In the afternoons I went out. Unless it was raining heavily, I walked, just setting out from the cottage and following my feet. On wet days I took the car, gradually expanding my knowledge of the Island, attaching images to the names in my new road map. I went to places we’d never visited with Dad or that I didn’t remember anyway. I took the straight road that ran down the south-west facet of the Island, and at St Catherine’s on the southernmost tip I parked the car in a lane and walked down to a cluster of low buildings and the single white tower of the lighthouse which presided over the Channel. I was there as darkness began to fall and the lamp came on, strobing across the water like a giant eye, not warning but watching. On another day I went further along the road and came into Ventnor, easing the car down its wet, narrow streets to the shabby centre just above a promenade of closed-up cafés and boarding houses. The palm trees in the beds above the beach were evidence of the town’s other, summer life, so remote I couldn’t imagine it.
I felt the history of the Island all the time, as if the past was so close to the surface that occasionally it broke through to the present. Nestled among the spongy woods on the slopes of St Boniface Down, white Victorian villas held themselves aloof from the cheap shops of lower Ventnor as if their time of reserve and rectitude had never passed. In Bonchurch I came across an eleventh-century stone church little larger than a garden shed. Rain had made its tiny graveyard verdant and darkened the headstones, many of which bore the names and Victorian dates of those who had come to Ventnor, I guessed, to take the cure I’d read about. A plaque told me that the church was mentioned in the Domesday Book and standing among the graves, listening to the rain dripping through the branches of the trees which pressed at the edge of the cemetery and threatened to overgrow it, I felt even that time wasn’t so very far away.
The days began to gather momentum, and November tipped into December. Christmas was inescapable suddenly. Everywhere I went there were signs of it: artificial trees covered with lurid flashing lights in windows and gardens, illuminated Santas leading teams of reindeer across the roofs of pebbledashed semis on the road out of Newport. In Yarmouth there was tinsel woven among the toys and teddies and plastic models that made up the newsagent’s window display, and the chemist’s blinking mirrors were joined by gift sets of soaps and talcum powder. Listening to the radio in the car or watching television meant subjection to heavy shelling by advertisement.
Ten days after we spoke, I wrote Matt an email to say that I’d decided not to come to Baltimore. I had a deadline approaching, I told him, and Helen had reminded me of a promise I’d made to spend Christmas with her. He would never find out it wasn’t true.
Since coming to the Island I had spoken to Helen once and even then only briefly. For the most part our contact, too, was via email; it was an easier medium for both of us. There was something forced about speaking on the phone now, as if we were trying too hard to go back and recapture the time when there was no awkwardness between us and we’d spoken every day as a matter of course. Email allowed us to tread water, to stop our friendship from fading out completely but to preserve the distance that seemed to be stretching between us. I kept my mobile with me all the time and checked my email several times an hour when I was working but the phone didn’t ring and her messages were so occasional that I jumped on them as soon as they arrived.
I heard nothing from Richard. I’d thought that later, after the first flush of his anger had faded, there would be texts, emails, phone calls late at night when he’d had a few glasses of wine but nothing came. It was as if he’d forgotten I’d ever existed.
Sometimes, during those weeks, I was quite proud of myself. Every day I went to bed exhausted, having stuck more or less to the pattern of what might be considered a normal day: focusing on the translation, walking until I was tired out, making sure I ate at mealtimes. The nights, though, I couldn’t control. In my sleep I ran towards what I dragged myself away from while I was awake: as soon as I lost consciousness, the gates which I kept locked in the daytime swung wide open. I fell with delirious relief into dreams in which Richard – the old Richard, from the beginning – was so real that he might have been lying in the bed next to me. I felt his skin, pressed my face against his shoulder, buried my nose in his hair, his armpit, vacuumed up the smell of him like a homesick child with one of her mother’s jumpers. Sometimes I was suffused with happiness, a sense of envelopment and homecoming. On other mornings, though, I would wake with puffy eyes and a sense of desolation, the feeling that just as I’d woken, Richard had pulled free of my arms and slipped out of the room.
