The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Don’t keep saying it, please,’ she said. ‘I get the message.’

  This was a guest room, she thought as she drew his body against her own; not the room he shared with his wife. Someone – his wife, probably, or perhaps an interior designer – someone had once stood in the doorway and looked at the empty space and thought, Blue and white, that’s what I want. Like a house by the sea is supposed to look. In the bathroom there were probably white towels embroidered with fish motifs or perhaps anchors; a length of weathered rope for a handrail; a framed old photo of the village from the days when people covered themselves from head to toe for a visit to the beach, travelling en vacances by steam train; an oar with hooks to hang your clothes on.

  But she was getting carried away now.

  ‘Before you get rid of me,’ she murmured, ‘do you even know my name?’

  ‘Of course I know your name. It is Tabitha.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Occasionally, since parting ways with Paul, she had used a different name, not because of any fear of entanglement or to conceal any crime, but because you could do things like that when everything was impermanent, when you were itinerant. You could use any name you liked because no one cared what your real name was; you could do it if only to see if it would change the story you told afterwards, or the actions you next decided to take.

  But she’d used her real name with this man; not even Tabby, but her full name, one that she associated with teachers and step-parents and border patrol officials. She must have wanted to impress him. The thought made her arch her torso more urgently, not so much in desire as in gratitude.

  The taxi driver spoke no English and she didn’t care to reveal her passable French just yet and expose herself to conversation. He knew he was delivering her ‘over the bridge’, but she would wait until the last possible minute before deciding which mode of transport she would pretend to be taking while knowing full well she could not afford to take it. And she could not face the humiliation of admitting that she was not sure where she was.

  It was a beautiful place, wherever it was, remote and low-lying, the land flattened as if by the light itself, which was yellow and colossal, the vast sky wobbling with it. She squinted into the blue as she sought road signs with place names.

  The first, Les Portes-en-Ré, had the diagonal red line through the words that meant they were leaving the village behind. Soon, a pattern had developed: Ars-en-Ré, Loix-en-Ré, Saint-Martin-de-Ré. They were in Ré, or on Ré, because one minute the water appeared in one direction and the next a seawall rose into view in another: a peninsula or an island, then. The bridge must connect it with the mainland.

  Ré. Her brain had returned to full working order and she knew she had never heard of the place when her man – Grégoire, it had come to her just as they said goodbye – had proposed the trip, for he had been going to spend the weekend in his holiday home, arriving a day earlier than his family in order to meet with an artisan about his leaking roof. And why should she have heard of it? It was not on the checklist of the budget traveller, but clearly the location of expensive properties owned by people like him, Parisians, rich, established ones for whom weekend tranquillity was a birthright.

  Presumably it was only in weaker moments that an interloper was picked up at the station and offered a bed for the night.

  At last, after a smooth stretch between dark wood and flat field, the ribbon of sea visible once more on the left, she saw the bridge. It was a mile or so away, a long, curving black spine that made her think of the tail of a dinosaur, and in the distance, on the far shore, there were industrial buildings, cranes and huge ships. The parting village, by contrast, was delightfully small-scale, the water of its bay still and shining and massed with seagulls. The taxi passed a smart hotel weatherboarded in grey, a pier with sculptures on it, an expensive-looking boulangerie with terrace furniture in ice-cream pastels… Forget weekend tranquillity, Tabby thought, this was a place you might choose to live permanently if you had the luxury of choice.

  ‘Stop,’ she told the driver, and he did so without argument.

  She had been given fifty euros by Grégoire for the taxi, the driver wanted twenty for the aborted trip, so she was up thirty on yesterday. Beyond this she had only her last loose change, the coins she might fish from the folds of her luggage.

  She retraced her route to the hotel they’d passed and found in the lobby a map of France by which she was at last able to locate herself: Rivedoux-Plage on the Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle. It was about halfway down the Atlantic coast, south-west of Paris, north-west of Bordeaux. Calais was several hours away and Saint-Malo, which she knew had ferry services to England, was half as near. She refused to think of the distances to either in terms of hitchhiking.

  At the reception desk, she asked how much the cheapest room was for a night.

  ‘One hundred and twenty euros.’ They had entered high season at Easter, the girl pointed out, which pushed the price up. Tabby only faintly recalled Easter, for one of the strange things about travelling was that you had no relationship with bank holidays or long weekends or annual festivals. You drifted through the calendar as you drifted across the map.

  In any case, the tariff might as well have been one thousand and twenty euros as far as she was concerned.

  She changed her approach: did they happen to have any job vacancies at the hotel?

  ‘What sort of work can you do?’

  ‘Any sort. Bar work. Cleaning. I could be a chambermaid?’

  The receptionist shook her head. ‘But there are many more hotels and restaurants in La Flotte and Saint-Martin. You should try there.’

