by Lucy Atkins
She lifted her head and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked totally washed out. She got out her make-up bag. The only way forward, she knew, was to grow up, forgive him and move on. Everyone makes mistakes. They just needed to work hard and fix this. At some point her anger would fade but right now she wasn’t sure that she wanted it to. She had a feeling that beneath her fury lay something worse, something very close to pity.
‘I can’t keep saying sorry to you,’ he said from the bed behind her, as if he’d read her mind.
She didn’t look around. She kept putting on her mascara. ‘I don’t want you to.’
‘OK.’ He got up abruptly. ‘I’m going to put the wine in the fridge. The others’ll be here any minute.’
She straightened, put away her make-up bag and went back to the window. The boys were both out of the pool now, sitting on sun loungers, jabbing desperately at their phones. Jess was alone in the water, ducking somersaults; the knots of her spine flickered as the water swallowed them, one by one.
A movement caught her eye beyond the terrace, a shape standing at the end of a scraggy line of olive trees. She blinked and squinted but as her eyes adjusted to the sunlight she could see that, of course, there was nobody there.
It was a stress thing, she knew, this tendency to feel watched. She always used to see him at times of stress.
In fact, it had happened again, for the first time in over a year, just before they left London. She had looked out of her study window at two in the morning and, through the condensation, glimpsed a figure in an overcoat, standing beneath a tree. He had ducked his head, turned and vanished round the corner. Something about the shape, the bulk, made her freeze. For moment she couldn’t quite breathe.
She’d never seen him near her home before. If he was real and standing in her street at two in the morning, then this was serious. He must have followed her home, or found their address even though it was not supposed to be in the public domain. She remembered the female TV presenter murdered years ago near her house in a west London residential street just like hers.
She rubbed away the condensation and pressed her face on the glass but the street was empty. She went up and woke David. Her fear pushed aside his recent betrayal; she just needed to know he was there, that she was safe. He sat up, rubbing his hair, and made her repeat herself. Then he was logical and reassuring, as she knew he would be. He pointed out that the street was poorly lit and she was not necessarily at her most calm right now. He reminded her, gently, that she’d never really established whether she was, or wasn’t, being stalked in the first place and that even the GP had suggested it could be a stress thing.
Most stalkers, he said, again not for the first time, made direct contact with their victim either via social media, by phone, or in person. They didn’t lurk at a distance, never showing their face, or vanish for a whole year. It was probably a late-night dog walker, he said. She should just come to bed and get some sleep. She found him both irritating and reassuring when he talked to her like this. She spent so much of her time coping, being in charge, being looked up to and relied on that it was a relief, sometimes, to be told what to do.
She rested one hand on the shutter and felt the warmth of the sun on her face, smelled wild thyme and lavender wafting off the hills. The movement was just a rag, fluttering on a pole, perhaps the lost bandana of an olive farmer. Nobody was out there, nobody was watching her. She didn’t want to lean on David now. She actually wanted to kill him.
When she turned, he was gone.
She heard Chloe’s laugh rising from the terrace, straightened her shoulders and went downstairs to greet their friends.
Al was with David in the kitchen, holding a box of beer. He looked sweaty and slightly bewildered, more portly than he had last time they met. He kissed her on both cheeks and she smelled his aftershave and perspiration and felt a great fondness for him. She realized that it was at least nine months since they had all got together. There was no sign of Al and Chloe’s boys but Chloe was out on the terrace.
She was wearing a cream halter-neck dress with her hair knotted at the nape of her neck. Her posture was always elegant – she’d almost become a yoga teacher once – and she looked particularly luminous in her own patch of sunlight. But then as she turned, Olivia caught something troubled in her expression, something like dread, and she suddenly felt sure that Chloe didn’t want to be here at all.
They hugged, then, and Olivia’s heart felt full. She hadn’t told Chloe what David had done. The only way to cope since she found out had been to keep going. Chloe had texted a few times, asking to meet for lunch or a drink before they left, but there had been no time.
