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‘Amanda Jennings is a writer on the ascendant and The Storm is her best novel yet. This twisty, malevolent and gripping story is virtually impossible to put down’
Lisa Jewell
‘Beautifully written, chilling and absorbing’
Adele Parks
‘Amanda Jennings is a fantastic storyteller and she’s at her very best here: warm-hearted, darkly atmospheric, and wholly addictive’
Lucy Atkins
‘Suspenseful, beautifully written, and utterly compelling’
Alice Feeney
‘A brilliant book. Gripping, intelligent, and beautifully written’
Cass Green
‘Vivid and evocative, the beautifully drawn characters and Cornish setting will linger in your mind long after you’ve turned the final page’
Lucy Dawson
‘The Storm is both beautifully crafted and chilling. A compelling tale you won’t want to put down’
Colette McBeth
‘A claustrophobic, brooding, atmospheric novel. No one writes complicated, conflicted characters like Amanda Jennings’
Tammy Cohen
‘A chilling, atmospheric and addictive tale’
Roz Watkins
‘I was blown away by its brilliance. I loved it!’
Michelle Davies
AMANDA JENNINGS lives in Oxfordshire with her husband, three daughters, and a menagerie of animals. She studied History of Art at Cambridge and before writing her first book, was a researcher at the BBC. With a deep fascination for the far-reaching effects of trauma, her books focus on the different ways people find to cope with loss, as well as the moral struggles her protagonists face. When she isn’t writing she can usually be found walking the dog. Her favourite place to be is up a mountain or beside the sea.
Also by Amanda Jennings
The Cliff House
In Her Wake
The Judas Scar
Sworn Secret
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Amanda Jennings 2020
Amanda Jennings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008248932
Version 2020-07-06
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008287061
To Chris. My one and only.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own
depth until the hour of separation.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
Contents
Cover
Praise
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One: Hannah
Chapter Two: Hannah
Chapter Three: Hannah
Chapter Four: Nathan
Chapter Five: Hannah
Chapter Six: Nathan
Chapter Seven: Hannah
Chapter Eight: Cam, 1998
Chapter Nine: Hannah
Chapter Ten: Hannah
Chapter Eleven: Hannah
Chapter Twelve: Hannah
Chapter Thirteen: Hannah
Chapter Fourteen: Hannah
Chapter Fifteen: Hannah
Chapter Sixteen: Cam, 1998
Chapter Seventeen: Hannah
Chapter Eighteen: Hannah
Chapter Nineteen: Hannah
Chapter Twenty: Nathan
Chapter Twenty-One: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Two: Cam, 1998
Chapter Twenty-Three: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Four: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Five: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Six: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Hannah
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hannah
Chapter Thirty: Cam, 1998
Chapter Thirty-One: Hannah
Chapter Thirty-Two: Hannah
Chapter Thirty-Three: Hannah
Chapter Thirty-Four: Hannah
Chapter Thirty-Five: Hannah
Chapter Thirty-Six: Cam, 1998
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Hannah
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Cam, 1998
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Hannah, 1998
Chapter Forty: Hannah
Chapter Forty-One: Hannah, 1998
Chapter Forty-Two: Cam, 1998
Chapter Forty-Three: Hannah, 1998
Chapter Forty-Four: Cam, 1998
Chapter Forty-Five: Nathan
Chapter Forty-Six: Hannah
Chapter Forty-Seven: Hannah
Chapter Forty-Eight: Hannah
Chapter Forty-Nine: Cam
Chapter Fifty: Hannah
Chapter Fifty-One: Nathan
Acknowledgements
Extract
About the Publisher
Prologue
The chill December wind blows in gusts, turning drizzle to slivers of glass and scoring the sea with angry white slashes. A boat emerges through the dawn mist like a ghostly galleon. The man at the helm is still and rigid. He cuts the engine and the small vessel drifts into dock. He moves to the side of the boat and bends for a coiled rope, which he throws over a bollard with ease. He pulls the rope tight and secures it at the cleat. His movements are sure, his features set in sombre concentration. The man reaches down and takes hold of the boat’s hose and, grim-faced, he washes the deck down. All the surfaces and edges and crevices. He takes great care.
He climbs out of the boat and begins to walk up the jetty. But he stops halfway and his head and shoulders slump forward like a marionette with snapped strings. For a few moments he is motionless, spent, his arms hanging limp at his sides, but then he rallies, straightens his back, forces himself along the gangway past the discarded fishing nets and stacked crates patched with algae and salt stains. Each step is heavy with the air of a condemned man approaching the gallows.
