Of course, now, in light of Emmie’s own revelation, Tabby cursed herself for these loose-tongued remarks: Any one of us could be struck down – poor Emmie must have been thinking then of her own losses. And what if one or both of Emmie’s parents had ‘hung on in agony’? How could Tabby have been so thoughtless? And yet, how much easier it would be to be sensitive and tactful if Emmie would only open up a little, reduce the potential for upset in every one of Tabby’s attempts at conversation.
All of this she considered as the bus arrived and they took their turns to board. Emmie chose a seat across the aisle from her and turned her face to the window, perhaps to spare herself any more of Tabby’s blundering small-talk. Tabby closed her eyes and relaxed. It took an age to reach the other end of the island, the warm air and constant stops and starts eventually sending her to sleep, so that Emmie had to poke her awake at their destination. The house was a ten-minute walk from the bus stop, on a remote road towards the beach, and the gates they passed concealed properties far larger than the fishermen’s cottages and seaside bungalows she had worked in to date. She realised they had ahead of them a hard afternoon’s labour, wished she could simply sneak off in the direction of the beach and snooze the afternoon away in the dunes.
Their client’s house was a broad, two-storey building, the grounds dotted with cypresses and fruit trees. There was a glamorous stone terrace and a narrow blue pool, a lawn that stretched towards the beach. It was a beautiful place, with sea views on two sides, no neighbours within earshot, a sense of being at the end of the world. The shutters were the same shade of blue as the sky.
Emmie took care of entering the required security codes and, once inside, deactivating the alarm. ‘Look at this place, it’s already clean!’ She pivoted in the spacious hallway, assessing the scale of the job. ‘It’ll be spotless by the time we finish,’ she added with indecent cheer, ending any hopes Tabby may have had that they might slacken their usual standards. Tabby surveyed the expanse of antique terracotta tiling with new weariness, a sudden vision in her mind of the thousands of other floors on the island gathering dust and waiting for her to arrive to mop them. Temperatures would soon rise, and not all of the houses – if any – would have air-conditioning. If she couldn’t face her job today, how on earth was she going to endure it in high season?
Because you have no choice, she told herself sternly. Remember, you could have been in a homeless shelter by now. Or worse.
‘Right, better get on with it,’ Emmie said, and, after locating the storage cupboard, instructed Tabby to take the kitchen and entrance hall while she handled the vast open-plan sitting room at the rear. ‘We’ll need to sweep the terrace as well. If they’ve got a high-pressure jet wash, we’ll use that.’
She began sweeping her allotted zone with focused intensity. This, according to protocol, would be followed by vacuuming and mopping, though in recent days Tabby had begun to omit the vacuuming stage when on her own. And it had never occurred to her to clean stone terraces or tidy courtyards, not unless the tasks were on Moira’s list.
She set to work too. It was a testament to how well she had settled into her new life that she had virtually forgotten its inception and therefore only recognised where she was when, after an hour in the kitchen, she paused for a glass of water and looked at the family photographs on the dresser while she drank it.
Then she fetched a second glass for Emmie, who had finished downstairs and was starting on the first of three bathrooms on the upper floor.
‘I’ve been here before,’ she told her.
‘Have you? That explains why it’s in such good nick.’ Emmie was scrubbing at the skirting boards with demonic energy, as if she’d found them thickly coated in syrup. ‘The owners probably haven’t set foot in the place since then. Had the oven been used? Moira says some people don’t ever cook, even when they’re here for weeks. They must pay her a retainer, I guess, get the place cleaned even when no one’s been here. It’s all right for some.’
‘No, not on a job for Moira,’ Tabby said, ignoring the last comments, though not before noting that Emmie was only ever talkative on impersonal, inconsequential matters. ‘I don’t mean that.’
‘When, then?’ Emmie asked the question with an air of sufferance rather than interest.
‘When I first came here… I haven’t told you about what happened before I turned up at your house.’
Emmie looked for a moment quite startled, but her face cleared as soon as Tabby added, ‘I was with a man, the owner of this place. That’s how I came to be on the island.’ She hardly needed add that it had been an illicit extramarital liaison, for the evidence of family life was all around them, the portraits that had caused the penny to drop in the first place, the bikes and surfboards and tennis racquets, the rows of teenagers’ sports shoes.
‘You had an affair with him?’ Emmie said, dispiritedly, and Tabby could not tell if it saddened her to hear the confession or simply to be having to hear anything more of Tabby’s history at all.
‘Not an affair, just one night. He picked me up in a bar in Paris. Or I picked him up, I don’t remember. Do you hate me?’
‘Why would I hate you?’
‘Well… some people might disapprove. Most people would. He’s married. He’s got, oh, I don’t know how many kids.’
‘Two. I saw the pictures. Both boys.’
‘I disapprove of me,’ Tabby told her.
