Back at the flat I took off my coat and sat down at my computer. I brought up Google and typed it in: ‘Isle of Wight rental property’.
That evening, when I’d finished packing, there had been two boxes at the door of my flat: one with the dictionaries and papers for work, one with my coffee pot and printer. My suitcase, filled with the most basic of my clothes, waited only for my wash-bag in the morning. Everything else that was personal – ornaments, the rest of my clothes, those of my books with any sentimental significance – had been tidied away into the cupboard in the tiny hall and the highest shelf of the wardrobe. I’d phoned Helen to apologise for my behaviour at the hospital, skirting away again when she tried to ask about Richard. She was still against my going to the Island but she’d accepted that I wouldn’t be persuaded and put me in touch with her assistant, Esther, and her boyfriend, who had been looking for a new place and were going to take over my lease for six months. Esther had been around to see the flat after work and though I had always been fond of it, seeing it through a stranger’s eyes, I was aware all of a sudden of the phone-box dimensions of the kitchen, the ill-fitting carpet, the stain on the bedroom ceiling from the time the guttering had clogged with dead leaves and overflowed. I had felt defensive about my life here, as if its inadequacies had been exposed. Esther was ten years younger than me and the flat was much more suitable for someone her age, just starting her career and with a first-job salary, than for someone of mine.
I had known I wouldn’t sleep. Earlier the landline had rung. I’d hesitated to pick it up but thought it might be the woman from the cottage again.
‘Kate?’ Richard’s voice had been full of surprise at getting through.
‘No,’ I’d said and dropped the receiver as if it had burnt me. The phone rang again immediately so I unplugged it from the wall. My heart was thumping against my ribs and I went straight to the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine, hands fumbling at the foil around the top.
A little after midnight I poured the last of it and sat down in the wicker chair by the window. The room was full of shades: everywhere I looked there were versions of Richard and I still playing out what we’d done here as if we’d been leaving a slipstream of our own molecules all the time. It was familiar, this sense that we had layered up a history here. Before, when he’d been away, I used to look around at the sofa we’d had sex on, the table where we’d eaten dinner, the bed we’d slept in, and felt that I was among my accomplices, not alone. Now, though, overriding all those others, came the memory I was determined not to have. I shoved it away.
I turned my back on the room and looked out of the window instead. The blinds were left open, as they always were, for the view of the flats opposite. I felt as if I knew the people who moved around in them. I knew their routines and the hours they kept; I knew I’d worked too late if all their lights had gone out. Though I’d never spoken to any of them, I would miss them. In a strange way, they were my community here; they had given me the sense that there was life going on. At the same time, though, they had served to highlight my isolation. Sometimes, late at night, I had felt as if I was standing on a bank by a railway line, watching those lighted windows and the people in them as if they were racing past on a fast train that somehow I had missed.
Driving out of London the next day, everything had seemed invested with significance all of a sudden: the grocery shop and café at the bottom of the Earls Court Road, the petrol station where I stopped to fill up, the Fuller’s brewery just before the turn-off at Chiswick. Shockingly, I had started to crave Richard. Everything was connected to him; every shop I passed, every stretch of road. There was a pain behind my breastbone as if I had swallowed something that had lodged in my windpipe, and the pressure was making it hard to breathe. Suddenly I hadn’t been leaving the current Richard but an earlier version, the one in whom I had invested so many dreams, the one with whom I’d spent days in bed, hardly thinking of anything at all. The new Richard was gone and the one I was driving away from was the one I loved.
Two hours later, I’d arrived at the ferry terminal in Lymington. At the ticket office my will almost failed me. More than I could ever remember wanting anything in my adult life, I wanted to go back to London. The ferry ride across the Solent had turned into something else in my mind, the strip of water now Atlantic in significance.
The girl at the counter waited patiently for me to speak. There was the chatter of approaching voices: the first foot passengers disembarking from the boat which had just docked. It would be returning again in a few minutes, either with me or without.
‘Come on,’ the man behind me had muttered under his breath.
I had thought of my flat. Helen was going to give the spare keys to Esther later on. It wasn’t mine any more, not until April anyway. I couldn’t go back there. I opened my purse and handed over my card.
As I returned it to my bag, I’d seen that the screen of my mobile was lit up. Sure enough, the call was international. He’d rung four times during the night, leaving messages that I’d deleted unheard. It would be six in the morning in New York now, though, and clearly he was already awake. I flushed with anger. Did he really think I would answer him? The phone had been on silent before but now I turned it off completely.
On the ferry, I took a seat in the lounge on the top deck and watched from the window as we began to wend our way down the Lymington River, past the mudflats on one side, the yacht club and marina on the other. Out towards the mouth of the river where the wind had a freer run, the boat juddered and the bottles behind the bar began to rattle. I put my coat back on and went out on deck. The air smelled like salt and ozone and diesel but also somehow clean. The sea was flecked with white, and spume flew up around the bow. Two hours from London, I thought, but it was a different world.