  She gave Tabby a tourist map and a bus schedule. The next bus for the proposed villages, which were back the way she’d come, was not due for an hour and so she began to walk along the main road, soon detouring along cycle paths through the pine woods she’d earlier passed in the taxi. She felt strangely fearless, charmed, like a character from a fairy tale, safe from the wolf’s eyes thanks to some invisible protector. No one knows I’m here, she thought, enjoying the sensation of secrecy and solitude. I am completely alone. Free to start again.

  As a waitress or a chambermaid, if she was lucky.

  She reached La Flotte. It was a larger place than Rivedoux, with a pretty port, cobbled quayside and windswept promenade. No doubt life here was busy by its own standards, but it ran at a fraction of the pace she’d been used to in Paris and the other cities that had come before. There were, however, dozens of bars, cafés and hotels and she tried every one she came to, only to find that none needed an English worker with broken French.

  Flagging, she continued to Saint-Martin, the capital village, but by now her legs and spirits ached too much for her to resume her search straight away. Besides, the port here was intimidating in its smartness, its bistros and art galleries reminding her of the chi-chi neighbourhoods of Paris that had had no place for the likes of her – and with rows of pristine yachts and speedboats to reinforce the divide. She sat on a bench on the waterfront and watched the people, out-of-season tourists, some in furs and designer sunglasses, with pre-schoolers wearing coats more costly than any she’d ever owned. Thirty euros was not going to buy a hotel room here, either, and only a miracle would produce any sort of hostel. She was going to have to make alternative arrangements.

  ‘Alternative arrangements’: how coy that sounded! She’d never done it before, slept rough. Two Australian guys she had met in Paris had said they’d done it all the time on a Greek trip the previous summer, and they made it sound like camping without a tent. You stayed up as late as you could bear, they said, then kipped in some secret nook for a few hours until sunrise, which was all very well in August and with old fishing boats strewn conveniently at the foot of sheltering cliffs, but did it work on the Atlantic in the first week of May, too? Would she be at risk of hypothermia or, in a place like this, police arrest? Instinct told her to head from the exposed and populated edges of the island to its
empty interior: what about the woods she’d passed through, might there be a little hut or barn she could slip into there? The thought was half-hearted, however. The hours remaining till dusk might be shrinking fast but she still clung to the belief that something would save her before they disappeared completely. Something.

  Thirty euros. She wasn’t a vagrant yet.

  Hungry, she struck off from the waterside and into the pedestrianised heart of the town in search of a boulangerie or supermarket. She bought a small stick of bread and settled halfway up a street of souvenir shops to eat it straight from the paper sleeve, her backpack at her feet. It was not high season, no, but there were numbers of shoppers. She watched one group come out of the nearby linen shop, tried to imagine how it must feel to be on holiday here and not near-destitute, up on your luck and not down, with the money – and the desire – to buy table runners and bathmats, cushion covers and oven gloves. For the twentieth time, she wondered what she had in her pack that she might sell.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, come on!’

  Her attention was caught by the sound of English being spoken – and in clear annoyance. Just a few feet away, down a narrow passageway to Tabby’s left, a woman was standing at a green door, stabbing with her index finger at the security pad on the wall, saying letters and numbers aloud in what was evidently an attempt to remember the correct entry code. She cursed when she got it wrong a second time, gaining access only at her third attempt (‘B one one nine oh three N, thank you…’), and the sound of her native, unaccented tongue released in Tabby the same peculiar flare of emotion that came with catching your favourite song in an unexpected place: here, at last, was hope! She could knock on the door and ask this woman for help, ask to borrow some money, one Englishwoman to another. But that was absurd. Why would anyone, compatriot or otherwise, lend a stranger money?

  No, she needed to find a public phone, ring her bank in the UK and beg for a last extension to her overdraft, enough to get her home and into someone’s spare room (anyone’s but her mother’s and stepfather’s), enough to feed herself while she looked for a job, any job that paid because beggars could not be choosers and she was a beggar. She had to admit that here, in the cobbled and picturesque streets of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, she had come to the end of the line.

  She finished her bread and wondered how much a bottle of water would cost in this town. It would be more prudent to get tap water for free. She needed the toilet, too, would set about finding a public one or a café that would let her use its facilities without requiring her to buy a drink.

  Down the alleyway, the woman had reappeared at her door, now carrying a backpack of the size you took on to planes to avoid checking in luggage. She pulled the door shut and hurried to the corner, head down, giving Tabby no more than a glimpse of drab-yellow anorak and the bleached ends of a head of cropped mouse-brown hair. She turned uphill in the direction of the church, leaving town, Tabby supposed idly. Imagine leaving a great place like this by choice, to go back to Britain! But she was forgetting that this was what normal people did. They came to the end of their holiday and had a home to return to, one they looked forward to seeing again, however restful the trip. Or, if they lived here, then they had jobs to hold down and places to be. They would come and go.

  Leaving town… Places to be… Come and go.

  To her credit, there was a civilised interval before the bad idea struck. When it did it caused as much revulsion as it did excitement, followed by the sensation of having been relieved of command of herself, of acting outside her own jurisdiction. And then, indecently quickly, it took hold of her completely.

