‘I never took you off, Mimi.’
‘But I’m not even your type,’ she says helplessly. ‘I was never your type. You needed someone sparky and curvy. Someone who went to the hairdresser and cooked decent meals. You’d have grown tired of me in no time.’
‘Is that why you went?’ he asks. ‘Because you thought I was going to dump you?’
‘It would never have worked.’
‘But you loved me,’ he insists. ‘I know you did.’
She looks at his face, so full of energy and passion, and she feels something hard and cold and sad start to melt inside her. ‘You’re right,’ she confesses with a rueful smile. ‘I did love you. I was utterly crazy about you.’
‘So why the fuck did you leave?’
Mary takes a deep breath. ‘I was pregnant,’ she says. ‘And I had an abortion.’
‘What?’’
‘There was no other option. We’d only known each other a few months. You were going off on that BBC training. We were too young. I was too young. It was impossible.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What would you have done? Married me? Got a “proper” job? I couldn’t make you do that.’
‘I could have come with you to the clinic at least.’
She shrugs. ‘Then you’d have carried the guilt too. What purpose would that have served?’
‘Oh, Mimi.’ He takes her hand and gently peels her glove off, then presses her bare palm to his lips. The tenderness of the gesture is nearly her undoing.
‘There’s more, I’m afraid,’ she says, closing her throat on her tears. ‘There were complications with the procedure. It made me unable to have children.’
‘No—’ He raises a stricken face to hers.
‘That’s why I left. I was distraught. I felt I was being punished. I felt I didn’t have anything to offer you. So I thought if I went to India, you’d forget about me.’ She smiles sadly. ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’
‘No, Mimi. You couldn’t be more wrong. There’s never been anyone like you.’
‘Then when I came back, everything was different. You were a rising star in the BBC, I was an aesthete training to be a Jungian analyst. It was hard, but I think it was probably the right decision.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
2007
Ian’s offered to call her a taxi from the hotel, but Mary wants to walk back on her own. Adrenaline’s surging in her veins, and God knows what else – oestrogen? oxytocin? testosterone? – whatever combination of hormones it is that gets what’s crudely referred to as “the juices” flowing. All in all, she thinks it would be wise to take herself as far away from Ian as possible for the rest of the evening.
Striding back along the sea wall, she relives that one kiss and laughs aloud at its dramatic effect on her body – out of all proportion to the brief act itself. How very strange to discover her sexual apparatus is in working order after all these years of disuse. Strange and embarrassing. And disquieting. And wonderfully, outrageously, ridiculously exciting.
The sea air is cold on her face, her throat. She throws her head back and breathes in a huge exhilarating lungful. Is she going to have an affair? No – the idea’s unthinkable. It would upset the entire edifice of her quiet life. But when he put her ungloved palm to his lips, it was one of the most shockingly erotic sensations she’d ever experienced. It’s as though his kiss, his removal of her glove, his big-hearted forgiveness for what she did to him, to their unborn child, to their future, has opened a new chapter in her life.
Why did she never tell him before? She knows why. Because she couldn’t bear his pity. He was so successful, so busy, so fecund, so apparently happy without her. When she was she so – what? So solitary, so studious, so old-fashioned. So barren.
It’s started to spit with rain: sharp cold needles that sting her cheeks. She pulls her shawl across her chest and walks faster. Could Ian be right about them being soulmates? If so, why has she felt compelled to reject him over and over? What if she was indeed Annie’s father once, and they had loved one another – deeply, hungrily, happily – as Henry and Dory, over a century ago? What would that mean for their relationship now?
What if there were indeed two fishermen in her past, as she’s always suspected: one who owned a tobacco tin with the initials T.H. scratched on the side – and the other a respected skipper named Henry Milburn, whose wife gazed at him with desire as he stirred sugar into his tea?
Well, tomorrow she’ll go to the library to see if she can find out.
