by Tina Seskis
‘I’m sorry, Chrissy,’ I say. I’m aware I sound half-hearted, desperate even. ‘You can leave me here if you like. I don’t want to spoil your honeymoon.’
‘Well, maybe I’d better go and tell Kenny what’s going on,’ she says. As she hauls herself up from the cushions, it seems she can’t wait to escape, but then she adds that she’ll come straight back, and I’m not sure whether it’s because she feels bad for abandoning me, or because she wants to stay involved. It’s hard to tell. She walks away, her head held high, her platinum hair blinding against the sun, her statuesque figure swaying with the breeze; and as I watch her leave I want to call after her, beg her to stay, but I can’t, so I don’t.
6
Seven-and-a-quarter years earlier
At times, Jemma was secretly grateful to Sasha that she’d sent Dan that email, and at others it put her in a quandary. Jemma had never felt able to admit that her friend had written it, as that would have been humiliating for him, and so she’d found herself going on a second date (in a different, busier pub, with a less nosy barman), and she’d finally found her tongue, and then later, outside the Tube station, so had Dan. And when he’d asked her to come to Kew Gardens with him at the weekend, she’d not had anything else on, and the day had felt comfortable, and yet romantic too. The next time they’d met was to see an art house movie that her previous boyfriend wouldn’t have dreamed of watching, and as they’d parted ways afterwards, she’d found herself almost annoyed that she still hadn’t slept with him – and so, before she’d had time to think, she’d invited him to hers the following week, for dinner.
Now here they were, nearly three months later, apparently boyfriend and girlfriend; and whenever he came round, she’d feel an odd thrill as she opened the door to see him standing there, tall and faintly embarrassed, and smelling of the earth. She and Dan continued to do simple things that she hadn’t done with other lovers, such as getting up before dawn to watch the sun coming up over London; or going for a walk in the autumn woods where Dan would tell her what each fallen leaf was and, even more surprising, she’d find she was interested. One time they even took conkers home to bake in vinegar, and then tied strings onto them and had a fight, which Jemma won, of course. She grew to enjoy hanging out with Dan at his place, cooking together, watching box sets of the latest Scandinavian thriller as they cosied up on the sofa, and as the weeks passed, she found happiness creeping up on her, the roots of their relationship being laid down in simple decency, calm acceptance, stability. He became a secret pleasure that she kept to herself, and it suited her.
Yet now Sasha had gone and disrupted the equilibrium by inviting Jemma and Dan for dinner with a group of their other friends. Jemma wasn’t exactly sure why she didn’t want to go – whether it was because of Sasha’s involvement in how she and Dan had got together, or the fact that Dan was shy, or (and she couldn’t quite admit it to herself) because he wasn’t as sophisticated as her previous boyfriends had been. It didn’t help that Sasha could sometimes be a bit full-on, and Jemma didn’t trust her not to drunkenly blurt out the truth about the email, which would be terrible. But anyway, whatever the reason, Jemma had decided she was going to tell Sasha that she and Dan were busy.
Jemma pulled on her coat, closed the door to her flat behind her, and started along the long, cold road towards the Tube. It was a Monday morning, and the day was one of those glum autumnal ones, without much to report: low clouds, colourless sky, an apathetic wind, slowly undressing trees revealing houses behind them in need of a paint. The summer was well and truly over, the mornings getting ever darker, and maybe it was that, on top of the unwanted dinner invitation, that was lowering Jemma’s mood. She decided that she would call Sasha instead of replying to the email and make her excuses verbally. Sasha would only ring her up anyway and try to force her to come.
A horn tooted, and Jemma ignored it. The sky had begun to spit at her, and she kept her head down as she pulled her coat tighter and put the collar up. The sound repeated, beside her this time, and when she finally looked up she saw Dan, driving a silver van that had ‘Armstrong’s Landscape Gardening’ printed on the side. He was kerb-crawling her, grinning.
‘Want a lift, darlin’?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was on my way to a job in Finchley and thought I might catch you on your way to work. Are you going to get in?’
