Downstairs I followed the noises to the back of the house and found myself in a huge kitchen. In the area near the door were large modern units, wood topped with steel, a range and a huge fridge from which Pete was taking a bottle of wine. Behind him, the grill was on and there were already slices of bread cut from a loaf on the board. ‘I haven’t got much, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I need to go shopping. But I can do you some cheese on toast.’ He unpeeled the foil from the wine and took a corkscrew from the row of utensils on hooks on the wall.
I wanted to stay close to him but with our clothes a degree of formality had returned so I sipped my wine and watched him moving round, grating cheese, arranging the bread on the grill pan, bare feet big on the wooden floor.
Beyond the units there was a wooden table and beyond that again a wicker sofa facing a long window. I went over to look out. There was scarcely a rim of garden round the back; the house, I saw, was perched right on the edge so that the view was all sea, the Solent stretching darkly to the mainland and the irregular lights along the shore there.
I was self-conscious about eating in front of him but at the same time I was so hungry it was an effort not to wolf down everything on the plate in seconds flat. He was sitting sideways to face me, his arm over the back of the sofa, one of his legs folded under.
‘What size are your feet?’ I said, looking at them.
‘Thirteen,’ he admitted. ‘Huge.’
It was a strange thing; I’d thought that I would find it uncomfortable to be in the house he’d shared with Alice but I didn’t feel her presence, even on a practical level. Apart, perhaps, from the wrought-iron bedstead, the style of the house wasn’t especially feminine which surprised me, given her apparent liking for fashion. It wasn’t sparse but there were no extra cushions on the sofa and no vases or photographs or ornaments on the shelves on the far wall, just books and a small wooden boat that looked from a distance like a scale model of Beatrice. Had he put away the things that reminded him of her or had there even ever been any?
There was silence for a moment and into it came the muffled sound of the bell at St James’s striking midnight. I remembered how it had sounded only yesterday for Alice’s memorial and was suddenly horrified at myself. How could I have thought to come here? I was a monster. My cheeks flamed.
Pete was watching me. ‘Did you hear about Alice?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I looked down, feeling more blood rush to my face. ‘Chris told me.’
‘All of it?’
‘I . . . I don’t know.’
‘Did he tell you that she’d been seeing someone else?’
‘Yes.’
‘The man she was seeing,’ he said, looking away and out of the window, ‘was her old boyfriend. David – he’s a banker. They went out for years, from when she was at university till she was twenty-seven. He was the great love of her life apparently.’ He snorted. ‘So much so that he dumped her when her dad was dying.
‘She came back here to look after her dad at the end. She was incredibly sad then but I thought it was just about that. We’d always been friends and so we saw each other a bit and I did my best to be a support – talking, you know. I’d always liked her – more than just as a friend – but other than a bit of a drunken kiss, nothing had happened between us before she’d gone away to university. Then suddenly, after Brian died, she started coming round more and more and we – started seeing each other. We were married within a year and I was so happy about it all that I didn’t think to question it. I had this occasional nagging doubt that I loved her more than she loved me but I thought that would come, as she got better, the grief lessened.’
I reached out and put my hand on his foot. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said.
‘I want to.’ He took a great swig of wine and emptied his glass. ‘Alice didn’t love me.’
‘Pete, that can’t . . .’
‘I’m not saying that she didn’t like me or we didn’t get on but she didn’t love me – not in the right way. In the end I had to acknowledge it. There were always areas of her life that she kept closed off. At first I tried to get her to open up but she resisted. She had dresses that she kept in suit bags but never wore. A couple of months after we got married, I came home once and she was just sitting there clutching one of them, crying, as if it was dead or something. He’d bought it for her. I tried buying her things, thinking that she just missed that part of her life – living in London, getting dressed up – but I’d missed the point.’ He stopped talking. The bottle was on the floor and he picked it up and refilled our glasses.
