‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. I don’t know. It’s nothing specific. Just, I know it will have made him angry, that’s all, when I refused to talk to him.’
‘Let him be angry,’ she said. ‘He lied and cheated – he deserves it.’
We finished our wine and Helen bought some more. As she handed me my glass and sat down again, my attention was caught by a man coming in. He was tall, easily a foot taller than the woman who came in with him, and I realised with a jolt that it was Peter Frewin and Sally. He hung his jacket on the back of a chair at a table not far from the door and they went to the bar together. Sally spent at least a couple of minutes scrutinising the wine list and in the end asked his opinion. I didn’t hear his answer but he sensed the weight of my stare and glanced up to identify who was watching him. I saw a hint of recognition on his face but also puzzlement, as if he couldn’t place me. Seeing him looking, Sally also looked over. I smiled but her face stayed oddly blank. I raised a hand; still nothing.
‘Someone you know?’ Helen asked.
I shook my head, confused. ‘Not really. Just someone I’ve seen around.’
They got their drinks and went back to their table. He was facing away from me and though I was afraid to let my gaze wander over in case I made eye contact with Sally again, I couldn’t help it. He was speaking in a low voice, his dark head inclined towards his hands as they filleted a beer mat, and she was leaning over the table to hear him, occasionally putting her hand on his forearm where it rested on the table, keeping her voice low, too. They had their one drink, then left.
‘That was the man whose wife was lost from her boat just after I came here,’ I said to Helen quietly when they’d gone. I’d told her the story but only in outline; I hadn’t mentioned how much Alice had preoccupied me.
‘Doesn’t look like he wasted much time filling the vacancy, does it?’ she said.
‘I don’t think it’s like that.’
By late morning the terminal building was busy with people returning to the mainland. The ferry’s propellers were churning the water to a white green. The cars arriving had already rolled off and dispersed, and those going back were loading. I waited while Helen bought a ticket at the desk. Nearby a woman who looked only a year or two years older than us was trying to persuade the middle of her three daughters to pack up the trail of Lego she’d laid along the windowsill.
The steward moved the rope barrier at the end of the room and called for foot passengers to start boarding. Helen returned, adjusting the weight of her overnight bag on her shoulder. She was holding her ticket. ‘I feel bad about leaving you here.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, putting on a smile. ‘I’ll be fine. I chose to come here.’
‘You’re so lonely.’
‘It’s fine. I’ll get out more – promise. Come on, you’ll miss it.’ Apart from two or three people down by the door, like the last grains of sand in an egg timer, the room was now empty.
She put her bag down and pulled me into a tight hug. ‘You look after yourself. Ring me. And come to London – soon.’
‘I will.’
‘And promise me you won’t answer Richard if he gets in touch again?’
‘I won’t. Go on – they’re closing the gate.’
She gave me a final look and then ran down towards the barrier, her bag banging on her back. I watched her go through and walk up the concrete slip to the gangplank, feeling as though I was watching my old life walking away again.
Outside, I waited on the quay for her to come out on deck and wave but there was no reason why she would think to do so. The ramp clanked as it curled up like a scorpion’s tail after the last of the cars. There was a hoot on the horn and a fine stripe of black smoke came from the funnel as the boat began to pull away. I watched until the people out on deck waving to their families were almost invisible and then I turned and went back to the house.
Chapter Thirteen
Later that afternoon, the gale blew up. I’d come to my desk as soon as Helen had gone, hoping to distract myself from the ache in my chest and the familiar emptiness which had reclaimed the house while I’d been out on the harbour front. Eventually I’d found a vein of concentration and I worked for a couple of hours before the first gust rattled the wooden sash and made me look up in surprise. Even as I watched, dark clouds were massing over the wood at Norton and advancing towards the town, casting shadows over the long winter grass on the other side of the road. The first drops of rain hit the window, heavy with intent, and another gust came almost at once to smear them over the glass.
Within half an hour, the wind had gained such momentum that when it buffeted the house, the whole front wall shuddered. The rain came in violent waves, dense enough to obscure the view. The usual half-hour of twilight was bypassed and the blackest night I could remember swallowed everything. There were no stars, no moon; even the streetlamps on the other side of River Road struggled to force out their light. The house felt so completely cut off that it might have been spinning through space, untethered. All night the wind howled around as if it were trying to find a way in. At times, lying in bed listening to it, I was afraid it would break the old glass in the windows and come swirling in like a flood tide, blowing the pages of the manuscript off the desk in the room next door and scattering them around the top floor, filling the curtains like sails. The lamp on the bedside table flickered and flickered again, the power barely hanging on.
Eventually I fell asleep, thinking that by morning the storm would have blown itself out, but when I woke up there was no change. I switched on the television for the local news and saw pictures of yachts toppled sideways in boatyards on the mainland and trees blown like straws across major roads. In Gosport, a man had been killed in his bed when his chimney collapsed and came through the roof into the room where he was sleeping. There were no ferries; all services to and from the mainland had been suspended. I stood at the bedroom window watching new banks of turbid cloud coming up from over the wood. The shallow water of the estuary jumped angrily in response to the wind’s taunting; the Solent rolled with waves that fought one another and crashed against the harbour wall, the spray rising twenty and thirty feet into the air.
