They decided on a different dress, between them. Simple, short, a black shift with a white lace collar that Bridget couldn’t remember even having ordered in, it was too schoolgirlish. And expensive. She waited behind the desk as Laura led them back over with a quick inquiring look: it was usually Laura dozy at the till or in a chair while Bridget gave encouragement and advice. But Bridget was numb, she couldn’t even deflect Laura’s glance, only returned it with a glazed smile.
Her fingers were rubber as she took the credit card, pushed it into the machine, processed the transaction: she had to enter the price three times. Laura was plumped down now on the sofa, oblivious, with her cup of tea on the mirrored cube, flicking through a magazine. His hands across the desk from her, the backs furred with sandy hair, as they reached for the card. Bridget felt as though she could hardly breathe, then she began to feel something else, something she couldn’t control, it wound its way up inside her, a tapeworm; a viper; a dragon. He was putting his credit card away when abruptly he looked her in the eye, and she had to hold his gaze.
Older, hair thinner, turkey neck. Sandy eyebrows. He smiled. He smiled at her.
He had been married, when she knew him, but they had no children. The girl standing beside him, peering eagerly at the carrier bag as Bridget slid it over the desk towards her, she wasn’t his daughter, nor granddaughter. She bent her neck to look inside, her shirt collar shifted and Bridget saw something else: there was the old familiar mark, the callous rough and reddening on the soft skin of her shoulder. The concert: of course. Isabel was a student of the violin. Not father, not grandfather, but teacher. Teacher.
What did the word say, to most people? Authority with kindness, that’s what it was supposed to be. The teacher is stern and wise. The teacher leans over the student and places her hands on the bow, on the stem of the instrument, his mouth is close to her ear. The teacher knows better.
‘All right if I take one of these?’ He spoke in his soft, deep voice: how had she not known it straight away? She realised that she had, that from the moment he came in there had been a hum in the air, of electricity, that had stopped her hearing anything properly.
He was asking if he could take one of the shop’s cards. She pulled herself together, and some hazy idea formed, some plan that had something to do with behaving normally. She was making conversation.
‘You’re not just visiting, then?’ Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Could he hear the fear in it? She knew he was listening: he was probing, circling.
‘I’m at the university. A visiting Fellow, in the Music department – well—’ and he was taking the card, he was putting it carefully in his wallet, casual. ‘It might be more than visiting.’ He smiled. ‘They seem to rather like me.’ Isabel had drifted towards the door. ‘Do you have a mailing list? Would you like my details, perhaps?’
Laura was looking up from her magazine at the sound of Bridget’s hesitation, so she leaned down, extracted a form and pushed it over to him. ‘Just the email address is fine,’ she said, but he was writing it all, address, telephone, laborious. That handwriting: copperplate, Mum had called it, approvingly. Classy, old school.
Anthony Carmichael.
The girl was waiting obedient beside him, swinging the bag.
Bridget watched, very still, as he signed with a flourish, handed the form back to her and for a moment his fingers rested on her forearm. He held the door for Isabel as she walked out in front of him.
Anthony Carmichael. Call me Tony.
Laura said, ‘Nice guy, right?’
Chapter Two
From the turning into the close Bridget saw the lights on downstairs and up: that meant they were both home. As she wheeled her bike up to the back door in the wet dark, anticipating Matt, the past came abruptly up to meet her.
Bridget couldn’t remember her own father, not really. A closed door and music behind it, frowning over his glasses at the dinner table.
In the dark, she paused. That wasn’t true. She could remember his hand stroking her hair when she was very small and had a temperature, and the smell of his ironed shirts. She could remember his face, lost and bewildered, at the door to his private room in the hospital, when he was dying. It was just that, after that, with Mum run ragged looking after her and Carrie, twelve and seven, while working shifts at the surgery as a receptionist, it seemed wisest not to remember him too often.
