The Red Room Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  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

  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

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  THANK YOU FOR READING

  The

  Red Room

  M S Morris

  This novel is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, names or events, is purely coincidental.

  M S Morris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Published by Landmark Media, a division of Landmark Internet Ltd.

  Copyright © 2018 M S Morris

  msmorrisbooks.com

  For Josie and John

  CHAPTER 1

  The letter lands on the doormat with a gentle thud, as if it is of little consequence.

  I’m upstairs stacking a pile of neatly ironed tea-towels in the airing cupboard when I hear the sound of the letterbox opening and closing. Confused, I hurry downstairs to see what it is. It’s Sunday today, so it can’t be the postman because he only delivers Monday to Saturday.

  A white envelope is lying on the doormat, face down. I pick it up and turn it over. I am startled to see that my name is written on the front in a flowing, cursive script. An old-fashioned style of handwriting, I think. An educated, thoughtful hand.

  Mrs Jane Harvey.

  That’s my name. I stare at the words written in blue ink with a fountain pen with an italic nib, not fully comprehending them. No one has ever written to me before. Not to me, in my own name. But someone just has, and they’ve taken the trouble to deliver it by hand instead of putting it in the post. A personal touch.

  I look out of the window to see who left it, but there is no one there, just the cold, damp winter landscape. The pearl grey sky is already growing dim in the late afternoon.

  Adam’s office door bangs open, making me jump, and in a moment he’s at my side. ‘What is it?’ he asks. ‘What have you got there?’

  I suppress an urge to hide it from him, to conceal it under my clothing. It is my letter, addressed to me. But that is foolish. He has already heard the opening and closing of the letterbox. The thud of the letter landing in the hallway brought him here. Besides, there is no reason to hide the letter. I have no secrets to keep from my husband.

  ‘It’s a letter,’ I say. ‘Someone dropped it through the letterbox just now. It’s addressed to me.’

  ‘To you?’ he says, going to the window. ‘Who delivered it?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’d already gone when I arrived.’

  He stares out of the window, as if hoping to catch the mysterious deliverer of letters still lurking there. ‘Well, are you going to open it?’ he asks. He looks mildly irritated, as if I have somehow let him down by receiving this strange letter addressed to me personally.

  I wonder if I have, if I have failed him in some way. Now I am scared to open it.

  As soon as he senses my uncertainty, he softens his voice. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘It’s only a letter. It won’t bite.’

  I hold the letter a little longer, savouring the feel of it. My first letter. It might be anything. It might be nothing. Until I open it, I am caught in a delightful state of not knowing.

  My hand trembles slightly as I slide a finger under the flap of the envelope and open it. Inside lies a folded sheet of good-quality writing paper. It offers a little resistance as I draw it out, paper sliding over crisp paper. I unfold it and read it to myself while Adam looks over my shoulder.

  Dear Jane,

  This is just a quick note to let you know that we’re having a little get-together at our house in the village on New Year’s Eve and we’d be delighted if you and your husband (sorry we don’t know his name) would like to come. Please let us know. We look forward to seeing you both there.

  Best wishes,

  Diana and Michael Potts (The Corner House)

  An invitation to a party. I’m touched that someone has tramped all the way to our cottage, a mile outside the village, to deliver this invitation to me on a wet Sunday afternoon in late December. But I don’t know how to respond to it. I have never been to a party before.

  Adam gently takes the letter out of my hand and re-reads it properly himself.

  ‘Do you know this Diana and Michael Potts?’ he asks. ‘You’ve never mentioned them.’

  ‘Only vaguely,’ I say, trying to remember who they are. ‘I think I might have met her in the village shop once. Yes, that’s it.’ It comes back to me now. An older woman, with a face that was somehow both kind and stern, lively and ancient. ‘She’s a retired schoolteacher. I think her husband might have been a headmaster once. Cath introduced us. I haven’t met her husband though.’

  Adam walks through to the lounge, still holding the invitation. I follow him, waiting to hear what he has to say. I draw the curtains against the dark outside. It’s only three o’clock but the light is already dwindling, being nearly the shortest day of the year.

  ‘What do you think?’ I prompt him. ‘About the invitation, I mean.’

  Adam scratches at the dark Sunday-afternoon stubble under his chin. ‘It’s very kind of them to invite us,’ he says at last. ‘I’m sure they mean well. But we’ll have to decline.’

  I thought he would say that, and I know he has good reason, but still I feel unaccountably disappointed. This was my invitation. My party.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt to go, would it?’ I ask. ‘Just this once? We wouldn’t have to stay long.’ We’ve been living in the village for years now, perhaps it’s time. Perhaps it’s time we got out a little. ‘It seems rude to say no,’ I add, searching for a reason to say yes.

  ‘I’m only thinking of you,’ he says gently, caressing the side of my face with his hand. ‘You know you don’t like crowds. I wouldn’t want you to become stressed.’

