The Appetite

Chapter One: The Causeway

The Somerset Levels in late October were less a landscape than a rumour of one. Rose Meyer stood at the top of the drive at six in the morning with a mug of tea going cold in her hands and watched the fields resolve out of the dark, one grey acre at a time. There were no hills to give the eye a place to rest. There was only the flat, sodden pasture running out to the horizon in every direction, cut into strips by the rhynes — the drainage ditches that stitched this country together — and the pollarded willows standing along them like men with their arms cut off at the elbow.

Water everywhere. Under the grass, in the ditches, hanging in the air. She had lived here eleven months and she still could not get used to the way the ground gave under her boots, as if the whole county were a sponge that had been left in a sink.

Behind her, Dunfield House waited.

It had been built in 1761 by a wool merchant with more money than judgement, three storeys of pale limestone set down in the middle of a floodplain with no thought at all to what the winter did here. Georgian symmetry, twelve-over-twelve sash windows, a pediment over the door with a carved swag of fruit that two and a half centuries of rain had chewed down into something more like a knot of worms. Somebody in the 1970s had added a flat-roofed extension on the east side and somebody in the 1990s had covered it in cedar cladding to apologise for it. From the causeway it looked like a handsome old face with a cheap dental bridge.

Rose loved it, in the way you love a difficult animal. It leaked. Its boiler had a personality. Its gutters filled with willow leaves in a single windy night. She had learned every one of its complaints in eleven months, and the learning had saved her life, though she would not have put it that way out loud.

She drank the last of her tea and walked the perimeter, which she did every morning, rain or not.

The kitchen garden first: four raised beds behind a lap-panel fence, leeks standing up like green swords, the last of the chard gone slack and purple. She pulled a dock out of the path and dropped it over the fence. Then the oil tank, dipstick down through the filler, three-quarters. Then the generator shed, where she started the diesel and let it run its five minutes while the exhaust hung in the wet air, and switched it off, and wrote the date in the notebook hanging from a nail. Then the pump house at the bottom of the paddock, where a submersible pump kept the low corner of the grounds from turning into a pond. It was working. It always worked until the week it didn't.

Then the causeway.

The causeway was the only road. It ran two miles east to the village of Langham Fen, raised about a metre and a half above the fields on an embankment of clay and hardcore, wide enough for one vehicle with three passing places. It had been built by hand in 1804 and it had flooded every autumn since. Rose walked out along it a hundred yards, as she did every morning, and looked at the water in the rhyne on the north side.

There was a fencepost there with a nail driven into it at a particular height. When the water reached the nail, the causeway had about thirty hours left before it went under.

This morning the water was a hand's width below the nail.

She stood a while, watching a moorhen make its jerky way along the far bank, and told herself what she always told herself: they had a generator, three freezers, a drug cupboard, a satellite phone that worked when it felt like it, and a hospice full of people who were not going anywhere anyway. The flood was an inconvenience, not a threat. Every autumn the road went under for a week or two and the world went on without them, and there was something in Rose that liked it. Something in her that stood on the causeway each October waiting for the water to close the door.

She went back to the house to start the day.

—

Dunfield House had eight beds and it was called a hospice, though what it actually was, legally, was a small charitable nursing home with a specialist palliative registration and a board of three trustees who met twice a year over a video call. It had been operating for twelve years. It took people who wanted to die without being saved.

That was the whole philosophy, and it was printed on nothing, advertised nowhere, and understood immediately by everyone who came. No crash team. No feeding tubes, no arterial lines, no last-ditch chemotherapy, no bright overhead light at three in the morning while a stranger drilled a cannula into the back of your hand. Pain relief when you asked for it and not a milligram when you didn't. Windows that opened. A cat, until last spring. Real food for as long as you could eat it. The right to be left alone.

People found it by word of mouth, the way people find anything that matters, and they came from as far as Newcastle, and their families either wept with gratitude or with fury, and Rose had learned to tell within thirty seconds which kind was standing in the hall.

She was not a nurse here. That was important. She had been a district nurse for sixteen years — Bristol, then Taunton, a Ford Fiesta with a boot full of dressings and a route of eleven housebound patients a day — and she had been good at it, and then her mother had died and she had not been anything at all for a while.

