Such was the power of this instinct that Tabby began to convince herself that Emmie had left the photograph lying around deliberately and that the reason for this was in some way connected with Tabby’s liaison with Grégoire that afternoon. It was as if she needed to let Tabby know that she had once been the attractive one, the one propositioned in shops and bedded in secret assignations.
But that made no sense at all. It had to be guilt giving her strange ideas. For fear of provoking disapproval, she had not told Emmie about meeting Grégoire again and she could think of no other way of her knowing. Yes, Tabby had borrowed her phone to text him, but she had deleted the message just as soon as she’d sent it, and in any case it had contained only the address of the house on rue du Rempart and the time that he should come. Emmie was not a witch or a clairvoyant. Additionally, she had not left the photograph lying face-up; Tabby had pulled it from the folder and in doing so had invaded Emmie’s closely guarded privacy, just as she had the night they’d met.
Something had shifted in Emmie this evening, though. However quick she had been to shut down interrogation, however able she was to compartmentalise those experiences that had led her to leave England (if nothing else, the photograph showed that at some point since she had radically altered her appearance, and everyone knew that people did that when they’d suffered some kind of trauma), that sigh of hers had been the sigh of a person accustomed to inspiring intrigue.
A person who did not wish to go on resisting other people’s questions for ever.
Chapter 12
Emily
I was intensely curious about Arthur’s house. It was on the uphill part of the Grove, the ‘right’ end (though there was hardly a wrong one), one of a row built for a better class of Georgian than the rest and now inhabited by a better class of Elizabethan. Having adjusted my route to work to pass it every day, I would steal long looks through the ground-floor windows, though there was disappointingly little to be glimpsed and nothing that ever altered. You could see a portion of book-lined wall, a standard feature on the street, a corner of a high-backed chestnut leather chair, and the pale stiff shade of a standard lamp. The curtains were of some dark, heavy fabric and possibly silk-lined – in any case, they were rarely pulled shut; the tops of a pair of blinds were also just visible. Arthur told me this room was his study, the kitchen and family room being, like the Laings’, below, and the whole of the first floor – with a trio of tall polished windows and vivid flowerboxes at the front – used as a formal sitting room. The bedrooms and bathrooms were on the two floors above, while in the garden was Sylvie’s studio (she made hand-decorated greetings cards, I had learned, and sold them at craft fairs and school fundraisers).
I should say here that I never once aspired to taking possession of this house, of kicking Sylvie out of her side of the marital bed and installing myself in her place – that would have been unthinkable on every level. I may have signed that rental lease for 199 with naïve dreams of sharing the grand and romantic identity of the street, but I was an outsider here, even in my own flat. In any case, the deeper my love for Arthur grew, the less I cared about either my neighbourhood or my status within it. When I imagined us in our new life, it was in a small cottage outside the city, with stone walls, square windows, a spray of wisteria, the classic childhood home I had always dreamed of.
Of course, my enemies would argue that I thought in these terms because Arthur was a father figure to me, as if there is something evil or perverse in that. But why should there be? Why should a lover not also be caring and protective? Do young women really want what I had with Matt, the initial thrill of the chase replaced all too soon by a casual neutrality whereby he called me ‘mate’ and prided himself on evading any ‘traps’ I might set for him? Was it really such a surprise that I responded to being treasured and adored by someone older?
‘Please can I see your house,’ I’d say to Arthur. ‘When she’s out for the day or down in Sussex. Just a five-minute tour. It’s hard to know someone properly without seeing where he lives.’
‘I live at work,’ he would say wryly.
I wasn’t serious, in any case. I knew it was too dangerous. Having lived on the Grove for twenty years, he and Sylvie knew everyone there worth knowing. If Ed or Nina Meeks, who lived opposite, did not see me entering the Woodhalls’, then someone else would and word would get back to Sylvie, if not directly then indirectly.
So it was quite a surprise when at last I got my invitation. In the middle of July, with exams over and school finished, Sylvie and the boys left to spend the summer in the house in Sussex. They would be away for six weeks, Arthur said, as had been the family’s custom since they’d bought the house ten years ago. Sylvie had a sister there and liked to blow away the cobwebs on long coastal walks, while the boys swam and sailed and, these days, partied with their cousins and friends in the village. Arthur was to join them for weekends when he could, as well as for ten days at the end of August. September had been discussed as a possible time for him to break the news to her that he was leaving; after Alexander had departed on his travels.
I did not allow myself to doubt the likelihood of this, nor did I dwell on how I might endure our time apart, but instead I concentrated on enjoying how available he was to me in the present. As experiences of being ‘the other woman’ went, this was freedom untold: in the first week, we went out for dinner twice in the West End, and spent a night in a hotel in Covent Garden. We had never been more besotted with one another.
On the second Friday, he phoned me in the evening. ‘I’m home early. Can you meet?’
