‘Since before the children were born, twenty years, something like that. They’re much too old for your egg cups, I’m afraid.’ So he had been listening.
‘That’s OK. I’m not here to drum up business. I get no share of the profits, more’s the pity.’ ‘More’s the pity’ was not the sort of expression I used often, but, as I say, there was something about Arthur that made me want to try harder. I was pleased when he gave a little smirk in response.
‘Is your wife here too?’ I asked.
‘Somewhere, yes.’
With the famous Nina, presumably, co-founders of the Comanches or whatever the clique was that the men found so amusing. Everyone here knew each other, by definition, of course: if you put a finger in the air you’d be able to touch the threads of the entanglements, the cat’s-cradle of private connections and presumed knowledge. There was a smugness in the room’s energy, a self-satisfaction bordering on glee. No one was casting about for a better bet in that way you often find at parties, all were utterly fixed on the person or people they were with. I felt sure that if my little group disbanded I’d be left alone, ignored until I left. Indeed, Ed and the voiceover artist were already drifting from Arthur and me. Did he hope to follow? I had the unsettling impulse to reach for his hand.
‘I don’t know a soul here,’ I told him. ‘I feel like a gatecrasher.’
‘Well, if you’ve just moved into the area,’ he said. Now we were out of earshot of the others he had lowered his reserve somewhat, eyeing me if not in appreciation then with encouragement.
‘I haven’t even met anyone in my own building yet – I’ve not been home much since we moved in, still got half the boxes to open. My dad’s very ill, you see, and I visit him after work whenever I can, then when I get back I just feel so tired the last thing I want to think about is unpacking, let alone decorating.’ Though I always tried to be friendly with new people, it was not like me to pour forth to a stranger in this confessional way, and I couldn’t understand what was making me do it; the champagne, I decided at the time – by then I’d dispatched my second glass and accepted a third. Later I understood that it was Arthur’s bedside manner, a mild-mannered charm common to many hospital consultants. Designed to calm and reassure, it acted on me as a reverser of inhibition.
‘What’s wrong with your father?’ he asked. His eyes met mine with deeper interest and I saw the colour of the irises properly: acorn brown flecked with amber, like tortoiseshell.
‘He’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s pretty advanced. They don’t expect him to make it to the end of next year.’
He raised his brows a fraction. ‘They’ve said that to you?’
‘Not in so many words, but reading between the lines, you know.’
‘He’s in a care home, I assume?’
‘He was until recently, yes, but now he’s been transferred to the hospital unit. He’s not eating enough, he keeps getting infections.’ Feeling distress rise in my gullet, I took a gulp from my glass to wash it back down. ‘But I hope he’ll go back to the nursing home. It was nicer there.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Sixty-two.’
‘That’s pretty young.’
‘Some of the people I’ve met there are a lot younger. It’s such a sad place.’ I felt suddenly very low, both for the poor patients in Dad’s unit and for my situation as a whole. I had nothing, I thought with sadness, no one. Looking down at the strawberry dress, the garment seemed to me to symbolise the mistaken nature of my position; it was not the statement of arrival I’d hoped for but the announcement of a permanent error of judgement. Compared with the tailored black dresses of the other women here, the expensive, heavy fabrics designed to skim and conceal, not cling and expose, it was out of place. I’d done it again: come somewhere I didn’t belong. And, as was becoming customary, I might as well have come alone. When I’d said I felt like a gatecrasher, what I’d really meant was I felt lonely.
‘Are you all right?’ Arthur asked, and there was gallantry to his mien, a paternal tenderness unbearable for the associations it stirred.
‘I think I’d better go and find Matt,’ I said, though I didn’t move. ‘I haven’t seen him since we got here.’
‘Well, if I can advise in any way, you only need ask.’
I looked at him, not understanding.
‘I mean about your father,’ he said.
‘Oh. Is that your field of medicine, then? Dementia?’
‘Field of medicine’ sounded wrong, too formal and outdated, but he didn’t seem to mind. ‘No, no, I’m an eye specialist.’ Since he did not expand, I preferred not to disappoint him with clichéd first questions (‘Don’t you get squeamish touching eyeballs?’ being the most common, I later discovered). ‘I just meant generally,’ he said. ‘Degenerative illness is very tough on close family. You might have questions you can’t get straight answers to at the hospital. They’ll be understaffed. I know what it’s like.’
My morale lifted irresistibly in response to this unexpected offer. ‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’
‘Not at all. That’s what all of this is for…’ He gestured to the mêlée, which struck me now as a distant carnival from which the two of us had fled: ‘neighbours helping each other out.’
‘Really? Even the ones renting crummy one-bedders half the size of this room? Non-“Friends”?’
‘Yes. Everybody counts,’ said Arthur Woodhall, and his face had a soulfulness in it that moved me. In spite of his credentials, his eminence – and I had no idea then just how eminent he was – he felt out of place too, I could tell, and partly perhaps by virtue of that last opinion, which was unlikely to be shared by many others in the room. I wished then that I hadn’t said I was going to find Matt. As I turned, though I was the one moving away, it felt like it does when you watch a train leave the station, understanding only after it’s gone from sight that it was the one you should have taken.