Next morning finds her striding along the top bank, cardigan flapping in the wind. She put some bread in the toaster before she left, but forgot to eat it, so buys an old-fashioned iced bun from Gregg’s and munches dutifully through it, waiting for the library to open.
Pete’s upstairs as usual, tidying maps away. ‘Lost your research assistants?’ he asks.
‘Ben’s off somewhere with his father,’ she explains. ‘I’ve no idea where Laura is.’
He guides her through the now-familiar rigmarole of logging on to the Births, Marriages and Deaths website and keying in Henry’s name and approximate date of birth, and his address in North Shields – and there he is, with his death registered in 1933.
So, poor Henry lived on for a further thirty-five years after his beloved Dory died. Mary wonders how they managed, that depleted little household: Henry, Jimmy and young Frank. Did things degenerate without Dory there to keep the range going and the clothes clean? How did Henry survive without her eyes following him, teasing him out of his dourness; without her arms opening to him in their narrow bed?
Pete breaks into her thoughts. ‘Tell that BBC man I’ve found what he was looking for, will you? He’s been in a few times – seems to have caught the bug off you lot.’ Then: ‘Was that all you wanted?’
‘There’s one other person I need to track down, if that’s OK. A woman who rented a room above the Push and Pull Inn on Church Stairs. I’m not quite sure of her surname or her dates, so can we start with the 1941 census and work backwards or forwards from there?’
‘Well we could, if there was a 1941 census. But the war rather put the kibosh on that sort of thing – but even if it hadn’t, we couldn’t look at it, because census data’s not available to the general public until 100 years after it’s collected.’
‘Oh,’ says Mary, rather crestfallen. ‘So what can I do?’
‘You’ll have to look at the voting registers – they’re on that stack over there. But that just gives the names of people eligible to vote at a particular address. If you want to find out about their children, you’ll have to go back to the BMD website.’
Mary takes down the tome for 1941 and leafs through, searching for Church Stairs. There’s the Push and Pull Inn, but no mention of a young woman named Margaret. Then she realizes: of course, Peggy wouldn’t appear on the electoral roll until she was twenty-one, the age women got the vote in those days, so she’ll have to look at a later volume and pray she’s still at the same address. Working systematically forwards through the Forties, she eventually finds a Margaret Louise Simpson in 1945.
Armed with a full name and address, she goes back to the BMD website – and there she is again, Margaret Louise Simpson, born 1924, died 1956 at the age of thirty-two.
So Peggy was born nine years before Henry died – which means Henry couldn’t possibly be one of Mary’s past lives.
Mary wanders down the library stairs in a bit of a daze. So that’s that. The link Ian was convinced must have existed between the two of them had never been there – at least not in the form he supposed. The revelation leaves her feeling oddly bereft, as though a cable that electrified a part of her life has been abruptly disconnected.
Damn.
With wry amusement, she realizes she’d rather liked the idea of having a soulmate. If she wasn’t to find a proper partner in this life, at least let her have had one in a previous incarnation. Poor Peggy never found lasting love, that’s for sure. O
ne certainly couldn’t count that brief liaison with Bobby’s father, who breezed into her life for a few sweet weeks, then was gone before she could tell him she was pregnant. What was his name? Stuart something, some Scottish name. Would he have married her? She never found out. But the fact that he left without a backward glance, without even saying goodbye, made Peggy determined not to go after him.
There’s one of those drinks machines in the library’s foyer, that sells execrable brown liquids in various guises, with and without milk powder and sugar; along with ostensible chicken soup, from an adjacent spigot, which gives everything a slight stock-cube flavour. Mary presses the ‘black coffee’ button and takes a cup of muddy liquid outside.
What now? She lights a Gitanes and takes a gulp of scalding coffee. Or is it tea? She peers at the thin brown foam that’s formed around the rim. Is it possible she’s pressed the wrong button?