A light was on in the kitchen, and another one upstairs in the little back bedroom. Finn was up there – it was where he did most of his living, these days. You could hear him laughing loudly, earphones on, or whooping over his computer, talking to whoever it was he gamed with in Arizona or Penang or Stockholm. Matt told her, it was fine. They had the usual filters in place, all the kids were doing it – and Matt should know. It was his job, computer officer, at the university. ‘It’s just a new kind of socialising.’
There was a girlfriend, too, now, at least. Shyly Finn had mentioned her: Phoebe, six months older. When he was online with her there was more laughing, but softer. A lot of clicking on the keyboard and sometimes they would hear him pad over to his door and close it.
Matt had worked at the university for fourteen years; the computer office had grown to four times its size and he was in charge, now. Monitoring usage, sorting out glitches, updating the systems, reprimanding students, when he had to, for exceeding the limits set on traffic, for streaming movies illegally when they should be working. It wasn’t a glamorous place, it wasn’t the sandstone and turrets of the university city in whose shadow Bridget had grown up and from whose shadow they had fled, eventually, she and Carrie and Mum. In search of cheaper accommodation, and a change of air.
It was a practical place, a hardworking place, built on idealism, was how Matt defended it even if the bricks and mortar, or rather concrete and glass, had failed it somewhat; sick building syndrome had been talked about, and in high winds it swayed. You could see the towers from everywhere: at night the red lights gleamed, they’d followed Bridget on her cycle ride home. At the back door she wiped her face, took off her helmet and turned off her lights.
The university suited Matt down to the ground, but why would someone come here from one of the old places, where dons have rooms and gardens? Matt might have passed him in the corridors. Anthony Carmichael. ‘They seem to like me,’ he had said, across the till to her. Matt might have been summoned to set up his internet connection.
She could see Matt moving behind the glass of the kitchen door, a slight, dark shape: she heard the tap running.
They’d bought this house – a new build, small and neat – when she got pregnant, barely in their twenties and choosing a kitchen on a plan. Four years left on the mortgage and they would be safe: God knows they wouldn’t be able to afford anything if they were starting now; standing on this doorstep always sparked that thought, of how lucky they were. The trees that had been saplings had grown tall, red maples alternating with cherries, bare and dripping now in the yellow streetlight on the gently sloping street, and you could see the estuary from their bedroom window.
The violin had been a lifesaver: she’d heard Mum use those words often enough, anyway. Keeps her out of mischief, and the proximity of the ancient university meant there was a concert hall, seems like she’s got quite a talent for it. There were lessons for underprivileged students. Her dad would be so proud. Dad, sitting in the car all on his own listening to the stereo, waiting in the drive till it had finished, a silhouette with a finger raised to conduct. Bridget remembered that too, out of the blue, as she stood lost in the blur of the past at her own back door. Where had that memory been? The door opened and there was Matt’s anxious face: she’d been standing there too long in the rain.
With a sound – half exasperation, half tenderness – that she knew very well, he reached past her and took the bike, leaning down to trace a squeak to its source. ‘You’re soaked,’ he said and she stepped inside. He would wheel the bike to the garage, wipe it down, che
ck the squeaking pedal, lock the garage up again after him.
He was cooking puttanesca, everyone’s favourite and Matt’s signature dish, he always said. Meaning what he’d cook if it looked like she was going to be too late or too tired, information he seemed to absorb out of the air before she knew it herself. She stared at the rich red sauce, smelled the tuna and oil and saltiness and felt sick. In that moment it was as if she had felt sick her whole life: she’d told herself memory was boxes, with lids, neatly stacked, but all the time it was like a sea, it was like seething space, a forest at night. It was all around her and it moved, in the dark.
Then Matt was back in the kitchen beside her and planting a kiss on her cheek, a whiff of bike oil and the wet outside on him. Matt who had wooed her with stammering persistence when she was nineteen and starting college, two stone underweight, jumpy and frightened and clinging on, for dear life, to normal. Matt gangly and awkward and obsessed with bikes, pushing his glasses up his nose. Matt who seemed to have seen everything about her at first glance: he had seen it all and never mentioned any of it.
