I took a swift step backwards. I’d caught only a momentary glimpse of his face before looking away in shocked embarrassment but what I’d seen in that fraction of a second was an expression of utter exhaustion. The deep grey hollows under his eyes and the whiteness of his skin suggested that he hadn’t slept in all the days that she’d been missing. He looked frangible, as if the merest touch would shatter him. I’d remembered him as tall and I was struck by his height again; the top of my head was parallel with his shoulder and the neck of the grey jumper he wore under a navy Musto jacket.
‘You’re looking for my cat,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry – I didn’t know he was yours.’
‘Why would you?’ He ran a hand over his eyes and blinked widely, as if coming awake. His eyes were a startling aqueous green against the wanness of the rest of his face. ‘Is he still under there?’
‘I couldn’t see – the light’s wrong.’
He went down on his haunches and craned his head around sideways, just as I had done. I stayed standing, unsure whether or not I should help, but a couple of seconds later he put his fingertips on the tarmac and pushed himself back up. ‘He’s not there – must have run out the other side. He’s avoiding me; he hasn’t been home for days.’
My face must have asked the question.
‘He’s not mine, really. He’s my wife’s.’ He blinked again, and his mouth seemed to fold in on itself. It felt like an invasion of his privacy to look at him, as if, in his vulnerability, he couldn’t help giving away more than was right for me to see. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘thanks.’
I opened my mouth to say something as yet unclear to me but he was gone, already yards away, striding down towards the harbour.
Without thinking, I crossed the road and went into the shop on the corner. I walked up the narrow aisle towards the back and stood in front of the open-fronted fridge. I looked blankly at the cheeses and cold meats, my mind full instead of the image of Peter Frewin’s face, the pain etched into it like scrimshaw.
‘Excuse me?’
I turned around. In front of me was a woman in jeans and a jumper, a huge black woollen coat hanging heavily from her shoulders. She was about my age, maybe a couple of years older, lines just beginning to fan out from the corners of her eyes, which were pale grey and watering slightly. Her brown hair, made wavy by the damp, was parted to the side and tucked behind her ears. She put her hand up and smoothed it, as if she wanted to make sure she was presentable before talking to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you.’
‘No – you didn’t.’
‘I hope you won’t think this is weird but I’ve seen you around a bit and I’ve been meaning to say hello. It’s always good to have new people here, especially younger ones.’ She lowered her voice conspiratorially, as if we were surrounded by pensioners who might take umbrage. ‘I’m Sally Vaughn.’ She put out a small hand for me to shake, which struck me as a strange formality.
‘Kate Gibson.’
‘Have you got time for a coffee?’
In my surprise at being asked, I hesitated and she seemed to withdraw a little. ‘I’m sorry – you must have lots to do,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, almost too quickly now. ‘Coffee would be good.’ Perhaps, I’d realised, being about the same age, she might have known Alice.
‘I’ll let you finish your shopping and then . . .’
‘I’m finished. I mean, I just came in for some cheese.’ I took a wedge of Brie from the fridge, wondering why I felt I had to offer a pretext. Looking to see what she was buying, preparing to be embarrassed by the evidence of effort-making home cooking, I realised she wasn’t holding anything.
There were two other people at the till, a veritable rush, and she waited out of the way by the door while I paid. The woman behind the counter was the one who had been kind to me before and she patted my hand now as she gave me my change. ‘You’re looking a bit better, love,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’
Outside we stopped to let a bowed old lady pass, her Jack Russell briefly investigating our trouser-legs before his leash tugged him onwards. I wondered whether, as a local, Sally would choose Mariners café or Gossips by the pier but when she started in the opposite direction I understood that we were going to her house; there were no cafés this way.
I felt awkward and a bit cumbersome walking by her side; she was three or four inches shorter than me and moved lightly, as if she were tripping along on tiptoes. We went down St James’s Street, two of my steps to three of hers, past the church and the terrace of white-painted houses whose faces, with their small windows, always looked so closed. Being with someone else changed the feel of the streets; in company they seemed more real somehow, no longer just theatre sets constructed out of cheap wood and cardboard. A ferry was in and we waited for the end of the brief flow of traffic before crossing Tennyson Road.
‘How long have you been here now?’ she asked.
I had to think about it. ‘Almost a fortnight – though it seems much longer.’
‘Where were you before?’
‘London.’
‘God, you must be finding it quiet.’
‘That’s an understatement.’
She didn’t reply and I wondered whether I’d been rude or whether she was waiting for me to ask. ‘Me?’ she said, when I did. ‘Oh, I feel like I’ve been here for ever. I’m from Portsmouth originally but we moved here when I was seven. I never got round to leaving.’ She laughed but the sound of it struck me as hollow.
Her house was beyond the school on Mill Road, one of a red-brick terrace that I had passed before. I waited as she found her keys in her handbag and opened the door, giving the bottom of it a sharp kick with a small booted foot. ‘The damp,’ she said. ‘It swells up and then it sticks. Drives me mad.’
