Finally, everything declared in order, the notary called all parties to attention. She was an Amazonian woman in a black leather jacket, skin-tight trousers, and high-heeled boots, who had a handshake that Sophie was sure could crush bones with ease. Terrified, she sheltered behind Anna’s capable and indomitable presence and watched silently as she slid closer and closer to doing something absolutely insane and complete unplanned. Two hours later, the contract was signed. Sophie stood outside the office in the full glare of the midday sun, reeling from the heat and shock.
She had a derelict three-hundred-year-old stone house in the Bay of Kotor and two months to find the money to pay for it.
Chapter 4
Sophie’s mother, on being told the news, reacted with horror.
‘Montenegro? A house? Oh, Sophie, what have you done? How can you even think of leaving the country at a time like this, when you are in such a state?’
The questions were not exactly rhetorical but nevertheless Sophie did not even attempt an answer. Appalled, Helena turned to coaxing rather than admonishing. ‘I’m sure you can still pull out. There must be a clause that can be invoked. You’ve got an English translation of the contract, haven’t you?’
Sitting on the sofa in her flat, her mother in the armchair opposite, Sophie pulled her knees towards her and hugged them protectively, momentarily shutting her eyes as she mustered the energy to reply.
‘I’m sorry, Mum; I know it’s a shock. I know you think I’ve gone crazy or I’m having some sort of breakdown. But I haven’t and I’m not.’
Helena was crying and at this last remark emitted a snorting hiccup. ‘But – then – why? You’ll be all alone there; you won’t have any of your family or friends around you. Why would you do that, after all you’ve been through?’
This was a hard question to answer, mainly because Sophie wasn’t sure herself why she had bought a house and decided to move – lock, stock, and barrel – to another country. She struggled for something to say, a way to put into words without hurting her mother further what it was that had motivated her to take such a drastic step. She could hardly tell her that she had gone with Anna’s belief that it was preordained; even in her befuddled state, she knew how ridiculous that would sound.
‘Now Matt has gone, I’ll be alone no matter where I am, Mum. I can’t go back to how it was before, can’t just sink into my old life again, minus Matt. The flat, my job, this area, walks on Hampstead Heath at the weekends; they all only mean something if Matt is doing them with me. I can’t see any way forward but to change everything.’
Helena considered this wordlessly for a while. She was pursing and unpursing her lips, a mannerism Sophie had never seen in her before. She knew how much she was tearing her mother’s heart apart and she didn’t want to do that – there was enough pain floating around without adding any more – but at the same time, she wasn’t going to change her mind.
‘But what will you do for money? How will you manage?’ The stupefaction that had halted Helena momentarily dissipated as further panic on Sophie’s behalf engulfed her. ‘You know how much you love your school, all those children you teach who really need you – you’re giving up a good, secure, steady job with a decent salary and a pension, and all for what?’
‘I’ve got enough to keep going for now. The offer on the flat is excellent, I won’t have a mortgage as it’s cheap over there still, and I’ll be changing my money at a fantastic rate.’ Sophie didn’t address the comments about leaving work. She would miss it, all of it: her colleagues, the buzz of a busy school, the energy. But at the same time, she knew she couldn’t cope with it now, and perhaps not for some time. ‘When the money runs out, I’ll – well, I’ll work out what to do then.’
‘I’ve never heard you even mention things like exchange rates before.’ Helena’s retort was sharp and harsh.
Sophie ignored the implication that she didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘No, well.’ She turned to look out of the window as she fought to quell the tears. ‘There are a lot of things I didn’t concern myself with while I had Matt to sort everything out. Now I’ve no choice but to engage with them.’ She paused to sniff, fumbling in her pocket for a tissue. ‘It’ll do me good. I was far too reliant on him. I didn’t take any responsibility. I should never have let myself become so dependent …’ Her words faded away as tears overwhelmed her.
