Some hours later, I came suddenly awake. A sharp noise downstairs had woken me. I lay frozen, heart thumping, ears trying so hard to hear that a pressure started to build between my temples. Nothing for a minute or so, maybe longer. Then it came again, a sharp, metallic rap near the bottom of the stairs – the sound of the flap of the letterbox dropping against the door. Though the bed was warm, all the hairs came up on my arms. Without moving even to turn on the bedside light, I waited ten minutes, maybe fifteen, but it didn’t happen again. It was the wind, I thought, only the wind.
Chapter Twenty
From the pavement, Sally’s house looked warm and alive. The kitchen blind was drawn but yellow light glowed around its edges and through it I could see her in silhouette, moving around in her fluttering, birdlike way. I knocked, there were quick footsteps and in a flurry I was inside and she was standing in front of me slightly nervously. The kitchen was steamy from the pot of pasta simmering on the hob and tendrils of hair were curling around her face. Her cheeks were flushed.
‘It’s only spag bol, I’m afraid,’ she said, taking my jacket.
‘It smells lovely,’ I said. ‘Just what I feel like.’
‘I just thought it was a shame – it was really nice to talk to you last time and we’ve never got round to doing it again.’
‘My fault – it was my turn to invite you but I had a deadline and everything else went by the board. But I’m back in the land of the living now.’
She turned away to rattle in the drawer for a corkscrew and I wondered again about the last time I’d seen her, in the Bugle that evening with Helen. She must just not have recognised me. It happened: I thought of all the times in London when I’d failed to identify people approaching me with broad smiles of recognition.
‘I’ve been rowing,’ I said. ‘I’ve borrowed a boat and I’ve been out this morning and yesterday, up the river before going to work at the café.’
‘Yes, I heard you were working with Mary. Whose boat have you borrowed?’
‘Peter Frewin’s. I was talking to Chris Harris about wanting one – do you know him? – and Peter was there and offered me it.’
‘Kind of him.’
‘Yes, very. He didn’t warn me about the blisters, though – look at these; they’re huge.’ I held my hands out.
‘Painful, but give them a week or so and they’ll toughen up.’
‘I’ll get hard pads, like a cat.’ I ran my thumb over them gently.
The glass door between the kitchen and the sitting room wore a heavy layer of condensation and from beyond it I could make out the sound of voices. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she handed me a glass, noticing me looking. ‘We could sit next door but Tom’s watching television. It’s best not to interrupt him. This is nearly ready anyway.’ She pulled out one of the chairs at the table for me and I sat and watched as she flitted here and there putting plates in to warm, filling a jug with water. The table was only laid for two.
She served the pasta and put her head round the door to the sitting room. ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said. There was no response that I could hear and she pulled the door gently closed. It was three or four minutes before the television went quiet; the plates sat cooling on the counter. As the door opened again, I turned in my chair to say hello.
He was tall, certainly six foot, and lean; when he passed me his shoulder blades were visible through his black jumper like the start of wings. His hands were in his pockets and his trainers squeaked on the linoleum tiles.
‘Tom, this is Kate,’ said Sally.
He took the plate that she held out to him and shoved a knife and fork into the back pocket of his jeans before turning round. Eyes the same grey as hers regarded me. He wasn’t good-looking – his features were too large for his face, as if they had grown first – but he would be. He knew it, I thought; there was a self-confidence in the way he acknowledged my presence with only the faintest nod. He took a can of Coke from the fridge and went up the stairs behind me. A door slammed, making the wall next to me shudder.
‘He spends so much time in his room,’ she said apologetically. ‘He’s got exams in the summer but I don’t know if he’s working. I know he’s smoking.’
‘Wouldn’t be a teenager if he wasn’t.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful it’s only smoking, shouldn’t I, not going round getting girls pregnant? He’s only a couple of years younger than I was when I had him. It changes your life, having a baby that early.’
‘You’ve done it, though – had a baby,’ I said. ‘I wonder if I ever will.’ There was a stab of complicated feeling in my stomach as I remembered Richard’s baby by the other woman; it could only be a few months old.
‘It’s not everything,’ she said, suddenly fierce. She looked away and we ate in silence for several moments, until the weight of it between us became uncomfortable.
‘So what’s it like working for Mary? She’s always been manic – people round here joke about it. She’d probably have gone pop years ago if it wasn’t for yoga.’
I smiled. ‘She’s only really in for a couple of hours at lunch; the rest of the time I’m there on my own. Not that many people come in.’
‘It’ll start getting busier in a month or so – once we get into March.’
‘I hope so. I did it for the company, really.’
‘You said last time you were lonely – working at home.’
‘Hermits could translate without feeling over-socialised.’
She wouldn’t let me help clear up so I stayed at the table and finished my wine while she scurried about rinsing our plates under the tap, loading them into the dishwasher. When she sat back down, she refilled our glasses again, emptying the bottle. Careful, I thought to myself; remember Chris’s.
‘When we had coffee,’ she said, ‘you said you’d broken up with someone. Was that why you came here?’
‘One of the reasons – the main one. But I’d been in a rut for a while, without realising it – well, acknowledging it.’