But Emmie shook her head. ‘Why did you leave the city with a complete stranger? Let him bring you somewhere so remote? He could have murdered you.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s been a murder here for centuries,’ Tabby said mildly.
‘Yes, but it could have been the murder capital of France for all you knew.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about murder,’ Tabby said, frustrated by this line of enquiry. Emmie never gave the predictable response, or the desired one. One moment she’d correctly detect a faint implication you hardly knew you’d made, the next she’d take you at your word when you couldn’t possibly have meant it. ‘I’d had a few drinks. And I had that good vibe about him, you know, like I already knew him well and could trust him?’
Emmie didn’t reply, but Tabby thought she could see in her face that she did know.
‘Anyway, he threw me out the next day. He had a meeting with a builder, and his family were arriving in the afternoon.’
‘So what were you expecting?’ That ambivalent sorrow reappeared in Emmie’s eyes.
‘Nothing, I suppose. I just remember it felt a bit sordid afterwards. Like I’d done it for money.’
‘He paid you?’
‘No! Well, he paid for the train and taxis. My expenses.’
‘Well, one night isn’t anything to fuss about, is it?’ Emmie made a dismissive face, as if the subject were closed, causing Tabby to jump in with an emotion that took her by surprise.
‘The thing is, Emmie, he was the first man since Paul. It felt like, are they always going to end with me being sent packing? It makes me feel, you know, like I get close to a man, he gets close to me, and then he takes it back again. He changes his mind about me.’ She heard the lurch of despair in her own voice, frightened herself by how quickly she could abandon optimism and descend into inarticulate self-pity. ‘Nobody wants me,’ she was about to add, but pulled herself together. ‘Oh, forget it, I’m just feeling sorry for myself.’
But all at once Emmie was on her feet, not only interested but gazing at her with true compassion, the intense, livid kind Tabby had not seen in her since the night they met. ‘No, I know exactly how you feel, Tabby. When he says there’s nothing to be gained any more. Nothing to be gained from love. I think it’s horrible to be denied, whether the other person is married or not.’
‘Denied’: it was a sweet, old-fashioned way of putting it, Tabby thought, but she hadn’t really been denied by Grégoire, only by Paul; she would have left this house of her own accord, if not that morning, then eventually. He’d been old enough to
be her father. And she’d never said anything about loving him, had she? But she didn’t want to hurt Emmie’s feelings by pointing this out.
‘Emmie, can I ask you something?’
‘You can ask,’ Emmie said.
‘Were you “denied”, too? Dumped, like me? Is that why you came here? Are we in the same boat?’
Emmie looked at her, the familiar shade of self-protection drawing over her face. ‘No, our boats are not the same at all, Tabby. I wish they were.’
Tabby burned inside and out with the need to know more. And it was more than plain curiosity: she longed to be able to reciprocate the kindness she had received from Emmie. As she understood it (and whether or not Paul had credited her with the knowledge), support worked both ways. ‘But what is your situation? You’ve never told me. I might be able to help, you know. Even just talking about it might be useful?’ When Emmie did not reply, she continued recklessly, ‘Do you remember when you discovered me that day in the house?’
‘How could I forget.’
‘You said, “How did you find me?”’
Emmie’s face tightened. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘No, you did, I’m sure you did. Why did you think I was looking for you, Emmie?’
‘I have no memory of that,’ Emmie said, ‘but presumably because it wouldn’t occur to me that you could be in my house for any other reason.’
It was a typical evasion and one that should have silenced Tabby, but, fired now to temperatures she could not control, she persisted. ‘Not like my situation: OK, so is it the opposite, then? You’re hiding from someone who does want you? You thought I might know him?’ She imagined now an obsessed lover, a hunter for Emmie’s heart, and registered momentary envy that the other woman should inspire extreme passion in a man while she had been discarded so casually. Shame followed. What if the man was violent and Emmie feared for her life? There was nothing to envy about that. He could be a Steve figure, an abuser, someone far more dangerous than anything she had had to contend with.
Emmie regarded her with resignation. ‘I wouldn’t call it hiding,’ she said at last, and there was pure desolation in her voice. ‘I would say it’s more like exile.’
‘Exile?’ It was a word with political connotations, one that conjured disgraced queens and fallen leaders. ‘Why would you be in exile? I don’t understand.’
‘That’s why I don’t want to talk about it. You won’t understand and I can’t explain.’
‘Yes, you can. You can tell me, I’ll be on your side.’ Tabby felt a twinge, remembering the phrase as one of her father’s when she was little. And he had been, even during the Susie years, or at least he’d start off on her side and Susie would grind him down. His instinct had been for her, though, and that was better than nothing, better than anything her mother could manage.
‘I doubt it,’ Emmie said in a shrunken voice, almost to herself. ‘No one else was, so why would you be?’