  He’s right, of course. Adam’s always right. And yet I’m sure I could handle a small gathering if he was there with me. ‘The invitation says it’s just a little get-together,’ I say.

  Adam chuckles. ‘That could mean anything. They’ve probably invited the whole village and all the farmers and their families from miles around.’

  I realise that’s true. If they’ve invited me and Adam, they will have invited everyone. The whole village, and the farmers too. It sounds a lot, the way he says it, but how many people is that really? The village isn’t that big. It’s tiny in fact. But more people than I’ve ever faced at any one time. Adam’s right. I don’t like crowds. Or at least, I don’t think I do.

  Adam has already made his decision. He re-folds the invitation, puts it neatly back into its envelope and drops it into the waste paper basket.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other people there. They won’t miss us if we don’t show up. In fact, we barely even know them. We’ll spend New Ye
ar’s Eve together, just you and me like we always do.’ He pulls me into his arms and kisses me on my forehead, hugging me tight. ‘I love you, Jane,’ he whispers into my ear.

  ‘I love you too,’ I say back to him.

  CHAPTER 2

  On Monday morning the alarm clock goes off early. Five o’clock. It’s still pitch black outside and will be for hours yet.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ says Adam. ‘Go back to sleep.’ He kisses me gently on the nape of my neck and climbs out of bed.

  I roll over and try to sleep, but I can hear him moving about and getting into the shower. He leaves the cottage early on Mondays to drive to Leeds Bradford Airport where he catches the first flight to London. He works in the City, and during the week he lives in a house in Putney in West London.

  There’s no need for me to get up yet, of course. I have nowhere to go.

  By five forty-five he’s ready to leave. I put the bedside light on so I can see him better. The yellow light casts a warm glow over his face. His weekend stubble is all gone now, and he looks smart and handsome in a dark business suit and tie. ‘I’ll phone you at nine tonight as usual,’ he says, bending down to plant a kiss on my lips.

  ‘I’ll be here,’ I say, smiling up at him. I won’t see him again until Friday evening. But he phones me every evening when he’s away just to make sure I’m all right and to ask me about my day. I don’t own a mobile phone. Adam says I don’t need one. But I’m always here for him, waiting for his call.

  After he’s gone I turn off the light and stay in bed, dozing, until half past seven when the first cool light of the winter dawn starts to penetrate the room. I put on a dressing gown and pull back the bedroom curtains. Today the view of the Yorkshire countryside is grey and bleak. The treeless moorland is crisscrossed with dry stone walls and dotted with sheep standing motionless like woolly statues against the cold, northerly wind. The fields are coated with a thin layer of frost. On a fine summer day you can see for miles, but today the clouds have closed in tight, making the world feel small.

  I go downstairs, put the kettle on and make myself some toast. After breakfast I shower and dress and then start on my list of jobs for the day. I put the laundry on, vacuum the downstairs and dust the lounge. Adam likes the place to be spotless when he returns at the end of the week. I’m about to empty the waste paper basket when I notice the letter from yesterday: the invitation from Diana and Michael Potts to their party on New Year’s Eve. A sharp white envelope with that elegant blue handwriting. Mrs Jane Harvey, it says. I retrieve the letter and re-read it.

  I like the handwriting. It’s a flowing script which makes me think the person who wrote it must be intelligent and warm-hearted. Of course I don’t know that for sure. I only met Diana Potts once very briefly, and Adam is always warning me about speaking to strangers. But she seemed nice, and it was kind of her to invite us. I realise that I would like to go to the party after all, despite what Adam said. But I don’t want to go against his wishes. And he’s probably right when he says it wouldn’t agree with me. Still, I put the letter on the sideboard. I’ll have another think about it later.

  We’re running low on milk and bread so I decide to walk to the village shop. I wrap up warm against the cold December weather and set off down the lane.

  Our cottage is a mile outside the village, which is itself tiny. Just a shop, a pub, a church and a cluster of houses, all built out of the local grey stone. There is no pavement down the country road so I stay close to the grass verge, but there are no cars anyway. The only sound is the gusting of the wind across the moor. In the springtime there is birdsong, but at this time of year the birds have fled to warmer places or have fallen silent.

  On my way I see the postman’s red van parked by the entrance to one of the farms. There’s a small post box here and the postman is opening it to see if there are any letters for him to collect. The bright red van jars against the green fields tinged with white frost. It assaults my senses and I flinch from it. I never wear red.

  ‘Morning,’ calls the postman in a cheery voice as I walk past. ‘Bit nippy today.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I say, hurrying on past the red van. Red for danger, red for blood. Soon I hear it drive away down the road again and I realise I have been holding my breath, waiting for it to leave. I exhale and my breath mists the air in front of me.

  Ten minutes later I cross a small humpback bridge over the stream and find myself in the village. I pass the church with its ancient graveyard and the village pub which is closed at this time of day. There’s no one about. The postman’s van reappears, tooting its horn as it overtakes me on the narrow road, and by the time I arrive at the village shop it’s parked outside.

