Absurdly, it took being on this knife’s edge, joy on one side of the blade, terror on the other, to make me understand that this love of ours was never going to be anything but opposed by other people, a source of condemnation and disgrace.
Even when freed to be together, our first task would be to fight the world.
She did not come. Even if he did not have the crucial new information I did, Arthur knew her far better than I and Saturday afternoon was going to be soon enough for her, after all. Her proposal last night had not been a spontaneous act and now she would need time to deliberate her next move. I imagined her on the phone, being prepared for the marital confrontation by Nina or another confidante, perhaps yesterday’s trusty informant, who could this morning report to her the respective times of our departures. I wondered how it was possible to hide the crisis from her sons, to make breakfast and plan a day as if there were not every chance that it would be their last as a family. Then I remembered that teenagers, young adults, did not get up for breakfast on holiday. They lived a different shift from their parents, going to bed at three in the morning and sleeping until after lunch. When their father arrived that afternoon, they would probably just be surfacing.
Be brave, Arthur, I thought. They will still love you. I may not have been a parent, but I was still a child, and I knew that a son’s love was as indestructible as a father’s.
In the morning, we lingered. It was a novelty for us, lingering; it was one of the things I knew separated proper couples from illegitimate ones (there were many, many other things besides, and how I longed to get on with discovering them). I was due at work, but Arthur had a conference call scheduled with the director of his African charity and needed to take that before heading off to Sussex.
At nine, I rang Charlotte. ‘I forgot to mention I have a dentist’s appointment this morning,’ I said.
‘You always seem to be forgetting to mention appointments,’ she said, in the tone of one who had held her tongue for long enough and would hold it no more. ‘What’s going on, Emily? It’s the school holidays now, we’re going to be packed today. You can’t just not turn up! Are dentists even open on the weekend?’
I sighed. ‘Of course they are. It’s just a check-up. I’ll be with you by eleven at the latest. And I’ll stay late this evening to make up the time.’
‘Fine.’ But she was furious and I prepared to leave soon after ten, knowing I could not risk being a minute later than the time I’d given.
‘This time tomorrow…’ Arthur said, kissing me goodbye in the hallway.
‘This time tomorrow. Good luck.’ As I approached the front door, the bell went, startling me with its low, grinding ring and sending me scuttling back to Arthur. ‘Is it her?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘She’d use her key, wouldn’t she? It can’t be the cleaner, it’s not one of her days. It’ll be a delivery or something. Stay in the study for a minute just in case…’
I took his seat at the desk, my heart in my mouth as I listened to him opening the door to the outside world. I noticed the light flashing on his mobile phone, charging on a shelf close to the power socket, and resisted the temptation to check if there was a text or voicemail from her.
‘Hello?’ Even in those two syllables Arthur’s voice was different, though I couldn’t immediately identify how. Afterwards, I realised that it was the first time I’d heard him express doubt.
‘Good morning, sir, are you Mr Woodhall?’ It was a male voice, not one I recognised. ‘The husband of Sylvie Woodhall?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Is anything the matter?’
‘I am Police Constable Matthews and this is Family Liaison Officer Louisa Wayne. Please can we come in and talk with you for a few minutes?’
‘Of course, yes.’
There were the shuffling sounds of footsteps on tile, the door closing, then a female voice – presumably Officer Wayne – asking very gently, ‘Are you here on your own this morning, Mr Woodhall?’
‘Yes,’ Arthur said, ‘I mean no, I have a friend here, but… What’s going on? Is something wrong?’
I was able to get a glimpse of the visitors as they followed him past the doorway, two uniformed officers, the man about my age, the woman older, in her forties. The gait of both was informal enough, but their profiles were tight with some contained emotion, some trained attitude I could not place.
He must have taken them down to the kitchen, close enough for me to hear that conversation was taking place but too far to decipher what was being said. I heard nothing for a minute or two but indistinct voices, then a cry of ‘No, oh no!’, and then more cries, strange shapeless sounds that carried up the stairs towards me. I didn’t recognise the anguish as Arthur’s at first, but it slowly dawned on me that it could not belong to either of the officers and that by process of elimination it could only be his.
Everything about this situation pointed to the phrase ‘I am sorry to inform you’.
I thought it was just Sylvie. I know ‘just’ isn’t the right word, that it could never be ‘just’ anyone, and perhaps a clearer way of expressing it is to say that I thought it was Sylvie and I thought that in itself was terrible enough, certainly enough to bring an end to Arthur and me. How could it not? We were as implicated as one another, as guilty. There followed a few seconds, maybe ten, in which I succeeded in suspending reality; though solidly seated in the chair, I felt myself hang in the air as if weightless, clinging to the last moments of us as we were, us as we’d been going to be but no longer would.
This time tomorrow.
Eventually, when love overcame fear, gravity returned and I got to my feet and left the room, with a last glance towards the two windows I’d passed twice a day since February. The blinds were still drawn; when opened again it would be on to a different world from the one they’d been closed on. I pulled the door silently behind me and walked towards the kitchen, the terrible, unavoidable questions forming on my lips.