The storm felt like a protest, a challenge to my decision to stay. ‘Why don’t you come back now?’ Helen had asked. ‘I know Esther’s got the flat until the spring but you can stay with me till then, have my spare room. You don’t have to put yourself through this.’
‘No,’ I’d said. ‘I’m going to stick it out.’ And as I’d said it, I’d felt my resolve strengthen. It wasn’t just Richard, the renewed need to stay away from the places he would know to look for me. On the beach at Compton on Boxing Day and watching the sea from the car at St Catherine’s, I’d felt the start of something, a reconnection. Perhaps it had only been because she was with me but I’d felt myself briefly in sympathy with the Island again. The storm was a test but I’d made up my mind.
In the afternoon I had no choice but to go out. Helen and I had eaten everything that I had bought for the week and I wanted to buy more candles in case the power did go off. I wouldn’t sit alone in the house in the dark, especially now. The wind was changing. Although it was as strong as ever, it was no longer buffeting and jostling the house as if displaying its strength but whining and wheedling instead. It came crying round the windows and down the chimney, pleading to be allowed in, like a wretched child or an animal in pain. The sound was upsetting; I felt it in my chest as much as heard it.
At noon the next day there was a lull in the wind and the sky lightened. There was brightness behind the cloud, as if the sun was trying to find its way through, but then it grew dark again and the wind seemed, if anything, to have gathered new force. Helen rang a little after three to suggest that I go up and stay for New Year. I told her I’d think about it but the idea of going to a party was outlandish. I would go up in a few weeks, I decided, after I had handed in the manuscript and when I had shaken off the uncomfortable feel
ing that Richard’s new contact had given me. Though I was distracted by the storm and also by work, if I allowed my mind to wander, it would slip me memories of him like a croupier dealing out cards.
For a time after he had turned up at the flat last year, I had been happy. I allowed myself to believe him when he told me that his marriage was just a formality now, a framework he maintained not because he was in love with his wife but because he cared for her and had promised himself he would look after her, financially and as a friend, until her health improved and she didn’t need him any more. I could understand why he hadn’t told me, that he hadn’t wanted to change the way things were between us or to destroy my trust in him. And every time I thought about how close I had come to losing him, going back to my old life, I felt a wash of panic.
And now we talked about love. If I had been afraid before that telling him I loved him would scare him off or make him feel he had won me too easily, that fear was gone. The intensity with which he behaved around me was thrilling, even sometimes, I allowed myself to admit, a little frightening. When we were together, it was rare for me to look up and find he wasn’t watching me. If he could be close to me, he would be. His hands seemed always to be on me, touching my hair or my face, sliding between the buttons of my shirt or resting under the waistband of my jeans. And if we had spent a lot of time in bed before, now it seemed we were hardly out of it. The sex had changed, too. It was never light-hearted or fun any more; instead it seemed to be the physical expression of this new need for a certainty about our feelings for one another. Sometimes my muscles would ache the day after I’d seen him from the force with which I had gripped him, and he me. New bruises started to appear on my skin in the places where his fingers had dented my flesh.
I remembered one evening in particular. He had been in Spain for two days for a meeting with his chief contractor, though we’d spoken so much during his trip that I felt as though he’d hardly been away at all. As soon as his taxi from the airport had dropped him off and he’d come up the stairs, he’d started taking my clothes off, kissing me all the time so that I hardly had time to say hello. We’d made love on the sitting-room floor, the blinds still up and the lights on, if not immediately visible to the people in the flats opposite, then at least clearly so to anyone who stood at their window and looked across. Afterwards he hadn’t moved off me but stayed where he was, pinning me to the carpet, my arms under his where he held them on either side of my face. His weight was beginning to get heavy on my pelvis and I shifted, trying to move the pressure off it.
‘Where are you going?’ he said, looking down at me.
‘Nowhere. You’re heavy.’ I wriggled, hoping that he would get the hint and take the weight off a bit but he didn’t.
He lowered his face and kissed me, a little roughly. ‘I keep thinking about that night,’ he said.
‘Which?’
‘At Christmas, when you threw me out. Didn’t you love me then?’
‘Richard . . .’ I laughed a little, not seeing how it could even occur to him.
‘If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have been able to do that. You didn’t even try to ring me,’ he said. He tilted his head to one side, as if he were considering the thing from a different angle. I tried moving again, increasingly uncomfortable. His sweat was sticky on my skin and the hair on his chest was beginning to make me itch.
‘You’re being silly,’ I said, pulling my arm out from under his and tipping his chin up so that he was forced to look at me. ‘How could I love you more than this?’
He seemed to snap out of it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He raised his torso off mine and sat up on his haunches. I was struck by the sheer heft of him, the power in his thighs and the muscles across his chest and shoulders. ‘Perhaps I’ll have to get you to show me.’