‘Because I’m different. I promise I will try to understand, whatever it is.’
Emmie breathed a long-suffering sigh. Neither of them had moved from her position on either side of the bathroom doorway, but now Emmie lowered herself on to the curved rim of the bathtub. ‘If you must know, I was accused of being something I wasn’t.’
Tabby digested this. Accused of being, not accused of doing. It seemed an important distinction. ‘What were you accused of being?’
‘A bad person.’
‘A bad person?’ It was curiously childlike phrasing. ‘Bad in what way? Did you commit some sort of crime?’
‘That depends on your point of view.’
‘What’s your point of view? That’s all I want to know.’
But Emmie would not say.
‘Why here, then?’ Tabby asked, determined not to lose the momentum of this breakthrough exchange. ‘At least tell me that. This place isn’t that well known in Britain, is it? Why not Paris or the south?’
‘It could have been anywhere, I suppose. But I knew about Ré. I’d heard about it from a friend.’ There was another pause, before she allowed, ‘We were going to come here together.’
‘We? This does involve a man, then?’
Emmie concurred, or at least implied doing so with that way she had of simultaneously dipping her chin and eyes.
‘Who? Why did you break up? Where is he now?’
But Emmie held up a hand: ‘Please don’t ask any more. I just want to rid myself of it. I need new words, new stories.’
‘But —’
‘No, please!’
Tabby did not have the first idea of what to make of these declarations. What new stories? What new words? Having finally extracted the admission of heartbreak she’d been so determined to win, she was rewarded only with a feeling of anti-climax. Then she reminded herself of the practical imperative for not irritating or distressing Emmie: to protect her position as beneficiary of Emmie’s good will. A good will all the more charitable now she had been given an inkling of how low Emmie must have been feeling.
‘We need to get on,’ Emmie said, and she resumed her scouring with an amiable air, as if they’d been passing the time in idle gossip, nothing to think any further on. ‘Thank you for the water. Could you make the beds next? According to the notes, the linen cupboard is by the door to the main bathroom at the back.’
‘OK, sure.’
Tabby approached the bedrooms in a tumult of remorse, not only for bullying poor Emmie into talking about events she plainly preferred to forget, but for the night of adultery that now returned to her as she entered the one room of the house she genuinely recognised. She’d thought it such a luxurious chamber and yet it was the smaller of two guest rooms, the most modest of the five bedrooms. Grégoire was a very wealthy man, clearly, and she had been a cheap and temporary acquisition.
Emmie was right, to want to free her mind. Our hearts shouldn’t have such a narrow focus she thought. Men, relationships, love: they shouldn’t be the only things that drive us to do extraordinary things like going to a different country and starting a new life. We should be here because we’re adventurers, not fugitives! There should be bigger, nobler things to motivate us.
For the moment she could not think what those big, noble things might be, but she felt utter conviction that she wanted to find them.
Chapter 8
Emily
Arthur was quite open about his womanising past, about how he had caused his wife pain not only by the infidelities themselves but also by his preference to spend the precious little time he had outside his work with someone – anyone – other than family. Had it been golf or rock-climbing or a mania for remote-control planes, it would have contributed just the same to his being a negligent husband and near-absent father. And while nothing to be proud of, his affairs were, he told me, nonetheless typical among his colleagues, some of whom lived separately from their families during the week, joining them only at weekends. Others were divorced, remarried, divorced a second time, the forgiveness of loved ones a luxury long relinquished. It was more than an occupational hazard, it was an epidemic.
‘It’s not the kind of marriage I set out to have,’ he said. ‘I didn’t aim to fail. I certainly didn’t aim to be the one who made it fail.’
‘Would you act differently if you could go back to the beginning?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. But I’d only need to do one thing differently – say no, not yes, that very first time – and the rest would never have followed.’
Instead, he’d said yes (to a colleague, predictably), and after that the women had come and gone, an easy reward for a gruelling spell, like having a drink on the way home from work; the lovers who lasted any length of time becoming the equivalent of a favourite pub. ‘I made the mistake of thinking that because it didn’t mean all that much to me, it couldn’t mean much to her either,’ he said, of Sylvie.
‘So what happened?’
‘Two years ago she gave me a final warning. She’d already found a divorce
lawyer and had written the email instructing him. She just hadn’t sent it yet.’
‘And?’
‘And so I stopped.’
‘Just like that?’ In spite of the absurd irony of his making this claim while his naked body was hooked around mine, I listened rapt, as if to a confirmed truth.
‘Yes, on the condition that she stopped with the constant accusations.’ As I raised my eyebrows, he continued, ‘I know how that sounds, I know I was the one at fault, but if I’d slept with as many women as she imagined, I would have had no time to do my job. Sometimes I was only in the pub because I was having a drink.’
‘Yes, while looking out the window for who might be passing by…’
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 11