A couple of rusted old iron chairs stood beneath a huge, sprawling pomegranate tree – who had put them there, and when, she had no idea – and beside them, an old, rotting stump made the perfect table. She sat down and looked towards the water. Though the tourist season was well and truly over, there were still a couple of boats on the water, white triangles of sails against an expanse of blue. Gradually, the small amount of warmth still remaining in the sun’s rays countered Sophie’s chill and dried her clothes.
As she grew more comfortable, Sophie began to retrace in her head the events of that summer that had brought her to be here now. It still did not feel real, was like a dream or a life that was happening to someone else. She could hardly fathom how any of it had come about, or how it would all end. She felt like someone after the apocalypse, just surviving, trying to get by, not contemplating the future because the future was too dreadful to behold.
That awful day when she had run back into the hospital, heart heaving out of her chest, bile rising in her throat and tears streaming down her cheeks, of course she had not found Matt alive and well. He had been dead, cold. She had been surprised, on viewing his body, how though it resembled him and had all of his facial features – his brown hair and hazel eyes and brown, slanting eyebrows – it had absolutely not been him. Matt had not been there, just the body of Matt, a vessel that he had used throughout his time on earth and had now cast aside, no longer needing it.
Instead, Matt was everywhere, all around her, beside her, in front and behind her. And he was in her mind and her body. Sophie had known then that, though he had gone, he would always be with her. It’s just that that wasn’t enough. She wanted him, the real him, with his caution and introspection that countered her impulsiveness, with his practical hands that could fix and mend and soothe and protect, with his searing intellect and inability to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. She wanted him, needed him, but couldn’t have him.
Sophie stayed outside for a long time, gazing at the mountains, watching as the sun slid away behind them, the last rays melting from the highest peaks, leaving behind the heavy dusk. Reluctantly, chilled again to the bone, she got up and went back to the house. Inside, she opened the biggest of her two suitcases – she had paid for extra baggage – and pulled out first a warm jumper and next the clean, fresh white bed linen she had carefully packed.
She made up the old bed with the creaking springs and huge, dark, wooden head and end boards, placing her much-loved pure wool blanket, a gift from Matt, on top. Looking at it she could tell that it wasn’t going to be nearly enough. The nippy evening air was creeping in through the walls and it was getting steadily colder.
She got her phone out of her bag and began to make a list in the notes. She had hired a car for a week so that she could drive around and buy all the essentials that she would need in her new home, and she put an extra warm duvet, kettle, and toaster at the top of the list. Glancing around her, she added dustpan and brush, broom, mop, cleaning liquids, and large bucket.
She was hungry and thought about going to the mini-market along the bay and buying some food but she couldn’t be bothered. The konoba right next door was closed for the winter already; it wouldn’t reopen until April at the earliest. She had half a bag of cashew nuts in the bottom of her handbag and she nibbled half-heartedly on those in lieu of a proper meal.
She had not slept well for days, weeks, and the flight had been so disgustingly early that she decided to go to bed, even though it was only 7.30. In preparation, she got out her torch, pleased with herself for remembering such an essential. There was working electricity in these rooms that Mileva had used on the first floor but no bedside lights.
She laughed to herself sarcastically at the thought. Did she think she was staying in some luxury hotel as she would have been with Matt? No, those days were long gone. She wasn’t exactly poor, but she needed to watch her money. The good thing was that here, apart from what would have to go on the house, there wasn’t much to spend one’s money on.
She placed her book on the pillow beside the torch; she would read herself to sleep. She changed into her pyjamas and went to the kitchen sink – the only tap – to clean her teeth. Turning it on, forgetting the force of the water, she soaked herself again. Now she could not stop the tears coming. She took off the wet garments and got under the sheets shivering, then, realizing this was not going to work, got back up and dressed fully: leggings, long-sleeved T-shirt, polo neck jumper. She longed for Matt’s warm body, for his embrace, for his strong caress on her softness.
She needed him so badly, needed Matt and not Matt’s ghost.
It was another bad night’s sleep. Sophie was spooked by noises on the stairs, voices in the street that seemed to be loitering outside her windows, strange bangings and thumpings that she could not figure out the origin of. She had spent so few nights alone since her marriage to Matt ten years before. In the darkness, the anger coursed through her veins anew. How could he? How could he have left her; how dare he?
And then it dissipated again, immediately, in a flood of repentance for her evil thoughts, which were even more insidious than the gushing water of the broken washing machine or the overenthusiastic tap. It couldn’t be true, that he would never lie beside her again, would never hold her in his arms or make love to her, would never kiss her neck and forehead and lips as he had done so many, many times over all the years. Surely it couldn’t be true.
When she did finally sleep, as the cold light of dawn was creeping around the sides of the wooden shutters and the spectres of the night seemed finally to be vanquished, she dreamt of Matt. He was walking towards her across the lawn at her parents’ house, laughing, unable to believe that she had really thought him to be dead, asking her how she could ever have conceived of the idea that he would leave her.