The sun sails out from behind a cloud and warms the top of her head. If her fisherman wasn’t Henry, who was he? She closes her eyes and conjures the familiar image of the tobacco tin, scuffed and scratched, with a fisherman in a sou’wester on the lid. The initials are on the side, rusty brown lines scored into the turquoise paint: T.H. The lines are roughly scratched: by an impatient man, perhaps, or a clumsy one.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, comes another image: of wet cobbles and boots clumping unsteadily along them in the dark; of putting out a hand against a damp wall, of concentrating on lifting the feet, one by one.
He’s drunk, she realizes, the person in the boots. The wall feels as though it’s tipping. Now his footsteps sound hollow; there’s wooden boards under his feet; they seem to be tipping too. There’s a door ahead, a flicker of yellow light through the crack under it: a candle. He can hear a woman laughing: a high breathy giggle, a nervous placatory sort of sound. Who’s she with? Why is she laughing like that?
He stumbles back against the wall and his tobacco tin’s dislodged from his pocket and clatters down the wooden stairs.
The nervous giggling stops. They’ve heard him.
Now he’s reaching up to the brim of his hat, where he keeps his filleting knife.
And then? Nothing.
Mary opens her eyes. Her heart’s thudding. The outside of the library has that greenish underwater appearance things acquire when one has closed one’s eyes in the sunshine. She takes a mouthful of coffee/tea. Was that a fragment of a past life, or a scene she’s simply imagined? She can’t tell, but she recognizes murderous rage when she feels it.
Taking out her notebook, she attempts to marshal her thoughts. Is it possible that her recurrent image of the tobacco tin is a screen memory she’s conjured to conceal the memory of a traumatic confrontation with the woman behind the door? It certainly has all the hallmarks of that Freudian phenomenon: an innocent yet cinematically vivid image, which contains elements of the memory it ‘screens’. In this case, the tobacco tin appears in both scenes, whereas the knife – which the image of the tin conceals – appears only by implication in the ‘screening’ image: as the clumsy, impatient scratches of the T.H. on the side of the tin.
A leaden lump settles in the pit of her stomach, making her feel rather nauseous. Oh dear, she thinks in dismay. T.H. Tom Hall. A knife. And she realizes, with a pang of dismay, that she’ll have to read back through all her old tape transcripts to try and determine whether Tom Hall is a part of her prehistory.
Mary’s storeroom is right at the top of the house: a dusty room with cracked plaster and bare floorboards, and panoramic views downriver to the sea and upriver to Gateshead and beyond. A heap of wood along one wall is destined for shelving; she had it delivered nearly a decade ago, but never got around to perusing the Yellow Pages for someone suitable to complete the job. Rolls of spare linoleum are stacked against another wall, along with the remains of that grey cord carpeting her estate agent gave her when he refurbished his office. The rest of the floor space is occupied by the usual detritus one inevitably accumulates if one stays in the same house for any length of time. There’s a defunct television, for example, and the old aerial from the roof; two large buff-coloured computers of different vintages plus accompanying paraphernalia.
And boxes of box files, going back thirty years, crammed with yellowing notebooks, cassette tapes, and slippery sheaves of those old grey photocopies that left a bitter taste on the fingers when you handled them. The boxes are dated – at least she achieved that – but have been moved so often that they are now in a random configuration of dusty teetering heaps.
The date she’s looking for is 1983: when she was living in Brighton after her Jungian training, practising as a clinical psychologist in the NHS and seeing private clients in the evenings. Along with the town’s energetic criminal and homosexual subcultures, there was a thriving ashram, which had rekindled Mary’s interest in Buddhism, that had been ignited during her brief sojourn in Tibet – and introduced her to Karleen, who was lecturing at the university at the time.
She’d noticed the small sturdy woman with her straight grey hair in meditation sessions, but they hadn’t spoken until they’d encountered one another at the women’s peace camp that materialized briefly on the Level that year, in support of the Greenham women’s trial. It was Ash Wednesday, Mary recalls, with sub-zero temperatures, and her hands had gone numb inside her thermal gloves; so they’d abandoned the fight against patriarchy and had sneaked off guiltily to a wholefood café to discuss past life regression therapy. The rest, as they say, is history.