Helena, too, was crying. Taking Sophie in her arms, she buried her face in her hair and held her tight. ‘I can’t stop you from doing what you want to do,’ she muttered finally, when she had regained enough composure. ‘You know I’ll always support you. I just can’t bear to lose you.’
***
Packing up Matt’s things was even more traumatic than Sophie had envisioned. His work suits, made to measure and much prized. His unobtrusive shirts, striped or plain, in white, blue, grey, and shades in between, that personified the muted elegance and intelligence of their owner. His cycling gear that seemed to carry the imprint of his body in the Lycra fibres of each soft, dark piece, which smelt not of him but of them, of their laundry powder and their togetherness.
She put them all in bags to take to the charity shop. It was decent stuff, in good condition. Someone would probably want it, would enjoy using it. A couple of things, his favourites and so her favourites, she kept. She could not get rid of everything.
His books, journals from law school together with the odd biography – Bradley Wiggins, Mr Nice – she stacked into boxes to keep in her parents’ garage until she decided what to do with them. Her own books she would store there, too, but she hoped she’d be able to ship them out to her new home at some point.
It was when this thought hit her that she stopped, mid-piling up of paperbacks, winded as if she’d been hit in the solar plexus. She felt sick at what she was doing, poleaxed by what she had set in motion and now did not have the power to halt. She was leaving everything and everyone and she realized, in a hot, livid flush, that Helena was right and she had made a terrible mistake.
But the flat was sold, she had already exchanged, and was due to complete any day now. The stone house was signed for and she would lose the thirty thousand euro deposit if she pulled out, let alone any fees if Mileva decided to sue for breach of contract. There was no turning back.
***
Once the flat no longer belonged to her, Sophie went to stay with Anna for a few days. She couldn’t leave the country yet as she needed to tie up all the paperwork from Matt’s death; it would be hard to do it from Montenegro. Crazy, lovely, irrepressible Anna lived in a huge, rambling house in Camden Town, a place that had been designated as short-life housing some time in the Eighties and then been ignored and neglected by the council ever since, apart from intermittent threats that it was about to be condemned or sold or auctioned or demolished. Anna had inherited her flat within it from her ex: the one thing he had given her, she always said, apart from a broken heart.
Though she couldn’t admit it, Sophie was finding it harder and harder to cope, unable to function with nothing to do, no schedule to keep to. The sleeplessness and night terrors were getting worse and she was exhausted. Perhaps they might go away if Anna and Tomasz were nearby, or at least recede enough to allow her a few hours’ rest.
For so many years her life had been dictated by the school year and now without it she was adrift on a sea of uncertainty, vaguely wafting to and fro with no purpose or direction. At the same time, she was glad she had resigned and, now that it was well into the autumn term, that she didn’t have to face the classroom every day, the scores of stroppy, hormonal, demanding teenagers, many with their own problems as bad or worse than hers. She knew she wouldn’t have got through it and, more to the point, would not have been a good teacher but instead a bad-tempered, impatient, ineffectual one.
There was one thought that preoccupied her, gliding in and out of her mind on an hourly basis. It was nearly three months since she’d had a period. She had hesitated
in front of the pharmacy several times in the last few weeks but not gone in and bought a test. The truth was that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be pregnant or not. She found herself negotiating the matter with Matt or God or fate or someone – she wasn’t really sure who.
‘I don’t mind not being pregnant if you just give him back to me,’ she would hear herself silently saying. ‘We’ll have plenty of chances for babies, all the time in the world, just let me have him back.’
There was never any answer, and she didn’t expect there to be. But she couldn’t stop the bargaining.
‘Did you know when you fell pregnant with Tomasz?’ she asked Anna one evening, amidst the chaos of Anna’s dining table, where you had to clear a space of post, newspapers, paint pots and brushes, mugs, toys, and books just to find room to put your elbows. Sophie didn’t tell her why she was asking. She knew she would not be able to withstand Anna’s insistence that she do the sensible thing and just buy a test, and she couldn’t face doing that right now.
