Passing the mirror on the landing, I caught a glimpse of my face and, despite my hurry, I had to stop. I looked hollowed-out. My skin was colourless apart from the rim of bruised purple in my eye socket, now subsiding into shades of rotten yellow and green, and the livid line under the spidery stitches that itched constantly. My eyes stared dully back at me, the pupils huge with lack of light. I touched my cheek and the skin felt dry and older than I ever remembered.
I was nervous about driving but I didn’t want to be out of the house for any longer than necessary. I went slowly, praying that I wouldn’t meet a situation which required a swift response. It occurred to me on the way that the shop might be closed – I wasn’t sure what day it was – but when I arrived, the lights were on. I took a minute to try to calm down before going in; I didn’t want a repeat of yesterday.
Inside, the atmosphere of unfussy order and peace was the same. The man behind the desk looked up as the bell announced my arrival. He recognised me and mouthed hello, and I turned to see another woman already browsing, her attention focused on the chunky paperback in her hand, shopping basket tucked into the crook of her arm. I nodded to him and moved out of view. Despite my determination to be calm, I felt the same overwhelming desire for the books that I had had for the food. I wanted to snatch them up and take them all back to the cottage. Five, I told myself; any more would look excessive.
I started scanning the rows, finding things I hadn’t noticed before. What would be more distracting, I wondered, old favourites or new stories? Behind me, the telephone rang and was answered. The man kept his voice low, as if we were in a library. Looking up, I realised his quietness was in deference only to me: the other woman had gone. A sudden urgency in his tone caught my attention.
‘Where?’ he said. A few seconds passed. ‘The coastguard? They didn’t bring her in themselves?’
Now I was straining to hear and I could just make out the sound of the voice at the other end of the line. I was too far away, however, to distinguish what it was saying.
‘And they think it is?’ Another pause. ‘Right. OK. You’ve tried his office, obviously? I may do – I think so, yes. If he is there, I’ll tell him – no, it’s all right. I’ll ring you. Half an hour?’
He hung up and I realised I’d been holding myself rigid, hardly breathing. The call was about Alice, I was sure. They’d found her body. For a moment I thought I might be sick, and I quickly put my hand over my mouth. The intensity of the feeling took me by surprise.
‘I’m sorry.’ The voice came from just behind my shoulder and I spun round as if he’d caught me stealing. ‘I have to close up now; I have to go.’
It took a second or two for the words to register. ‘No, of course. That’s . . .’ I remembered the books under my arm.
‘Have them.’ He was searching for his keys, patting his pockets, shaking his jacket to hear them.
‘What?’
‘The books – have them.’
‘I couldn’t; I wouldn’t feel . . .’
‘Please. It doesn’t matter at all. I’m sorry – I hate hurrying you like this but I really do have to go.’
He followed me out of the shop, turning the light off and locking the door behind him. I got back into the car and watched in the rear-view mirror as he went down the hill towards the war memorial, his slightly bow-legged stride quick for a man of his age. He was going to find Peter Frewin, I knew it.
Chapter Eight
I’d spoken to my brother less since he’d moved to America. The cost of transatlantic calls, especially from a mobile, meant that when we talked now there was a third party involved in our conversations, the clock ticking through the minutes, racking up the pounds or dollars. Most of the time, we kept in touch by email but today I wanted to hear the sound of his voice with the Bristol accent that it had retained despite all the years since he’d left home and the move to another continent.
I called him at midnight: seven o’clock in Baltimore. With the exception of the man in the shop in the afternoon, it would be the first time I’d spoken to anyone in days. I hesitated before dialling the number, nervous all of a sudden at the prospect of speaking to my own brother. The phone rang and rang but when at last he answered, there was delight in his voice.
‘How are you?’ he was asking. ‘How’s the Island?’
I swallowed quickly, not wanting him to hear the lump that had come into my throat. ‘It’s cold,’ I said. ‘And it was foggy and now it’s windy.’
‘But you’re enjoying it?’
