‘Tabitha. We weren’t expecting to see you today.’ Her father’s wife Susie had answered the door, her welcome just a grade warmer than if it had been the gas man come to read the meter in the middle of dinner. She wavered visibly between asking Tabby to come back at a more convenient time and just letting her in and telling her to make it snappy. Her eyes dipped to the bulging canvas bag her stepdaughter carried, but she made no comment.
‘Come on in. Mike’s in the garden with the girls.’ She never said ‘your father’, always ‘Mike’. It wasn’t a conscious strategy, Tabby noticed – and in fact it had an inclusive quality, a suggestion that she was one of the adults now – but it was consistent, she never slipped.
In fact her father was just coming indoors himself. He must have been playing some particularly energetic game because he was breathing heavily and looked hot in the face. He was overweight these days, well fed by his new wife. Close behind him, Susie’s two girls appeared from the kitchen, tearing the plastic off a pack of juices and needing their stepfather’s help to extract the cartons. They called him Dad now, no Mike for them. He took the third one for himself and was just putting the straw to his lips when he noticed her.
‘Hello, love! When did you get here?’
‘Just this second.’ She wanted to hug her father, but did not. Shows of affection felt awkward now and were easier avoided. ‘Hi, girls, have you had a nice game? What were you playing?’
‘Football,’ her father replied on behalf of the two small girls, who were sucking their drinks in that dramatic way small kids did, as if on the brink of acute dehydration.
‘Would you like one of these?’ he asked her.
‘I think we’ve run out,’ Susie said.
‘That’s OK,’ Tabby said. ‘I’m not thirsty. Maybe later.’ She could see Susie did not relish that ‘later’. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Tabby or begrudged her basic refreshment, no one thought that; it was just that she planned her family’s weekend with some precision and did not welcome spontaneity.
‘Everything all right?’ her father asked her.
‘Yes – I mean, no, not really.’ Tabby faltered, flooded by a sudden sensation of disorientation. The sight of her father as a resident in a house where she was merely a guest, even the way the light bounced off him here: it was like meeting his doppelganger or travelling to the future and seeing how he would become after she no longer needed him. And yet she did need him still, that was why she was here. Perhaps the problem was that she had spent so little time in this house there was nothing familiar about it or its contents; when picturing this scene en route, she’d misremembered the colour of the sofa, the size of the garden, even the height of his second wife, whose house this had been during her first marriage. Would it be different if Tabby’s mother had moved out of the family home and Susie and the girls in? Or would that only have made it heartbreaking in a different way?
‘I wondered if I could stay with you for a little while,’ she said, careful to include Susie in her appeal.
‘Stay?’ Susie repeated. ‘You mean sleep here?’
Knowing that the lack of a spare room had been cited frequently as a reason for her not to stay the night, Tabby added pre-emptively, ‘I don’t mind sleeping on the sofa. Or in a tent in the garden if you like.’
‘A tent? Don’t be soft, of course you can stay,’ her father said, just as she’d hoped. (His agreeability had been part of what had allowed Susie to install him as her own with such ease.)
‘Can I have a word, Mike?’ Susie said, inevitably. She dispatched the two girls to the TV at the far end of the room, presumably to keep them out of range should the discussion get heated. But Susie did not allow heat, Tabby should have remembered that. She was what Tabby’s mother called passive-aggressive. The conference took place in pained murmurs in the kitchen and before too long Susie could be heard stalking up the stairs, then moving items about in one of the bedrooms. Layla, the elder daughter, followed her up, asking what was happening, as her father returned to deliver the verdict.
‘It’s no problem,’ he told Tabby, though his flush suggested otherwise. ‘The girls can bunk up together. You can have Layla’s room.’
On cue, Layla could be heard protesting at the top of the stairs. ‘It’s only for a night or two,’ Susie was saying. ‘Like when your gran comes to stay.’
‘Why can’t she have Jessica’s room? Why does it have to be mine?’
‘Are you sure?’ Tabby said to her father. Desperate though she was, she half regretted this invasion.
‘Of course. It’s not for long, is it? So what’s happened this time then?’
She’d planned to tell her father the real reason for her decampment, had rehearsed the words, the true ones, imagining herself saying them in one breathless go, perhaps not quite meeting her father’s eye as she did: ‘Steve’s been pestering me. He says he’s got a picture of me in my underwear and he’s put it on some internet site for other men to rate. He said he’s had messages saying how they understand his torment with jailbait like me in the house. I can’t tell Mum, he said he’d deny it and say I was coming on to him, and he’s right, I know she’d take his side…’
It was this last fear that distressed her most, more than the claim itself, which may or may not have been true. How could he have taken a picture of her in her underwear? She could not see any opportunity, though the suggestion itself was horrible enough. No, the suspicion that her mother would accept his word over hers: that was the frightening part. She had ended her marriage for Steve; mightn’t she be willing to risk her relationship with her daughter, too?
