‘No, it’s OK. Honestly. It’s been years now and I’ve accepted what it is. Now I’m preparing myself for what’s next.’
I was not as brave as I sounded. It was probably truer to say that I was preparing myself for having to prepare myself for what was next.
‘Your mother’s not in the picture?’ Arthur asked.
‘No, she died when I was nine. That’s why we’re so close, Dad and me. Why it’s all so hard.’
In the dim light I caught the blink of surprise, the pluck of compassion at his mouth. ‘You’ve been unlucky, Emily.’
‘Maybe. But luckier than some people.’ For instance, hearing him speak my name for the first time made me feel magnificently lucky. I wondered what he would say if I told him that. I wondered what he would do if I slipped my arm through his, pleading fear of the dark, perhaps, or pleading nothing at all.
‘It’s good that you think that way,’ he said. ‘It’s very easy to feel persecuted by health problems. I see it all the time. People always want to know why it’s happened to them, as if it’s some sort of punishment or personal injustice.’
‘It hasn’t happened to me,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s far worse for him. And he doesn’t think in terms of punishment or justice. Maybe that’s the one good thing about it.’
‘Do you not have brothers and sisters to share the responsibility?’
‘I have a brother. He lives out in Newbury, but he visits once a week. To be honest, when he does I take the night off.’ This was an unfortunate consequence of Dad’s hospitalisation: Phil and I were the only ones who could give each other a break and so rarely saw each other.
‘Still, it’s a tough situation. You’re handling it very well, I would say. And working full-time in the café, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Excuse the pun.’
‘Oh, it’s manageable. It’s not as if I’ve got children as well,’ I added, my glance having fallen on the outlines of the swings and climbing frames in the distance, too dark now for there to be any families still out playing. ‘I have plenty of spare time compared to a lot of people.’
‘But you’d like children one day?’ The way he said it made the unspoken ‘obviously’ perfectly audible to me. And he looked candidly at me, keen to learn the answer. Then, when I failed to reply, he remembered himself. ‘Forgive me. I suppose I’m used to reading between the lines. It’s none of my business.’ But he held my gaze well beyond the natural threshold, the prolonging of it forcing us to slow our step. At last he looked away and lengthened his stride once more. ‘It’s getting cold,’ he said.
I scurried to catch him up. ‘I would like kids, yes,’ I said in a rush, as if fearful of having missed my chance. ‘Of course I would. But my boyfriend…’
‘He’s the one you were at the party with? Matt?’
‘Yes. He doesn’t want to start a family. Not that I would want to with him, anyway, so it’s not a problem. He doesn’t want me. I don’t want him.’
This was a bold declaration by anyone’s standards, but Arthur responded smoothly, as if he heard this sort of thing routinely. ‘I see. It’s like that.’
‘It’s like that,’ I agreed, calming myself. ‘And he wouldn’t be at all bothered to hear me say it. I call him my boyfriend, but we’re really just friends these days, flatmates. We had to find somewhere to live in a hurry and there wasn’t time to sort out an alternative. We should have just called it a day.’ The stupidity of signing a new lease with Matt had never been clearer to me, the wastefulness of it. We both deserved better than love by expediency. ‘You’re very good at getting people to tell you their secrets, aren’t you?’ I said, for this was the second time I’d found myself treating a casual conversation with this man as a confession. I was struck by the absence of embarrassment on either of our parts. ‘But in a very tactful way, I mean. No offence.’
‘It’s my job, I suppose,’ Arthur said. ‘You learn to discover the information you need to know.’
I tried not to ponder whether my relationship status was information he ‘needed’ to know; he himself was married, after all. ‘Of course, you’re a surgeon at St Barnabas’, you must deal with every type of person and get told all sorts of secrets.’
‘I certainly do. I don’t always want to know them, however.’
I smiled. ‘Do you use euphemisms, like Dad’s doctors do? I bet you’ve never actually used the word “death” with your patients, have you?’
For the first time in my company, he laughed, a spontaneous chuckle of delight that made me giggle too. ‘Well, since I’m mostly correcting squints, the subject doesn’t tend to come up.’
I pulled a face at my mistake. ‘I suppose someone might encounter complications with the anaesthetic?’
‘That’s true, but the anaesthetist will have outlined the risks of that with the patient. I just concentrate on solving the vision problems.’
It was all too easy to imagine him at work: he’d be utterly unflustered, focused to the point of severity. He’d probably known from an early age what he would become and trained at the top medical schools – unlike someone like me, who had not been to university and was as easily distracted from jobs as she had been in falling into them. I was not climbing any ladder, only stepping on to the nearest unoccupied rung of the next one along, determined not to notice how close to the ground I remained. (Maybe mine was a vision problem, too.) Pulling myself back from such thoughts, I blurted, ‘I’ve never had an anaesthetic. I can’t imagine what it’s like.’
‘That’s something to be pleased about, believe me. You’ve obviously never needed surgery.’
‘No. Have you?’