‘Apparently he found her again on the internet, if you can believe it. She was using her maiden name in chat-rooms. She used to go over there to meet him.’ He looked at me, oddly defensive suddenly. ‘I suspected it; I did. She was happier, much happier – initially I thought that it was this new psychologist she claimed to be seeing but she was too happy for that. But you know, the truth is – and this is why I’ve felt so guilty – I’d run out of energy. I’d tried so hard but nothing had been enough, and it’s hard to carry on loving someone when they don’t love you back.’
I’d left my hand on his foot, and now I pressed down slightly, unsure what I could say that would help.
‘She thought that it was all going to work out, she was making plans to leave me, but he dropped her again. That’s why she did it in the end – went out in the boat. It nearly finished her the first time – she just couldn’t handle it again.
‘The reason I’m telling you this – it all reflects badly on me, I know that; I’m hardly painting myself as the irresistible love-object, am I? – it’s because I want you to have the truth. I know I’m sounding heavy and I’m jumping the gun but I want you to know that if you want . . . What I mean is, this – you and me – it’s not about Alice.’
I stayed the night. We finished the wine, then went upstairs and got back into bed. We didn’t have sex again but he lay behind me, his body following the shape of mine, his arm around my waist. His breath was warm on my shoulder as we murmured to each other and I listened to the sea lapping at the wall of the garden, feet below. We fell asleep with the light on and when I woke briefly and reached over to turn it off, I felt his arm tighten round me. I lay down again, feeling his chest hair tickle my back. Even when things had been at their best with Richard, I had struggled to sleep in his arms but with Pete, it felt different.
I slept dreamlessly until the first light of the morning began to reach in through the curtains. Then I came awake with a start. Richard’s words were in my ears again as clearly as if he’d been leaning over the bed to whisper them. I’d kill you.
Chapter Thirty-three
I did sleep again but only fitfully, and after I’d heard St James’s strike seven, I knew it was pointless to keep trying. I turned over carefully so as not to wake Pete. He was lying on his side, facing me. He’d worked his way over to the other side of the bed during the night but his arm was stretched towards me, its open palm up. His face was open, too, unguarded: his gentle mouth, the large eyelids with their fringe of dark lashes, the cheek with its coat of stubble. I wanted to wake him up so that he would put his arms around me but I wanted him to sleep on, too, so that I didn’t have to stop looking at him.
Last night as his breathing had slowed and I felt myself beginning to fall asleep, I’d realised something. In the past his openness about his feelings and how Alice had treated him would have sent me running. However much I’d liked him, that level of honesty – intimacy – would have horrified me and immediately triggered a sabotage campaign, with me finding reasons why I couldn’t get involved, imagining faults, starting arguments, eventually conjuring up a feeling not unlike pity for the poor man who’d made the mistake of wanting me. I didn’t feel it now: I had no urge to flee.
Should I tell him about Richard, the real reason I’d come here? I wanted to, when he’d been so honest with me. But telling him would mean confessing that I’d taken Richard back when I�
�d known he was married. Alice had been an adulterer but I had, too. I heard him sigh as he buried his head further into the pillow. I had to try not to think about Richard here, not to let his poison seep in. Maybe it would all collapse, anyway; maybe there was just too much weighing on us. I would take that risk, though. I would take the pain later if it meant I could have this now, even for a while.
I’d kill you. My stomach turned over, and the previous day came back to me in a great swell. Had Helen heard my message? I had to get through to her. She had been seeing him, I was certain about that, but in what way? Her resistance would have made it all the more exciting for him to seduce her. Perhaps, though, that wasn’t it; perhaps he was getting closer to her, winning her confidence so that she would tell him where I was. But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t betray my trust, not on that. I was certain.
Eventually, Pete opened his eyes. He smiled when he saw me, a slow smile that started with surprise and ended with a grin. He shifted across the bed and put his arms round me. I felt a surge of emotion, happiness but also something painfully like nostalgia, an awareness that we didn’t have long. After a few minutes, his hand slipped from my waist to my hip and the feeling changed, becoming a mix of desire and intense longing.