The question was so far from the mark that I couldn’t think how to answer. I’ve got no one to talk to and the day after I came here, I met a woman who drowned. I could say it, of course I could, but I couldn’t really tell him how I felt; as soon as he’d picked up the phone, I’d known that. In Matt’s eyes, I was the one who knew how to handle things, the one who helped and solved problems. I’d been the person he rang when he was seventeen, at university a year early and out of his depth in London. A second-year by then, I knew my way around and enjoyed showing off my new sophistication as much as I’d enjoyed helping him out. If I told him how I really was now, it would reveal a side of me he had never known and it wasn’t just for his sake that I didn’t want that. His perception of me was important for me, too: I needed him to think of me as capable and strong. While I had that, I still had the façade of my old self at least. If I kept it, I could perhaps rebuild myself behind it; if I lost it, then there would be nothing left. There was another element to the feeling, too: pride. I couldn’t bear him to know that I’d made such a mess of things, especially when now, having always been the less worldly of us, he’d got everything right.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s fine, yes. It’s good.’
‘I was really surprised when Dad told me. I’ve been meaning to drop you a line but we’ve been doing trials at work and Charlie’s had a chest infection.’
‘He’s all right though?’
‘Getting better now but Mel was really worried – we both were. His temperature was so high. But why did you move? I didn’t even know you were thinking about it.’
‘You know, I felt like I needed a change.’
He laughed. ‘And you couldn’t just go on holiday like normal people?’
‘As if you’d know what normal people do.’
‘All right,’ he said, a little defensive but also a little pleased. I felt a flood of affection for him. I wished that he was here so that I could put my arms around him and press my face against the chest which had been parallel with my forehead since he was thirteen. He’d inherited Dad’s height, as well as his love of physics. It had been like growing up with a couple of tall aliens who communicated in a code beyond my ken. But the geek in Matt was accompanied by a kindly diffidence that, over the past four or five years and much to his bafflement, had made him popular with women despite his elongated frame and its tendency to stringiness. And here he was now, his life all in order: the research job at Johns Hopkins that he might have been born to do – something to do with magnetic imaging, as far as I could make out – marriage to Melissa and then, a year ago, the arrival of Charlie. I wondered how he had made it all happen.
‘Oh, and I split up with Richard.’ I tried to sound casual.
‘Shit. You OK? What went wrong?’
The lump was back in my throat, hard as baked clay. What had I told him? I tried to remember. The truth was so far buried under layers of lies and half lies that I couldn’t be sure what he knew. But anyway, of everyone in the world, he was the last person I could tell. The thought alone made me wither.
‘I’m fine. It wasn’t meant to be, that’s all.’
‘Come on, you really liked him. You loved him. You’ve never talked about anyone like that before.’
‘I’ll get over it.’
‘If it would help to talk . . .’
‘I said it’s not a big deal. Just leave it.’
He was silent for a few seconds, and I could tell that I
’d hurt him. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘if you change your mind, you know where to find me.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
There was an awkward pause in which I felt bad.
‘Look, what are you doing for Christmas?’ he said. ‘We spoke to Dad and Jane last night and we suddenly thought, why don’t you all come out here? I’d love to see you – Mel would, too. We could have a big family Christmas.’
One side of me felt an immediate yearning. I’d only seen emailed pictures of his house, a two-storey white clapboard place with a screen door and a long lawn out front, but I imagined going there, spending the holiday with them all in a fug of family warmth, feeling part of something. But the other side recoiled from the idea: how could I go there, tainting their happiness with the hash I’d made of my own life, making light of everything to keep up the pretence but seething with it all behind the façade, simultaneously pleased that I could hide it and angry that they, the people to whom I was supposed to be closest of all, were fooled? And how could I go from this isolation to that? It would be like coming up out of a mine into bright sunshine. No, impossible.
‘Let me think about it,’ I said.
‘Dinner’s ready, Matthew.’ Melissa’s voice reached me at second hand.
‘Well, I’d better go,’ he said.