David had begged her not to tell Chloe or Emma what he’d done. He couldn’t face the shame. It was unreasonable of him to expect her not to talk to her best friends, but even so, a thread of loyalty to him had remained and she’d decided not to. She was angry but she didn’t want to hurt or embarrass him or make the holiday any more tense than it would already be.
But now she realized there was no way that she could spend two weeks with Chloe and not tell her. And if she told Chloe, she’d have to tell Emma too.
They swapped stories of their journeys and the heat, the baffling road signs, the lack of mobile signal, the near impossibility of finding the track up to the house. But Chloe was not her usual laid-back, yogic self. She was jittery and her enthusiasm felt forced as she exclaimed over the view, the village rooftops and the hills on the other side. ‘It’s paradise!’ she cried. ‘Amazing!’ Olivia had the urge to sit her down and soothe her but she was off again, striding past the pool to peer down at the olive grove beneath the terrace. ‘Olives!’ She threw up her hands. ‘Wow!’
‘Where’s Paul?’ Miles, Chloe and Al’s eldest son, and Olivia’s godchild, came out onto the terrace, followed by his brother, Ben, skinny and knock-kneed, small for eight. Olivia liked Ben more than she liked Miles, though of course she could never admit this. Miles was overconfident and a bit brash, while Ben was sweet and vulnerable. She told them about the games room and suggested they go and look for the others there.
Chloe fanned herself with both hands when her boys had gone. A fine silver bracelet slid down her forearm, ‘My God. It’s boiling here! Are you hot? God, it’s hot!’ Something was definitely wrong.
She thought about Chloe’s attempts to meet up before they left England. Maybe she had needed to talk about something important. Maybe her marriage was in trouble, too, or something else was amiss. Olivia really been a poor friend lately, swallowed up by her own concerns, too overworked to see anyone.
‘What do you two want to drink?’ David called out.
‘Anything as long as it’s alcoholic.’ Chloe looked at Olivia as she said this, as if it was her who’d asked the question and not David. Then she looked away again. ‘God, it’s stunning here, it really is. Where should we all sleep?’
‘Well, most of the bedrooms are in that side of the house and there’s a lovely big double with a view …’ Olivia gestured behind. ‘Or there’s the master suite, up those stairs, that way.’
‘Don’t listen to her, Chlo.’ David came out and handed them each a glass of slightly warm rosé. ‘She’s already unpacked our bags up there.’
‘I have not!’ She felt her face heat up at David’s pocket-sized betrayal. ‘I really haven’t.’
‘Oh for God’s sake.’ Chloe touched her arm. ‘Don’t be silly. You should have the master suite. You found this place, you did all the legwork and I really don’t mind what room we’re in.’ She turned away again, smiling wildly. ‘This whole place is paradise!’
Khalil and Emma didn’t arrive until much later, hovering in the hallway looking shaken, talking about their delayed easyJet flight, a malfunctioning sat nav, the hidden track to the house – impossible in the dark. They had had to go back and knock on doors further down the hill until they found a local man willing to come out and show them the way. Em, pale and freckled and petite in j
eans and a plain white shirt, clutched Nura as if she were a baby and not a girl of almost nine who still sucked her thumb. Nura gazed at them all with anxious spaniel eyes.
‘Poor thing, she’s shattered.’ Olivia stroked Nura’s pretty cheek.
‘She’s been so, so good,’ Emma said.
‘The sat nav coordinates are out,’ said Khalil, again.
Olivia laughed. ‘I know, the same thing happened to all of us. Come on, come and have a drink, we’re out on the terrace and the kids are all watching a DVD … Look, there’s Jess – Jess? Nuri’s here.’ Jess glanced up, drowsily, then went back to the TV. ‘Jess! Say hello properly to Nura.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Em, ‘They’re all tired, aren’t they? It’s so late.’
Bedroom negotiations somehow culminated in all of the children, except for Dominic, dragging their mattresses and pillows across the courtyard through the dust and packing them onto the ground floor of the priest’s tower.