  B11903N.

  She stepped into the alleyway towards the green door and without risking a glance to either side of her she keyed into the pad the same sequence of letters and numbers she’d heard said a few minutes earlier. There was an affirmative click, and when she pushed at the door it gave way. She slipped quickly through the gap with her eyes down, pushed the door silently behind her, then stood facing it for several seconds, waiting and listening. The weightless sensation had gone and now her lungs squeezed, painful and arrhythmic, like bellows operated by a lunatic, jolting an explanation from her. What are you doing? What on earth are you doing?

  She turned and looked ahead of her. A short passageway drew her into a small, dark ground-floor room with two shuttered windows and a glass door, which appeared to open on to a sliver of outside space too narrow for any furniture and shaded from the sun by a tall brick wall. There was a galley kitchen along the far wall, the units in a state of near-dilapidation, the worktop disorderly but clean enough. The sight of a single mug on the draining board reignited her thirst and she went straight to the tap and drank, returning the mug to its spot and looking about from her new vantage point. There were two small sofas by the fireplace, both ancient and fraying, an oval dining table with cheap cane chairs and various other junk-shop pieces: lamps, books, all the furnishings of a modest home. In the right-hand corner of the room there were stairs: so it was a house, a small, cavernous one, hidden from the street, open to the light only at the back.

  Right, she thought, think. The place did not appear to be any kind of holiday unit and even if it was the woman had left possessions about the place and so could not have checked out. Best-case scenario: she lived in England and used the house only occasionally (why else could she have needed three attempts to get the code right?); she had left for the airport (hence the carry-on bag) and was returning home, perhaps not coming back again until summer. Tabby could stay here for weeks, come and go using the code, not catch anyone’s eye, not answer any questions. It wouldn’t matter if the electricity supply had been turned off, she needed only water which she already knew she had.

  She tested the lights: working.

  Worst-case scenario: the woman would be back in five minutes, having gone to the gym or to the shop to pick up dinner. There could be any number of explanations why a person might choose to leave her house at five o’clock in the afternoon with a medium-sized bag, and relatively few involved fleeing the country. Whoever she was, she was here alone, for the items about the place came singly: one bike propped against the wall, one pair of wellington boots by the door, one jacket and one fleece on the coat hooks; that lone mug on the draining board.

  Tabby took the stairs, moving on soft feet like the prowler she was, careful not to scuff walls with her pack. There were two bedrooms, and from the door of the larger one she noted the handful of items on the chest of drawers – a leather-bound notebook, a small bottle of perfume (an upmarket English brand, bluebell, less than half left), a laptop of a size and manufacturer that made it, even to her uneducated eye, out of date. Tucked into the corner of a wood-framed mirror was a postcard of a painting, a swirl of red and pink, one of very few personal touches in the room. But she had no wish to touch and snoop: she was too tired and, besides, she had some principles. That made her smile, and the sensation of smiling in a situation like this – finding it funny! – brought on a deep sense of unreality.

  If she couldn’t trust her own responses, could she trust that this was actually happening and not playing inside her mind as she snoozed in the sun somewhere?

  Her need for the loo was real enough and she used the one next to the bathroom, willing the sound of the flush to fade quickly, in case the woman came back. She thought, I should get out of this place, forget I was ever here. No one will ever know I was.

  But fatigue was taking her in the opposite direction, up a run of three stairs and towards the door of a second bedroom at the rear. It was less spacious than the first, no larger than the cabin of a boat, and was furnished with only a small double bed under the window, a chest of drawers and a stool. It looked as if no one had stepped into the room for months. She pulled the door to behind her, not quite closing it, and sat on the bed.

  Her second guest room of the day, her second stranger’s bed. Though neatly made, the covers and pillowcase had the damp coldness of fabric not touche
d or turned for a long time.

  She laid herself on top of them and closed her eyes. Even in this context, her last waking thought was of him, Paul.

  Dreamlessness ended with physical touch: she was being shaken. There was a rough clutch on her left shoulder and hot breath on her face, and she could feel the anger in both.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my house?’ The words were in English at first, frantic and involuntary, and then repeated in French.

  Tabby opened her eyes properly. It was the woman she’d seen in the street, of course, her wan English skin flushed, dark eyes ablaze with fear. The light in the house had dimmed: it was evening now.

  She struggled upright. In her sleep she had pulled the covers around her and they were tangled at the ankles and knees, shackling her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, voice gruff with sleep, ‘I’m so sorry. I just needed somewhere to rest. I didn’t think you were coming back…’ But she gave up almost at once. There was nothing she could say that would alter the fact of her trespass, the clear illegality of it. She needed to escape – and quickly.

  ‘Hang on, you’re English?’ If anything, the discovery appeared to intensify the woman’s distress, deepen her skin to a feverish red. Her grip tightened. ‘Who are you, tell me? How did you find me?’