‘Yes.’ I always said yes. I had learned early on that to contrive to be unavailable was only to cut off my nose to spite my face. And since I was already home from work, there was no need for the anxious invention of some emergency in order to hoodwink Charlotte into releasing me early. All those sudden sicknesses and last-minute days off I’d been taking were beginning to stack up.
‘The thing is, the Crescent’s fully booked.’ This was the hotel we’d been using since the Inn on the Hill had been declared high-risk. ‘We could go into town again?’
‘Come here,’ I suggested. ‘Saves us both travelling in.’ And out again – separately, in both directions. ‘We could take a chance just this once: Sarah’s away, I saw her leave earlier.’
Until then, my flat had remained frustratingly out of bounds. Though Matt was gone, there remained the issue of the Laings, more precisely Sarah, who worked from home around her children’s hours and seemed always to be getting into or out of her huge black Range-Rover to take one of them one place or collect the other from another, even late into the evenings. Since the babysitting episode I’d had no further run-ins with her, but I rarely arrived or departed without the sensation of being observed. Having learned from her daughter that, irritatingly, the family was not going on holiday until the very day Arthur was due to join Sylvie in Sussex, I had given up on the possibility of him sneaking up to see me – until that afternoon, when I’d seen Sarah and the kids heading for the car with overnight bags. My hopes for a lucky break were confirmed when I heard the girl say she would miss Misty – their family cat – and Sarah reply, ‘We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, you’ll see her again then.’
Relaying this now to Arthur, I was amazed when he responded, ‘You’re right, we can take a risk for once. Why don’t you come to me?’
‘To you? Are you sure? What about —?’
‘Ed and Nina left this morning for a birthday party in Italy. I don’t know about the other neighbours, but carry a book or something, just in case. Then if anyone mentions seeing you to Sylvie I can say you were returning something I lent you.’
He had in fact lent me an NHS document about Alzheimer’s and I held this in my arms, feeling like a student visiting her professor with an assignment to be marked. It was a bright, still evening and the street was gold and green, its beauty silent and heightened, as if special-effects had cleansed the walls and paths of
any marks or sounds of human imperfection. It stirred in me the most joyful reprise of the epiphany I’d had in Arthur’s car coming home from the hospital: I would not worry about the future, either in terms of my father’s illness or my affair with Arthur, but would live for the day, for the moment, and on this day at this moment I was lucky enough to be walking up one of the most beautiful streets in London towards the house of the man I loved. After all, I could be run over and killed before the night was over – would I like to think I’d spent my final hours second-guessing the travel plans of Sarah Laing or Nina Meeks, two women I hardly knew and who both loathed me? (Ironically, by basing herself in Sussex, Sylvie Woodhall was the only person making life easy for Arthur and me.)
I was in a state of exhilaration by the time I turned in to his gate, leaping up the steps and reaching for the bell with childlike glee. But the effects quickly faded when Arthur answered the door, a grudging smile on his lips, primed for any watching eyes and listening ears.
‘Emily, hello. You found it, did you? Excellent. Come and have a coffee while you tell me what you think.’ He acted so convincingly, I forgot that we were lovers, and though he kissed me the moment the door closed behind us, it fell well short of the welcome I received when I joined him in the hotel room – a frantic assault of lust, a proclamation that the wait had been far too long to bear. Instead he broke off almost at once, telling me he’d show me the house ‘first’. As he led me from room to room, he was a diffident tour guide and my admiring comments began to be replaced by a fretting disappointment at that ‘first’ of his, his assumption that I was here for sex, at his service, for ever the easy conquest.
It was a lovely house, though, it really was. Whoever owns it now is to be envied, just as the Woodhalls once were. It didn’t have the self-conscious dramatic touches of Sarah’s, but was more casual, even dated, with clusters of sofas and armchairs in every space, antique rugs on the oak floors, everything cranberry and yellow and other warm hues. It was not hard to imagine the two teenage boys and their friends stretched on the huge mustard sofas in the family room, or Sylvie cooking at the double range in the kitchen, her dinner guests drinking wine at the beautiful rear window overlooking the lawn. Her garden studio, a painted wooden cabin in the New England style, was just what I dreamed of in my fantasies about starting to write.
‘I like this room best,’ I said of Arthur’s study. There were photographs on his desk, but otherwise there was little evidence of the other three members of the family. I noticed that the blinds had been rolled down. All those times I’d passed, I’d never seen them in use, I’d been able to look in, but now I was inside I was not permitted to look out. Ridiculously, tears bubbled at my eyes at the thought that he was concealing me. I knew it was only necessary caution, but it felt like shame.
He released my hand then – it seemed to me as if to signal the end of the pretence that this site visit was anything but ill-conceived. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said, and it was the first time I’d seen him subdued and distracted like this; I knew his misgivings must be serious. Until then, I had never considered how it might be for him to see me in his home, only how I might react to being in it, but had I done I would have guessed there was a risk of his being so struck by the wrongness of it, it might shake his conviction about us. As for my reaction, I had scarcely prepared any better for that: would seeing the family photographs that chronicled two decades of another woman’s possession of him make horribly true what had always been my suspicion, that the idea of him leaving had never been anything but fantasy, like an invalid planning the round-the-world adventure he knew, deep down, he would never take?