Chapter 13
Tabby
Dear Tabby,
I am very worried about your psychological state and am on the verge of reporting you missing – please get in touch.
Mum
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Tabby thought. Her ‘psychological state’? Since when had her mother cared about that?
Emails from Elaine had arrived sporadically during her travels, at first chatty bulletins about family and friends, her work and, of course, her perverted husband, but in recent weeks, while Tabby had been offline, it appeared that they had contracted to urgent pleas for her to get in touch – or risk becoming a matter for Interpol.
Tabby sighed. She had enjoyed her spell without technology more than she might have expected: no communication with her mother, no Facebook with old friends whose lives appeared to have none of the troughs of hers, no glances at the British news headlines – war might have broken out and she would be completely in the dark. Then Moira had told her about a bureau in a shopping street off the market car park where you could pay to use a PC by the hour. Its opening hours were irregular, however, and she’d only managed to get online at last this evening, a Friday night in July.
She had had no illusions as to what she was hoping to find when her new email appeared on screen, the only thing: Paul’s name. But it was not there. Of course it was not there. She was history, wasn’t she? I’ve tried to tell you before, but you never get the message. And there was no new message now. Scanning her inbox a second time, even a third, did not make one magically appear.
She typed her mother the necessary reply: Am alive. Still in France. No need for drama.
Once or twice this last year she had considered putting it all down in writing, the distress Steve had caused her, sharing it with Elaine while she was in a position to avoid the repercussions. But each time she would decide against it: chances were, there would be no repercussions, except possibly to smother what little was left of the parent-daughter relationship. One day, she might wish her own children to know th
eir grandmother (though, under no circumstances, their step-grandfather). And what was the point in any case when the bathroom incident, which had been the worst, had been dismissed out of hand as an embarrassing blunder?
For Steve had not, in the end, ever actually touched her. Who was going to believe that the effect his attentions had had on her had been so profound that by the time she left for college she hardly uttered a word at home and had developed a compulsion for privacy that bled into the rest of her life? In the sixth form, while her friends had dressed in sexually provocative ways, imitating their celebrity heroes as teenagers their age usually did, Tabby, with someone in her home all too easily provoked, dressed as unglamorously as possible and kept her hair boyishly short.
‘You know Elaine’s worried you might be a dyke,’ Steve told her. ‘I know you’re not. You could wear sackcloth and you couldn’t hide what you’ve got. Your body is unbelievable, it’s a crime against red-blooded males to cover it up the way you do. Tell me what you get up to with that boyfriend of yours, tell me every detail.’
And: ‘Come on, it’s summer, it’s way too hot for all those clothes. Put your bikini on and sunbathe in the garden. You can take your top off if you like, don’t mind me.’
And: ‘Getting excited, are you? Am I getting you nice and wet?’
‘I’m not listening,’ she would say, if she said anything at all. She would try not to show her distress, but he could sense it just the same. And even when she turned away she could still feel those horrible sliding looks that groped no differently from fingers.
They married, of course, Steve and her mother. The confusing thing was that he seemed genuinely to love Elaine, treated her perfectly well, which was part of what made it so impossible for Tabby to tell.
‘You could try and look happy for me,’ her mother said, the morning of the wedding. ‘Please don’t ruin today for me, Tabby.’
Somehow the pestered adolescent had become the killjoy, the toxic teenager every parent dreaded, the one who slunk around in glum self-absorption, plotting to ruin weddings. She heard them sometimes laughing about her. Laughing.
At least their marriage won her a two-week break from them, when they went to Spain for their honeymoon. Steve was scrupulous about leaving no trail, there were never texts or voicemails or emails while he was away, anything that she could take to her mother – or any other authority – as evidence. She fantasised sometimes about buying surveillance equipment, but it was clear she could not afford concealable cameras or microphones. She considered using her mobile phone to record his harassment, but it was too obvious: the moment she reached into her pocket or bag he would simply change the subject to something legitimate – ‘How’s the geography essay going?’ – or stop speaking altogether.
No, she would never tell now. Nothing had actually happened, and actual happenings were the only things people took seriously; anything else could be considered imaginary. And it was more than likely that Steve had long ago pre-empted any complaints by reporting it all himself, his version of events, in which he’d recast Tabby as the temptress and himself as the victim, the one made to feel hunted in his own home. How easily he could have sent himself a suggestive message from Tabby’s phone and stored it for use in the event of a confrontation. It was ancient history, anyhow, seven years had passed since she’d last slept under the same roof as him and her mother – what good would it do to audit her unhappiness now? She could just hear her mother saying to her friends, ‘I know she’s my daughter, but it’s just as well she’s out of the country. Even before her father died she was a handful. An overactive imagination, that’s the problem.’
Having paid for an hour’s internet use, she thought she might Google Grégoire, but she could not remember his surname. He was a doctor in Paris but she did not know which hospital, only that he specialised in allergies and immunology. It was too hard to understand in French.