He thinks the port is deserted. He thinks he’s alone with only the waking seagulls and the echo of his laboured footsteps for company. But he’s wrong.
He isn’t alone.
There is somebody watching.
Chapter One
Hannah
In the early days, when memories of that night ambushed me at every opportunity, routine was my lifeline. Routine gave me a set of stepping stones over the quicksand. It got me through my days without thinking. Thinking wasn’t good for me. Thinking was where the madness lay.
These days, fifteen years on, I rely less on routine. I’ve let go of the smaller things. I no longer wear navy on a Monday, for example, or pull my hair – twisted clockwise, using seven pins – into a tight bun on a Thursday. The bigger jobs, the weekly chores, still have their set days, more, I think, because I find it comforting rather than necessary. Today is a Tuesday, so after I’ve walked the dog, I’ll catch the 10.07 bus into Penzance to meet Vicky, spend an hour with her, shop for what I need that day, then catch the 14.13 home, and make our supper. I cook from scratch every day. On a Tuesday I make something with lamb. For ease, I rotate three of Nathan’s favourites: shepherd’s pie, Lancashire hotpot, moussaka.
Today it’s shepherd’s pie.
‘Come on then,’ I say to the dog.
Cass enjoys routine as much as I do and has been waiting at the back door, her eyes bolted to me, since Alex left for school. When I lift her lead from the hook she jumps up and spins excited circles around me. I swear this dog smiles proper smiles. Her face breaks in two, white teeth on show, eyes crinkled with joyful anticipation.
‘Silly dog,’ I whisper, as she bounds out of the back door and along the gravel path which folds around the house. When she gets to the gate she stops and glances back at me, jogging on the spot with impatience.
Cass is a tricoloured collie-cross from the animal rescue in Truro. She has odd eyes, one brown, the other – a wall eye – the colour of glacier ice, the pale blue accentuated by the pirate’s patch of black fur which surrounds it. When we aren’t walking, she spends her time curled up in her basket in the kitchen or stretched out on the front doorstep, paws neatly crossed, watching the world with her dewy mismatched eyes. Nathan took some convincing. I begged for years. A home isn’t a home without a dog, I’d said. Thankfully he was swayed by the ‘a large country house needs a dog’ argument I pushed. I’m not exaggerating when I say that before Cass arrived to keep me company, the never-ending hours spent in this suffocating place were torture. Nathan has never taken to her, but she’s clever and keeps herself inconspicuous when he’s around.
The gate clicks shut behind us and I breathe in deeply, relishing, as I do every day, the immediate sense of freedom. I loathe the house. Disquiet ferments in its shadows and the air inside is heavy as if each molecule is formed from lead. To the outside world Trevose House is impressive, huge and undeniably beautiful, a grand building which passersby take note of. I watch them sometimes, from the window on the first floor landing, concealed from sight behind the musty damask curtains. Walkers on the lane who slow down to take a better look, occasionally stop and lean casually over the wall to point out features and nod with appreciation. Some take photographs on their phone. Perhaps for Instagram. Hashtag housegoals. Sometimes, if I’m outside, hanging the laundry or pinning back raspberry canes, they might catch sight of me and blush, ashamed of their snooping, hastily informing me how lovely my home is as if this will excuse their intrusion. A curt nod and no attempt to engage invariably sends them scurrying away and I become no more than an easily dismissed entry etched into the diary of their day, the dour owner of that beautiful house we walked past.
Trevose House, near New Mill, with iron gates which close with a clang and lock with a large key more at home on the belt of a gaoler. Two stone pillars stand guard either side. The granite walls are studded with a line of sash windows and three wide steps lead up to a grand doorway beside which the date of construction – 1753 – is carved into the seal-grey stone. The house was the principal dwelling on land profitably run by the Cardew family for generations. That was, until Nathan’s father got involved. Charles Cardew was a poker-loving drunk who, between inheriting the estate in his mid-thirties and killing himself at fifty-two, sold most of it off in chunks to pay gambling debts. Three hundred acres or so, four farm workers’ cottages, and a number of characterful barns which, as Nathan often tells me bitterly, could have been converted into lucrative holiday rentals.