He smirked, raising his eyebrows only fractionally. ‘Maybe I ought to know you a bit better before I reveal that sort of detail.’
It was one of the most bizarre conversations I’d ever had with anyone. Confiding in him about my father, telling him my relationship was a sham, asking if he’d had surgery! With anyone else I would have considered that I’d made a fool of myself, but with him I felt as if I’d been only direct and agreeable. It seemed a thing of wonder that two people could lead such different lives, one so accomplished, the other so unremarkable, and yet still have so much to say to each other, still feel a powerful connection. It was a connection I did not yet like to name, though I must have known what it was, of course, and it had nothing to do with sharing a postcode.
We reached the park gate and he held it open for me. The park would be locked at any minute, we were probably the last to leave. Back under street light we quickened our step, soon at my end of the Grove, at the gateless path of 199. The windows of my flat were dark: Matt was out. I lingered with Arthur, nearly suggested he come up for a drink, almost but not quite willing to ignore the mental picture of my kitchen, the sink stacked with last night’s dinner dishes, Matt’s cycling gear strewn about, the laughable lack of anything to drink but cheap lager. ‘I’d love to invite you in for a cup of tea,’ I said, ‘but the place is in such a state, I’m embarrassed for you to see it.’
Arthur’s smile, mild but rueful, implied that such an invitation would not have been turned down. ‘If you’d ever laid eyes on my elder son’s bedroom, you’d know I’ve seen a lot worse.’
I pictured his home at the opposite, smarter end of the street, the family waiting, a wife eager to inspect her pottery. With the exception of the son’s pit, the house would be immaculate, along the lines of the Laings’, full of chic, expensive furnishings, walls of inherited art, a piano in the library perhaps. They’d be going out that evening to some grand dinner party or charity do, or perhaps to the ballet or opera. They’d be Friends, of course. And yet, it seemed to me already that all of that might in fact be immaterial to him, that he held within him nobler concerns.
‘Well, another time,’ he said, smiling.
‘Definitely.’
We stood looking at each other in the dark, only a couple of feet apart and close enough for me to see that the skin around his eyes was fragile and br
uised, as if rubbing with fingertips had worn it thin. Neither of us turned to leave and I had exactly the same feeling I’d had at our first meeting, reluctance in the form of a physical tugging – not heartstrings, not yet, but bits of my gut, maybe; something bodily and fundamental.
‘You look different,’ he said at last, his tone thoughtful.
I realised he meant different from the night of the party. ‘What, as in worse? Run ragged?’ I laughed. ‘I would agree with that.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant at all. I like both ways.’
‘Thank you.’ I didn’t know what else to say.
Now he left me, casting a quick glance up at the Laings’ house as he went. Though in reality the two families were probably friends, I liked to imagine that Arthur was praying he would not catch one of them coming or going, just as I did whenever I walked past.
It was his wife, Sylvie Woodhall, who came to collect the plate the following Saturday. As I squatted a short distance from the cash desk, unpacking a delivery of ready-to-paint jewellery boxes, I could hear her announcing her name and describing the piece to Aislene. ‘I did send my husband in last weekend, but he’s obviously not to be trusted with such a task.’ And then she cried out, ‘That’s it there, on the bottom shelf, that big yellow one! I don’t see how he could possibly have missed it.’
‘Must need his eyes testing,’ a female voice replied, followed by a single sharp bark of laughter that set Sylvie off, and without being told I knew this wisecracker must be the scalp-hunting journalist Nina.
I adjusted my position behind the raised lid of my cardboard box so I could study the two of them more discreetly. Both women were in their late forties or early fifties and very well dressed: expensive-looking woollen coats and wedge-heeled suede boots, cashmere scarves in understated shades twined casually about the neck and shoulders, handbags about a hundred times more costly than any in my possession. Arthur’s wife had a shower of natural-looking blond curls, angular features and a pink English complexion, Nina dark bobbed hair and the kind of polished-pearl skin that spoke of high-end facials. As they queued together at the till, the huge plate now held in Sylvie’s arms like the Wimbledon trophy, they chatted openly about personal matters, quite heedless of who might be in earshot. Admittedly, this was not unusual behaviour for customers and I’d long ago learned to zone out of the myriad soap operas going on around me; this time, though, I found myself listening closely. Finishing with the jewellery boxes, I started on a package of piggy-banks that were supposed to have waited till later, dallying over the job and hoping Charlotte would not come on to the shop floor from the office upstairs to notice my breach of protocol.
‘Anyway, if you ask me, you’re doing brilliantly,’ the Nina woman said in the strong, carrying tone of a public announcement. She exuded a sense of command you rarely encountered in real life, as if she could quite unselfconsciously bring the room to silence and start an impromptu rally for the cause of her choice. ‘It’s almost two years now, isn’t it? That’s pretty good for him.’
‘As far as I know, yes. Pathetic, really, to be congratulating him on it.’
‘I think you should be congratulating yourself for getting safely to the other side, not beating yourself up because you’re not Pollyanna.’