‘All right?’ He peered down into the sauce, not looking at her.
And then Finn was on the stairs, jumping, humming under his breath, ‘Mum?’ he called, happy.
‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ she said to Matt, making her sigh sound just weary, and taking the kettle to the sink.
In the shop Laura hadn’t seen Carmichael’s hand, sliding down the girl’s back as they walked out, and the girl jumpy as a foal under his touch, sidestepping. Laura hadn’t seen him turn his head a fraction to catch Bridget’s eye, his face all planes and shadows under the downlighting. ‘Bless,’ Laura had said, patting her belly. ‘Buying the kid a party dress.’
And now even as Bridget turned on the tap she was wondering, could they move? How would she put it to Matt? To Finn, with his first girlfriend? Finn horrified by his mother, his soft mother whom he stopped to kiss on the cheek every time he passed her.
Something came to her, the batsqueak of a memory. A man’s fingers on her arm and Bridget made a sound. Leaning over the sauce, Matt didn’t respond, but he heard. She knew he heard.
Finn was already at the table, knife and fork upright in each hand, impatient, when they came in with the food. His knee under the table was tapping, cheerful but also itching to run, to be back upstairs. He ate like a wolf, forking the pasta in, oblivious.
Bridget ate, because if she didn’t Matt would know, one alarm bell was one thing, more than one – well, she didn’t know what would happen then. How many had to go off before he asked questions? The thought was horrible: Matt had never asked. It was why they were happy. Never asked why there were things she couldn’t do, or listen to, or eat: he treated her like she was normal and in turn she did the same for him. Mr and Mrs Normal: she knew it was why plenty of her customers came in, they could be sure there’d be no hysterics, no loud music, no clothes with bits flapping or unexpected holes. There’d be the magazine perfectly centred on the mirrored cube and the bright, soft colours. Tomorrow she’d have orders to place, boxes to unpack. She could set it to rights.
Matt poured her a glass of water. He didn’t ask her if she wanted any more to eat though the bowl was still half full. He sighed. ‘Long day,’ she said, automatically. ‘Sorry to be late. There was – we had a couple of customers come in, just as we were shutting up shop.’
‘Laura must be nearly due, isn’t she?’ Pushing his glasses up his nose as he inspected the pasta on his plate. Matt was shy around women, unless there was something that suggested they needed practical help of some kind. Laura needed all sorts: chairs pulling out for her, doors opening. He liked Laura.
‘Nearly,’ said Bridget. ‘A fortnight, she says,’ and she saw his focus shift. Bridget remembered Finn being born, the shock of that, and Matt stepping up to help, not needing to ask. A small boy pressed against her, on her knee, arms tight around her. He couldn’t know: could never know. Nor could Matt. The way they would think of her.
There was a sudden scrape and Finn was up and out of there, throwing a thanks, Dad over his shoulder, pounding on the stairs, and they were alone together. Before anything could be said she got up too and went to Matt, arms around him as he still sat there in the chair, breathing in his hair, his skin, his healthy smell. ‘Let’s go up too,’ she said.
They had their routines, never made explicit, mysterious. Quiet, intent, kind sex. Early in the mornings, late at night when Finn’s door was closed, Saturdays in the days when he used to go off to football at eight. The first time she had panicked: she had thought somehow he would know she wasn’t like other girls. But he knew nothing: they had been a pair of virgins, after all. They had lain there quiet afterwards in the student bed and for a moment, nothing had been wrong. Nothing at all.
It was like a piece of precious old glass, though. You had to keep it safe, you had to hide it, you had to wrap it up the same way every time, as careful as you could be, or it would break.
Four in the morning was the bad time. In the silence she could hear a hum from somewhere. Finn’s computer, the big one he’d built with Matt, updating some mega-game or other in the dark across the landing. He could sleep through it: it occurred to her briefly that he might not be able to sleep without it, eventually.