The day ended with most of the adults out on the terrace, hollow-eyed, opening more bottles of wine and swatting mosquitos. Chloe really was behaving quite oddly. She talked too fast, for too long, gesturing too much, telling them all about a recent commission she’d had to restore a shattered Toby Jug. When she started talking about rivets, re-bonding and epoxy resin Al put an arm round her and she took a deep breath in and fell silent.
Then Al asked Olivia what she was working on next. He meant television, of course, it was all anyone was interested in when they asked about her work these days, but she couldn’t face talking about that so she made an excuse and went into the kitchen for a jug of water. As she left the terrace, she heard Al say to David, ‘Oops. Sore subject?’
She stood at the sink and stared down at the smeared plates. She couldn’t think about work or what she might have to do in the coming year. She turned on the tap and sponged dark red clots of jam from a plate. David was months, perhaps even years, away from finishing Trust, and there was no guarantee that it would sell as well as Intuition had. Plenty of writers failed to replicate the sales of their big hit debut.
So much, she realized, was now resting on Annabel. Joy certainly believed in the book’s potential sales. ‘It’s completely compelling,’ she had said, on the phone, after reading the final draft. ‘I was up all night with it. My God, that murder confession! You’ve timed that perfectly now. And then her making it to medical school after all she’s been through, and the chapter on her First World War women’s hospital work. It’s fascinating, it really is. She’s coming across now as completely heroic and wonderful. I was rooting for her all the way through. I’ve got a few small final notes, but it’s unputdownable, Olivia. It’s going to be huge. You’re the new Amanda Foreman, the new Simon Schama!’
It was to be the publisher’s lead non-fiction title in the lucrative pre-Christmas publication slot, with an enviable publicity budget, posters in the Tube, a huge social media campaign, TV appearances, magazine features, serializations. If Annabel were to flop after this it would, apart from anything else, be a humiliating public failure.
She heard movement behind her and span round. Emma and Khalil were hovering on the other side of the kitchen. They must have come in from the living room. She pressed a wet hand over her heart. ‘Jesus! You made me jump – I didn’t see you there. Everyone’s outside.’
Emma’s strawberry-blonde hair was middle-parted and her kind, freckled face looked drawn. ‘Actually, Liv, we were wondering if it might not be so safe for the children to be sleeping all the way across the courtyard in that tower.’ She looked as if she might implode with the strain of worrying about Nura.
‘Oh? I think they’ll be fine, Em, really. The door to the faulty staircase is locked and the owners did say it’s OK to use the downstairs room, it’s part of the rental.’
‘It’s just that it’s so far from the house.’ Emma’s frown deepened and her hand fluttered to her neck. ‘We wouldn’t be able to hear if anything happened.’
‘Hmm, I know it feels a bit odd … But we’ll all have our windows open, won’t we, so I’m sure we’d hear? And if anything did happen, one of them could easily just run over and wake us up, or even just shout.’ She looked at Khalil for back-up. There was nowhere else to put the children. She wasn’t sure if Em had appreciated this.
Khalil fixed his dark, long-lashed eyes on his wife. ‘You know what? I think we need to let Nuri have an adventure with the others. Miles is twelve, Paul’s thirteen, they’ll look after her.’ They looked meaningfully at one another for a second and Olivia sensed that this was an issue they had covered before, probably in therapy.
‘OK,’ Emma sighed, at last. ‘Fine.’
‘Honestly, Em,’ Olivia went over and squeezed her thin arm. ‘They’ll all be safe, I promise. Paul and Miles are sensible boys, really, and they’re only a stone’s throw from the house. We’d definitely hear them if anything went wrong.’ She felt Emma stiffen. ‘Not that anything’s going to go wrong. It’s totally safe here, Em, it really is.’
Vivian
Newhaven–Dieppe Ferry
I am doing my utmost to blot out the appalling racket and stench but it is not easy.