By New Year’s Eve, the worst of the storm was over. The wind had died away and the final, lighter bands of rain were falling. On the early-evening forecast the satellite pictures showed a better front coming in across the Atlantic. I’d bought a decent bottle of wine in honour of the new year and, just before midnight, I went downstairs to refill my glass. The absence of the wind had left a strange silence, like the feeling of relief after a toothache, and in it the softest sounds had become distinct. The rain was pattering against the window over the sink and I could hear it bubbling down the drain outside. Listening carefully, I could just make out voices coming through the wall from the house next door.
Into the peace, shockingly loud, my mobile upstairs rang once to tell me that I had a message. Helen, I thought, texting from the party. I went up to answer her.
The message wasn’t from Helen, though. I’m thinking about you tonight, he’d written. Happy New Year.
I dropped the phone on to the table. The skin on the back of my neck was prickling. After a moment or two, I picked the phone up again, read the message once more to be sure I hadn’t imagined it, then deleted it. I took a couple of large mouthfuls of wine and went downstairs. On the shelf to the right of the fireplace was the packet of cigarettes Helen had forgotten. There were two left. I took one and found the matches in the kitchen. I thought about going outside to smoke but beyond the glass of the sliding doors the yard was in darkness. I took great gulps at the cigarette, aware of the tremble in my hands and the racing of my heart. I will not be afraid, I told myself; I will not be afraid.
Chapter Fourteen
At the tiny post office I waited my turn behind a couple who had come in to collect their pensions. I was getting used to the pace at which people moved here, the apparent view that errands were social occasions but also the rarity of the barely concealed rage that characterised queues in London. In my hands was the finished translation; I always sent a hard copy as well as an emailed one. Surreptitiously I lifted it as if checking the postcode and brushed my lips against it for luck, a habit which had started with the first book I’d worked on. Richard had laughed when I told him. ‘Sweetheart, you’re so quaint.’
Walking out into the street again, I had an end-of-term feeling. I was going to have lunch at the café on the pier and then walk up to Totland and along the beach. On my way back I would go to the bookshop. I hadn’t been since the week before Christmas, almost a month, and dropping in to see Chris seemed the easiest way of honouring my promise to Helen to make more effort socially. It was still cold – very cold – but the light had the clarity that I was beginning to think of as peculiar to the sea. Bathed in it, everything seemed incredibly bright, somehow super-real.
I hadn’t been to Gossips since I’d been back. It was smarter than it had been when we were children, if slightly twee. The wooden floor was varnished and shelves displayed items of retro kitchenware – striped china jars and scales with weights – and black-and-white photographs of the town. I chose a table with views of the Solent at the front and the beach at the George to my left, sitting down just as a pair of gulls flew by the window, one holding something in its beak, the other giving chase. They landed on the shingle in a battering of wings, both issuing their ugly cry, the one in triumph as it swallowed its morsel, the other in indignant disbelief.
I watched the waitress as she worked. A couple of days earlier on one of my afternoon walks I’d seen a sign in the window of the other little café up the High Street advertising for someone part time and I’d gone in to apply. ‘Am I being mad?’ I asked Helen when I rang her that evening.
‘I don’t see why. If you’ve got a gap between books and you fancy it, why not? Give yourself a break from all that time on your own.’
‘I don’t think it’d pay much but that’s not really the point. It’d be fun – it’d remind me of all the waitressing I did when I was a teenager.’ In Bristol I’d worked on Saturdays and in the holidays at a café down on the waterfront, and I’d ended up saving a couple of thousand pounds towards my university fees. I’d also waitressed in a brasserie in the Marais during my student year in Paris. It was something I associated with happy periods of my life.
By the time I’d finished my lunch at Gossips and walked up to Totland, it was three. I tramped along, feeling fitter already, enjoying the heat I’d worked up inside my coat. The breeze on my face had a rinsing quality. There were other people on the beach, including a woman walking a large red setter. The fur on its legs and undercarriage was hanging in wet ropes where it had been in the sea and I hurried to get out of the way as it planted itself four-square and prepared to shake.
I walked to the end of the bay and then turned round to see how far I’d come. Everything was clean and sharp, as if it had been glazed: the buoys marking the lobster pots, the pebbly beach, the skeleton of the derelict pier. I took deep breaths of the chill air, feeling the weeks of close work lifting from me. I could see the way forward now. If I got the job at the café I would have a framework for my time. I could get agency translating work – brochures, catalogues – if I started feeling anxious about eating up my tiny savings account. It was mid-January already and with even a degree of structure, the weeks would pass more quickly. Then it would be time to go back to London and I would have done it, stuck it out.
Surprisingly, there had been no more contact from Richard since his text on New Year’s Eve. I’d been afraid that, along with the message at Christmas, it had been the vanguard of a new campaign but that didn’t seem to be the case after all. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned the second message to Helen; she would have asked again why I was worried and I would have been back in the same position, wanting both to tell her and to conceal it. Keeping quiet had been the right decision.
‘Hello again. Is it too late to wish you a happy new year?’ Chris looked at the books I’d handed him with the expression of assessment that I had seen before. ‘I was wondering if you’d left us, thought maybe the Island had got a bit much and you’d decamped back to the mainland.’
The Bed I Made Page 13