would have been worse,’ says her husband Mike, reaching down to pick up the can of warm Diet Coke they’re sharing, and taking a swig. ‘Mind you, at least we no longer have kids with us. Do you remember that time we were going camping in Bude, and we blindly followed the satnav and it rerouted us through a completely bumper-to-bumper Bristol? Jules was potty training, and you ended up having to get her out of the car to have a poo beside a pub garden full of drinkers.’
‘Oh, yep,’ says Amanda, laughing. Well, she laughs for a bit, they both do, but then they sit in silence for a moment, because the memory is bittersweet. Those days of early parenting were often challenging, as they are for most, but now that Julia and Luke have left home, memories of their childhood are tinged with the kind of nostalgia that bites rather than comforts.
Luke is nineteen and brimming with the enthusiasm and confidence of someone on the cusp of anything and everything. He’s about to go into his second year of a Physiotherapy degree at Bristol. Julia, meanwhile, is twenty-one and after three years of ambivalence studying Psychology, is about to embark on an MA in Film in London with her boyfriend Tom, who she met volunteering at a film festival last summer.
Both of their children are happy young adults, on the verge of an exciting future. And yet… And yet Amanda has been harbouring a hope that one of them might have taken some time out of their summer of partying, part-time work and travel to visit their parents. So far, however, they seem to have preferred their rented student accommodation to the family home. Or what was the family home, Amanda thinks, correcting herself as a lump forms in her throat. They don’t have one now. Well, not one big enough for a family, anyway.
They haven’t seen either child since Julia’s graduation in July. WhatsApp messages since have been sporadic; mostly pared down, evasive responses to Amanda’s increasingly probing questions. She’s delighted they’re both following their own particular stars. Of course she is. But she also misses them desperately. And she suspects Mike does too, although he doesn’t say so.
It takes four more hours to travel the one hundred and thirty-nine further miles to their destination, a journey that ordinarily should take about half of that. Amanda and Mike pass the time hopping between radio stations, asking the satnav to try to find them a better route, and talking about the new challenge they’re both taking on.
Mike is the one who’s been appointed deputy head, of course, so he’s the one with the actual job, but Amanda has been his wife long enough to know she is absolutely part of the package. When you take a live-in job in a boarding school and you have a spouse, that person will also have their daily life dictated by the establishment. The school decides where you live, usually in a small flat or house on site. This is a perk, of course, but it has also meant they’ve always lived in someone else’s place. They’ve invested the money they’ve saved on housing into a rented flat in Bristol, which provides an income stream but none of the comfort of a home.
The school also decides your holidays and which parts of the weekend are your own. They also insist on your free labour to perform an unlimited number of duties such as: theatre set design and construction, birthday cake making, cricket catering and open day planning. Amanda has done all of these in the twenty-plus years Mike has been teaching in the private school sector, most of them schools with boarders. It’s a bit like being a vicar’s wife about fifty years ago, Amanda thinks, except the accommodation is usually less spacious.
As they turn off the A30 and drive along the network of ever narrowing roads that lead to Hallows Abbey, Amanda catches glimpses of azure in the distance, coupled with the undeniable smell of the sea. She is immediately transported to holidays long ago in this part of England, when the children had been small, their budget had been just as tiny, and they had spent long sunny days on the beach and long wet days touring dusty National Trust houses.
It would be so wonderful if actually living in Cornwall could help me recapture some of the magic of those times, she thinks, aware of course that living somewhere will always be very different to the suspension of disbelief a holiday provides, and that the children are no longer children, and also, not here. But still, she thinks: the sea. I will be living by the sea, and I’ve always wanted to do that. And this thought is just enough to keep her homesickness for their little terraced house in London, their home for almost a decade, at bay for a few more hours. She has promised herself she will not cry today. Or at least, not in front of Mike.
‘There should be a sign around here somewhere,’ he says, peering at a thick, tall hedge with intent. ‘I remember it from the interview. Yep, yep, here it is.’
They arrive at what appears at first to be just more hedge, but then slowly reveals itself to be a narrow gap leading to yet another narrow lane. There’s a large wooden sign sitting atop a somewhat wonky pair of wooden posts. The gold paint that reads ‘Hallows Abbey, a Catholic boarding school for boys aged 13–18’ is faded, and the blue paint is flaking. ‘One of the first things I’m going to do is fix that sign,’ says Mike, and they both smile as they turn into the lane.
At first, Amanda thinks someone’s moved the sign for a prank, because all she can see is hedge, the very occasional windswept tree and the crest of a grassy hill. But then they reach its peak, where fields give way to moorland, and the sight that greets them on the other side makes her gasp. She already knew that Hallows Abbey sat on its own on a headland, but nothing has prepared her for this: the windswept moor ending abruptly at the edge of sheer cliffs on three sides; the school buildings, sports pitches and abbey, which together resemble a small village; and just a short walk along what looks to be a perilous coastal path, the skeletal remains of a tin mine and its engine houses, silhouetted against the sky.
‘I know,’ says Mike. ‘Quite something, isn’t it.’
‘It feels… like it’s not quite real.’
‘Yes. You wouldn’t know it was here, would you, if you hadn’t turned down the road? I know some parents say the isolation puts them off sending their kids here. But it can also be a strength, I think. If you can’t get a mobile phone signal, the kids aren’t going to watch stuff they shouldn’t on their phones. And if you do it right, you could foster a real sense of community here, of being in it together, of being part of nature.’
‘Is that what you said in your interview?’ she says, with a smile.
‘Pretty much.’ Mike laughs. ‘I do believe that, though. I think maybe we all need to step away from modern society for a while. It’s pretty crazy out there.’
Amanda understands what he means. She knows that social media has the capacity to turn ordinary people into monsters, and the dark underbelly of society had been visible even in the fairly affluent area of London they’d been living in. But even so, the capital had charmed her easily. It had charmed all of them, in fact. When the kids had still been at school, they’d spent weekends and holidays wandering around the Tate Modern with Julia and then stopping for frozen yogurt at Snog or visiting HMS Belfast and the Imperial War Museum on repeat with history-mad Luke.