‘What are you doing today?’ he asked a while later.
‘No plans. It’s Saturday – no work, or not at the café at least.’ Guiltily I remembered the translation, still barely started.
‘We could go over to Ventnor and walk along to Steephill Cove, maybe have a pub lunch.’
It was so lovely, so simple – so normal – that I only just stopped my eyes filling with tears. I sat up, turning away a little, and thought quickly. ‘That’d be good,’ I said. ‘But I’ll need to go home first – to have a bath and get changed.’
‘Sure.’ He kissed my shoulder. ‘I’m going to get up and make some coffee.’ He padded out, lovely in his solid nakedness, and I saw him go across to the other room from which he emerged minutes later in a different pair of jeans and a checked shirt whose sleeves he was rolling up.
I put my clothes back on and followed him down. Cross-legged on the sofa I drank my coffee and watched the Solent beyond the window. The morning was one of those so sharp and clean it was almost too much to take in. Already the sun had set the water sparkling and there were a handful of boats out. Later, I was sure, there would be many more.
‘I’ll see you at eleven,’ I said, when we were standing in the hall.
‘Kate,’ he said suddenly, as I put my hand on the latch to open it. I turned round. ‘I don’t want to be secretive about you and me but I think we should keep it low-key. There’ll be people in Yarmouth who won’t like it – especially not so soon.’
And there’s someone you don’t even know about who would like it even less. My gut clenched. ‘Under my hat,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘See you in a bit.’
I scanned around as I came out of his front door. There were several people on the High Street but further down, towards the Square; I didn’t think anyone had seen me leaving. I’d switched my phone off before going to Pete’s but I turned it back on as I walked, hoping for a voicemail or text. However reluctant she was to listen to what I had to say, surely if she’d heard my messages, she would know I was telling the truth. There was nothing, though, not even a missed call. I tried her mobile but it was still switched off.
Back at the cottage, I started running a bath, then turned on my laptop. On a scrap of paper on the table there were telephone numbers; it took me a moment to remember that they were the ones for the estate agents I was supposed to be seeing. I’d never even let them know I wasn’t coming. While the computer was warming up, I rang them both and apologised profusely, claiming a family emergency. ‘Would you like to remake the appointments for another day?’ the second one asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Can I think? I’ll ring again in a few days.’
Heart beating uncomfortably, I opened my Hotmail account: one new message. I said a silent prayer.
I mean it – you do know that?
‘You’re quiet.’ Pete took his eye off the road for a second and looked across.
‘No – I’m OK.’ I glanced at him quickly and looked away again. The dishonesty of it, being here in the car pretending normality when I knew how thin the membrane between this – us – and the massing force on the other side had stretched.
We’d come what I now thought of as the back route towards Ventnor, along the military road rather than to Newport and down. On our right the sea was glittering, more blue again than green. A tanker was tracking across the horizon, its outline sharp in the clear light of the sky. As we rounded the steep bend where the road ran so close to the edge, I remembered something. ‘I heard once that you used to come speeding along here on an old motorbike in the dead of night. Apparently you were apprehended by the police.’
He laughed, surprised. ‘Guilty as charged. That was my teenage rebellion – the options were limited round here.’ He looked at me again. ‘I’d forgotten all about that. Who told you? Chris?’
I hesitated. ‘Sally.’
‘Well, yes. She does like to keep herself up on my business, it seems.’ His mouth straightened and I wished I hadn’t said anything.
In Ventnor he parked on the esplanade. We were about a hundred yards from where I’d been the day Sarah had called me; I remembered it all. In my bag, my mobile was on silent. I didn’t want to turn it off in case it gave Helen the wrong impression but if it rang, Pete would think it odd if I didn’t answer and I couldn’t speak to her in his earshot.
