Hold My Hand by Serena Mackesy Read Free Book Online

weddings.
    Why do the working class have to be so bloody superstitious? He thinks. It’s all very well selling the Daphne du Maurier line to the tourists, but when the locals start buying into it, it leads to nothing but chaos. He turns the figurines back to face the room again, picks up the bin-liners and heads out of the back door.
    In the courtyard, no longer surrounded by six-foot-thick walls, his phone picks up a signal, beeps twice. It's annoying, the way the phone signal comes and goes down here, but it's the same across most of the county: as though the phone companies are part of some great conspiracy against the Celtic Fringes. He checks it, sees the message icon, dials through to voicemail. There's a light Bodmin drizzle in the air, but he stays in the open because he will lose the signal if he gets under cover.
    Two messages. One from his three o'clock: his wife doesn't want to uproot herself from Sheffield, sorry, hopes he understands, no point in coming all the way down there and wasting both their time. Tom stabs at the 3  button and deletes it. Don't worry about wasting your time, he thinks. I've just been hanging around here all day waiting for you.
    “Yes, well,” he says out loud, “at least he had the manners to ring, I suppose. Which is more than the other one did.”
    The second is from Bridget Sweeny, at four o’clock. He notes the time because she can’t possibly have got back to London by then. Keen, he thinks. Imagines her in the car park at the Exeter services, pacing up and down by that run-down little banger as she speaks. She looks run-down herself, he thinks. Tired, but perhaps that’s not so surprising, with a six-year-old and no husband. Perhaps I'm being too suspicious. She looks like someone who needs a break.
    And possibly, he smaller voice tells him, like someone who doesn’t have too many options to leave once she gets here, either.
    “Hello, Mr Gordhavo,” she says. “It’s Bridget Sweeny here. Your one o’clock interview. I just wanted to say that I enjoyed looking round the house, and meeting you, and…” he hears her pause to think, hears her consider her words so she doesn’t sound too eager, too desperate. Notes it with a tiny tingle of hope. She wouldn’t be looking to uproot a six-year-old just before Christmas unless there were pressing reasons, after all.  “…and I’d just like to say that I’d be happy to come and work for you if you thought I was suitable. I checked out the village, and the school, and I think that… anyway… that’s beside the point... Anyway, I wanted really to give you my number, just in case… you know…” she reels off a list of figures – a mobile, not a landline, he notices; one of the signs of economic change, that the poor have cellphones, these days, because you don’t have to have a contract and a credit rating “... and I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Thanks. Goodb– oh, actually: one other thing. We can come fairly much whenever. Whatever suited you. Ok... Well, bye.”
    Tom finishes his walk across the yard, unlocks the shed door. The single light bulb fizzes slightly as it comes to life, illuminates an interior where spiders have run unchecked for a hundred years. This is the old smithy, beams hung with chains, a platform for animal fodder less than a foot above his head which trickles woodworm dust onto his hair as the breeze enters with him. It’s used as storage only for the stuff that’s too far gone, too ugly, too worthless, even for the attic. Stuff that people have occasionally thought might come in useful as timber, or lumber, or kindling at least, which has been forgotten over the decades as new loads of stately logs more suited to a tourist’s idea of fuel for Rospetroc’s great fireplaces have been stacked on either side of the porch. It smells of rot and beetles.
    The trouble with families like ours, he thinks, is we can never throw anything away. Once something has meant something to