All of this Tabby had planned to tell her father, to ask him what he thought she should do next and hear him say that whatever it was he’d do it with her or for her, that she would never have to suffer this kind of harassment again, but being here, in a house with two small children within earshot, she felt that she would contaminate the air they breathed, make herself even more undesirable to Susie than she already was.
‘We fell out,’ she said at last.
‘What about?’
‘Nothing in particular.’
And that was that. She had not told her mother and now here she was not telling her father either. Perhaps she’d known all along she wouldn’t. Perhaps she wanted to test him, to see if he would take her in for no other reason than that she asked him to.
Which he had. It would have to be enough that he nodded in protective concern, even though he probably thought the episode was something and nothing and that it was his place to err on the side of something until such a time as Tabby declared its nothingness and returned home. Until she was eighteen, home was always going to be where her mother was. Everyone knew that offspring remained with their mother after a divorce, even those old enough to have a considered preference and whose considered preference was for their father. Instead, ‘Mike’ went on living in a stranger’s house, with another man’s children, and just as he got Layla and Jessica to care for, Steve, who had no children of his own, got Tabby.
She stayed a week or so before returning, following pressure from both sides. Her only strategy was hope, hope that Steve would never again speak to her as he had done, hope that he’d not speak to her at all when they were alone but just go back to contenting himself with staring at her legs or her breasts or her lips, never raising his eyes to hers, just going on staring until she got up and left the room.
She fixed a bolt to her bedroom door. Only later did she find she’d barred the wrong door.
‘What’s your surname?’ she asked Emmie one evening towards the end of their first week together. She’d glanced idly at the mail that had come through their letterbox the last few mornings, but there was nothing for Emmie, all envelopes addressed to a M. and Mme Robert, presumably the owners of the property.
Emmie looked up from her book, a defensive cast to her face.
‘I just remember you saying Moira didn’t know it,’ Tabby said. ‘And I realised whe
n I was talking to her that I didn’t know either.’
Since the first evening, when she’d shared her life story in a hysteria of soul-bearing so unchecked she could now scarcely remember what she had revealed and what she had kept to herself, she had not had a conversation with Emmie of anything approaching the same intimacy. Lack of opportunity was a factor, of course. Not only had both of them been busy working, but Tabby had continued with her walks too, completing circuits of the town ramparts and of the cycle paths to neighbouring villages. It surprised her how quickly she’d come to feel as if she’d been walking these routes for months, down the coastal paths where oyster shells crunched underfoot, inland through open country, past neat rows of vines and walled estates. Perhaps it was because her thoughts remained the same: thoughts of Paul that had to be suppressed, thoughts that she still needed him in exactly the ways that had driven him from her. What was becoming depressingly evident was that her love for him was enduring, and apparently in no way connected to whether he loved her; it was like an addiction or an eating disorder: she would never again live without it, but could only manage its dormancy. She was as defined by his absence as she’d been by his presence. And there were moments when it hardly seemed to matter which.
Returning from those expeditions to their shuttered house in its hidden lane, not wide enough for two to walk abreast, she’d trained herself into the habit of early nights, which prevented her both from spending money and from intruding on Emmie’s private time. Whenever in the same room with Emmie, she was careful to match the other woman’s mood, which, rather to her surprise, was more often than not silent and preoccupied. Twice, Emmie had spent the whole evening in her bedroom at her laptop.
But Tabby was naturally gregarious, some might say garrulous, and her self-imposed discretion could not last for ever. There was that inquisitive streak, too, the one that had already led her to investigate the more private corners of Moira’s clients’ properties, and she awaited Emmie’s answer now with real interest.
‘It’s Mason,’ Emmie replied at last, with an exaggerated sense of surrender.
‘Emmie Mason,’ Tabby repeated, to get a feel for the name. ‘It sounds like an old movie star or something.’
‘Well, that’s what it is,’ Emmie said.
‘Of course.’
This added one more item to the modest list of facts she knew about Emmie. Emmie had been in Saint-Martin for five weeks or so, staying at first in a guesthouse in the newer quarter of the village before finding this place inside the old walls thanks to an advertisement on the noticeboard in one of the supermarkets. The rent was low because the place was in urgent need of upgrading; nothing in the house worked properly, Emmie said (this, Tabby had found for herself, was true, or at least in so far as nothing electrical in the house worked at the same time as anything else). Though she appeared to have settled here for the foreseeable future, she had no plans to open a French bank account and had utility bills included in her rent, dealing only in cash and living ‘on the black’, as the French called it, an arrangement Tabby was keen to emulate. Her French was excellent, certainly strong enough for her to have found shop work, but she was happy enough to clean. Tabby had not asked her her age, but judged it to be early thirties. Nor had she yet voiced her theory that Emmie was suffering from – and had been driven into solitude by – the same critical illness as her own: heartbreak.