Ahead lay the Island, a line of wooded green rising out of the water. My hands became raw with the cold but I stayed out for the rest of the journey anyway, holding on to the railing, watching the land come into sharper and sharper definition, like a photograph developing. The buildings along the shore at Yarmouth grew larger. There was the George hotel, tucked in next to the castle, and the yacht club and the row of large houses out towards the Common. On the other side, near where the ferry came in, was the harbour with its white spinney of masts. It was all just as I remembered it and I felt my spirits lift. Helen was wrong to think my coming here was a mistake.
The house was three minutes’ walk, if that, from the harbour. The owner was a woman in early middle age, with the premature lines and ruddy cheeks of someone who had lived a good portion of her life outside. She was wearing a pair of navy trousers in heavy cotton and a chunky sweater. Her jacket, a waterproof, hung on the back of one of the chairs at the foldaway kitchen table. My own outfit, a pair of skintight jeans, a polo neck and black leather jacket, although simple, felt suddenly attention-seeking and wrong.
‘Ouch,’ she said when she saw the cut on my brow and the deep purple-grey ring beneath my eye.
‘I fell off my bike,’ I said. ‘Hit the kerb. I should look where I’m going.’
‘I don’t know why you people do it – cycle in London. Seems like madness to me.’ She went back to making the coffee. When it was ready, we went through to the sitting room. It was large, spanning the whole width of the building and opening through sliding glass doors on to a paved area with a small wooden picnic table and a cluster of empty terracotta planters. At the end, beyond the patio, were wooden double gates. The room itself was plain, the armchair and sofa upholstered in oatmeal, a porridge-coloured carpet. There was a pine coffee table and an amateurish watercolour of yachts over the fireplace. It had the functional feel of most rental places, nothing of value or quality left to damage or steal.
‘You know it gets very quiet here in the winter?’ She looked at me over the rim of her cup.
I told her about my work, emphasising the advantages of peace.
‘You’re not married? No partner?’
‘N
o.’
‘There’s internet here, if that helps,’ she said. ‘For your work, I mean. The last tenant asked for it.’ She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘I’ll show you the rest.’
I followed her up a narrow staircase to a landing barely large enough to turn around on and saw the two bedrooms and a bathroom whose uncompromisingly avocado fittings suggested the 1970s weren’t over yet. Back downstairs in the kitchen, the cooker’s digital clock said it was twelve. Odd that it was still so early; I felt a whole day should have passed already. It was the journey; not only had it removed me from the mainland, it had dislocated my sense of time, too. Distance, though, was what I wanted. I wrote her a cheque for the deposit.
When she’d gone I went back to the harbour front for the car. It took me twenty seconds to reach the wooden gates and drive it into the yard, and perhaps three minutes more to open the sliding doors and carry the suitcase and the boxes into the house.
Then, the doors locked again behind me, I sat down at the kitchen table, my legs going from under me all of a sudden as if in shock at how quickly I had achieved it, bringing myself here to this place. There was no noise at all from the town; no cars passing or voices on the street. Little by little, the sounds of the house itself pressed themselves on my attention: the low vibration of the fridge whose phases resolved every minute or two with a mechanical shudder, the irregular drips of water from the tap into the steel sink, the surge of the central heating when the temperature dipped below whatever the thermostat had been set at. I leant forward and put my head in my hands. What the hell have I done? I thought.
Chapter Four
I hadn’t been afraid the night I met him. On the way back to his house I had looked blithely out of the taxi window at unfamiliar streets and thought to myself that I had only been to that part of London once before, crossing it on a bus for a reason I’d forgotten. He had had his hand on my thigh, his fingers curling in to press on the soft flesh on the inside, and it seemed to weigh heavier than a hand should. I had smiled as I turned my face down to my shoulder, baring more of my neck for him to put his lips against, knowing that the driver was flicking his eyes to watch us in the mirror.
Helen and I had been out for supper in Soho. She had been tired by the time we finished eating but I was suddenly full of energy, excited that it was Saturday and we were out, the streets busy, full of possibility. ‘It’s too early to go home,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘Come on. How often do we celebrate your getting promoted?’
‘It’s nearly midnight,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do tomorrow.’
‘More work.’
‘Well, yes but . . .’
‘Is this the Helen who only used to leave a club when they started sweeping? Come on – one more.’
We found a place round the corner. Neither of us had been there before. It was crowded with people dressed more smartly than us and when at last we were served, there was nowhere to sit. We were shunted away from the bar and found ourselves standing by an arrangement of dramatic red flowers, birds of paradise and amaryllises, by an alcove near the door. The room was hot and airless. I saw Helen stifling a yawn and felt bad: I shouldn’t have dragged her on; we should have gone home.
Afterwards I couldn’t have said how it happened but suddenly they were talking to us, him and another man. His friend, who focused on Helen almost immediately, was tall and peered down at her with pale strained eyes. His light brown hair was cut very short, as if he was adamant no one should think he didn’t know he was receding.