As in my cottage, the door opened straight into a small kitchen. The units and the painted wooden table were white and very clean, and there was a blue gingham blind in the window. She took my coat and ushered me into one of the pine wheel-back chairs at the table. On top of a pile of raffia placemats was a bowl of small, imperfect apples and a GCSE chemistry textbook, which she saw me notice. ‘Tom’s – my son.’ She turned to the sink and filled the kettle. ‘You don’t have any children?’
The question surprised me, as it always did. It was ridiculous but there was a part of me that still thought I was too young. The textbook made clear exactly how ridiculous: I’d guessed that she was only a couple of years older than me, thirty-four or -five, maybe, and her son had to be fifteen or sixteen if he was doing GCSEs.
I watched her as she took down mugs and decanted milk into a jug. Out of the coat she was as slight as I’d thought she must be, and her hands moved quickly, flitting back and forth between objects as if she checked things by touch rather than sight. She took a tin of biscuits from a cupboard and arranged some on a plate with a doily, and I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a doily in a private house.
‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’
‘Instant’s fine – great. Please, don’t go to any trouble.’
She brought the mugs over to the table and sat down. ‘Have a biscuit.’ She proffered the plate and I took one, largely from a sense that it would be rude to refuse. She took one herself and began to gnaw at the end of it. ‘Did you come to the Island for work then?’ she asked.
I explained about the translating, how I could do it anywhere. I wondered as I talked how many days it had been since I’d done any actual work. It was stretching to weeks now. I would have to be careful; before any of this had happened, I’d been ahead of schedule, as I always was, but coming here, the days when I’d been incapable of doing anything: I was losing ground, and I couldn’t afford to get the reputation of not being able to work to deadline.
‘That sounds interesting – much more interesting than my job. I’m a PA, for a company of solicitors in Newport.’
‘Translating has its downsides. It’s p
retty lonely, for one thing,’ I said, feeling I had to offer some consolation. ‘This probably isn’t the right place for it, not in my situation.’
‘You don’t think you’ll stay then?’
‘Not permanently. I don’t know anyone here.’
‘You know Pete, though. Pete Frewin.’ She looked up from where her fingers were following the doily’s scalloped edge. ‘I saw you talking.’ There was a moment’s silence and then she laughed lightly. ‘That sounded terrible – as if I’m stalking you or something. What I meant was: I noticed you talking to him in the Square before I went into Wavells.’
‘That was the first time we’ve ever spoken. I was trying to stroke his cat – I used to have one who looked exactly the same.’
‘You know about his wife?’
‘Did you know her?’ The coffee was still very hot but I took a big mouthful, wanting to mask my face in case it gave away the extent of my interest.
‘Yes. She was my friend.’ She was looking down again now and I thought I detected a tremor in her lower lip. ‘Since sixth form. All three of us – us and Pete. She went to university on the mainland, in London, but when she came back, we just picked up where we left off. She was . . .’ She swallowed audibly.
‘I’m sorry. It must be very hard.’
A few seconds passed, then she sniffed as if fortifying herself and looked up again, resolute. Her eyes were watery, as they had been when I first saw her, but she blinked the tears quickly away. ‘If we knew for certain,’ she said, ‘that would help. Poor Pete – he’s being so strong but what must he be going through?’
I nodded. There were so many questions I wanted to ask but now it was near impossible. I couldn’t probe into her grief. I tried to imagine how it would feel if Helen disappeared and felt a wash of anxiety go over me. ‘Was there any warning?’ I said gently. ‘That she might . . .’
‘Not really. She’d been through a particularly bad patch recently and we’d been worried for her then but, if anything, she seemed calmer in the last few days, even excited – as if she’d sorted herself out, found some sort of answer to it all. Of course, it makes sense now,’ she glanced away and bit her lip. ‘She had found the answer. A terrible answer.’ She looked back at me. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear all this – and we’ve only just met and here’s me crying all over you.’
‘If it would help you to talk . . .’
‘You know what I don’t understand? She knew that we were here for her, whenever she needed us, Pete and me.’ She shook her head. ‘Pete was the best thing that ever happened to Alice. The way he loved her.’ She looked at me fiercely, as though I were trying to contradict her. ‘They were perfect. If he couldn’t make her happy, loving her like he did, then nothing would have done.’
To my horror, I felt my own eyes fill with tears. She noticed them and reached across the table to put her small hand on mine. Her nails were neat and painted with clear polish. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m upsetting you now. We won’t talk about it any more. Tell me about you instead. Do you have a partner?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There was someone but it went wrong.’ She looked genuinely troubled, as if it mattered to her. ‘How about you?’
‘I had Tom when I was eighteen,’ she said. ‘My father was furious, said I’d wasted myself. I didn’t care – Tom was worth every bit of the shouting then. The only thing that bothered me was that I split up from his dad quite soon after. I would have liked him to have a dad. Still, we’ve done OK, I think. We’ve managed.’