Sometimes, though, when I cried in my sleep, it was because the other memories, the later ones, had worked themselves into my dreams. In those it was always dark and I couldn’t work out who was talking or where I was or how I would ever get home. Lights shone and were abruptly extinguished. There were slammed doors and footsteps that came and went and sudden, sharp cries. I was chasing someone but I didn’t know whom. There were always paths for me to follow, shadowy, twilit tracks that led through woods and cobbled lanes in old cities, but at the same time that I was pursuing, I was being pursued. A beam swept over me and back again like a searchlight and I couldn’t stop for more than a few seconds before there were running footsteps which came louder and louder until they were joined by laughter. There was triumph in the laughter, knowledge of certain victory. I ran and ran and ran and when I woke up my heart was pounding and the T-shirt I slept in was as soaked with sweat as if I’d been running for years.
I’d started lighting the fire in the evenings. After supper I would work for another hour or so and then come down to sit in the armchair and read, closing the door between the sitting room and the kitchen and letting the heat build up until the room was really snug. By the second week in December I had finished the last of the five books and needed another batch. I was embarrassed to go back to the Totland shop though really I had nothing to be embarrassed about: he hadn’t known I’d been listening. And if I went back, I could pay him for the books he’d given me in his rush to go.
I took the car. It had been threatening rain all day, the sky thickening periodically with pigeon-grey clouds which loomed overhead but then moved off further up the coast just when it seemed they couldn’t get any heavier. The wind had a stinging edge, as if it came full of salt from the sea to seek out any cuts and blemishes on the skin. I felt it on my face even after I stepped out of it into the shop.
Christmas had arrived here, too, but in the most modest of ways. There was an arrangement of holly in a tall vase, the branches clearly chosen for their profusion of scarlet berries, and along the windowsills behind the desk there were lengths of trailing ivy. The owner was on the telephone again but he looked up and raised his spare hand in a sort of salute. I worked my way methodically along the shelves, glad that he was talking and that I could browse without any pressure. The conversation this time seemed to be about the safe packing of a book that he was sending to Berlin. After a while the carriage clock on his desk chimed four and, glancing up, I saw that the light outside was gone. Against the glass came the patter of incipient rain.
I chose another five books and went to pay. He’d finished on the telephone now and was writing in a ledger. He looked up quickly when he saw me, held up a single finger while he filled in the sum at the bottom of a column and then gave me his full attention.
‘Hello again,’ he said. ‘I’d hoped you’d come back. I wanted to apologise for the other day – hustling you out. I’d had what I thought was some rather bad news.’
‘Actually I’ve been feeling bad – I’d like to pay you for the other books.’
‘Absolutely not. You can put that thought from your mind once and for all.’ He took the new books from me, tipping them sideways to look at the spines, nodding slowly as if he had either predicted my choice – heavy on Graham Greene this time – or approved of it. Behind him, there was a sudden angry sound, as if someone had thrown a handful of fine gravel
against the window. A couple of seconds later, it came again. ‘God, listen to it,’ he said. ‘That’s sleet. You’re not walking, I hope?’
‘No, I’ve got the car but it’s down by the chemist.’
‘Umbrella?’
I shook my head. He frowned, making a deep grid of the fine mesh of lines which crossed his forehead. It seemed odd to me that he should be here in Totland running a second-hand bookshop; he didn’t quite fit. In fact, with his academic look, I could imagine him in the languages department of my old university. I filled in the rest of that life for him, too: a bachelor pad filled with shelves and shelves of books, a small circle of faculty friends whom he met for Saturday afternoon pints in pubs in Hampstead. Or perhaps a life with a family, two or three teenage children whom he loved but also liked to escape from into the relative calm of a study in a house somewhere in an unfashionable but more affordable area of suburbia.
‘Sorry?’ I said, realising that he had been talking.
‘I said, I’d lend you one but I gave it to someone else last week, alas, and she hasn’t returned it yet. Look, rather than get soaked, and get these wet’ – he rapped his knuckles on the top of the pile as if knocking on a door – ‘why don’t you stay and have a cup of tea with me? I shouldn’t think it’ll last more than a few minutes but it does sound vicious. Freezing cold, too.’
