The receptionist replaced the phone and called me forward. ‘Mr Woodhall would like you to leave,’ he said. He’d tactfully lowered his voice, but the tone was quite different now, implicit of grave consequences were I to choose not to cooperate.
Though I felt as if I’d been booted in the solar plexus, I feigned mild surprise. ‘He hasn’t got time to see me?’
‘He is only seeing registered patients today. There are already several he might not get to as it is. When he finishes his clinic he goes straight upstairs into theatre. He doesn’t have a minute to spare.’
My control began to slip. ‘But he must! He must have a minute, one minute! What about after he’s finished in theatre?’
He gestured sharply, losing his patience with me. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you can see for yourself we’re up to our necks here.’ As those behind me agitated to check in, he reached across me to take the next appointment card and rattled the computer mouse to refresh the screen. ‘This isn’t the place for personal calls,’ he added in a mutter.
‘Then where is the place!’ I cried, not noticing I’d raised my voice until silence fell among those waiting around me. Realising I was creating a scene, one that might later be reported to Arthur, I began sobbing into my hands.
A second member of staff now materialised, asking the first, ‘Want me to call Security, Bob?’
He and Bob frowned at me in joint query.
‘No,’ I told them, wiping tears and mucus from my face. ‘Forget it. I’m going.’
Such was my loss of a hold on reality that by the time I reached Earth, Paint & Fire I had convinced myself that my message had never reached Arthur, that his staff had refused the request without consulting him, overprotective of him in his bereavement. At the first opportunity, I phoned his St Barnabas’ secretary and left a cheerful voicemail asking her to confirm that Arthur had been informed of my visit. When she did not call back that day, nor after I’d left an urgent second message early the following morning, I phoned his private clinic in Harley Street. It was nine o’clock, just before I had to leave for work, and this time I had my strategy ready. I would not claim private acquaintance but would make an appointment as a patient. But of course the first thing I was asked was if I had a referral or a health-insurance policy number, and right away I was floundering.
‘Can’t I just have the consultation and pay for it out of my own pocket?’ I said.
‘What exactly are your symptoms?’ she asked.
I made something up about blurred vision and a sharp pain behind the left eye, but that only made her too concerned. ‘It sounds as if you need to go to Accident and Emergency at Moorfields,’ she said. ‘They’re open twenty-four hours. Can I give you the address?’
‘No,’ I said impatiently. ‘It has to be Mr Woodhall. He’s been recommended to me by a good friend.’ When she asked for a name, I blurted out, ‘Nina Meeks. The journalist. She knows him well.’
At last she capitulated, agreeing to check Arthur’s schedule for an opening and asking for my personal details. But no sooner had I said my surname than she was changing her mind, and quite unapologetically: ‘I’m afraid Mr Woodhall has no appointments available for the foreseeable future. In fact, he asks that you please do not call again.’
‘What do you mean “he asks that”? You haven’t had time to tell him who this is!’ All at once my voice turned shrill, my breath frantic, my body struggling to process the sudden mental stress. This exceeded my distress at St Barnabas’ the previous day; I was experiencing the first symptoms of a panic attack. ‘Is he standing right there, listening in? If he is, can I please speak to him in person and we can get this misunderstanding sorted out!’
Ignoring my hysteria, she spoke in a low, unyielding tone: ‘Mr Woodhall is not here, no. All I can tell you is that he has asked that you do not contact him again. He has been very clear about that.’ The suggestion was that he had briefed all staff at the practice to turn me away – me, the one who loved him most in the whole world! The one he had kissed from head to toe, the one he had said he could not be without.
I hung up without another word and fell from the sofa to the floor, my arms protecting my head as if reacting to sudden gunfire at the window. I don’t know how long I lay there, crying, but I broke off only once, in order to call into work sick. I was sick.
‘This is your last chance,’ Charlotte said, mean with exasperation (and who could blame her?). ‘If you’re not in tomorrow, don’t come in again at all.’ She was so inured now to my excuses she was able to end the call even as I wept.
I returned to work the following day, and the next and the next. As the weeks crawled by, all I could do was work, and when I wasn’t working I lay on the sofa in my living room, shrunken and inert, waiting to work again. As I’d promised Phil, I resumed my visits to the hospital, only to find that the relapse I had fabricated to explain my original misery had come to pass. Dad had contracted pneumonia and been moved to a bed in the high-dependency unit. Though he was fading again, he recognised me without difficulty and for the first time in many months he struck me as substantially his own self. I couldn’t explain why, but it was almost as if I believed that as long as he went on knowing me, so my own chances of survival would improve. It was the only faith I had left.
‘I love you,’ I told him, repeating it until the words sounded foreign and abstract, a lullaby playing even after sleep came. More than once I dozed off in the chair at his bedside and would have stayed overnight had I not been woken and sent home by the nurses.