‘Why do you want to know, anyway?’ Emmie said, eyes restless.
Why do you want to know why I want to know? Tabby thought to herself, for it had hardly been an invasive question. What’s your name? It wasn’t like asking someone her blood group or preferred hair-removal method or tally of sexual partners. ‘No reason, I’m just interested. You know my name is Dewhurst, right?’
‘Right,’ said Emmie, as if humouring in Tabby an unnecessary and embarrassing compulsion to confess her fetishes. The contrast between this and that initial display of interest and compassion was marked, and in different circumstances might have hurt Tabby’s feelings.
Instead she gave Emmie a look of warm amusement. Whatever her own inclinations, she had no intention of finding fault with her new landlady. She opted for a joke: ‘You’re like someone on a witness-protection programme, Emmie. You know, make no eye contact, leave no paper trail. Are the mob after you or something?’
Emmie smiled, relenting a little. ‘I’d hardly have invited you to move in if I was completely anti-social.’
‘Maybe you thought you needed a bodyguard?’ Tabby said mischievously. ‘To protect you from whoever it is that’s after you?’
Emmie took this in better humour than Tabby might have expected, given the unpromising start to the exchange. ‘Yes, next time I find a stranger asleep in the spare room I’ll be sure to call for your support.’
They both laughed then, and Tabby revived the hope that the two of them were on their way to becoming great friends, discovering that crucial shared sense of fun in one another. What did it matter that Emmie was naturally rather more private? As she’d pointed out, she’d shared her home, hadn’t she? You didn’t get much more open-hearted than that. This reluctance to divulge personal information came from living alone for weeks on end, possibly months. Unlikely though their teaming-up was, it would do Emmie good to have Tabby’s company. She’d soon have her sharing war stories as single women usually did.
‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ Emmie said just then, though Tabby had made none of these comments out loud.
‘Thought what?’
But Emmie just returned her questioning look with one of her own, making Tabby wonder if she had spoken up after all and been too absent-minded to notice. Either that or Emmie was one of those people whose thoughts flowed so loud and clear in her own ears that she mistook them for having been part of general conversation.
Again, the sort of thing you might do if you’d lived on your own for too long.
And so Tabby did the decent thing and pretended not to notice. ‘Shall we open the shutters?’ she suggested. ‘It’s not dark yet.’ It was brighter longer here than in Paris and, even with the high wall beyond their windows, there was a well of natural light that she longed to expose.
‘I like them shut,’ Emmie said.
Chapter 6
Emily
I won’t spend time on my family background. I can’t work on this story indefinitely, but will soon need to find work and earn money again, and in any case, there isn’t any need for a full autobiography. I want this to be about Arthur and me, that’s all, and in all honesty I don’t believe my childhood is relevant. It goes without saying that I don’t agree with the media’s speculation about what kind of tragic, motherless upbringing made a man-eating sociopath of me – any more than I agree that I’m a man-eating sociopath in the first place. Nor am I interested in claiming some psychological condition that made me a victim-in-waiting. I fell in love: that was what happened. It was of itself, a one of a kind.
I suppose it is fair to say that as the year opened I was beset by strange new emotions. Knowing that I might lose my father during the months ahead was giving me previously unknown urges to seize the day, to make life count while I was young and healthy enough to appreciate the difference. Of course, I see now that I had my head up at exactly the time when I should have been keeping it down.
But I don’t regret it. Even now, I don’t regret it.
As Nina Meeks would tell it, I brazenly seduced Arthur. I was less a neighbour than a Venus flytrap positioned on the other side of his garden fence, carnivorous and hungry, every hair on the surface of me alert to his approach. But it wasn’t like that at all. The night it happened, he couldn’t have been further from my mind.
I’d been to visit Dad after work. Visits were never more surreal than on a Saturday evening, when that contrast between the outside world, which throbbed with the heartless energy of young lives being led, and the inside one, a muted, ageing, heartbroken realm, was at its most pronounced. Saturday night was
also when I was at my most tired, too tired sometimes to raise the bonhomie required to make the visit enjoyable for Dad.
The hospital was just outside London, in Hertfordshire, well over an hour by tube and train from my neighbourhood south of the river, and the dementia unit was a sobering place to visit at the best of times, as I suppose would be any medical facility where security was strictly monitored. With some patients liable to wander out of bounds, it was necessary to ring and wait for a member of staff to admit you through several sets of locked doors. Sometimes, if they were short-staffed, you waited ten minutes simply to gain entry.
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 8