Nathan has no fond memories of his father and rarely mentions him with anything other than contempt in his voice. According to my mother, Charles was a drog-polat – a rascal – with a twinkle in his eye. He spent most of his time in the pubs of Penzance and Newlyn, buying drinks for the locals and losing his money to anybody willing to sit down and play cards with him. He shot himself in the face in the study at Trevose House on Nathan’s thirteenth birthday. Nathan and his sister, Kerensa, who was seventeen, found him. It turned out the debts he’d run up were far worse than he’d let on and, after she’d replaced the carpet in the study, it fell to Nathan’s mother to clear up the financial mess he’d left behind. Sylvia Cardew had, in her own words, no time for fools, gluttons, the idle or weak, and slowly but surely she managed to sort out the chaos. Kerensa ran away from home soon after Charles killed himself and – if sotto voce local rumours were to be believed – died from a heroin overdose in a squalid bedsit in Hastings eight months later. Though Nathan doesn’t talk about his sister, there’s a photograph of her in a silver frame on his desk, taken when she was about fifteen or sixteen. She sits in the garden of Trevose, holding a blade of grass, smiling at something, or someone, unseen beyond the camera. Her hair is plaited into a loose braid and she’s dressed in a long flowery skirt and muslin shirt. Bare feet. A silver ring on her middle toe. She wears no make-up and her face is dusted with freckles, her eyes shining with joyful abandon. I think I would have liked her.
Sylvia Cardew didn’t stay in Cornwall. She once told me, lips pursed, nose wrinkled as if smelling something vile, that she’d never got on with the county – too parochial, too backward – but I’m certain it was scandal and snide whispers that drove her away. Whatever the reason, the curtains at Trevose House were drawn and the furniture sheeted, and she and Nathan, aged fifteen, moved to a mews house with neat window boxes in Kensington. When Nathan and I married, she bequeathed him their holiday home as a wedding gift. It was riddled with ghosts she wanted nothing more to do with, so instead gave them to me.
‘Live in it. Sell it. Burn it to the godforsaken ground for all I care.’
My mother-in-law is the type of woman who chills the air when she enters a room. God knows what it must have been like having her as a mother. Thankfully she refuses to see me. On our first meeting, over tea served from a paper-thin china teapot decorated with gold patterning, she smiled and said lightly, ‘I would have expected Nathan to choose someone quite different. More bookish. Brighter. With a degree in a modern language, perhaps, or the history of art. Still,’ she went on, sipping her tea, ‘one can never know what happens behind a closed bedroom door. I am sure you are excellent at what you do. It’s just a shame my son wasn’t more careful. Shotgun weddings lack class.’
On the rare occasions Nathan needs to see her, he makes the journey to London alone, but never stays more than an hour or two. Serves her right. She’s a stuck-up cow. The only thing I wish is she’d taken her husband’s ghost with her. He’s there wherever I go in the house. As I walk from room to room I can feel him watching me, his face blown apart, an unidentifiable mush leering at me from every corner. I pleaded with Nathan to sell up, but he wouldn’t hear of it. What man wants to live in the house where his father committed suicide?
It’s not all bad. The inside of the house might give me the shivers but I adore the garden. The plot is enclosed by a drystone wall that plays host to an array of colourful flowers between May and October. Beyond the boundary we’re surrounded by farmland and in the summer months, when the cows are on the pasture, I lean on the wall and watch them, content and languid as they graze, flicking their tails at the flies which irritate their gentle eyes. The air hangs with their scent, but occasionally, if I’m lucky, an onshore breeze will bring up the smell of the sea and with it the heady memories of my childhood.
There’s a substantial lawn which takes over two hours to mow. I do it on a Friday because Nathan likes it nice for the weekend. Huge flowerbeds brim over with rhododendrons, camellias, azaleas and agapanthus, and in the far corner is a regimented vegetable patch, put in by Nathan and covered over with netting to keep off the birds. He restored the Victorian greenhouse a number of years ago and now spends his time nurturing his tomatoes and cucumbers, red peppers and courgettes, protecting them from thieving rodents and brushing their skins clean of greenfly and dust. He digs powdered ox blood into the compost and repots the delicate seedlings, handling each one as if made of glass.
Mum and Dad made their first trip to the house soon after we arrived back from our honeymoon in the Dordogne. Mum had dressed Dad in a tie I didn’t know he owned which he apparently kept for funerals and the like. The two of them sat on the edge of the sofa, hands clasped in their laps, spines starched rigid, shifting in their seats like fidgeting children in church. Mum cleared her throat constantly, which made me want to scream, whilst Dad tapped out some sort of SOS in Morse code with his freshly polished shoe, knowing full well the funeral tie was fooling nobody. Despite their discomfort a mantle of pride hung over them both. At one point Mum lost control and a beaming smile erupted on her face as she nudged Dad’s knee and exclaimed in her broad Cornish accent, ‘Oh, Harry, can you believe it? Our melder, lady of the manor!’