The first thing I noticed about the man who turned to me was his eyebrows. They were thick and black, and arched up so that he seemed permanently to be asking a question, one to which he already knew the answer. There was something griffin-like about his expression; there was dry humour in it but also a challenge, as if he was saying: surprise me. He was watching me intently but didn’t speak. It was strange: it should have unnerved me but instead I found myself responding to the intensity. It was like suddenly finding myself in a spotlight.
‘You’re in suits,’ I said eventually, to break the silence. ‘You and your friend.’
‘We’ve been at work.’
‘On a Saturday evening?’
‘Until about an hour ago, yes. It’s been a big week.’ His voice was accentless and somehow confidential, as if we’d known each other a long time and he was telling me a piece of information whose importance only I would understand.
A new group of people came in from the street and, to make room for them, he took a step towards me. I took a corresponding step back into the alcove and, in doing so, lost Helen from direct sight. There were a few seconds in which neither of us spoke. We looked at each other, and one of his eyebrows lifted, as if he was daring me to look away first. His eyes were a colour I hadn’t seen before – light brown, like toffee – and there was something Persian about their shape. In their corners were lines which the remnants of a tan made more pronounced. I put him in his late thirties. One side of his mouth was rising. I smiled back, feeling the start of a bubbling hilarity in my stomach, but in the end it was me who broke the eye contact. I took a sip of my drink to find that, apart from the ice cubes, the glass was empty.
‘I’ll get us some more,’ he said. ‘Gin and tonic, yes?’
Before I could say anything, he was on his way to the bar. I came forward a couple of steps. The man with Helen was leaning against the wall next to her now, his rucksack between his feet. He was talking – something about Spain – and I waited for him to break off but a minute later the new drinks were back from the bar. ‘That was quick,’ I said. ‘It took us ages to get served.’
He made a face that suggested he hadn’t noticed one way or the other and took a mouthful from his glass. Then he stepped closer to me and we were back in the alcove again. He smiled and I looked at his mouth. His lips were full but in no way feminine. His hair was cropped close to his head and so thick that it looked not silky but velvety. I suppressed an urge to put out my hand and stroke it.
A trio of women in cocktail dresses had moved to our side of the room for the waves of cooler air that came in when the door opened, and they pushed us closer together, so close now we were almost touching. The three or four inches of space between us came alive with tension. Suddenly and without taking his eyes off me, he took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. He brought our hands up next to my face and pushed me lightly back against the wall. His mouth moved closer to mine but ten or twelve seconds passed and he didn’t kiss me. Go on; surprise me, his eyes said. This time I held his stare, making no movement either towards or away from him, wanting him to know I could play this game, too. I saw him register it and then, at last, he leaned the small extra distance and his lips touched mine for perhaps a second. The frisson spread over the whole surface of my body.
He moved away and took a sip of his drink.
Disorientated, I struggled to think of something to say. In the end, I asked what he did. It sounded like ridiculous drinks-party small talk after what had just happened.
‘I’m a property developer.’
‘What sort of property?’
‘Residential – sometimes in the UK but mostly overseas. We’re working on a project in Andalusia at the moment.’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.’
He was watching me as if he was trying to work out what I was thinking. I was suddenly determined not to give him any idea. I would surprise him, I thought, if that was what he wanted.
He kissed me again but this time his lips stayed on mine, and for seconds before and afterwards our mouths were so close that we were breathing each other’s breath. His arm was on the wall next to my head, simultaneously creating a barrier between me and the girl who was pushing against us, and fencing me in. The pit of my stomach felt tight, the hilarity becoming a different sort of excitement.
When he pulled away again, Helen was standing behind him, wearing a question
ing expression. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘I’m going home. Are you coming?’
In front of her, visible only to me, his eyebrows twitched up. I looked at Helen and then back again at him, at his mouth. I shook my head. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay and finish my drink.’ I raised the glass towards her, as if it were proof of my need to stay, but found that it was empty again.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ she said. ‘Outside.’
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ I said to him. He took my glass.
I followed her as she pushed a way towards the door. We reached the pavement and I took a deep breath of the fresh air. It was much cooler than inside but still warm. Some of the heat seemed to be rising from the pavement, the concrete radiating the sun which it had been storing all afternoon.
‘Tell me you’re not going home with him,’ she said.
Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought beyond what it had felt like when he kissed me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘You’ve just met him. You haven’t got a clue who he is.’
‘I know that.’
‘I don’t want to leave you in the middle of Soho when you’ve been drinking.’
‘Relax. I’ll have one more, then I’ll get a taxi.’
She looked at me appraisingly. ‘Will you?’
I felt a surge of rebellion against her. Who was she, I wanted to ask, to pass judgement on me like this? ‘What if I do?’ I said. ‘What if I do go home with him?’
‘You met him two minutes ago – in a bar. He could be an axe murderer.’
‘He’s not an axe murderer.’ I laughed. ‘He’s a property developer.’
Helen closed her eyes briefly, as if she were trying hard not to lose her temper. ‘Come home with me. You can sleep in my spare room.’
‘No. I don’t want to. When did you get so old and . . . censorious, Helen? Why are you like this? And why shouldn’t I have some fun?’
The Bed I Made Page 3