‘Yes, you better had.’
‘You should come, though. Do think about it.’
When he hung up the silence began to settle in the house again like snow and I felt a yawning disappointment. What I’d really wanted was to talk about Alice. I wanted at least to try to articulate to someone the intensity of what I’d felt earlier in the afternoon, the sense that there was some sort of connection between she and I, that we were two sides of a coin, heads and tails, and it was only that one moment on the down that separated us. I had pulled back, I had made that decision, but the moment had been so fractional, such a tiny blink of time, that it seemed only chance that I was still here while she was gone. I felt pity for her, pity that made my stomach ache, but it was tinged, too, with something else: guilt. Survivor’s guilt.
Of course I couldn’t have told Matt any of it – even the thought was ridiculous. Horrified, he would have rung Dad, who would have insisted on coming up from Cornwall and making everything worse. The only person it might have been possible to talk to about it was Helen but I couldn’t do that, either.
Because of Richard’s travelling, things between us never became routine. He could decide at such short notice that he needed to go abroad that I wouldn’t know until the day before or even, when there were emergencies, the same day. As well as the Spanish development, there was a plot of land on the Côte d’Azur which was coming up for sale and because he was also considering investing in a project in New Jersey there were occasional trips to the States. As a result and because it could never be taken for granted, the time we spent together felt more valuable. Sometimes, when he rang me from the taxi that was bringing him to me straight from Heathrow, I was sorry for the couple in the flat across the street with the baby and the settled routine. I wouldn’t have traded my excitement for anything in the world.
There were times, though, when he had to shelve supper with me in favour of dinner with investors or when meetings overran and he missed his flights. The disappointment then was like feeling the carpet drop away from under my feet and, the evening suddenly empty, I would open a bottle of wine and drink it. I almost always woke up the next morning to a string of late-night texts and I would be cross that I had let the alcohol depress me and make me forget that because what we had was not ordinary, there was a higher price for it.
More and more often when I was with Richard or on the phone to him, I had to stop myself from blurting out that I loved him. I could feel the words inside, causing pressure in my chest and stomach, threatening to rise up my throat and out of my mouth like shaken Coca-Cola. However much I wanted to say them, though, I didn’t. The semi-combative game between us, the bantering exchanges about who had supremacy, appealed to him. He liked the challenge, the competition: it fired sparks between us and, for that reason, I liked it, too. It also appealed to my vanity that I could meet this clever, ambitious man and match him. I loved the thrill of daring to respond to his bait with indifference and firing back a challenge of my own. It hadn’t taken me long to understand that for Richard, things acquired value in direct proportion to their difficulty. I wanted him and so I gave him the impression that he would have to work for me.
I couldn’t resist trying to put claims on him in covert ways, however. The unpredictability of our relationship gave it an air of unreality; afterwards, the bubbles of time I spent with him could seem dreamlike. I wanted to plant them more firmly and make them feel like part of my real life and so it became increasingly important to me that he meet Helen again and get to know her, at least a little. Despite the tension between us, Helen was still the anchor of my life in London. I wanted her to acknowledge my relationship with him and put her seal on it but I also wanted her to understand. I wanted her to like him. Though I’d hoped she’d relent once we started seeing one another properly, she’d remained sceptical about Richard, which infuriated me. ‘It sounds all right,’ she said, when I talked about him, ‘just don’t rush it, OK?’
‘Can’t you be happy for me?’ I would ask. ‘I’ve met someone I really like.’
‘I just – oh, I don’t know. The guy who was with him that night said he worked him pretty hard. He made him sound a bit . . . ruthless.’
‘Of course he’s ruthless when he’s working – that’s why he’s successful.’
‘You know him better than I do,’ she said, and I heard resignation, as if she had decided it was pointless trying to argue with me.