Maureen Wheeler had taken nine weeks to die on a mixed-sex ward on the fourth floor of a hospital Rose would not name even inside her own head. Bowel cancer, secondaries in the liver. Nine weeks. Rose had sat beside her for most of it and had watched her mother, who had once run a school kitchen and could carry two trays and a conversation at the same time, be processed. Moved twice in one night for bed management. Left in a corridor for four hours outside radiology in a gown that did not close at the back. Given a bowl of soup she could not lift and having it taken away untouched forty minutes later by a young man who wrote nil by mouth on the chart because that was easier than asking. Called by the wrong name. Called by no name. Assessed by a rotating cast of thirty-one different doctors, Rose counted, thirty-one, and not one of them ever sat down.

And at the end, when Rose had gone home for six hours to shower and sleep because a nurse had promised her there was time, her mother had died alone at twenty past four in the morning between the observation round and the drug round, and had lain there for an hour and a half before anybody noticed, and the ward sister had said, in a voice of genuine kindness, that at least she'd gone peacefully.

Rose had gone back to work eleven days later and had lasted five months. What ended it was not dramatic. She was in a bungalow in Bridgwater changing a leg dressing on a woman named Joyce, and Joyce asked her a perfectly ordinary question about the weather, and Rose found she could not answer, could not open her mouth, could not make her hands continue, and she sat down on the carpet of a stranger's front room and could not get up for two hours.

After that there was a diagnosis and some tablets and a stretch of months she remembered mainly as the sound of daytime television through a wall. Then, in an old-fashioned newsletter from a nursing charity she had never got round to unsubscribing from, an advertisement.

CARETAKER required, live-in, small rural hospice, Somerset Levels. Practical person. Solitary post. Must not mind the dark.

She had laughed at that last line and then read it four more times, and then she had applied.

Donald Bridger had interviewed her himself, in the drawing room, sitting very upright in a wing chair with his hands folded. He was seventy-one, London-based, with a silver moustache and the smooth, weightless courtesy of a man who has spent his life making other people feel accommodated. He asked her almost nothing about maintenance. He asked her about her mother. He listened without once looking away, and when she had finished he said, "Then you understand what this house is for," and offered her the job.

He visited once a quarter, always with a box of good coffee for the staff room and a manner that made everyone stand slightly straighter. He was not due again until December.

—

The kitchen at Dunfield was in the old servants' wing, low-ceilinged and warm, with a green Rayburn that Rose had personally rebuilt in February. Gail Truscott was at the table with the handover book open in front of her and a piece of toast she had not touched.

"Water's a hand off the nail," Rose said.

"So it begins." Gail did not look up. She was fifty-eight, broad-shouldered, with grey hair cut short as a nailbrush and reading glasses she refused to admit she needed, so she held the book at arm's length like it had insulted her. She had been head nurse at Dunfield since the day it opened. Twelve years, four hundred and some deaths, and Rose had never once seen her hurry. "I'll tell Bex to bring the milk order forward."

"Already texted her."

"Of course you have." Gail turned a page. "Mrs. Woolley had a bad night. Tamsin had her up twice, once at one, once at half four, both times trying to get out of bed to go and find her sister."

"Does she have a sister?"

"Had. Died in 1997." Gail took her glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Patrick's chest is a bit rattly. I've asked Dr. Prasad to look at him Thursday if the road's still there. Lewis is Lewis."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning he was in the day room at four in the morning with all the lights off, and when Tamsin asked him what he was doing he said he was listening."

Rose filled the kettle. "To what?"

"He didn't say. He gave her that look he does." Gail closed the book. "He's the worst kind of patient, that one. Clever, funny, and doesn't want anything from you. You end up giving him more than the ones who beg."

They were three, that October. Eight beds and three occupied, which was low, and the trustees had made noises about it in September.

Lewis Brooks was sixty-four, a retired veterinary surgeon from Frome, six foot two and now about nine stone, with a pancreatic tumour that had been inoperable at the moment of discovery and had spread to his liver by August. He had declined chemotherapy with what his oncologist's letter described as "unusual firmness." He still walked. He walked the corridors at all hours with one hand on the dado rail, wearing a burgundy dressing gown over pyjamas, and he read enormous hardbacks about polar expeditions and made dry, filthy jokes to Gail, who pretended to disapprove. He had no family that visited. There had been a wife; she had gone twenty years ago.