‘As soon as he was conceived.’ Anna sighed happily at the memory, though it was not one of fantastic sex with a gorgeous man. Despairing of ever finding a life partner after being disappointed and let down once too often, Anna had conceived Tomasz as a single mother with the help of IVF and a sperm donor. Nevertheless, a pregnancy is a pregnancy however it occurs and Sophie didn’t feel pregnant at all.
‘How did you know?’ she pressed, insistently.
Anna shrugged. ‘I just did. Women know these things. You’ll know when you –’ Anna stopped, abruptly. ‘What I mean is, often people just … know it. That’s all,’ she continued, lamely.
Sophie looked into her cup of tea as if the leaves might have the answer. She couldn’t be pregnant, then, if she were so uncertain. And if she wasn’t now, she never would be. The bargain hadn’t been accepted, because there didn’t seem to be a baby and there wasn’t Matt, either.
Tomasz wandered in, halfway to bed, the ankle-skimming legs of his pyjamas marking his latest growth spurt. Sophie ruffled his white-blond hair as he passed. She had him, her godchild. She would always have Tomasz to love. He would be enough.
Realistically, even if she had ever been carrying a child, or the very beginnings of a child, she couldn’t be any more. Surely such extreme emotion, such terror and shock as she had experienced, would have killed it off? What minuscule bunch of cells could survive such trauma? And then giving those cells no nutrition, so many days and weeks passing when she could hardly swallow anything down without gagging, even if she bothered to get round to trying, would only have contributed to the harm. But still – at the back of her mind resided the possibility of a baby.
Despite Sophie’s gratitude for Anna and Tomasz’s company, their house was anything but restful. Sophie had not accounted for the constant comings and goings, or the casual droppings-in of the motley collection of inhabitants who occupied the other floors. On her last evening, it was even more hectic than usual; there were visits from the sound recordist downstairs who wanted Anna’s opinion on a new jingle he’d written, the penniless playwright in the attic who needed her to comment on the authenticity of a Polish character he had created, and the ‘self-employed’ (euphemism for unemployed) hipster from the flat in between who came to borrow a teabag and stayed ‘for a chat’ for three hours.
When she did finally get to bed, Sophie sank under the covers with a huge sigh of relief. She found herself longing for the stone house on the waterfront, for the peace, quiet, and solitude that awaited her there.
Chapter 5
The airport was heaving, despite the fact that it was late October and only 5 a.m. Sophie remembered that it was half-term and she couldn’t believe that after all her years of teaching she’d forgotten that it always fell at this time of year. Weaving her way through torrents of men, women, and children pulling suitcases with thunderous wheels or loaded down with bags dripping from every arm and shoulder, she fought back rising waves of panic.
The intermittent announcements rang out across the terminal building, shattering her nerves. Apart from the last few days at Anna’s, she had been living silently since Matt’s death, not listening to TV nor radio, not travelling on the tube, not going to work where there was constant noise and bustle.
The flight was uncomfortable, as she was crammed into the budget airline seat that was far too upright to make rest, let alone sleep, possible. The little girl seated next to her became fractious and had to be bribed with chocolate, which led to a predictable messy, sticky outcome. Sophie felt anaesthetized to it all, not caring about the child’s cries or her liberal distribution of smears of chocolate that constantly threatened Sophie’s own book and cardigan. What did it matter? What did anything matter?
Now that the denial and the desperate bargaining were over, she was starting to feel angry – searing, entrenched fury coursing corrosively through her veins. She was enraged with Matt for not taking care of his health and therefore bringing upon himself the aneurysm that had killed him. The reports on his death had come through and a massive, catastrophic bleed to the brain had been diagnosed as the cause.
But her wrath was tinged with guilt; Matt had been complaining of headaches and she had not given it much heed, advising him to take an ibuprofen and get an early night. It had seemed to Sophie that headaches were inevitable with the hours he worked and the stress he was under and she had tried to mitigate both with good, nutritious food and lots of love. But it hadn’t, in the end, been either of these things that he had needed. He should have been having proper medical treatment, MRI scans, and consultant’s appointments, not lamb tagine with couscous or something healthy with aubergine from Deliciously Ella and so, as well as her anger at him, she was incandescent at herself. She could have averted this tragedy but she hadn’t and now it was too late.
