Erykah walked from the landing stage to the clubhouse of the Molesey & Hampton Anglian Boat Club, aware of the men’s squad standing in the rain. Their coach, Dom, was giving the men a bollocking for almost crashing into the weir. Eight heads bowed and ducked, trying to avoid the rain spattering off the roof onto the pavement. They stood quiet and guilty in their black splash tops. Eight pairs of eyes took in surreptitious looks of her and Nicole’s bodies.
Few of the men at the club ever tried it on. There was the age difference, for one thing. The top squad were fresh out of university, in their early twenties, twenty-five, max; the women were both over thirty, and Erykah was forty. Not to mention that Erykah was the one mixed-race member of the women’s squad in a sport that was usually whiter than white. No, none of them would ever have dared. Eight pairs of eyes followed the women all the way to the changing room door.
‘Fierce outing today,’ Nicole said. She loosened her pigtail of reddish-blonde hair with one hand and squeezed Erykah’s shoulder with the other. ‘That was good. Passionate.’ She turned on the shower and flinched as the first spurt of water came through ice cold. Nicole was once part of the USA squad and also had a few Henley medals under her belt. She might have been a decade or more off her best performances but she was still a cut above most of the other women at the club. Praise from her was praise indeed.
‘It all fell into place, I suppose.’ Erykah smiled and wrapped a towel around her long body. ‘Have to keep warm somehow.’
‘That’s not the only thing . . .’ Nicole peered around the corner to the lockers, but the women from the eight weren’t back yet. At the rate the other boat had been lagging up at Kingston it might be twenty minutes or more before anyone else came in. Seeing they were alone, Nicole’s hand strayed to Erykah’s towelled waist.
They kissed and she felt Nicole’s fingers tangle in the moist curls at the nape of her neck. ‘Not now,’ Erykah hissed, ignoring the warm lust rising inside her. She was still smiling, though, as she flicked the towel off and slipped into a pair of jeans and a soft cashmere jumper. She loosed the knot of curls from her head and combed through them lightly with her fingertips, pulling the hair back down from where it had shrunk against her scalp from sweat.
Nicole smiled and watched her lover primp. ‘I have something for you.’ She handed Erykah a thick, pastel-pink card envelope. ‘For my valentine.’ Her smile was part mocking of the silly holiday, but also part tender.
Erykah clapped a hand over her mouth. She had been so wound up, thinking about her anniversary and about leaving her husband that she’d forgotten to think of Nicole. ‘I didn’t get you anything!’
‘It’s only a little thing,’ Nicole said. She traced a finger along Erykah’s arm. ‘And I’ll see you later, anyway.’
Erykah felt Nicole’s green eyes on her as she drew out the card. Affixed to the front was an antique-looking key, secured to the card with a pink ribbon. The weight of the key sat in Erykah’s palm and she caught her breath. It looked like the key to Nicole’s cottage along the towpath. A short walk from the boathouse, they had spent many stolen afternoons there.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I can’t take this home.’ If Rab found the card she would have questions to answer. She didn’t want to start a row about infidelity while she was walking out the door, and she definitely didn’t need him to know where she was planning to go tonight.
‘I know,’ Nicole said. ‘Let’s not talk about him.’
‘All right,’ Erykah said. ‘How about . . . when are you going to give me the photos from the Star Club Head Race so I can upload them to the website?’ she teased.
Nicole laughed. It was a shared joke: they hadn’t gone to any such race, as it had been cancelled at the last minute. But it was the excuse Erykah had given her husband to justify being away from the house. For a glorious forty-eight hours, the pair hadn’t left Nicole’s cottage at all. And any pictures wouldn’t have been suitable for the club’s website anyway.
Erykah tucked the key and card back into the envelope and wedged it in the corner of her locker door. They had talked about running away, wrapped in the afterglow of sex, so many times. You can walk away from him anytime, Nicole would say. And Erykah would make some excuse. She didn’t want to put pressure on the relationship to become more than what it was. Erykah knew from bitter experience what could go wrong when things went too far, too fast.
Eventually, though, her resistance started to wear down. They stopped talking about someday and maybe, and started talking about how, and when. Erykah set a date: her anniversary. She started taking cash out and saving it, just to have a buffer until things calmed down. She would pack her bags, break the news to her husband, and walk out. She didn’t want to move in with Nicole straight away, but the cottage was close and Nicole assured her she was fine to crash there while she looked for her own place.
There had been a connection from the start with Nicole. Maybe it was because they were both outsiders in Molesey. Maybe it was the way Nicole saw her, really saw her, after years of indifference, bordering on outright hostility, from Rab.
Erykah closed the locker door, her fingertips lingering on the cool steel. She watched Nicole dress and felt a swelling in her chest. Nicole was an ex-Radcliffe girl, one of those healthy American types with freckles and muscular thighs and tan lines that extended only as far as the edge of her Lycra shorts. Nicole was someone who had grown up with orthodontist checks, being driven to tennis lessons, and apples for a lunchbox snack. The casual confidence about her place in the world showed, from how she walked and talked, to how she treated other people. Like nothing could stand in her way, be it a powerful opposing crew, or a lover’s difficult husband. Like nothing had the right to stop her.