It had begun normally, with Matt turning off the light and touching her. Matt wasn’t a talker, not emotional or demonstrative, this was how he made sure everything was all right. He always put his mouth on her breasts first, one and then the other, certain that she liked it, because she did. But then he had shifted in a quick movement and knelt over her and suddenly there was something else there. With the lights out Bridget was only aware of the breadth of his shoulders over her in the dark, then of how practised he was, and she felt the panic bubbling up, she had to control herself. Her breathing was too fast: she was frightened. But then something slipped back into place and she came, too quickly, too suddenly.
Nothing could be different, not even this kind of different. This violent feeling. Matt had responded to her, reliable, instantaneous, and then fallen asleep in the moment after. She must have done too but an hour later, perhaps two, she had started awake in a surge of fear, sweating.
Why was Anthony Carmichael there? Call me Tony.
How could she get away?
They would move. She would say Carrie was ill, Bridget had to be near her. But schools? Jobs? Close the shop? She tried to talk herself down in the dark. It wasn’t that he wanted contact with her, he hadn’t come after her. She could have sworn he had no idea, when he walked into the shop. Why would he? She must have fallen asleep again, and woken again, in the same lather of violent fear.
And then it was four o’clock and she was wide awake. A man had come to the shop with a child. He could be her father or grandfather but he wasn’t. Isabel, Isabel: in the deep dark she remembered the girl’s innocence, her admiration, her glee at being special, it blazed. Bridget had been special once, as she frowned down at her instrument, the instrument burnished and warm from her touch, trying, trying, trying, her heart in her mouth. Him watching her, impatient.
He hasn’t come back for you. He isn’t interested. He will leave.
Do nothing. She lay still and waited for dawn.
Chapter Three
It took almost a week of uneventful days for the panic to subside. Going through the motions, eating, drinking, working: they went out to the reservoir on the Sunday, just her and Matt, because there was a dinghy he wanted to look at. He’d always wanted to sail.
That had been a bleak, cold day, the cloud lying in grey layers with lemon-coloured sky in between, and the dinghies all under tarpaulins. The owner of the one Matt wanted to look at came out of the little clubhouse, a clapboard shanty, with a pint in his hand, and with the other lifted a tarpaulin for them, revealing a pretty small boat, varnished wood. She could just see Matt out here sanding it happily for hours on end.
‘You’d come too?’ he said suddenly,
as if he knew what she was thinking.
‘Yes,’ she said, and a smile came unbidden. It felt like months since she’d smiled and she didn’t quite want to say anything else, shoving her hands in her pockets. It was freezing. As Matt and the owner chatted she looked out over the still water, the reeds at the edge black against the silvered surface, some bare trees standing on a steep bank on the opposite side. It was a flooded quarry, Matt had told her, very deep and very cold.
‘I’ll let you know,’ Matt had said to the man with his pint, their breath making clouds in the air, but he’d been in a good mood, driving home. Humming, tapping his hands on the steering wheel. ‘We’d bring it over to the estuary of course,’ to himself. Making plans.
Eating, drinking, working: sleeping, even, eventually. Talking to Matt about the summer holiday. They’d go walking somewhere. Corsica, or Elba, some island.
‘Fancy that, Finn?’ Matt had asked him and he’d raised his shaggy head from his phone as they sat side by side on the sofa and gazed, mildly uncomprehending, his mind somewhere else. ‘Walking in the Med?’
Their holidays followed the same pattern – didn’t everyone’s? Canoeing or walking, camping or modest hotels, usually somewhere they could drive to. Cornwall or France or Spain at a pinch, nothing flash. Just the three of them, with their happy routines of making tea on a camping stove and staying at the beach till it was dark.
‘Uh, well, I, sure – but some of the lads. Phoebe.’ Looking back down at his phone and frowning.
It wasn’t even a sentence but they exchanged glances, both knowing where it was going.
‘Come on, Finn,’ Matt said, smiling. ‘You’re only just sixteen. Come with us for one last year.’
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 2