Beyond my workplace and the hospital, I went nowhere, saw no one. I knew I needed to give notice on the flat – since Matt had gone, ninety per cent of my salary went on my rent and utility bills – but the thought of flat-hunting, of flat-sharing, even of packing, exhausted me. More important to me than any future debt was the fact that this was where Arthur could find me. I could not live with the thought of him resurfacing one day and needing me, ringing my bell and finding a stranger in residence.
Besides, I had nowhere to go. Phil’s house in Newbury would mean too long and expensive a commute, even if he and Julie agreed to let me stay in the first place, and since I’d told no one of my affair with Arthur, there was no one to take me in and comfort me – or reproach me – now it was over. The last friendships I’d sidelined during my romance with Arthur now petered out beyond the point of no return.
Marooned both physically and emotionally, I spent Christmas alone, turning down an invitation to spend it with Phil. New Year passed unnoticed. I suppose I must have eaten and drunk enough not to expire.
Now, when I think about that time, the thoughts are confined to a dark recess. My brain has tricked itself into forgetting, just as women forget childbirth – or at least the full details of it, their memory reduced to the finer pains, the poetic part at which the peak of human endurance is reached and tips back again.
If I shone a light on it, if I granted it more space, I know I would go mad.
Chapter 16
Tabby
The purple folder had reappeared. It was on the kitchen table again, right in the centre, just as it had been before – and this time its owner was out at work. Before laying a finger on it, Tabby used coins from the nearby bowl of odds and ends to mark its exact spot on the table.
She was not sure she recognised herself any longer.
Perhaps it was living so anonymously that had somehow made her lawless – or maybe ‘amoral’ was the word; she was so… so unaccountable here. Yes, she had given Moira and Emmie her real name, and she had shared with Emmie her true history, but she might just as easily have made both up. Perhaps it was to do with the tone she’d set right at the beginning of her time on the island: wrongful entry, first in Grégoire’s wife’s house, then in Emmie’s, and most recently, in a fashion, at the rue du Rempart property – had she ever really improved on it? Had the eluding of consequences excited her, addicted her? Was she any different from Grégoire, for whom betrayal of trust a
nd violation of rules were clearly aphrodisiacs?
And, perhaps the most crucial question of all: did recognising your faults diminish them in some small way, or did it make them all the harder to excuse?
Whichever the answer, a warning phone call from Moira had not been enough to bring her into line.
‘Tabby, I just wanted to check that you do know it’s strictly forbidden to invite friends into any of the houses when you’re at work? The owner of rue du Rempart is particularly clear about that. He deserves the utmost privacy and discretion.’ She was so grand sometimes, made it sound as though the owner were the Emperor of Japan, not some faceless Belgian who happened to employ a cleaner to help him rake in thousands of euros from overpaid holidaymakers.
‘Of course,’ Tabby said. ‘I know the rules.’
‘It’s just that someone mentioned seeing a visitor arrive last Saturday…’
‘Oh, who?’
‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ Moira said, more sternly.
‘No, I mean who says he saw that?’ Though she was confident she sounded as innocent and eager as ever, Tabby alarmed herself by the devious turn her thoughts were taking, even as she should be concentrating on convincing Moira of her blamelessness. Already she was wondering if her new Sunday property might accommodate her assignations with Grégoire instead. The problem was that it was British-owned and the families often drove from Calais or Saint-Malo, arriving earlier than the official check-in and knocking at the door to ask if they could just start unloading their luggage, and since they were there could the children quickly use the loo or get a drink of water? In any case, would Grégoire be able to manage a Sunday meeting? Even in this ungodly state of affairs, it was possible that Sunday remained sacred to him and his family. She had seen the locals going to Mass at the church in the village. And Sunday was a family day all over the world, wasn’t it? She remembered trips she’d been taken on by her parents as a child and, later, being aware of those her father and Susie arranged for the girls.
Moira was growing impatient. ‘Can you just answer the question, Tabby. Did you have a visitor at the rue du Rempart house or not?’
‘No, of course not. It must have been the postman or a delivery or something.’
‘What delivery?’
‘I don’t know. You do get the occasional neighbour knocking on the door. A kid’s ball came over the wall once and the father came to get it back. Should I start keeping a log? For all the properties, or just that one?’
This was easier than she’d expected, and the original witness statement clearly not as solid as threatened, because Moira was already backing down. ‘Of course you don’t need to keep a log. I know I can trust you. It’s a question of security as much as anything. If you were to allow a friend in for a coffee and then something went missing, it could get very complicated.’
‘Nothing will go missing,’ she assured Moira. ‘Everything’s fine.’
Nothing would go missing, that was true, but everything would be touched, including the documents the owner trusted he’d left under lock and key. It was a matter of routine now that she try any odd keys in those drawers and cupboards she found locked (the key was often in a box or jar nearby, or tucked at the side of a bookshelf). The thrill was not in the scrutiny of any plumber’s estimate or insurance policy or even in the factures sent by Moira herself, detailing her commission and expenses, but in the fantasy of being some sort of all-seeing spirit, or at any rate something less prosaic than a snoop. It was the perversion of justice unknown to any judge, the breach of trust that would never be known by the betrayed.