‘That’s kind but . . .’
‘It’s no trouble at all – I was about to put the kettle on anyway. I’m Christopher, by the way – Chris.’
Awkwardly I sat down on the chair that he pulled out for me. He disappeared through a side door and I heard a kettle being filled and cups and saucers being taken from a cupboard. My eyes moved over his desk. The pages of the ledger, now closed, had pink marbled edges, and it reminded me of a notebook of Dad’s which I had always coveted. The laptop was still on but it faced away from me; periodically, it whirred, then settled again. I shifted uncomfortably. Why the hell hadn’t I made an excuse and left? The sleet threw itself at the window again, malicious, and I willed it to pass over so that I could go home.
‘Here we are.’ He returned with two teacups, one of which he gave me before retreating to his side of the table. I took a sip straight away, burning my tongue. The cup clattered as it returned to the saucer. He was looking at me and I realised I should say something.
‘Thank you – this is very kind of you.’
‘No problem at all. As I said, I was about to have a cup anyway.’
‘I like your shop, it’s . . .’ I stopped, uncertain how to describe what I felt.
He nodded an acknowledgement. ‘Thank you. It’s not the main part of my business but I enjoy it and it gets a bit busier in the summer, when the holidaymakers come in. I deal in antiquarian books, really, mostly on the phone and over the internet. The shop’s slightly more sociable, though I still find the winters lonely, I must admit. What do you do? Are you working locally?’
‘At home. I’m a translator, English to French.’
‘You have family on the Island?’
‘No. I’m here on my own.’
He nodded again and I was interested to find that I didn’t feel as if I had to justify myself. ‘I’ve been back for ten years now,’ he said. ‘I grew up here but went to the mainland for university and ended up staying until I was fifty.’ He laughed. ‘I came back when my own children went to college. I can easily do my dealing from here, especially now with the internet.’
‘I came here years ago and I associated it with being happy.’
I hesitated. I was filled with a sudden urge to tell him the whole reason I was on the Island. Weeks of words were welling up into my mouth. Perhaps it was his kindness or the calm he emanated. Maybe it was because he was older I felt he would understand. But I didn’t like the idea of spilling my secrets to someone I’d just met, the emotional incontinence of it. And for all his kindness, there was nothing to suggest that he was taking a special interest in me. He was just a decent man behaving as decent people did, no more than that. I pushed the words down again and kept quiet. He asked me more about my work and we talked about places we both knew in France, moving from the subject of Gascony to Alexandre Dumas and then on to other writers. We had a surprising number of favourites in common.
All the time we were talking I thought about the telephone conversation I’d overheard. Obviously he must know Peter Frewin very well to be the person people called when they were trying to find him. And if he knew Peter he would also certainly have known Alice, maybe equally as well. There was no way I could raise the subject, though, without revealing that I’d been eavesdropping last time and even if I angled at it another way, approached it in seeming innocence, I was sure he would guess. What, I couldn’t help wondering anyway, would he be able to tell me about Alice? Though I’d been moved when Sally had said how much Peter had loved her, afterwards I’d found myself remembering the women I’d overheard in the Mariners, the implication of the one that he might have been at the root of her unhappiness. I could hear the woman’s reedy voice quite clearly: ‘Well, something happened.’
‘There you are, it sounds as if it’s stopped,’ he – Chris – said eventually. He stood slowly and picked up our cups. ‘You’ll have to come and have tea again after Christmas – if you’d like to, that is.’ Returning from the kitchen, he handed me my parcel from the desk. ‘Don’t forget these.’
He followed me to the door and took the books back while I buttoned up my coat. He handed them over again and then rested his hand lightly on my forearm. ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he said.