Nicole caught her staring and smiled. ‘I’ll pick up the wine for tonight,’ she said. ‘Or whisky for you? Ring me when you’re on the way.’ She brushed her lips against Erykah’s neck. ‘I love you.’
Was what they had love? Erykah didn’t know. What she did know was it was like lungs full of fresh air after being trapped inside.
Erykah walked home the long way, through Molesey village instead of along the river towpath. She felt buoyant, as light as the boat in the water. Even though it was still cold enough for there to be patches of frost in the shadows, the few shards of sunlight seemed to her like high noon in the middle of summer.
There was some work she needed to do on the club website. Members had been asking for the training schedule for the weeks leading up to the Head of the River, not to mention all the photos from recent events stacking up in her inbox. They would have to wait for now. Managing the club’s site wasn’t a paid position – Erykah had volunteered herself as web admin – but normally she did her best to keep it up to date and professional.
She stopped in a corner shop to pick up a post-training coffee and scrolled through some tasks on her tablet while the assistant got her drink. The website admin never ended. This morning, it could wait.
Most of the website work was just a matter of cleaning house. Like last week, when she logged in one morning to find a queue of troll comments about the club’s latest blog update. Only registered commenters could post directly to the page; everything else went to her inbox for moderation and three unapproved comments claimed to be from three people. The comments used different pseudonyms, but according to the IP addresses, they were all coming from one person using a rival club’s Wi-Fi. Or possibly it really was three different people all sitting in the same club at the same time, but she found that unlikely. Trolls talking to nobody but themselves. Erykah had sighed and deleted all three comments. Weren’t these people bright enough to realise that she could see where they were posting from?
Erykah thanked the shop assistant for the coffee and continued home. She thought of the card from Nicole. It had been a long time since someone had made such a romantic gesture to her, and she was overwhelmed – i
n a good way.
Rab probably wouldn’t even remember it was Valentine’s, much less their anniversary. Not that she wanted him to. Even when things between them had been good he was more likely to bring her some petrol station flowers and rewrap a free mug from work than remember to buy her a real gift. Lately, he hadn’t even done that much.
Even before Nicole entered her life, Erykah had spent ages trying to figure out why she had married him at all. Erykah Macdonald and her husband hadn’t shared a bedroom in several years. They hadn’t shared anything of substance since well before that.
It was hard to remember, but when they met she had been bowled over by who he was. Or at least, by who he appeared to be. A dashing, tall officer type, lean and handsome with slicked back blond hair and a stilted, formal way of speaking. He could have walked out of a war film, all cheekbone angles, glowing skin and snappy, smart comments. And at a time of her life when it felt as if everything was crashing down around her, he made her feel safe. As if he really could whisk her away from all the worry about the press, about money, about what other people thought of her.
Then the mask started to slip. She started to see his patterns, as if he was a computer program looping through a script. He knew a lot of general trivia, but wasn’t as smart as his allusions implied. His healthy glow came from a tanning bed, not from sport. The witty comments she admired were a handful of lines and quotes he repeated thousands of times for effect. He could tell you the first four lines of Macbeth, but she came to doubt he had ever read it.
But that wasn’t the real problem. She assumed all couples go through a stage of discovering the gulf between who you thought someone was and who they turned out to be. No, it was the lying that troubled her. He had told her he was a former Army intelligence officer, but she learned he had been kicked out of his university’s Officer Training Corps for failing to turn up to training nights and hadn’t even got in to Sandhurst. She discovered he was born in Norwich, not Edinburgh as he claimed. Nothing about her husband was what he said it was. Not his high-pressure job in the City as a trader on the commodities floor – it turned out he was really an insurer.
‘A property underwriter actually,’ he’d said, peevishly, when she found his card in the pocket of a suit she was taking to the dry cleaner and confronted him. ‘Soon to be senior. Some women would be grateful to have a partner who can provide for them through honest work.’
That hurt, and he had said it knowing it would hurt her. The implication that her love life up until meeting him was populated by criminals and thugs. But what hurt even more was he had got her wrong – it wasn’t the job title that mattered to her, and certainly not the money, he earned plenty whatever it was he was up to and she didn’t need that much. It was the fact that he had felt the need to lie when there was no reason to. To juice things up, to make himself sound more interesting than he was, when the truth would have been fine. By then they were married and living in a nice flat paid entirely with his salary, and her mother was gone, and, as he reminded her, she had no one else; nowhere to go and lick the wounds of her humiliation.
The morning rain eased and the mist hanging over the river had lifted. It was the time of the morning when Molesey transformed from commuter-land into the Ladies Who Lunch belt, from Weetabix and coffee to long conversations over bresaola and Côtes du Rhône.
On any other day, Erykah might have joined in, but today things were different.
She could finally see her marriage through clear eyes. Gone was the frustration, anger, and guilt that usually clouded her thinking. Suddenly, being on the wrong side of forty didn’t matter. Maybe she would take Nicole out to dinner, their first date as a public couple. Did people still do that? Have dates? And in a couple of weeks they would be at the training camp in Switzerland with the rest of the squad, preparing for the Women’s Head. Anyway, it was a day worth celebrating. Her marriage had been seven thousand, three hundred and four days too long. Today was the first day of the rest of her life.