Jemma did as she was told. She had to clamber up onto the seat, which was grimy. Dan was wearing grubby grey cargo trousers and an old sweatshirt, and his hair was hidden under a baseball cap. An empty sandwich carton sat on the dashboard and crisp packets littered the black plastic footwell. As he grinned shyly at her, she felt conscious of her smart black dress and neat heels. There was a client meeting today about a new upmarket restaurant in Abu Dhabi, and she had to be at her most conservative. It was the first time she’d seen Dan in work mode, and it felt as if they were strangers.
Dan put the van into gear and they roared away, and she wasn’t sure whether it was for comedic effect or whether he really did drive it like that. He switched on the wipers and the few drops of rain dragged caked dirt across the windscreen in painful curved strata, making the grit shriek against the glass.
‘Ouch, sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve run out of windscreen wash.’
Jemma sat quietly for the two minutes it took to get caught in the traffic that led up to the lights by the Tube. She knew it would be quicker to walk from here, but she didn’t want to appear ungrateful. She could feel the pull of attraction towards him across the van, and it confused her a little. She still couldn’t believe Dan was her boyfriend, somehow – he was unlike anyone else she’d ever been out with.
When they finally reached the station, she leaned over and briefly kissed him goodbye. Just as she was climbing down from the van, she saw her lawyer neighbour, who gave her a decidedly odd look – and Jemma felt so ashamed of her embarrassment at being seen with her gardener boyfriend that she decided things with Dan had gone far enough now. She needed to finish it.
7
Now
Poor Dad. He sounds heartbroken. Six days ago he’d married off his only daughter, at last, and now he gets me crying and ranting down the phone from my bungalow in the Maldives, as incoherent as a child waking up from a nightmare, and at first he can’t even understand me.
‘Jemma, love,’ he says. ‘Jemma, please, calm down, sweetheart. What are you saying?’
‘I said I can’t find him,’ I shriek. ‘He’s gone!’
‘OK, OK. Have you had a row?’
‘Yes. No. He disappeared, in the night. His mask and flippers are gone. Dad, he’s missing.’ I kick viciously at the hand-carved wooden bed-frame with my silver flip-flop, stubbing my toe, trying to let out some of the panic.
‘Oh my word,’ says my dad. I imagine him sitting at the desk in his book-lined study, sagging suddenly. He gets it at last.
‘What am I going to do?’ I ask, more quietly now.
‘Has anyone told his parents?’
Even the question, less than a week after our wedding, is diabolical. ‘No. I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘I haven’t, and the hotel wouldn’t know how to contact them.’
‘Have the police been told?’
‘I don’t know. They’ve sent out a rescue boat though. Oh, Dad, I think he might have drowned.’ I start heaving, and I can’t talk any more. The words have got stuck, and they are so alien it’s as though I am trying to put the wrong objects through a child’s shape sorter. We were meant to be on our honeymoon. There is no space in that sentence for words to do with death.
Dad lets me pause for a few moments, and his unfailing patience at the end of the line boosts me, helps me compose myself. I sit down on the bed, and its softness is at odds with the situation. My floaty orange beach dress with appliqué flowers at the neckline is at odds with it, too. I rip one of the flowers off, which takes quite an effort, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.
‘Look,
Jemma, it’s all right, love,’ Dad says at last, his breath rasping faintly with stress. ‘Do you want me to ring Peter and Veronica?’
‘I don’t know. It’s too awful. What if he turns up and I’ve worried them for nothing?’
‘Well, then there’s no harm done. I think they need to know.’
‘Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault, love,’ he says, and although he keeps telling me over and over, I know that he’s wrong, and that it is my fault, but I can’t tell anyone that, apart from maybe Chrissy, who almost certainly already knows. The regret seeps out of me as if from a weeping, infected wound. What on earth have I done?
When at last I put down the phone, I lie on the bed and bury my head in the pillows and sob, for my husband, for the mistakes we have made. I cry my eyes out, for what might have been, for what might yet be. I allow myself perhaps ten minutes of this indulgence, and then I get up, wipe away my tears, tiptoe onto the terrace and walk out through the trees to the beach. The water is sparkling, but it’s so vast, and I see nothing, nothing at all out there, although I know that underneath the cool, blank surface the sea is swarming with hot life. As I patrol the shoreline I will my husband into view, try to magic him back. I make all sorts of promises to him, to myself, even to God, just in case. I almost wish I’d taken up Dad’s offer to come out here, but I’ve told him to hold off for now, wait and see. I don’t want to make him travel all this way for nothing.