Eventually, after what seemed like days of travelling rather than hours, Sophie arrived in the village that was to be her home, and found that she could only look around and think that Matt would have loved it, too; that they should have been embarking on this new adventure together, not just her, alone, pretending she could cope. On entering the house, she found it was even stiller and more silent than when she had first seen it in the summer, its contents fossilized by age and neglect.
She meandered from room to room, picking up objects that lay on tables or shelves, and putting them back down again. Everything was covered in dust, layers of it, so thick it turned her fingers grey and made them feel gritty and sticky to the touch, setting her teeth on edge like the scratch of fingers on a blackboard. She could have been a decaying Miss Havisham, moving among the sordid remnants of her misery. It occurred to Sophie that she must be the only person she’d ever met who’d bought a house on one viewing. Her impulsion, without Matt to temper it, had really landed her in it this time.
In each hushed chamber, the shutters were closed and barred, letting in only the smallest chinks of light. She found her breath coming in great heaving sighs. Her emotions had been oscillating so wildly since Matt’s death that she had almost got used to going from normality to despair to agony in the space of a few minutes and on an hourly basis. But now the feeling of wanting him hit her so hard that she physically could not stand. She sank down onto one of the heavy, dark pieces of furniture, her head in her hands. She had underestimated what a wreck the house was, how much work would be needed to make it properly habitable.
The three rooms Mileva had used were more or less all right but everything else was in rack and ruin: filthy, floorboards soft and rotten from some previous roof leak, and riddled with woodworm. Bits of lino covered the worst areas but on her first journey up the stairs with her heavy suitcases she put her foot straight through one tread and it was clear that they all needed replacing. How could she do this without Matt? She couldn’t even deal with the washing machine filter.
She went to the window and opened it, taking deep, gulping mouthfuls of fresh air. It was this view that had
captivated her in the summer, that had seemed to break the cycle of her despair, her inability to look after herself, her refusal to leave her flat. But the sunshine was pale and watery now, with none of the brilliance it had had in August. Sophie was not sorry; she had no use for brightness, for the light that exposed her so cruelly to all that she had lost.
A noise from outside alerted her to the fact that one of her neighbours was out and about. It was followed by a firm rapping at the front door. She started, feeling a cold flush of fear run through her. Quickly, she drew closed the wooden shutters, and the dust-smeared window, and bolted them firm. She could not face anyone, could not talk to anyone, did not want to have to try to engage with a single other human being. Contact frightened her just now.
Momentarily paralysed, she rested her forehead against the grimy windowpane, struggling to regain control. Then she rallied, took a deep breath, and forced herself onwards. She went to the rudimentary kitchen to make coffee, hoping the sharp, strong hit of caffeine would bolster up her heart and her will.
There was no kettle, but she found an old, battered saucepan and a chipped china mug with Crna Gora written on it. She went to the sink to fill the pan. The tap spouted with a pressure never known to Thames Water, spraying malevolently in all directions, instantly drenching her top and the waistband of her jeans.
She was soaked, and freezing. There was winter in the air and in the temperature, a winter she would face alone in this huge old stone house with no central heating – and she had absolutely no idea why she had done this and what had brought her here. Except the yearning to be free, to start over, to be that long-gone sixteen-year-old who had not yet met the love of her life, married him, and lost him, much too young and much too soon.
Shivering uncontrollably, Sophie waited for the pan to boil painstakingly slowly. She took her overfilled mug, spilling a trail of coffee along the bare-boarded corridor as she went, and made her way to the dilapidated door into the garden. Furtively glancing around her, checking for signs of anyone about, she slipped up the snaking path that led through the unkempt grass and weeds to the top terrace. Up there, she was safe from encounters with anyone.
Under an Amber Sky Page 4