Patrick Kellow was forty-nine. He had taught geography at a comprehensive in Yeovil until three years ago, when he had started dropping the chalk. Motor neurone disease had taken him with the particular cruelty it saves for the young: he could not move anything below his neck. He could speak, still, though the words came slowly and with a wet effort that made listeners want to help and made Patrick furious when they did. He had a wife, Denise, who came every Sunday and sat holding his hand and talking about the garden, and two teenage sons who came once a month and stood in the doorway like boys outside a headmaster's office. He had a motorised wheelchair he drove with a chin-operated joystick, and he was extremely good at it, and he took corners in the corridor with the recklessness of a man who has very little left to break.

Mrs. Cath Woolley was eighty-two and had advanced dementia. She had been at Dunfield fourteen months, which was long for here, and she had come because two previous care homes had not been able to keep her from injuring herself — she climbed, she fell, she opened doors that should have been locked, and once, in Weston, she had walked three quarters of a mile in a nightdress before anyone noticed. Her son lived in Perth and rang on Sundays and asked the same four questions. She could not stand unaided any more. She talked all day in a low, busy murmur to people who were not in the room, and sometimes, very rarely, she surfaced, and looked at you with a clear grey eye and said something so exactly right that it made the back of your neck cold.

That was the house. Three patients, one head nurse, one night nurse — Tamsin Hopkins, twenty-nine, who drove in from Street and did four nights a week and vaped in the porch — two care assistants who came in from the village, Bex Yelland and her mother-in-law Marilyn Prowse, a cook three days a week, and Rose, who fixed things.

And the building. Which was the fourth patient, really, and the one Rose spent most of her time with.

—

After breakfast she went down to the basement to get a new roll of pipe lagging.

The basement at Dunfield was original, older than the house above it in places — you could see where the Georgian builders had simply built on top of something earlier and not bothered to explain themselves. It ran under the west wing only. Stone-flagged floor, barrel-vaulted ceiling in the corridor, brick arches, whitewash going the colour of tea. There was a boiler room, a wine cellar with nothing in it, and, at the far end, past a right-angle turn, the old servants' pantry.

The pantry was maybe twelve feet by fifteen, with a stone floor and a slate shelf running along two walls at waist height. Rose used it for storage: paint, lagging, spare bulbs, a Christmas tree in a bag, four hundred paper towels. It had a heavy door with a mortice lock and a deadbolt she had fitted herself last winter, because in an unlocked building full of confused people it was sensible to keep the room with the paint stripper in it shut.

She unlocked it, took her lagging, and stood a moment in the doorway.

The pantry was very quiet. That was normal; it was underground and the walls were three feet thick. It was also cold, which was also normal.

What was not normal — and she noticed it only as a faint wrongness, the way you notice a picture hanging a degree off true — was the smell. Not damp. Damp was the house's usual perfume. This was something else, very faint, sweetish, at the back of the nose rather than the front.

She sniffed, found nothing, decided it was the paint tins, and locked the door behind her.

On the way back up the stone stairs she passed Lewis Brooks coming down, one hand on the wall, his slippers whispering on the steps.

"There's nothing down there for you," she said.

"There's nothing anywhere for me, Rose. That's rather the point of my situation." He stopped two steps above her, breathing carefully. Up close his skin had the yellow undertone she had learned to read in a second. "I like the temperature down there. It's the only part of this house that doesn't feel like a waiting room."

"It's a cellar."

"Yes." He smiled. He had a wide, wolfish smile that must have been charming once and was now mostly teeth. "Have you ever noticed how the air moves in it?"

"It doesn't. There's no through draught."

"That's what I'd have said too." He looked past her, down the stairs, into the dark at the bottom. "And yet."

He went back up ahead of her, slowly, and she followed with the pipe lagging under her arm, and she did not think about it again for eleven days.

That night the rain started in earnest. It came in off the Bristol Channel and settled over the Levels like a hand pressing down, and Rose lay in her bed in the caretaker's cottage listening to it hammer the flat roof of the extension, and the water in the rhyne rose to the nail and covered it.