I have found myself a single seat, unfortunately near the toilets and behind a loud family, but at least I can sit on my own. I am glad to be en route at last – the waiting is over. It is important to distract myself from the mewling infant, the toddler stabbing at his baby iPad, the bickering couple popping Coke cans and fussing with clingfilm, the stink of their clammy cheddar sandwiches.
I am glad to be out of Ileford though. I had begun to feel as if I were living in the carcass of a beached whale – as if the house was collapsing in on itself and I was drowning with it. As I lay in bed this morning in the half-light, waiting for my booming and sickened heart to subside, I noticed that the shadow on the moist lung of my bedroom ceiling is getting bigger and it occurred to me that the damp area of plaster might loosen and drop onto me. If Bertie were here I would have to do something about it urgently. But of course, he is not, and perhaps a swift sharp ending – a crack of Victorian plaster to the forehead – would not be such a bad way to go.
When I tried to sit up this morning I still felt dizzy. The after-effects of my night visitor are more prolonged than ever these days. Even after half an hour or so, my heart was still lurching and I could still feel the warm liquid trickling from her forehead onto mine. The worst thing of all is being unable to move when it happens. I am paralysed and have to watch as she reaches out to fold her slow hands over my mouth and nose.
Eventually, I regained control of myself by listing the common names of ladybirds: water, larch, cream spot, eleven-spot, five-spot, seven-spot, scarce seven-spot, striped, kidney, eye. I was able to get up after that and go downstairs.
I rub my neck. I hope that my night visitor does not come to me in France. It is possible that I cry out in panic sometimes in the moments after the paralysis – I know I did this as a child and it would infuriate my father to be woken. I do not want to disturb other guests at the chambres d’hôte or call attention to myself. I do know, of course, that my night visitor is not real, that she exists only in my brain, a by-product of a sleep disorder that has plagued me since childhood. She is a hallucination born of the transitional and shadowy phase that lies between wakefulness and sleep, the result of muscle atonia and post-dormital awareness, an incomplete REM cycle, hyper-vigilance in the mid-brain. I am not the only person to have experienced this sleep problem, it is documented throughout history and across all cultures. My visitor is the Newfoundland hag, the ancient Greek choker, the Norse mara, the incubus crouched on the sleeper’s chest in Fuseli’s famous painting. None of this helps when I wake, paralysed to find her sitting on my chest, dripping blood onto my face before smothering me with her cold hands.
I think perhaps it was particularly bad last night because I was leaving Ileford and therefore, in a sense, Bertie. It is irrational, I know – after all, it is five months and t
en days since he went – but I feel as if I am abandoning him all over again.
It is the not knowing that takes its toll. A vanishing can be more cruel than death. But Bertie is dead, I know that, although even now I sometimes hear his claws tap-tapping in the hall and joy rockets me to my feet. The hall is always empty, of course. I feel that the house judges me at these moments, and finds me wanting.
I do torment myself by imagining how he met his end. The word ‘terrier’ comes from the French ‘terre’, meaning earth, and in my sleepless hours I picture him down a badger sett with his gullet torn, or wedged in a rabbit burrow, his muzzle and eyes clogged with soil. I picture him in great pain, struggling to free himself, hearing my voice fade as I walk away.
I have searched for him – of course I have – tracing ever-wider circles around Ileford, day after day, shouting until I lost my voice. I still look for him in the woods and fields even though I know, rationally, that he is dead.
Nobody would have taken him, that’s for sure. He was of no value to anyone but me. He was a sooty mutt with a hoary muzzle and bushy eyebrows, a genetic mishmash; fast-moving, suspicious of strangers. I had longed for a dog all my adult life but you cannot bring a dog into a lab, a college or a museum. Nor could I countenance leaving a dog home alone during the day, since I frequently did not return from work until nine or ten at night. Coming to Ileford, at least, allowed me to realize my long-held dream of companionship. Until, on that horrible March day, I was alone again.
I must not blame Olivia for this. It was not her fault, at least not wholly. We must share the blame for his vanishing.