Kneeling on the bare boards, Mary finds one 1983 box almost immediately, but it’s full of client records. Inevitably, the box she’s after is one of the last she opens – but there, finally, are the tapes, transcripts and notes she took during her training with Karleen: her detailed hypnotically retrieved memories of Peggy’s life – and some fragmentary flashes from the life of a fisherman with the initials T.H.
She’s just begun leafing through the transcripts when she hears a voice at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Howay! Anyone there?’
It’s Mr Skipper. Now what on earth might he want?
‘Coming!’ she calls, bundling everything back into the box and hoisting it into her arms.
‘Where’s that Laura and the lad?’ he asks suspiciously as she reaches the ground floor.
‘No one’s here except me,’ she says, shouldering the consulting room door open and plumping the box on the floor beside her chair. ‘It feels a bit strange, actually, to have my house back to myself for a while.’
She offers him a Gitanes and they go outside.
‘What about that BBC man then?’ he asks, settling down on the Coca Cola crate and taking out his Rizlas. ‘Where’s he?’
‘At his hotel. I don’t know when he’s coming back.’
‘He says he wants to film me. With you, like. In that room where you talk to people.’
She frowns; this is outrageous. ‘I told him not to bother you.’
‘It’s no bother. He’s going to buy them paintings he was looking at.’
‘That doesn’t mean you have to let him film you,’ she says. How dare Ian set this up without consulting her? ‘Don’t take any notice of him. He can’t film you unless you’re willing.’
‘Only last time I was in your talking room, it wasn’t very clever.’
‘No,’ she says, remembering. ‘You became rather upset.’
‘So I thought maybes we could try it again first. If you’re agreeable, like. You know, just you and me. See how it goes.’
She sighs with annoyance. ‘There’s really no need for this,’ she says.
‘I told him I would.’ The papery end of his roll-up flares briefly as he lights it.
‘But he shouldn’t have asked you.’ Just when she was starting to trust Ian, he does something crass like this.
‘He said I’d be on the telly.’
‘Do you want to be on the telly?’ It’s a stupid question. As Ian has so often pointed out, everyone wants to be on t
he telly. That’s what makes his approach to Mr Skipper so unacceptable.
‘He said loads of people will want to buy my paintings.’
She briefly considers making a complaint to the BBC, arguing that in her opinion the old man’s not fit to be on television. But he seems so determined, and has obviously thought it through carefully. Looking closer, she sees that he’s shaved, too, and had a bath – or at least washed his hair. With the grease gone and the nicotine stain faded, it’s a rather lustrous creamy grey.
‘I’m not sure about this,’ she demurs. In place of his usual blue anorak and cap, he’s wearing a saggy tweed jacket: from Oxfam presumably, or the back of an unfrequented wardrobe in wherever it is that he lives.
‘You can wake me up if I start hollering,’ he offers.
‘But it took you hours to get over it last time. I thought we might have to call an ambulance.’
One of the past lives she’d unearthed was a woman who’d been killed in a bombing raid during the war – at least that was what it seemed like. She’d been sheltering in a factory when it took a direct hit and the carnage was appalling. It seemed like three of her daughters were killed too. But it was difficult to separate those memories from scenes from what appeared to be a violent abusive relationship with a man – or perhaps a series of abusive relationships. No wonder he’d been so distressed.
‘I was all right in the end though, wasn’t I?’ he argues, reasonably enough. ‘So no harm done.’
She smiles. ‘No.’ With his cap off, she spies what looks like a port wine stain birthmark on his forehead, on the left side under his hair. How odd that she’s never noticed it before.
They’ve finished their cigarettes. It might be all right, she tell herself; if she asks him about Annie and tries to steer clear of his own past life traumas. She can always interrupt the session if he gets too upset. In fact it might be rather an interesting exercise to see if the date prompt she tried with Ian will work again. She wants to do it, she realizes. She wants to see if he knew Annie in a previous life too.
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