‘Were you together for a long time?’
‘A year and a half. But it wasn’t . . . simple.’
She put her elbow on the table and looked at me. I hesitated but then thought, what the hell: she was open with me. ‘He was married.’
‘That’s hard.’ She frowned.
‘I didn’t know for the first six months. It was a total shock. But then, the thought of going back to what things were like before I met him . . .’ If I’d known then what he was really like, I thought, I would have run for my life.
She picked at a loose piece of the raffia of her table mat. ‘I’ve done that, too, put up with things I shouldn’t. I’ve made some real mistakes. Particularly in my early twenties, when Tom was so young and I looked round and everyone else from school was off at university or going out all the time. I felt left out – no, actually, I felt cheated. I know that sounds bad. It’s better now – Tom’s almost grown up – but then? Forget it. I was the girl with the baby.’
‘That must have been very difficult.’
‘Yeah. But with what my dad was saying about having thrown myself away, I thought I deserved it then. I let people treat me like that. I get really angry with myself when I look back.’
‘I’m always telling myself that I’ll learn from my mistakes,’ I said, smiling. ‘But I never do.’
‘Glad I’m not the only one.’ The bottle was empty and she stood up and took another from the fridge, holding it out to me tentatively. ‘Shall we?’
‘Oh, why not?’ I said. The tenor of the evening was changing. It was the wine, of course, but she seemed to be relaxing, the conversation getting easier. I shifted into a more comfortable position on my chair, tucking one of my legs under the other.
‘I’ve done the gamut of dodgy boyfriends,’ she said. ‘The ones who never phone, the ones who only want sex,’ she lowered her voice a little, glancing at the ceiling, ‘the ones who borrow money or just take it from your purse – can you imagine?’ She
fluttered her hand, indicating the modesty of our surroundings.
‘I’ve never had one of those, thank God, not that I’ve ever had any money, either. But Richard – the last one – was the worst. He played games. Seeing how far he could push me.’ I tapped my nails on my glass, feeling a sudden urge to blurt it all out, try to lessen the pressure. ‘And at the end he went for me. He hit me, tried to force me to . . . Anyway.’
‘God.’
‘It was my own fault –’
‘How is it your fault if he hit you?’
‘It was my fault I was still there – that I hadn’t ended it months before. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going – he made everything so confused.’ I looked down, realising that I still hadn’t told Helen any of this at all. ‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Talking helps. Stops you feeling like you’re the only one.’
‘Yes.’ I paused. ‘Sally, with Alice and Peter – was it something between them that made her depressed? She was depressed, wasn’t she?’
She sat back in her chair, surprised at the sudden shift in the conversation. I wished I’d managed a little more subtlety. ‘You mean, did he ever hit her?’ she said.
‘No, no – I mean, were they happy together? You said that he loved her but . . .’
‘What you have to understand about Alice,’ she said, her voice cooler now, ‘is that she was highly strung – unstable. She always was – long before Pete. I could see it the first day that she started at college. Some girls are just like that and there are men who seem to like it – want to look after them.
‘Look, I’m not saying Pete’s perfect – far from it. He can be difficult. He was wild at college. He used to take boats off their moorings at night and sail them over to the mainland or just drift, lie up on deck smoking. We used to go with him, Alice and me. Oh, there were all sorts of things. When he was sixteen, he worked at the garage in Totland and they let him tinker about with this old motorbike which he eventually got going. Do you know the military road?’
‘The one which goes along the edge?’
‘He used to drive along there flat out at the dead of night without any lights on. He was too young to take his test, let alone pass it. The police caught him twice. He’s always been like it – a risk-taker. He took a massive gamble at the start of his business – sold his soul to the bank, basically. It worked but things could have been really different.’
Again I thought of Richard, the mortgaging and remortgaging he’d told me he’d done at the beginning. I remembered thinking how most people wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night, knowing they had debts like that – hundreds of thousands of pounds. He had shrugged. Perhaps Peter was the same, and the cavalier attitude extended to women in his case, too, whatever Sally had said last time.
‘But the main thing about Pete was how much he loved Alice.’ She was looking at me steadily, almost as if she had heard my thought and wanted to contradict it. ‘He loved her when he was sixteen and he loved her when they were married and he loves her now. Everything he did was for her. It still is – he hasn’t given up hope.’
From through the ceiling all of a sudden came the thump of bass guitar, heavy as footfall. ‘Oh God – I was hoping we’d get an evening off,’ she said. ‘Excuse me a sec.’
She went upstairs and a moment or two later I heard the sound of gentle knocking. No response. She knocked again, a little louder. There was another thud of bass so profound that I felt it go through the floor under my shoes and then I heard the door crack open. There was a brief exchange of words that I couldn’t make out over the music and then the door slammed shut again. The volume stayed the same.
She came back down and we tried to pick the conversation up again but it was hopeless. It wasn’t just the music, which reached regular thrashing crescendos; worse was the embarrassment that was coming off her in waves. Every thump of the bass overhead seemed intended to humiliate her and demonstrate her lack of authority. If I’d been her, I would have barged in and unplugged the stereo.