That night, for the first time in a week, I had trouble sleeping again. For the past few days, I’d been falling into a dreamless oblivion so complete it was as if I’d been anaesthetised but now lying in bed, the faint glow of the streetlights along River Road coming through the thin curtains, I realised something disturbing: I was jealous of Alice. Not for what she’d done, of course not, but for the obvious love she’d had, both from her husband and from Sally. I envied her that. More disturbingly still, however, I realised that I was also jealous of my brother. When I’d put the phone down after talking to him that evening, the house had settled into near-silence around me again and I’d thought of him sitting down to supper in his kitchen with Mel, opening a bottle of wine, Charlie already in his cot for the night. I’d felt it then: the first pang of unmistakable envy. They’d been together four years now and before Melissa, Matt had had another girlfriend for years, too, a shy girl called Rebecca whom he’d met in the labs at university. He could have no idea of what it was like, I thought, to have to breathe life into a cold house every time you walked in, to come home to cook your own supper every night and to eat it alone, never even to have to look for something and find it other than where you’d put it.
This time last year Richard had been in France and had got into London late on a Friday evening. We’d spent most of the night awake, lying in bed talking and drinking the wine he’d brought back with him. The following morning I went to the newsagent’s on Earls Court Road to buy milk and a newspaper. Though I’d had almost no sleep at all, I’d felt euphoric. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ he had asked an hour earlier. He was lying behind me, his body tucked in behind mine, his fingers gently tracing over my hip bone.
‘I don’t know yet,’ I’d said. ‘Normally we spend it with Dad in Bristol but he’s moved now and Matt and Mel have just had their baby.’
‘Spend it with me then. Let’s have Christmas here.’
‘Here? What, in this flat?’
‘Why not?’
‘Yours is much nicer – and much bigger. Do you really want to spend Christmas picking your way around the edge of the bed to get to the window?’
‘Maybe I don’t intend to spend much time out of bed at all.’ He moved his hand, sliding it off my hip and along the top of my thigh instead.
I wriggled out of his arms and turned to face him. ‘You mean it, then? You want to spend the holiday here? With me?’
‘Yes. Is that so very extraordinary?’ His eyebrows twitched and I laughed and kissed him.
I’d been so excited that I’d had to stop myself hopscotching along the pavement to the newsagent’s. I knew that going home with him that first night had been reckless but I didn’t care. If I hadn’t taken the risk, maybe I wouldn’t have had this. Often in the past when I’d felt myself beginning to care about men, I’d experienced something like panic. It was difficult: I wanted to connect with people, I went looking for connections, but I struggled with the reality of getting close to men because I was afraid of losing my emotional independence, being made vulnerable. Even I could recognise the pattern: as soon as I began to see potential in a new relationship, it was as if a switch was thrown in my brain and I deliberately began the sabotage, picking fights, looking for faults.
It hadn’t seemed to be happening with Richard, though. Perhaps it was the mock-confrontational banter between us which made me feel as if I was playing a role in a film and kept things light. But perhaps, I’d increasingly thought, it was because we had so much in common. He understood me and my need to be independent. Certainly he understood my need to work and why it was important for me to prove myself; it was one of his defining characteristics, too. ‘Thank you for understanding,’ he would say sometimes, when he left for his office on a Saturday afternoon. ‘You’re different. You get me.’ I liked the idea of being the person who understood him. And perhaps, I’d started to think, perhaps this was the understanding, the easiness, people meant when they talked about how they knew they’d met the right person.
As I’d walked back up the stairs that morning, I’d heard noises coming from my flat and as I approached the front door, I realised it was music. Richard had put the radio on. The unexpectedness of it, something in the flat that I hadn’t done, was strangely thrilling. I put down the papers and milk and followed the music through to its source in the bathroom. In the time that I’d been gone, he’d run a bath and was now in it, hidden up to his chest by bubbles. The sig
ht of him in there, the adult, masculine shape of his body emerging from the childish foam, made me so happy that I burst out laughing. Then I took off my clothes, left them where they dropped and got in with him, lowering myself gently in so as not to send water spilling over the side.
‘I think you’ve got a talent for pleasure,’ he’d said, as I leant back against his chest.
‘And I thought I was only any good at languages.’
Chapter Nine
I knew that the way to pull myself together now was to work. Telling Sally about the translating had reminded me that it was there, not only an increasingly pressing obligation but also an escape route, a way I could make myself disappear.
Starting the day after I met her, I set out to establish a routine, getting up as soon as the alarm went off, putting on my old cord trousers and making a percolator of coffee. The first day, I only read through the notes I’d written when I’d begun work on the book – they might have been made by someone else for all the memory I had of them – but after that, gratefully, I found a rhythm again and within days I was working at such a pitch that I stood up from my desk at lunchtime feeling sick from the intensity of the concentration. While I was focusing on the text, on finding the neatest, most succinct and idiomatic way of turning the English words into French, I could lose my problems, shake them off.
The Bed I Made Page 8