Embarrassed, I thanked him again and said goodbye, still feeling the imprint of his touch even through the thick wool of my coat. The bell above the door rang merrily but then I found myself out on the street and my fleeting moment of connection was over. Though the sleet had stopped, the wind was still rushing the trees, gusting, then whispering, shivering the branches as if in admonition. There was no one else on the pavement and the orange of the streetlights gleamed uninterrupted on the wet road. I walked briskly back to the car, trying to put from my mind the idea that behind the curtains in the melancholy houses unseen eyes were watching me.
Chapter Ten
I hadn’t realised until a few days before Christmas last year that Richard’s mother had Alzheimer’s. I knew his father had died some time earlier and I’d had the impression that his mother had, too, though as soon as he told me about her illness, I wondered whether I had jumped to that conclusion because I had heard him talk about her in the past tense, as people sometimes did about elderly relatives with serious mental-health problems. She still lived in their family house in Highgate, he said, the one in which he had grown up, having made him swear that he would never put her in a home, and the money his father had left was used to pay for round-the-clock carers. ‘She’s very ill now,’ he said. ‘I want to spend some time with her over the holiday. In case . . .’ he looked away.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘I’m taking four days off. I’d like to spend two with her and the other two here, with you.’
I hoped my selfish disappointment at having so little time after all hadn’t registered on my face. ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Would you like me to come with you, though? Can I help?’
‘Sweetheart, it’s kind of you to offer.’ He kissed me lightly on the forehead, something he hadn’t done before. ‘But she gets confused by new people. Also, it upsets me when people meet her now. She was beautiful, my mother – elegant.’ He looked away again and I saw that he wanted to leave the subject alone.
As our holiday couldn’t be long, I decided that it would be perfect. I bought a Christmas tree from the market on North End Road, wildly miscalculating the size. It protruded from the boot of the car as I drove carefully home, its tip bent against the inside of the windscreen, and it dropped needles over the upholstery and all the way up the stairs as, red-faced and scratched, I half-carried, half-dragged it to the top floor. I’d also bought ivy
which I put across the top of the pictures and on the mantelpiece, and a big sprig of mistletoe to hang by the door.
On Christmas Eve I went to the delicatessen and bought cheese, cold meats and two loaves of bread, one sourdough, one with apricots. I got olives, pickles, pâté and several other things which hadn’t been on the list: amaretti biscuits, cheese straws and a bottle of Muscat. In the evening I baked a ham, which even I recognised as overkill, and made mince pies, listening to the carols from King’s while I sprayed pastry crumbs round the kitchen and got a bit drunk. Later on, as I turned out the lights before going to bed, I stood at the window and raised my glass to the flats across the street, wishing them a Christmas as happy as the one I was going to have.
By the time Richard arrived at three o’clock the following afternoon, I was ready. I’d opened my presents and rung Dad and Matt to say thank you. The vegetables were prepared and the turkey – ostrich-sized – had just gone into the oven. We were eating late because he’d already had lunch with his mother and her carer. I’d washed my hair again and put on my favourite black dress. As he crested the top of the stairs, I saw that as well as his usual overnight bag, he was carrying a large paper one with cord handles. He held it away from me, then put it down and pulled me with him under the mistletoe. ‘Look at this place,’ he said. ‘It’s a Christmas explosion.’
In the sitting room, he opened the bag and handed me two bottles of Burgundy. I fetched glasses and joined him on the sofa. He was wearing dark jeans and a navy cashmere jumper. ‘What?’ he said.
‘I’m just thinking I don’t see you in casual clothes very often.’
‘That’s because I’ve been working so hard since I met you.’
‘Are you saying you ever work less hard?’ I teased.
‘No. Would you like your presents?’
‘Let me give you yours first.’ I stood up to fetch them from under the tree. I had been excited at the idea of buying them, both because I wanted to give him presents and also because it was the first time in three years that I’d had someone, a man – the word ‘boyfriend’ didn’t seem right to describe Richard, somehow – to buy for, but it had turned out to be hard. Everything I looked at seemed charged with significance and though I wanted to give him gifts that reflected how I felt, at the same time I didn’t want to reveal myself. The three presents that I put on the coffee table were the result of many hours’ deliberation.
The Bed I Made Page 9