And so here I am – in the bizarre, surreal, numbing position of being on my honeymoon, yet minus my husband. All I have as support are the friendly, ever-obliging resort staff. There’s Chrissy and Kenny too, of course, but they’re on their own honeymoon – and, perhaps more pertinently and for all sorts of reasons, our fledgling friendship now feels awkward for all of us.
At last I leave the beach and return to the terrace. I sit down, my hands folded neatly in my lap, my feet still covered in sand. I feel my bottom lip vibrate and I bite it, hard. An image of a body comes into my head, with the sea as an aquamarine backdrop, and I push my fists into my eyes, press so hard my engagement ring stabs my left eyelid, try to will the picture away. I feel sick with horror. I have looked forward to this trip for so many years – and now it seems that it has turned to disaster. I don’t know how things have come to this, what we could have done differently. Was any of it possible to predict? I just don’t know. All I know right now is that if it does turn out that the worst has happened, ultimately it will be because of me – and I will never ever forgive myself.
8
Seven years earlier
It was early December and Jemma still hadn’t got around to finishing with Dan. They’d already had a weekend in Bath booked at the time of the kerb-crawling incident, so she could hardly have done it then. And then he’d got tickets to see her favourite band at Brixton Academy, so that had taken them through to November. And of course the sex was great, so what was the point of giving that up for no good reason? The relationship was easy, fulfilling, yet casual for both of them. For a busy twenty-seven-year-old career girl it was fine.
Today Jemma and Dan were on their way to his parents’ for lunch, ostensibly for Dan’s birthday; plus Jemma had run out of excuses as to why she couldn’t ever meet them. Although Dan had delivered a couple of mild warnings on the way, Jemma hadn’t taken too much notice, as it didn’t really matter what the parents were like. It was just a nice day out in the country, she told herself. It didn’t need to mean anything more.
Dan’s parents’ house was an architectural oddity, set on the steepest of hills, and as Jemma entered, the air had a chill to it that wasn’t just from the heating being set too low. The living room was upstairs, and it looked out on to a garden that fell away from the house, like a crater, and the furniture was old-fashioned and of good quality, even though the house itself was modern. Jemma and Dan had been ushered straight upstairs to have some coffee (whether they wanted it or not) and now, even though they’d only been there for five minutes, his mother was going on and on about her newly fitted kitchen, and how it was so amazing, and how Dan’s old girlfriend had helped her choose the tiles, and what an amazing girl she’d been. And then she put down the coffee pot and let out a heaving sigh at the memory. Next, she started telling Jemma about her other son, Jamie – how he had such an amazing career, and how he was bound to do well in the City, but of course, he took after his father. And how Dan had packed it all in to start his own business, and wasn’t that amazing? Amazing, amazing, amazing. Everything was amazing. Except Jemma, it seemed, judging by the notable absence of interest in her own attributes, her career as an interior designer meriting little more than a sniff.
‘So how did you two meet, Jemma?’ Peter asked, over lunch.
‘In a pub,’ Dan said, as Jemma was struggling with a mouthful of stroganoff. ‘The weather was so bad, Jemma came in looking like a drowned rat, and so I bought her a drink. And that was that. Wasn’t it, Jem?’
Jemma nodded, still unable to speak. She’d happened upon a large piece of gristle and wasn’t sure how to manage it. She tried discreetly to disgorge the meat into her linen napkin and then smiled as nonchalantly as she could manage.
‘Oh,’ said Dan’s mother. Her nose wrinkled as Jemma put down the napkin. ‘That’s an odd way to meet.’
‘Well, I think I was very lucky,’ said Dan.
Jemma saw Veronica’s eyes harden above her cerise polo neck. She seemed to be one of those people who appeared to be nice, but then would say something ambivalent that could easily be taken as cutting. Passive aggressive, Jemma thought it was called, and she wondered how someone as lovely as Dan could have been spawned from such a fake of a mother. It was a mystery. But Dan’s father seemed decent enough, so maybe that was the answer.