We got out and started walking. The businesses that lined the esplanade were remaking themselves for the new season. At a café with a small outside area, a woman with a bucket of water and a sponge wiped down plastic chairs; further along, a man was touching up the paintwork at a bed and breakfast. The summer that I hadn’t been able to imagine here was coming.
On the path along the cliff-top there were other people, middle-aged couples in walking boots and a man our age struggling to control a boxer that strained at its leash, but after a while, confident we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew, Pete took my hand. I galloped along, trying to match his stride, trying to fix the scene in my mind. I wanted to remember it for ever: the soft grass that covered the cliff-top here, the rooks that rose in flurries from the stand of trees beyond the path and the wind-dappled sea that stretched all the way to France like an expanse of shimmering fish-scales vanishing to a steel-blue line. I wondered briefly what my mother would think if she saw me now and decided I didn’t give a toss.
After we got back from the other side of the Island, we dropped in at the cottage for my things. Pete sat downstairs and watched athletics on television for a few minutes while I put my toothbrush and a change of clothes in a bag. Feeling dishonest again, I checked my email: no new messages. In the bathroom, I checked my phone.
When I got downstairs again, Pete was not alone.
‘Ah,’ I said, coming into the room.
‘Does he come here often?’ He turned to me. The cat known to me as Hercule regarded me with innocent eyes from over the arm of Pete’s jumper.
‘Yes. I encouraged him, I’m afraid. I think he comes for the squirrel – there’s one in the yard and he chases it. He started following me into the house and standing by the fridge. Eventually I gave him milk. Sorry.’
‘Cats do their own thing, don’t they? He comes home now, too.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Victor. That’s what they’d called him at the shelter.’
‘I think he looks like Hercule Poirot.’
Pete laughed. ‘The dinner jacket – yes.’
Back at his house we opened a bottle of wine and cooked the steaks we’d bought at the butcher in Ventnor. Afterwards we lay on the sofa. Beyond us the Solent had turned dark and I could hear it lapping on the rocks round the bottom of the sea wall below. I remembered again how I’d heard the water that day on T
ennyson Down, how I’d imagined Alice in the sound of it, calling to me, calling me over.
‘Upstairs,’ he said. ‘We’re not in the main bedroom.’
‘Of course – there’s no need to . . .’
‘I want this but I feel guilty. I feel guilty about even thinking about it – you.’ He moved on to his back and there was silence for a moment. ‘I’ll always wonder whether I could have done more. I’ll always think about her.’ He turned his head and looked at me, his eyes very green. ‘What I’m trying to say is it might take time.’
‘We’ve got time,’ I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew it was a lie.
On Sunday we went out on the boat. I’d woken to an empty bed and had got up immediately and gone down to the kitchen. He had been standing by the window, looking out over the Solent. I went to stand next to him, and he put his arm around my shoulder. The window was open and a cool breeze swept in around my bare legs.
‘Shall we go sailing today?’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘I thought you had no plans?’
I hesitated. ‘I’m feeling bad about the translation – the weeks are ticking past and it’s a tight schedule anyway.’
‘You can’t work on it all day, surely? Come, and then work this evening. Go on.’ He smiled and slipped his hand up inside the jumper I’d put on. His thumb found my nipple and circled it gently.
‘This is coercion.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘OK, then.’ I breathed in the smell of his hair as he bent to kiss my neck, then my jaw. ‘I won’t forget this, though – how you’ve lured me off the path of diligence.’
‘I should hope not.’
Out on Beatrice, I watched him from behind my sunglasses. He sat at the back of the cockpit, one hand resting gently on the tiller, the other shielding his eyes from the sun that shone directly across him. He looked more relaxed again now, though he’d been tense earlier. Just as we’d been leaving the house to get into the car, early enough to think there wouldn’t be many other people around, Tom had been coming down the High Street, clearly on his way home from the night before. He hadn’t even bothered to try to conceal his cigarette. ‘Morning,’ he’d said, his voice full of innuendo. ‘Pete. Kate.’
The Bed I Made Page 29