  I push open the door of the shop and an overhead bell jangles to announce my arrival. The shop, which doubles as a post office, is tiny but it sells milk, sliced bread and a selection of tinned soups. I decide I might as well buy a tin of mushroom soup for lunch whilst I’m here.

  The postman is chatting to Cath who runs the shop with her husband. She is the only person I really know in the village because she introduced herself to me years ago when we first moved here from Oxford. She was thrilled that some new people had moved to the village because, as she told me at the time, most of the young people couldn’t wait to leave, finding it too isolated.

  ‘I’ll be glad when Christmas is over,’ the postman is telling Cath in his thick Yorkshire accent. ‘Folks with nowt to say to each other all year round suddenly feel the urge to send each other cards and letters. You wouldn’t believe the mounds of post waiting for me back at the sorting office.’

  He must mean the sorting office in the nearby town. I browse the shelves whilst I wait for him to leave.

  ‘I love receiving Christmas cards though,’ says Cath. ‘Don’t you? How’s your wife by the way?’

  Cath likes to chat to everyone. The postman tells her about his wife’s operation, then picks up the sack of letters and leaves.

  ‘Sorry to keep you, Jane,’ says Cath as I hand over my small collection of items for her to put through the till. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say.

  ‘Looks like we might have snow soon.’ She glances out of the window. ‘Are you doing anything special for Christmas? Visiting relatives or anything?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Adam and I don’t really have any relatives. We’ll just have a quiet Christmas at home.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ says Cath. ‘Our Christmases are never quiet.’ She and her husband have two teenage boys. ‘Still, it’s nice to be with family, isn’t it?’

  I put the items into my shopping bag and pass her a ten pound note.

  ‘Are you coming to the New Year’s Eve party at the Potts’s house?’ she asks. ‘I saw Diana yesterday and she said she was going to drop an invitation through your door.’ She hands me my change.

  I’m not sure what to tell her. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, even though Adam was very clear about it. ‘We don’t normally go to parties.’ I can feel the confusion rising in my chest and I’m sure I’m turning pink.

  ‘Oh, go on,’ she says, patting me gently on the arm. ‘It’ll do you both good to come and meet some people. Me and Ken will be there. There’s no need to be shy.’

  ‘I’m not shy,’ I say quickly. ‘Not really. It’s just that…’ I’m not sure what I’m trying to say to her. I can’t tell her that I have never been to a party before. I can’t tell her that Adam said no. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I say finally.

  Back outside I take a deep breath to steady my nerves. Maybe Cath is right. It might be a good idea to go to the party. Other people go to parties. I could too. I like Cath, and part of me thinks why not? Adam and I have lived here for more than seven years now. Perhaps it’s time that we met a few more people.

  When I arrive home I put the milk in the fridge, then I fetch the invitation from the sideboard. Adam won’t like it if I disobey him, but I’m sure that he will understand if I explain to him why I want
to go to the party after all. I feel that if I do this quickly, I will have the courage to see it through. Before I can change my mind I hastily write a reply on a spare piece of paper I find in Adam’s office, seal it in an envelope, affix a stamp, and then walk down to the post box outside the farm to post it. The white envelope slips into the red box with a thud.

  There, I’ve done it, I think as I go back to the cottage. We’ll just go to the party for a short time. We don’t have to stay long. If there are too many people, we can leave. And besides, Adam will look after me and make sure I don’t come to any harm.

  I spend the rest of the day doing jobs around the cottage. It’s an old, stone building with three bedrooms upstairs. It’s been modernised, but still retains its period charm. The rooms are all painted in neutral shades: cream, beige and magnolia. I dust around the upstairs windows and look out over the small plot of land that extends behind the cottage. In the summer I grow vegetables and flowers in the garden but at this time of year the ground is rock hard and bare. The frost has gone, but the grey clouds still press down heavily on the landscape. The light fades quickly under the leaden winter sky and I pull the curtains closed to keep in the warmth.

  At nine o’clock I’m curled up on the sofa reading a novel when the phone rings. It’s Adam of course. His evening phone call is never late.

  I hear his deep, reassuringly familiar voice over the line. ‘How are you?’ he asks. ‘Have you had a nice day?’ He always starts with the same questions.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he says. ‘Busy at work as always’ – he has a senior position with the insurance market, Lloyd’s of London – ‘What have you been up to today then?’

  ‘Just the usual,’ I say. ‘I did the housework. Mostly laundry and cleaning.’

  ‘Did you go out at all?’

  ‘I just popped into the village to buy some milk.’ My days don’t vary much. I wonder sometimes if Adam finds my daily reports dull, but he always seems to be intensely interested in every little detail. I ought to tell him about my decision to reply to the party invitation, but the words stick in my throat. It would be easier to tell him face to face when I see him again on Friday. I hope he won’t be angry, but Adam never gets angry with me.