Chapter 3
Tabby
Right from the start, Emmie was an enigma to her. Tabby could not make her out at all. But that was beside the point: what Emmie made of her was what mattered, and that she should make anything that did not involve the bringing of criminal charges was a cause for celebration. And yet, to take her in, to sit her down and try to understand the circumstances that had led her to this desperate intrusion: that was tantamount to a miracle.
Then again, this was a day in which nothing had been predictable, least of all her own actions. The best Tabby could hope for was to survive till morning.
She talked for two hours or more that first evening, long enough for the windows to turn black and reflective and for the house to grow silent but for her own voice or, in occasional prompt or query, Emmie’s. She told all about her travels with Paul, how they’d begun seven months ago with a flight to Bangkok, just the two of them against the world – or for the world – and how by the time of their arrival in India three months later they had disassembled into something she neither understood nor desired: a travelling couple who couldn’t bear to be in the same country together, much less the same room.
‘There was no one thing,’ she said to Emmie. ‘Every day a few more threads broke.’ But in trying to explain to a stranger how each new place Paul had set eyes on, each new person he’d met, had cast a brighter light by which her own inadequacies might be exposed, she encountered only the same bewilderment that had made the actual break-up so impossible to process. If she’d understood how to stop it, she would have. How could Emmie know what it felt like to live every moment as the one before the axe fell? She wouldn’t wish her to know!
And when it did fall, there’d been no relief in it, only the splitting pain she’d anticipated. ‘Don’t you get it? We’re history,’ he’d said, changing the tense of them just like that. Why, she had asked, of course. Why? And when he struggled to express himself she saw that it wasn’t that he couldn’t find the words, but rather that he had hoped to spare her the truth of them.
‘You�
��re too…’
‘Too what?’
‘You’re too much,’ he said, finally.
Now, she repeated to Emmie, ‘It was no one thing.’
Emmie nodded, with her eyes as much as her head. She had listened to Tabby’s account with an air of gracious impassivity, almost as if she were a therapist who had had the session scheduled all along. It was only when Tabby told her how Paul had abandoned her, literally walked away from her in a street in Varanasi, leaving her without map or guidebook or (for all he knew) money, that the other woman broke her composure and interrupted.
‘That’s disgusting,’ she cried, indignant. ‘Anything could have happened to you, left on your own like that. You could have been robbed or raped!’
Tabby gave her a grateful smile. Given the circumstances, she had not expected to gain sympathy so easily. ‘Well, there were lots of other travellers about and in the end I just picked up my stuff from the hostel and found out where the train station was. I still had some money, I wasn’t destitute.’
Not like now.
‘Even so, you must have been devastated. We all know how it feels to be totally shut out by someone.’ Emmie glared with a sudden scorching intensity, and there was a new significance to her body language, a bracing of the torso, as if challenging Tabby to demand how she had come by this awful knowledge. Indeed, Tabby felt her natural curiosity surface, but the fierceness of Emmie’s face discouraged her from pursuing it.
‘It’s terrible,’ she agreed. ‘He was like a different person. He just did not resemble the man I knew.’ Thought I knew. ‘But people change when they travel, don’t they? I was warned about that, but I thought we were… we were… together.’ Will I ever heal? she asked herself. The drifting that had followed Paul’s desertion, the way in which she had turned her escape from real life into some sort of penance for having left it, it all stemmed from the day of the break-up. And today had been her most desperate to date; was she then not only failing to heal but actually starting to self-destruct?
She gazed at her unlikely confidante with fresh despair, willing her to supply the answers. Instead, Emmie had another question, one she put with some eagerness:
‘Was he married?’
‘Paul?’ It was a peculiar idea, Tabby thought, since married men were not known to set out on year-long backpacking odysseys with their lovers, though it was true she had met a few divorcees along the way. ‘No. The last thing he wants is to get married.’
‘To you, you mean.’
Tabby was taken aback by the bitterness of this remark. Coming so soon after the one about being shut out, it pointed to Emmie having suffered a recent relationship catastrophe of her own, perhaps a broken marriage. Again, she dared not ask, could not risk giving offence and reminding the other woman that rather than wasting time with this torturous heart-to-heart she should be turning her out into the street and setting about changing her locks.
‘So what brought you to Ré?’ Emmie asked.
‘Nothing in particular.’ Tabby decided not to tell her about her one-night stand with Grégoire, not least because of that bitter indignation about married men. She knew she was a good person, but when you added casual adultery to criminal breaking and entering the evidence rather pointed against it. ‘I got a cheap one-way ticket from Paris. I thought I might find work here. It’s a big holiday destination, right?’
‘Yes, when the summer season starts. But that’s not till late June. It’s very expensive here. I’ve probably got the cheapest rental on the island. This place isn’t in good enough shape to let to tourists.’ Emmie looked about her as if dismissive of a hovel, though to Tabby the house was a paradise of comforts. ‘It seems an odd place to choose if you’re down to your last cents,’ she added. Her expression – apparently somewhat changeable – once again brimmed with suspicion.