And now here she was breaching the most important trust of all: Emmie’s.
She snapped off the two bands and opened the folder. Somehow she had known it would not contain mundane house-related documents, but she had not expected what she found, either: a pristinely ordered stack of newspaper cuttings and print-outs from internet news sites. It was some sort of research project, perhaps. The edges were so rigidly aligned, certain sections clipped in what was apparently a very particular order, she was loath to disarrange them and give herself away. She contented herself for the moment with reading the topmost page, a photocopy of a cutting from the British newspaper the Press. The page had a picture of two women in garden chairs, squinting into the sun, glasses of wine in hand, while in the background a group of half-naked infants circled a paddling pool. The picture was captioned Happy days: Sylvie Woodhall and Nina Meeks in 1999, when their children were young.
Sitting now, her back to the front door, Tabby read the article in full:
A MOTHER REMEMBERED
Nina Meeks pays tribute to the real ‘other woman’ in this week’s media storm – the wife…
You will not have found any obituary of Sylvie Woodhall in the broadsheet newspapers the week she died last July. She was not famous in her life, not ‘noted’ or ‘celebrated’ for anything, not so far as the world was concerned. Only by the nature of her death has she come to our attention, and only then because of who she was married to: the eminent eye surgeon Arthur Woodhall.
It was always Arthur who was the famous one, and for good reason. There was the undisputed surgical gift, the royal and celebrity patients, the near-holy status that top-ranked surgeons like him command, inspiring as they do reverence in the rest of us, ignorant of all but the most basic medical facts.
But none of that impressed me. I was Sylvie’s friend, not his. We met when our eldest sons started nursery school together sixteen years ago, and quickly became the closest of confidantes. I moved into a house on the same street as hers. We could wave to one another from our front doors. By happy coincidence our second children – another son for Sylvie, a daughter for me – were also in the same school year. They became friends too.
My children are now as bereft as I am.
The verdicts found by the coroner this week were, according to my legal friends, inevitable, but that does not mean we have to accept them as anything but a formality. It was Sylvie who was driving that terrible morning, yes, but the truth is she was driven to that tragic ending. She was driven to it by a woman who has come this week to represent much that is despicable in our culture today: a lack of respect for others, disregard for their emotions, for their human dignity.
A woman who thought – and I have no doubt still thinks – only of herself.
I won’t use her name here, though you will know precisely who I mean. In a few short days she has become a household name, better-known than Sylvie herself. But I will not name her and sully what will likely be Sylvie’s only obituary in a national newspaper. If the many of us who loved her have any hope for her to rest in peace – she is buried with her beloved Alexander and Hugo in a cemetery near her home in Sussex – we must ensure that her memory is mercifully spared any connection to the woman who, to all intents and purposes, conspired to end her life.
Farewell, Sylvie. You were a wonderful mother, a dutiful wife, a loving daughter and sister and a true friend. You never once stopped doing your best for us all and we honour your memory.
Tabby felt her eyes water, ran her thumb across the printed text as if better to understand the source of so powerful and heartfelt a tribute. To have a friend write about you like this, to lambast your enemies and protect your memory! Who was this Sylvie woman and why would Emmie want to keep her obituary?
She peered at the date. The article had been published on Sunday, 12 February 2012, almost six months ago. Emmie had said she’d come to Saint-Martin in late March. Was there some sort of link? Was Sylvie a good friend, or even a relative? An older sister, whose death had caused a grief so severe Emmie needed to leave the country? Woodhall was Sylvie’s married name, but might her maiden name have been Mason? On the other hand, wouldn’t a sister want constant contact with remaining family and friends so soon after the loss of a loved one? Except… Emmie had told her both her parents were dead; she’d admitted her relationship (perhaps even marriage) was over, too. And what about
that strange word she had used that Tabby had never been able to make sense of, ‘exile’?
At the sound of the entry pad clicking at the door behind her, Tabby abandoned the cutting and closed the folder. She replaced it on the table and put the coins back in the bowl. The chime of metal hitting ceramic rang out as she turned in greeting.
‘All right, Emmie?’
Emmie’s eyes moved from the folder to Tabby, who lowered her face to conceal her embarrassment, pretending to leaf through a tourist brochure about boat trips.
‘I thought you didn’t finish till six?’ Tabby said.
‘No, five,’ Emmie said.
Tabby was certain she’d said six. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. You look tired.’
She felt her face burn with shame. Had she learned nothing from Emmie’s forgiveness that day in May when she’d been discovered uninvited and asleep in the back bedroom? What kind of a person had she allowed herself to become? Had she really just thought that self-indulgent nonsense about being an all-seeing spirit? What she was doing was cowardly and wrong and if she couldn’t stop snooping of her own accord then she needed professional help. She was becoming as self-absorbed as the terrible woman described in the article she’d just read.
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 23