As the meal wore on Jemma found herself feeling increasingly nervous and tetchy, and when, during dessert, Dan’s mother mentioned Lydia, Dan’s ex, for the umpteenth time, Jemma was tempted to lift her fork and stab the older woman in the arm, like in Betty Blue, but of course she didn’t. Dan apologized afterwards, on the way home, and although Jemma told him it was fine, she couldn’t help wondering why Dan had never mentioned his ex-girlfriend. As they made painfully slow progress towards London in the Sunday afternoon traffic, the question continued to thrum inside her, and hook itself on to her nervous system.
‘So … when was it that you split up with Lydia?’ she asked, finally capitulating, just as Dan was parking the van outside her flat.
‘What?’ Dan was looking over his shoulder as he expertly reversed into the space. A muscle in his neck spasmed, and Jemma had to restrain herself from prodding it.
‘I just wondered when you and Lydia broke up.’ She clamped her teeth together, to stop herself saying anything further.
‘Why? What does it matter?’ Dan swung the nose in too fast, nudging the car in front, and then yanked on the handbrake.
‘Well, why didn’t you tell me about her?’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’ His voice was peculiarly emotionless. ‘I presume you’ve had other boyfriends before me?’
‘Yeah, but none my family would go on and on ad nauseam to you about.’
‘Well, maybe they would do if you ever gave me a chance to meet them!’ Dan switched off the ignition and glared across the cab at her, and his brow was furrowed in a way that she’d never seen before. Jemma stared back at him. It was so unlike Dan to rise to anything. Were they about to have their first row? It was almost exciting.
Jemma pressed her lips together and looked out of the window. She unclenched her fists and smoothed down her denim skirt, willing herself to not say anything further, to leave it there. It was his birthday tomorrow. And besides, she’d already made herself look jealous, which was bad enough; she certainly didn’t want to bring her family into it. Dan broke the tension by getting out of the van and, as he stood on the pavement waiting for her, he looked tall, broad-shouldered, impatient – and the thought of him bein
g angry with her seemed intolerable somehow.
‘Sorry,’ Jemma said as she opened the door. She walked round to his side of the van and put her hand through his arm.
‘For what?’
‘For being an idiot.’
‘It’s fine,’ he said, although he didn’t sound convincing.
Jemma forced a smile as she unlocked the door to the flat, knowing better than to say anything more now. Yet still, from that point on Jemma wondered who the mysterious Lydia was, and just how Dan felt about her.
9
Now
It is mid-afternoon and although the rescue boat has been out for hours, there’s still no sign of my husband. A toxic scream has formed in the base of my throat, and I want to let rip with it. I long to have a full-on toddler meltdown, but I mustn’t, not here at the main bar and restaurant. All the other guests have become aware of the situation, and it has caused a fractious ripple of excitement through the resort. People don’t know quite what to do, now that they’ve taken a cursory walk around the island, calling his name; but the irony is that at least some atmosphere seems to have been created at last. Before all this, the restaurant may well have served truly fantastic food, but it had the personality of a morgue. I wince at my own analogy.
Three glamorous young Chinese couples are sitting together, having just come back from a trip through the bush looking for my husband. Normally, the Chinese tourists here operate as isolated units, sitting opposite each other, playing on their iPhones, or else the men are taking elaborately posed shots of their partners on the beach, with flowers in their hair. The three girls at the table are cute, dressed in their standard uniform of designer mini-skirts with tiny cinched-in waists and sky-high heels, which is possibly not the most appropriate attire for trampling through the jungle on a manhunt. They’re all chatting now, engaged in a spirited jabbering discussion which not only makes a change from their usual silent communing with technology, but also creates a suitable soundtrack to the overall mood. An over-affectionate American couple have taken their tongues out of each other’s ears for once and are at this moment talking earnestly to the manager, trying not to look excited. Even the older rich couples, the ones who usually seem bored with life itself, as if they’ve had one Michelin-starred meal too many, look interested in something for a change. The fact that I am, by default, the star attraction is a peculiar feeling in this ghastly in-between time. What should I be doing? How should I be acting? How are you meant to behave when your husband has vanished like a magician’s bunny on your honeymoon?