‘I suppose I didn’t want to go home and so I took the next available offer,’ Tabby said, truthfully.
‘Why don’t you want to go home?’
‘I’m not close to my family, not since my dad died. My mum is… well, I’m not really welcome there. I don’t get on with my stepfather.’
‘Why not? You don’t think she should have had a new relationship so soon after your father’s death?’
Tabby took a moment to process the leap in the other woman’s logic. ‘No, not that. They split up years before he died, they both had new partners.’ Much as she wished to cooperate, on the subject of her parents’ post-divorce relationships there were no words, not yet, not when she had succeeded for so long in burying the memories. Besides, there was enough dirt flying about without the need to unearth more.
‘No brothers or sisters?’
‘My father had two stepdaughters, but I never really got close to them and we didn’t keep in touch after he died.’ How wretched this all sounded: as if she had failed every one of her relationships. If her earlier actions had not been repellent enough, then she was not selling herself any better with this summary of her family history.
‘How long have you been away?’ Emmie said.
‘Seven months.’
‘That long?’
‘Yes, since October.’ Once more, she was ready to make the same enquiry in return, but the rigid set of Emmie’s jaw reminded her that this was not an exchange between equals. She was the one being asked to explain herself here, Emmie the one whose trust was to be won. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m totally out of touch with home,’ she added blithely, keen to avoid long pauses that might allow Emmie to reconsider her position. ‘Anything could have happened and I wouldn’t have a clue.’
At this, there was another sharpening of interest in Emmie’s eyes. ‘You mean you haven’t spoken to anyone in England this whole time you’ve been away?’ She was incredulous. ‘You haven’t followed current affairs at all?’
Tabby thought of the weeks and months that had slipped by without her having given a thought to the wider world. ‘Well, you know, for the first few months, when I was still with Paul, I was just on the beach or travelling on buses from one place to the next. I liked not knowing what was happening anywhere else.’ It was true that at first there had been a sense of deliberately casting herself away, a natural embracing of a freedom she’d never tasted before, but later, less commendably, she’d been too fixated on her own heartbreak to consider the outside world; self-pity had been a continent all of its own, anything beyond it hopelessly out of reach. ‘I haven’t really thought about the news at home.’
Embarrassed though she was by the admission, it seemed to hearten Emmie. ‘Then that means…’ There was the lift of optimism in her words, though she did not finish, only averted her eyes and smiled to herself.
‘Means what?’ Tabby said, encouraged.
‘Nothing. Forget it.’ Emmie drew herself up and collected the empty mugs, her demeanour relaxed once more. ‘It’s good that you don’t know anything. It’s not relevant.’
Baffling as this was, Tabby was more interested in the fact that Emmie was heading to the kitchen and refilling the kettle, preparing for a second round of tea. Her stay of execution was prolonged.
Then, bringing in Tabby a sensation close to deliverance, Emmie called out, ‘You must be hungry – would you like something to eat?’
When it grew very late, Emmie said Tabby might as well stay the night. For Tabby, the irony of this invitation was immense, inescapable, but she strove to contain her gasps lest Emmie came suddenly to her senses and remembered she was dealing with a person semi-vicious enough to consider squatting acceptable. The thought of a night in some doorway down by the port, with its still, dark water, the cold Atlantic beyond, was not appealing.
‘You know where the spare bedroom is,’ was the only clue Emmie gave that she recalled the earlier part of the evening at all. She added that she had to go to work in the morning and Tabby should take her time getting up, have a bath and rest her sprained knee.
‘Thank you, that would be fantastic, Emmie.’ Talk ab
out my lucky day, Tabby thought. She didn’t deserve this generosity, she wasn’t at all sure why she was receiving it – her story of rejection had struck a chord with Emmie, evidently – but she was damned if she was going to turn it down.
From the moment she closed the bedroom door behind her, she entered a state of being that was nothing less than bliss. To go to bed in a room all her own, knowing she could wake up in her own time and get up without harassment. To not worry about having her pack tampered with (though, frankly, there was nothing left in it to steal), or her person, for that matter. How extraordinary life was, that the things you took for granted in childhood should at the age of twenty-five have become so novel they felt like blessed gifts: the clean bed, the full stomach, the quiet night.
And, in the morning, church bells, blue skies, a long, undisturbed bath. The taps ran painfully slowly, but she didn’t care because the water was hot; the tub was a huge old rolltop, long enough for her to lie totally submerged, her skin itching with the forgotten luxury of it, her injured knee rapidly losing the last of its soreness. Above her head the paint on the ceiling peeled, the roof tiles visible through the skylight were ancient and eroded, but sun poured in, bringing charm to the irregular angles of the room. Whatever Emmie said, the house was superior in a hundred ways to the hostel in Paris she’d slept in a few nights ago, the dormitory conditions she’d grown used to, the communal bathrooms, the shared odours.
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 4