The snug suburb of Molesey had never seemed more unreal to her than it did today. Beyond each gravelled driveway and shiny painted door, who knew what was really going on? Couples and families playing their perfect parts, buffered from the reality of other peoples’ lives by money and geography.
It was less than twenty miles from where Erykah was born but might as well have been another planet. She’d grown up in a one-bedroom flat on the third level of a council block where the lift, when it was working, only stopped at the even numbered floors. They kept a stack of pound coins inside the cupboard next to the gas meter, with a torch to find it when the meter ran out.
Sometimes as a kid Erykah felt brave enough to sneak a coin out of the stack and spend it on crosswords and second-hand books, but she always had to hide them in case her mother found out. Her mum, Rainbow, religiously switched off unused lights because, as she always said, at least sunlight is free.
Free. Now wasn’t that a funny kind of word?
Erykah came in through the back door to the kitchen, knowing Rab would have left by now, kicked off the wet trainers in favour of her sheepskin slippers. The stainless steel units and granite counters she’d had installed a few years ago still looked new because they rarely ate together, and rarely anything but takeaways. She switched on a talk radio show and turned the volume all the way up. The sleekly expensive Bang & Olufsen stereo system echoed through the large empty rooms and long empty hallways.
In the front room was a small cupboard where her collection of whisky bottles sat. Erykah opened the cupboard and poured herself a shot of Glen Ord. She grimaced only slightly at the first hit of alcohol, waited for the sweet finish of spice lingering on her tongue. A fine breakfast dram.
Was there anything worth packing here? Not the wedding photos, sitting on the mantelpiece above the fire they never lit. The booze was replaceable. The polished pewter cups won over years of rowing regattas would have to wait for now. She could always come back for more things later.
She caught her reflection in the oak-framed mirror above the drinks cabinet. On a good day, in the right light, she didn’t look too different from how she had looked the day she got married. With some make-up and generous backlighting, she could pass for a much younger woman. But that still didn’t give her the time back.
Twenty years. How did it happen? For so much of it, it had felt as if time was dragging so slowly. Then, before she knew it, two decades were gone.
The house was as still as a museum and, she supposed, not altogether different from one. They had bought it a few years after getting married with a down payment from Rab’s first big bonuses after getting a promotion. He had left any renovation and redecoration to her, and Erykah spent months poring over catalogues and magazines. What did people who lived in houses like this think looked good? Would they laugh at her for buying top end everything, or laugh at her if she didn’t? In the end she dumped the pile of magazines in the hands of a decorator whose final interpretation could probably only generously be called Hotel Lobby Chic. There were nice touches, but it had no soul. Such as the double-ended jet bath for two in the master en-suite. The catalogue showed a laughing couple, bath bubbles up to their shoulders, clinking champagne glasses. Erykah couldn’t recall a single time she hadn’t had a bath in it all alone.
Upstairs there were banknotes in her underwear drawer, rolled inside a stocking. Erykah counted it: about five grand. That would do for a start. She threw a large, buttery leather bag on the bed and started to pack what she would need to take with her.
The bag was a memento from a trip to Milan, a rowing camp when she and Nicole had snuck away one afternoon for shopping. It was huge and chic, and she loved it. She stuffed some underwear into the bag. A dove grey silk bra and knickers Nicole said she looked good in. A make-up kit, a notebook, a jersey dress. In a jewellery box she found her diamond engagement and wedding rings. She stopped wearing them because they got in the
way during rowing – or that was what she had planned to tell Rab if he asked. He had never asked.
Erykah slid the bands on her left ring finger. Might as well take them; they would be worth a few quid. She looked around the room. There ought to be more. Two decades of marriage and all it boiled down to was a half-filled handbag? But so much of what they had together was a display, for show. She felt no real emotion about any of it any more. The photos of her and Rab together: she didn’t want them wherever she went next. The stacks of books on the shelves and the bedside table? Well, there were always bookshops.
She had fantasised so many times about leaving, and in her fantasies Rab always let her go. But she knew that wasn’t what would really happen. He wouldn’t take her at her word – he would browbeat her into submission. He would demand ‘his say’, ranting about how she was lazy, reliant on him, took him for granted. How no one else would put up with her. How no one else would have done what he did, how no one would want someone with her background, her history. How he was the only reason anyone in Molesey accepted her. He heard the way other people talked behind her back, he would say, things they would never dream of saying to her face. And he was her only defender, he would claim, the one thing standing between her life now and social ruin. She had heard it all so many times before.
And the threat that came up most often? How, if she left, he would tell everyone the whole truth about her. A part of her believed him when he said these things. He had said the words so many times over the years, so convincingly, that she had started to see herself as the trash he insisted she was. ‘You and your Jeremy Kyle family,’ he said with disgust, and she felt it was the truth. His words had become part of her own head and her own heart. Even with a new life waiting, with a bag packed and Nicole in the river cottage along the towpath, would Erykah be able to forget it all, walk away that easily, and just be fine? She wasn’t sure.
The Turning Tide Page 2