I remember being dazed and confused, as if waking from an operation, anaesthesia clogging my veins. Where the hell was I? How on earth had I got there? Stop it, I wanted to shriek at them. Stop being so impressed. You’ve nothing to be impressed by. It was as if I were no longer their daughter, but had emerged altered from a cocoon, an unrecognisable stranger sitting opposite them.
A few weeks later I’d mentioned this to Mum. Her smile, warm and kind, made my heart ache. ‘That’s normal, melder.’ Her voice was silky with love. ‘You are a different person now. You’re Mrs Nathan Cardew.’ Then she glanced at my stomach, which had begun to swell against the cotton of my skirt refusing to stay concealed any longer. ‘And you’ve got the babi to think about now.’
After our walk, I change quickly, drag a brush through my hair, and kiss Cass before walking briskly down to wait for the bus. The bus stop is no more sophisticated than a laminated timetable nailed to a telegraph pole, riddled with woodworm, on the overgrown verge. It’s about a quarter of a mile from the house. I always leave plenty of time to walk down and, as usual, am ten minutes early. I lean back against the telegraph pole and tip my face into the warmth of the sun. For a moment I allow my mind to drift to where it’s desperate to be.
With you.
We are on the beach at Godrevy. The sky is the colour of cornflowers, the wind cold and fresh, the mid-October sunshine is bright. Your hand is warm and holds mine tightly as if you’re worried I might blow away. I’m talking too much. About everything and nothing. Suddenly self-conscious, I stop myself and look up at you.
You smile. Carry on, you say.
I’m not boring you?
Boring me? You laugh and it sounds like music. How could you ever bore me?
It’s low tide. The beach is deserted but for a man sweeping a metal detector like a metronome over the ribbed sand. I can smell the mussel-cloaked rocks. The sea. Drying seaweed. You unpack the picnic you made. Thin squares of electric pink ham on sliced white, spread with margarine.
Mum would call you a criminal for not using butter.
Your sheepish smile melts my heart. Your body is hard and muscular. Not an ounce of fat. The feel of it excites me as I lean against you.
I’m sorry, you say.
It’s delicious, I whisper. Best sandwich I ever tasted.
We talk. Drink Fosters. Smoke roll-ups and kiss. We don’t notice the tide coming in until the sea skims our toes. We’re trapped. We laugh. Jump up. Hold hands and wade through the icy water to reach the path. I stumble, giddy from the lager and kissing, and you catch my elbow.
Saved you, you say.
I miss you.
I had no idea how important these moments would become. At the time it was just a picnic on the beach. With a boy I was falling in love with. Something fun to do at the weekend. We had no idea how fleeting our happiness would be. We took love for granted. We imagined we’d always be free. But now the memory of that picnic on Godrevy is a scrap of precious fabric I cling to like a child with their blanket, comforting and safe, ragged with overuse. I remember the heat of him. I can taste the cigarettes on his breath. As I let his lips linger on mine, my pulse quickens. I recall the smell of him. The feel of his skin against mine. The sound of his voice as he whispered in my ear.
It only takes a moment for grief to take over. My stomach pitches with loss and the image of him dissolves, leaving the space where he was desolate and empty. Regret seeps into every nook of me.
If only I could replay that night. Do things differently. Alter our course.
If only.
I hear the bus wending its way along the lane and push myself off the telegraph pole. It draws to a halt and the door opens with a hydraulic sigh. The driver, who’s been driving this route for years, greets me like a friend. I count my fare out. I no longer apologise for the coppers. He waits patiently as I drop them into the dish and thanks me when I’m done.
I don’t know his name and the only words we’ve exchanged are the occasional comment on the weather and a ‘Happy Christmas’ or ‘Happy New Year’ when seasonally appropriate. I always sit close enough to watch his face in the rearview mirror. He wears his happiness like a medal of honour. Right there, on show, unashamedly proud of it. He is one of those people who whistles a tune. Sometimes he’ll spontaneously smile and when he does, it makes me glow as I imagine he’s recalling something funny or touching. Perhaps he’s thinking of his wife and children clamouring around him when he gets home from shuttling backwards and forwards between Land’s End and Penzance. I imagine he has a simple life. An allotment. A comfortable, threadbare armchair he’ll never throw out. I find imagining this man in a life of contentment comforting. My Tuesday bus journey is something I look forward to. On the rare Tuesdays when there’s an unknown at the wheel, I can become inexplicably agitated, as if my world has tipped and I’m sliding towards the edge.