She felt so relieved, even as she slumbered she could feel the tension and anxiety pour out of her, could hear herself sighing at the release of all the trauma she had been holding tight inside. Matt wasn’t dead; of course he wasn’t. In the dream, a new worry took hold – how was she going to explain away her resignation from work? The funeral? People would think she was a terrible fraud; how could she have made such a mistake as to think her husband had died?
She woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed, her hair hanging in lumpy strands across her face. She reached out across the bed, wanting to touch Matt to make sure he was really there. The covers were flat and cold. She flung herself forward, reaching out with her hands, feeling all around for his warm, muscular body. Nothing. Her eyes had adjusted to the light now. There was no one beside her. Apart from her, the bed was completely empty. The dream was a cruel illusion.
Matt’s absence, his death, was the cold, hard reality.
Chapter 6
Over the next few weeks, Sophie survived, but only just. She knew she was not eating enough, doing enough, sleeping enough. Everything was scant. When she did eat, she found herself unable to sit down and instead snacked on the hoof, wandering restlessly from room to room, concentrating on not letting the food make her retch. When she attempted chores, she did them half-heartedly, never quite getting anything finished, never totally eradicating the layers of dust that coated everything. When she slept, she felt that she was always just beneath the surface, never in a deep sleep, never comatose the way she wanted to be.
And then what was bad anyway got even worse. A dull ache in her belly heralded the arrival of her period, and the understanding that there would be no baby. She was not pregnant. The heavy, dragging pain, much worse than she had ever experienced before, receded gradually as the days passed in equal proportion to the tightening of the band of misery around her chest.
She had thought that a heart already in pieces could not shatter any further but now she understood that it could. The disappointment melded with her grief and became indistinguishable from it and she was mourning, in addition to her husband, a baby that never was.
He
r self-imposed isolation was, for the most part, complete. But every day, an old man would come wandering along the bay, from which property Sophie knew not, and take up a perch on the large flat bollard on the pier in front of her house. Slowly, he would lay out an array of plastic containers, unravel his fishing line from the rod, bait the hook, and start fishing. He was exceptionally old, Sophie was sure – his wrinkled face, bent posture, and pure white hair and beard testified to that – but he seemed hale and hearty. He wore a red woolly bobble hat that gave him a more than passing resemblance to a jolly, though skinny, Santa Claus.
She would watch him from her window, see the prodigious amounts of fish he seemed to always catch. If she happened to come out when he was there, he would invariably strike up a conversation, engaging her in voluble streams of utter incomprehensibility. She would stand, arms held helplessly by her sides indicating her inability to understand a word.
He liked to press rakija upon her, and she would politely take the minutest sip, feeling the burn down her throat and the instant warming of her stomach as she did so. The only thing she consistently refused were the fruits of his catch that he urged her to take; she had no idea how to clean or gut a fish and no intention of learning. But strangely, over the days and weeks that passed, far from dreading these encounters she started to enjoy them. It was oddly calming not to have to say anything, just to nod and smile and shake her head, following his lead as to which would be the most appropriate of these gestures.
The man, name unknown, felt like a friend, and she didn’t have any others out here. He was utterly unperturbed by her lack of response or engagement and carried on talking regardless until, eventually, Sophie would say do videnja (goodbye) loudly several times and then make her escape.
Her mother and Anna phoned regularly; Kotor was generously equipped with free Wi-Fi so calls, whether video or not, were easily made if she was in town. Other than that she had little contact with anyone from home. Friends and acquaintances had melted away in the aftermath of Matt’s death, embarrassed perhaps by Sophie’s raw grief, unable or unwilling to find a way through it so opting for absence instead. It felt as if she had moved to another planet rather than another country in Europe.
Gradually, the weeks slid by and winter set in; on these short days, the sun barely reached the tops of the mountains before disappearing, leaving behind the gathering dusk and long December nights.
Christmas was not far off and Sophie had already decided she wouldn’t spend it in England. It was the season that she and Matt had both adored. They’d met at the school Christmas disco – the one event a year when the girls’ and boys’ establishments had come together. It had been love at first sight; they’d kissed under the mistletoe on New Year’s Eve just two weeks later and done so every year since, secure in the certainty of their devotion.
They would each prepare the other a stocking full of presents to open on Christmas morning, always just the two of them together, never sharing this so special of moments. Sophie would make by hand as many as she could: baking little packages of the shortbread biscuits that Matt so loved, embroidering socks with his initials and L for left and R for right so that he always knew which were a pair, sewing a fabric roll in which to store his cufflinks.
Doing her shopping now, just the smell of the tangerines, redolent with memories of magical Christmases past, assaulted her and sent her flying for the supermarket exit as if under fire. She knew that the scent of pine needles, of burning candle wax, of central heating newly turned on in rooms long left empty, would destroy her. The only way to survive the so-called festive season without Matt was to ignore it, to pretend it was not happening. And to stay here in Montenegro, where the memories might hurt but would not kill.