Reminding herself of her epiphany that her life’s purpose should not be so easily interchanged with the seeking of male approval, she sat for a minute or two furiously denying further thought of any of the men who routinely troubled her thoughts. Then she tapped instead the words ‘Emmie Mason’.
It was a common name, it turned out, more common than she’d thought, judging by the thousands of results. The first few pages referred to an artist, a songwriter and a cross-country runner of the same name; there was also a headmistress, a florist, a dentist, an environmentalist interested in homesteading (whatever that was), not to mention the dozens more who populated the business networking sites, often known simply as ‘Em’ or ‘Emi’. Not surprisingly, a scan of image results yielded no photograph of her Emmie, either in the current low-key incarnation or in the earlier more head-turning blond guise she’d glimpsed in the mystery photograph. She even tried ‘Emmie Mason London’ and ‘Emmie Mason France’, only to be faced with millions of possibilities where the words were combined. Her Emmie was the needle in the haystack, perhaps not even stuck in the haystack at all.
Well, it was hardly surprising, given the innate elusiveness of Emmie. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it was like one of those film plots when you woke up and found your friend gone, only to discover you were the only person who thought she’d existed in the first place, everyone else insisting they’d never laid eyes on her. You then had to find a maverick detective to help you figure out if she were ever real or just a figment of your imagination, a ghost you’d created for company.
But no, that could not happen here. No matter what her mother might say, she didn’t think the authorities need be alerted just yet.
She had ten minutes of her hour left. To torture herself, she reopened her email and read some of the messages Paul had sent her when they were still together and counting down to their trip. They were the memos of a mate, a fellow adventurer: Twenty-eight days to Full Moon Party!; Check out this awesome surfing ashram! (She never did find out what that was.) How easy it was with hindsight to read them as pleas for release. I can’t be your father, he’d said, or your mother or your therapist or your friend. I just want to be freed from you.
Then she began to read the messages she’d sent in return. One stood out: Honestly, Paul, without this trip to look forward to, I think I might go mad. He’d had no choice but to take her with him. She had made herself his responsibility.
She re-read the last mail she’d sent him, from Paris, before her money ran out: I still love you and am here if you want to get in touch. It was the work of a doormat, and yet wasn’t it the awful truth that she still meant every feeble-minded syllable of it?
Whatever it was she was doing with Grégoire could make no difference to that.
‘Who is this man who has made you so sad?’ he asked her the next day, in the master bedroom of the rue du Rempart house. The shutters were, of course, closed.
‘You,’ Tabby said, teasing.
‘No, who?’
‘No one. He doesn’t matter,’ she said, circumstance alone giving her words a temporary and quite credible conviction (how could he matter if she were happy to lie in bed with someone else?). ‘He doesn’t want me, so…’
‘If he doesn’t want you, why do you want him?’
‘Oh, come on,’ Tabby said. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted someone who didn’t want you? Or wanted her because she doesn’t want you?’ She was aware of sounding rather young, mouthing psychologies she’d read in magazines as opposed to having gained from experience. Luckily, such lack of authenticity was either willingly indulged by Grégoire or lost in translation.
‘Never. I think this is cultural differences,’ he said, and he shrugged and Tabby laughed, which made him laugh, and this was as serious as things would get between them.
It was an affair now, albeit a seasonal one. They had their routine, their honed subterfuge: early on Friday evening she would text him confirmation of their rendezvous the following day. Since she had finally bought credit for her own phone and no longer needed to borrow Emmie’s, sh
e and Grégoire even spoke sometimes, for there was no risk to it. Noémie and the boys being based for the whole summer at the house in Les Portes, he was alone in Paris during the week, joining his family on Friday evenings or – via Tabby – on Saturday afternoons. She did not ask him his cover story, assuming it was simply a matter of his telling his family a false arrival time. If he arrived instead on the Friday, he only had to fabricate some errand to run for a couple of hours the next day. Somehow, his blithe arrogance counteracted any guilt she was experiencing; nonetheless, she liked to think Noémie had her own weekly vanishing act, her own lover in a secret cottage somewhere on the island (though she rather doubted that her lover had been hired to clean the cottage first).
Check-in/-out procedures at the cottage also worked in their favour. Though check-out was eleven o’clock – when her own shift would officially start – the owners were Belgian and invariably their tenants were of the same nationality, leaving by nine for the eleven o’clock Brussels flight from La Rochelle. This meant Tabby could arrive early and then extend her ‘break’ in the middle of the day. The incoming holidaymakers were expected to occupy themselves before checking in at 3 p.m. and the entry system would be disabled until then, so they could not surprise her unannounced. Meanwhile, the owner never visited, bookings and payment taken entirely online, so there was no one for the neighbours to go to with gossip – if there were any neighbours who had not let their own property and entrusted its upkeep to a Tabby of their own. As for Moira, she made the occasional spot-check on her cleaners, but according to Emmie she closed shop at midday on Saturday, returning to her home on the mainland for the rest of the weekend. Since Grégoire did not arrive until after twelve, there was minimal chance of discovery.
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 20