‘I just can’t help it, though. Every so often the resentment just bursts through.’ Sylvie’s voice was higher in pitch than her friend’s, making her sound a little wheedling. ‘Not just about that, but about the balance of power in general. You know, like we’ve said before, Neen, all the domestic inequalities, the stuff it wouldn’t occur to him to know about. It’s all so far beneath him it might as well be taking place underground.’
Sighing, Nina removed her gloves – leather, a beautiful smoky blue – as if settling in for a prolonged debate. ‘And it only seems to get worse as they get older, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t believe the self-importance of Ed these days, you’d think he was the Foreign Secretary, not someone who just tries to get a question in at press briefings. He’s far too pivotal to the future of our democracy to book a restaurant or stay in for the plumber. At least Arthur has a secretary to do his dirty work. For most of us, we’ve been saddled with the job without having ever applied for the bloody thing. Maybe they’re cleverer than we think, eh?’
‘Maybe.’ Sylvie Woodhall stood further from me than Nina and her voice did not carry as clearly, but I could still piece together most of what she said. ‘The problem I have is there is an imbalance, a real one. I’m not like you, my job can’t begin to compare with his, not on any level.’ She sighed. ‘But it’s not like that’s news to anyone so I don’t know why I bore myself by going on about it.’
I wondered what it was that Sylvie did. I suspected amateur interior design or some unprofitable enterprise involving semi-precious stones; she’d be her own boss, certainly, no kneeling on shop floors among the piggy-banks for her. As for Arthur, I had of course Googled him since our last meeting and knew now that he was celebrated and revered, one of the top specialists in the world in an area of eye medicine called strabismus, his reputation having been established many years ago when he had treated a member of the Royal Family who had suffered problems with his vision following a stroke. My fifteen minutes on Matt’s laptop had also told me that he worked in a private practice in Harley Street as well as at St Barnabas’, and had in fact two secretaries, not one, to make his restaurant reservations and calls to the plumber. There were strings of letters after his name, a name he lent, along with several days’ surgical time a year, to a charitable enterprise in a West African country. He appeared occasionally in the society pages.
‘Well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t compare,’ Nina said, ‘just because he’s a famous surgeon. I mean it’s not like it’s anything heroic, is it? Like A&E or heart transplants for babies. It’s just squints. Double vision. Come on, most of us can cure that by cutting down our wine intake a couple of nights a week.’
‘Yes, well, I did, I suppose, didn’t I?’ They both hooted at this private allusion, Arthur’s wife’s laugh a low, bitter sound that lasted longer than Nina’s barking staccato. Though Sylvie’s humour was self-deprecating, I could tell she greatly enjoyed this opportunity for irreverence towards her husband. I supposed it didn’t come her way very often, not if my own rapt response to him was anything to go by, and that Nina gave her the confidence to rebel. I sneaked a longer look at Nina. Though nervous of her in a primal way, I could easily appreciate her appeal: she was bold and strong and funny. It was she who drove the mood of the conversation, championing her friend with a gusto none of mine did me (nor I them). How had Sylvie, a pale, complaining creature, won her as a friend – or Arthur as a husband, for that matter? Had she once been different? I longed to know the full story of it. And so did other people, for I could tell that I was not the only one eavesdropping: several customers had let their own conversations lapse in order to listen in. Even for this place, Sylvie and Nina were being indiscreet, something I put down to pure arrogance. At parties or when among their own kind, they were probably more vigilant, but somewhere like this, where it was mainly mothers with younger children, or people who’d travelled from other, lesser postcodes, or staff who were by definition below consideration (so far below as to be underground, I thought wryly), there was no need for caution. Everybody counts, Arthur had said to me, but for women like these two that was not true. No one else mattered, except for those in their own lofty sphere.
That wasn’t to say that once in a while someone or something outside it would not catch their eye, as I did now when I shifted my position on the floor and rolled back my tensed-up shoulders to ease the beginnings of an ache, sliding the half-full box closer to the storage unit.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ Nina called out, regarding me with interest. As Sylvie reached the front of the queue and handed over the plate for wrapping, she took a step towards me, evidently enjoying this test of her memory. ‘Where would it be from…?’
&n
bsp; ‘You might have seen me here before?’ I suggested timidly. Under her direct beam, my skin reacted, stinging with sudden high colour.
‘That’s not it, I never come here. Weren’t you at Marcus and Sarah’s party at Christmas?’
‘I was,’ I said, swallowing. ‘I live next door to them. But I don’t think we met, did we?’
She looked amused by the idea that I might not be sure, might be able to consider her in any way forgettable. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Emily Marr.’
‘Emily Marr,’ she repeated, not exactly with distaste but with a certain precision, as if sensing it would benefit her to remember it. ‘Nina Meeks,’ she offered in return, and her name caused a noticeable catch in the atmosphere. If anyone had been in any doubt as to who this droll, charismatic woman was, they knew now.
‘I’m at the other end of the Grove from Sarah,’ she told me. ‘I won’t say which number out loud, though. You never know where your enemies might be hiding.’
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 6