It was a relief to step out of her humid kitchen into the antiseptic cold of the night air. I stood in the lane for a moment or two after the door closed behind me, letting my eyes get accustomed to the darkness. The streetlamps here gave a minimal light which somehow did not spread to illuminate the road but hung in narrow bells beneath the posts. It was only half ten but the quiet had settled over the town again; it was almost as silent as when I had come this way on Saturday morning. I turned to go, suddenly aware of being alone in the dark, and as I did, there was a movement in the upstairs window of Sally’s house. I turned my head quickly, just in time to see the corner of the curtain dropping back into place.
Chapter Twenty-one
Sally was right about the blisters. Within days, they hardened into tough pads at the base of my fingers and the pleasure of the rowing was unalloyed even by that mild discomfort. I went out whenever I could: before work or, on the couple of days we’d closed early and there was still enough light, afterwards. I loved the ritual of it: untying and pushing off, the first strokes, the oars growing warm under my hands, the speed with which I could get round the pontoon now and up under the bridge. It was simple, this new proficiency, but I was oddly proud of it.
Today I’d woken to the sound of rain against the bedroom window and it had continued all morning and for most of the afternoon. It was after four by the time it stopped and there wasn’t much daylight left but I decided to take the boat out anyway, just for a while; I needed the exercise after being inside all day. I bailed out the rainwater then untied and rowed up to the edge of the river near the mill, where I idled in the shallows, seeing how close I could get to the marshes without running myself aground. I pulled the oars in and leaned gently over the side to watch the wildlife moving in the inches of water: a crab no bigger than a coin, its legs and body still soft and white, scuttling between weed and stone, and a shoal of fish the size of needles moving as one, darting this way and that as though on a desperate search. Strings of bubbles rose from an unseen source: a larger crab, a fish or perhaps a mollusc of some sort, processing the air from beneath the mud.
I stayed in the boat until after dark. The tide carried me up into the farther reaches of the estuary and overhead the first stars began to appear like tiny bulbs in the deep blue. The fading light and the sound of the water lapping against the sides gave me a sense that I was in a world of my own.
Since the supper at her house, I’d been thinking about Sally. She wasn’t the sort of person I’d usually have been friends with; until now, perhaps, we hadn’t had much in common. She’d had Tom and her life on the Island as a mother; I’d had London, no responsibilities at all except for myself and – after a fashion – trying to make a career. Her nervous energy was so different from the confidence of Helen and the other women I knew. And yet I was warming to her; I was grateful for her efforts to be friendly. And we did have something in common: we were both lonely. I’d thought at first that having her son would insulate her from it but now I thought the opposite. Was there anything lonelier than being disrespected, even despised, in one’s own home, by a child for whom one had sacrificed so much? I remembered how he had sabotaged her evening, how embarrassed she had been, and felt sad for her.
Back at the cottage I switched on my computer and emailed Matt; I hadn’t told him about the dinghy yet and he would remember rowing up the river years ago with Dad. The view of the harbour from the study window was the night-time one, just the lights along River Road and by the harbour office, and the smaller ones of the boats in the harbour itself; funny how being inside made the outside look so much darker.
I was just about to close the internet connection and turn the computer off when the message arrived, appearing in my inbox with a merry ping.
I haven’t given up on you and I’m not going to. It’s time to stop playing hard to get now, Katie.
You never believed I would sort things out with Sarah, did you? Well, I’ve done it. I’ve t
old her that I can’t wait any more, that I need a divorce now. She’s heartbroken but you forced my hand – you wanted me to leave her, didn’t you? So I’ve done it and I’m free to be with you – I’m all yours.
Come back to me. You’ve made your point. You’re the only woman I’ve ever felt like this about. We’re different – we’re two of a kind. Marry me.
I pulled away from the screen as if he had bodily appeared there, inches in front of me. The nausea I’d felt when Sarah rang swept through me again. I’d expected contact after her call but the days had passed and I’d begun to allow myself a small nugget of hope that she was wrong, that he’d given up and moved on, but now here he was, inevitable. I haven’t given up on you and I’m not going to.
Marry me. I made myself look at the screen again. It was unbelievable – actually beyond my powers to grasp. How could he think – after everything that had happened? Didn’t he remember? Had he forgotten why I’d run away? Had he forgotten that he’d almost raped me? Playing hard to get: he thought this was a game.
I couldn’t look at it any more. I deleted the message, snapped the laptop closed and went downstairs. My heart was still hammering against my chest wall and taking deep breaths did nothing to slow it down. I poured a glass of wine and paced the sitting room while I gulped it.
It was minutes before my breath came more easily and I could impose some order on the riot of dread and fear that had broken out inside me. ‘They’re words,’ I told myself, ‘just words. He can’t hurt you now; he can’t hurt you.’
I poured another glass of wine and stopped pacing. Now I was angry with myself: I shouldn’t let him affect me like this; I should be stronger. Come on, I thought; are you going to let him do this to you? Turn you upside down with an email? He’s just a vicious bully who’s furious because he can’t reach you. This is a mind game and he’s playing it because it’s all he’s got. You can beat him.
The Bed I Made Page 19