Instead, her parents came and took her to a small hotel in a town further down the coast, near the Albanian border. It was even more suitable than Sophie had imagined as the population was predominantly Muslim so Christmas barely featured. The weather was beautiful, sunshine most days, and they walked around the cobbled streets and down to watch the boats in the harbour, or along the wide, windswept beach where the seabirds wheeled in a white-blue sky.
In the evenings, they retired to one of their bedrooms to watch the box sets Helena had brought out, the many series that Sophie had missed and her mother claimed to want to watch even though Sophie knew that she didn’t, but just didn’t want her to be sitting alone and brooding.
One evening, Helena ran her a bath and Sophie, against the instructions of her mother who was continually anxious about her mental state, locked the bathroom door. Undressing, she saw that she’d been wearing her jumper inside out all day. She was always doing that, on work days getting ready in the dark so as not to disturb Matt as she left so much earlier in the morning than him, putting things on in haste to get out of the door and into school early so that she could finish some marking or do some printing. Matt, who might have blearily surfaced to say goodbye to her and make coffee, would call her back to turn her top around or even, once, her skirt.
That must have been another Sophie though, she thought now, reclining in the bubbles, the Sophie who had been living a make-believe grown-up life with her perfect husband and lovely home. Now she was the child Sophie again, being looked after by her mum, the life she’d had with Matt erased in one short afternoon.
She lay in the bath until the water was stone cold. She was shivering but couldn’t get out, didn’t have the strength either mental or physical to haul herself up and scale the sides of the pure white tub. It was only when Helena’s rapping on the door became increasingly urgent that she suddenly lurched upwards and stood, spraying water in all directions, before grabbing her towel and roughly drying herself, teeth chattering.
A time when she might feel normal, be normal, seemed further away than ever. She knew that her mother was longing to kidnap her, to bind her up and smuggle her back to England. She knew she was being obstinate in staying.
***
It was only on her return to the stone house in January that Sophie remembered the box with the letters. What had happened to it? It was no longer in the bureau and her perfunctory attempts to tidy up had not revealed it. She felt a stab of pain and loss – another thing she longed for but could not have. She turned the house upside down but couldn’t find it. Mileva must have taken the box with her after all.
Disappointment over the loss of the mysterious letters combined with the onset of the long, lonely weeks of deepest winter induced a fresh apathy in Sophie. Instead of fresh beginnings, the new year brought grey skies and Biblical rivers of rain. It shattered onto the mountains and cascaded downwards, surging through dense undergrowth and past fig, pomegranate, and citrus trees, sometimes uprooting them and bringing them with it.
The rainwater gully beside the house ran full and the drains on the streets overflowed, sending sheets of water across the tarmac to fall purposefully into the sea. Mountain springs ran fresh and hard and, at various places around the bay, winter waterfalls sprang up, blossoming and billowing, barely able to contain the quantities of rain that fell, day after day. One long, sleepless night Sophie stood at the window and watched whilst lightning split the sky as if Zeus himself were in residence.
In these January evenings, after the watery sun had set, a profound cold descended on the bay, clinging to the stone floors and walls of the old house, curling itself into every nook and cranny. Sophie felt chilled to her core. In one of the ground-floor konobas – a word meaning taverns as well as storage rooms– she found a small stash of firewood; it was bone dry, signifying it had been there for some time. Presumably no one had visited outside of the summer months for years. In the first-floor sitting room was an open fire, a monstrosity built into the corner of the room and taking up a huge amount of unnecessary space.
Sophie wondered if the chimney was clear, if it had ever been swept. She peered up it, narrowing her eyelids instinctively against any falling soot. She could see nothing, not
the merest chink of sky, not the faintest glimmer of daylight. For a few days, she sat and shivered, going to bed early in an attempt to keep herself warm. And then the cold got the better of her and she lit the fire anyway and to hell with it if there were a chimney blaze. At least she wouldn’t freeze.
She had nothing with which to entertain herself or pass the long, empty hours except her Kindle. She would go into town to the internet café and load up books on it, book after book, in all genres including those she had never read before – fantasy, sci-fi, romance – then go back to the stone house, light the fire and read.
Every now and again her reading would be interrupted by tears that crept insidiously up on her and began to inch out of her eyes and run down her cheeks, dropping onto the screen and blurring the words. Sometimes she indulged the crying. At other times she tried to stop it. At still others, she could do nothing but curl up on the oversized beanbag she’d bought from one of the furniture stores on the road to Budva and mourn everything she had lost.
Apart from that beanbag, almost nothing in the house was new or hers. Everything was what Mileva had left behind: her antique bed with towering head and end boards, her fraying sofa, and Sixties-style table with two chairs. Sophie was living in the past, but whose past it was often evaded her.
Chapter 7
The hours, days, and weeks went by, melding into one, forming a huge vacuum inside which Sophie flailed and floundered. And then February came, and with it one of the rarest occurrences in coastal Montenegro. Sophie woke early one morning and immediately sensed the quiet stillness that snow brings. Shivering in her cotton pyjamas, she flung open her window and stood, wonderstruck, at the sight she beheld.
Under an Amber Sky Page 5