It was important to me, too, that Richard liked Helen, and her opposition to him that first night hadn’t endeared her to him. I was sure, though, that if they met properly, things between them would come right. For a reason I couldn’t fathom, though, I’d been nervous about asking Richard, and his initial response hadn’t been positive. ‘What?’ he’d said, as he pulled me in under his arm, moving his head slightly so that there was room for mine on the pillow. ‘You’d rather we go out to dinner with her than on our own? Or we could stay in and . . .’
‘I want you to meet her. She’s my best friend.’
‘I thought I was your best friend,’ he huffed, smiling, and I felt his breath on my face.
‘Funny.’ I pressed my knee hard against his thigh. ‘But if you really don’t want to go out, I can cook for us all here.’
So in the end I made dinner at the flat. I was anxious beforehand and abandoned work for the afternoon to slow-cook the Moroccan lamb which I knew they both liked. I cleared the table I used as a desk and laid it up with three places, and vacuumed and dusted as though I was preparing the place for inspectors.
Actually, immediately afterwards, I’d thought the evening had gone well. Richard was great; I’d been worried that the bantering way we talked to each other would strike Helen as odd but he was softer and it came across as a fond sort of teasing. He didn’t talk about himself but focused his full-beam charm on her, asking informed questions about brand-management and how media buying was evolving with changes in technology, paying her subtle compliments. I watched her keenly for signs that she was thawing towards him and threw in encouraging remarks and leading questions from time to time, like a parent trying to arrange an advantageous marriage. The next day, after Richard had gone home, I rang for her verdict, excited. ‘He’s great, isn’t he? And gorgeous.’
‘Yes, he’s very good-looking,’ she’d said and, encouraged, I’d pressed her, wanting further confirmation. No matter how much I angled, though, she wouldn’t say that she’d liked him and eventually I gave in and hung up, in case my frustration boiled over and caused me to say something I might regret.
The morning after I went to Totland again, I put on the television for the sound of voices and heard that the body recovered fr
om the sea near Brighton hadn’t been Alice Frewin but a mother of two from Basingstoke who’d gone missing a month previously. I felt a soaring feeling behind my ribs and made a sharp sound somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. It felt like she’d been given a reprieve, a second chance. I went into the kitchen to turn on the hob and then turned it off again, too agitated now to make breakfast at the cottage. I wanted to go out and hear what the locals were saying. They must have known about the body being recovered; behind the town’s closed doors, news like that would have jumped from house to house like fire.
There were people in the Square today: a middle-aged man in paint-covered trousers on his way into the chandlery, and a couple of women by the delicatessen. I went along the pavement next to them and pretended to look at the display of preserves and chutneys while I eavesdropped but they were talking in tones of outrage about some obscene graffiti which seemed to have appeared at the bus stop. The wind of the past few days had moderated and the cloud which had been harried across the sky now lowered itself comfortably down to sit overhead. The flat light contributed to the strange sense of anticlimax which I felt, the crisis which had threatened but not materialised. I bought a newspaper and went to Mariners café where I drank a cup of coffee and listened but the handful of customers were waiting for the ferry and weren’t local. Eventually, running out of reasons to linger, I paid the bill and left.
Before making my way back to the cottage, however, I crossed the Square to look for a moment at the display of binoculars and compasses in the window of Harwoods. I’d been standing there only a few seconds when, in the shadow on the glass, my eye was caught by something moving quickly along the ground. I turned round just as it stopped and saw a cat standing about six feet away, quite confidently watching me. He was the image of Magpie, the cat we’d had growing up: spotless black with a white bib, a tendency to corpulence and, it seemed, the same inquisitorial manner – a feline Hercule Poirot. He wasn’t at all fazed by me; instead he turned his head analytically to one side and carried on staring. I felt a sudden urge to pick him up and press my face into his fur but, despite the paunch, he was too fast and presented me with only the final inches of a lustrous black tail as he disappeared under the car parked at the kerbside. I crouched down and peered but before my eyes could become accustomed to the dark underneath, I sensed rather than saw someone next to me. I got up quickly and found myself standing slightly too close to Peter Frewin.
The Bed I Made Page 7