Following him up the stairs, I felt a certain despair that these thoughts had occurred so late, a despair that only grew when the tour came to an end at the open door of a bedroom, just as he’d assumed, a guest bedroom on the second floor. Only as we were closing the door behind us did I reach the logical conclusion that one or both of us might not relish sleeping with the other this evening, one or both of us might find it so distasteful we might want to terminate the affair there and then. In fact, one of us might already have decided to do so, allowing himself one last congress for old times’ sake. So convinced was I suddenly that this was the case that even as we slipped under the covers (smooth and cool with disuse), even as we made love quietly and quickly, as if the house were not empty at all but full of people suspicious of our activities and likely to spring at any moment, even then I felt like crying. My eyes kept finding our clothes, normally abandoned without care but this time piled on a single chair by the bed, the better to access in the emergency change of heart that I expected to be announced within minutes of our breaking our bodies apart and recovering our breath.
‘You didn’t enjoy that,’ Arthur said, an acknowledgement, not a question.
‘I feel funny being here.’ I can’t relax, I added, silently, knowing I’m about to go to the gallows. I felt a shiver at the back of my neck.
‘I’ve got some news,’ he said with ghastly timing.
‘Oh yes?’ As the first tear caught in my eyelashes, I did not at first understand what he said when he said it.
‘I think I’ve found somewhere for us to go.’
‘You mean a new hotel?’ We were both half whispering, as if defying hidden microphones.
‘No, I mean properly, somewhere to live together when I move out.’
My heart bounced so hard he must have felt the impact through our ribcages. ‘When you move out?’
He pressed me to him closer still. ‘Yes. It’s just temporary, but a friend of mine at the clinic in town lives out in Hampshire and has a flat in Marylebone for when he’s up here. He and the family are away for the whole of August and he’s going to give me the keys. We’ll have a month to find somewhere else, but in the meantime we’ll be together. It’s a nice place, in one of the mansion blocks near the High Street. If we like it, we can maybe look for a place nearby. It’s as good a base as any while we decide where we want to live long-term, and while the lawyers work out what budget there is for a new place.’
I gaped, joy clenched in the tight fist of shock. ‘You mean… you mean you’re going to leave her now, this summer, while she’s in Sussex?’
‘Yes. It’s time. I’ll go down tomorrow and tell her. Talk to the boys. Their exams are all done, Alex is off to South America in a couple of weeks – what difference does it make if I wait for him to get on a plane? And Hugo: we understand each other, I’m sure he’ll handle it better than anyone. In many ways it’s the best time for Sylvie, as well. She’ll be near her family, won’t have to explain to anyone what’s happened until she gets back.’
‘My God.’ I was flabbergasted. How could my instincts have been so poor? ‘Marylebone? I assumed that if it happened… well, I thought you would just move in with me at first.’
Arthur frowned. ‘Oh no, I can’t stay on the Grove – and nor can you, darling. Sylvie knows every last soul here and they’ll all take her side. We’d both be lynched. And don’t forget Hugo will still be at school. I couldn’t have him seeing us together in his own neighbourhood, it would be cruel.’ Now he said it, it was obvious.
‘I’ll need to give notice on the flat,’ I said. This I had been about to do whether Arthur left Sylvie or not; I could not afford it on my own for much longer.
He nodded. ‘It’ll be useful to have it for storage for a few weeks. There’s not much space in the Marylebone place.’
The shock was loosening its grip, allowing euphoria to seep into the air. ‘Are you sure, Arthur? Are you really ready to leave all this?’
‘Yes. Actually, seeing you here has confirmed it.’
‘Really?’
‘Life doesn’t last for ever, and I want to spend the rest of mine with you. I’m not prepared to risk you leaving me by constantly delaying. You’ll lose heart, I can tell. Besides, there’ll never be a perfect time to do this; people will be just as upset if it’s tomorrow or ten years from now. The
way I see it, now is as imperfect a time as any.’
‘Gosh.’
‘I know, gosh. You’re pleased, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am, I’m overjoyed.’
He kissed me hard. ‘I can’t wait to have you in my bed every night.’
‘Nor can I.’ I was light-headed with pleasure.
‘I hope you can bear with me these next few months,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m going to get hell from all directions. There’ll be an enormous amount to sort out with lawyers and accountants. Sylvie will get both families in her camp, God knows what they’ll dream up to punish me…’ He breathed a heavy, anticipatory sigh. ‘But let’s not worry about any of that tonight. We need champagne,’ he added, smiling.
‘Absolutely!’ But I didn’t really expect to celebrate the theft of another woman’s husband in her own house, using her best crystal flutes.
‘I’ll nip out and get a bottle.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to go out, Arthur. Ordinary wine will do. Anything. A beer?’
‘I’ll still have to go. There’s no alcohol in the house.’
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 18