Atlantic Shift

by Emily Barr

  Or else he had it in his pocket all the time, and dropped it on to the mat when he deliberately came back before me. It would have been easy to distract Ian and Megan. He is ignoring what I said.

  I pick it up to open it. Then I stop myself. For the first time, I don’t think I want to know.

  On Sunday night, I pick a fight with Megan. I do it deliberately, because I don’t want to be her friend any more. I don’t want to be anybody’s friend. I cannot make myself upset Kate, but I don’t need anyone else in my life.

  Guy leaves with barely a word to me. From time to time I have caught him looking at me, but he always looks away again as our eyes meet.

  ‘Meg,’ I say sharply, after he has gone.

  ‘Mmmm?’ she asks, a dreamy smile on her face. We are in the sitting room, leafing through the Sunday papers. Megan looks a little more worldly than she used to. She is dressed in a vest and drawstring trousers, with her bra strap showing, and she keeps smiling to herself. Her rosy cheeks don’t look as innocent as they once did.

  ‘How old’s your dad?’

  She turns a page of the colour supplement. ‘Fifty-eight. Why?’

  ‘So Guy’s younger than him, at least.’

  She frowns at me, but it’s a gentle, puzzled frown. Then she stretches her legs out. ‘You don’t have a problem with that, do you, Evie? You were the one who introduced us.’

  ‘And I wish I hadn’t,’ I tell her. ‘I do have a problem. Guy’s fifty-five. He has a past. He’s definitely old enough to be your father, and he looks it, too. What is wrong with men of our age?’

  ‘What, like Dan Donovan?’

  ‘Dan’s history. And there were twelve years between us. Not twenty-eight. You and Guy look sick together, like he’s into kids or something.’

  Megan stands up and stares at me. She drops her magazine. ‘I thought you were more open-minded than this. Where did this come from? What business is it of yours?’

  ‘It’s just what everyone thinks. I’ve known Guy for ever, and I find your relationship with him disturbing. If he had children, they’d be older than you are. And you’re so loud together. I can hear everything. I know exactly what you do together. And I find it disgusting.’ As I say it, I know I am being unnecessarily cruel and that Megan doesn’t deserve it. I don’t care. I’m sick of having her as a friend.

  ‘Right, thanks for telling me how you feel,’ she says, and leaves the room. I hear her bedroom door slam. Ten minutes later she creeps back into the sitting room to fetch the phone. I don’t look at her, and she doesn’t look at me.

  chapter twelve

  Five days later

  Until now, I have treated the letters as a mild annoyance. Occasionally they have scared me, but I have almost enjoyed the frisson. I have never, ever imagined that whoever was writing them was really going to come to the flat and attack me.

  That was until this morning. I abandoned Meg without a second thought and ran away, because he came to get me. He actually came to get me. I heard him, so I ran as fast as I could.

  That’s why I’m sitting in Camden, on Jack’s sofa. That’s why I’m fiddling compulsively with the ring pull of my Coke can. I don’t even like Coke. I could do with some Calm Iced Tea.

  Jack is sitting next to me, his arm around my shoulders. For once, I don’t want to shrug it off. I’m glad Jack still wants to put his arm round my shoulders. I don’t want to be married to him, but I do want to be able to run to him when I need to.

  ‘Go with them,’ he says firmly. I open my mouth to tell him all the reasons I can’t, and he touches my hand. ‘Don’t say anything. Just do it. You know it’s your only option.’

  I nod. Then I look at him, at the tender way he’s looking at me. It pleases me. ‘Come with us?’ I ask him, in a small, appealing voice.

  Jack laughs, but kindly. ‘Evie, I would love to. New York, with you and Ian and Kate. It would be great, like old times. A blast. But it wouldn’t be right. If there was a chance we were getting back together I’d drop everything, but that’s not what you really want, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what I really want.’ I lean my head on his shoulder.

  He looks to the door, and I know he’s wondering whether Sophia will reappear. He seems nervous. She must have her own key.

  I stare down at the empty can in my hand. I’m still shaking. This is annoying: I ought to be able to control myself better than this. Although it’s good that Jack’s seeing me vulnerable, and feeling sorry for me, I would have preferred him to have seen me fake-vulnerable, rather than the real thing.

  I bought the Coke this morning because I needed a caffeine fix, and I didn’t have time to get a coffee. The newsagent was next to the bus stop. I ran in and ran out and jumped on to the back of the bus that had come and almost gone while I was waiting for my change.

  ‘What number bus is this? Where’s it going?’ I asked the conductor. I was panting for breath. He looked at me with the long-suffering manner that I imagine a London bus attendant quickly acquires. He was a young man, but he looked careworn.

  ‘It’s a twenty-seven,’ he said. ‘Chalk Farm.’ I thought about it. I could go to Chalk Farm, but I didn’t know what I would do when I got there. Then I remembered Jack.

  ‘Do you go through Camden Town?’

  He looked bored. ‘One pound.’

  A fake-casual call to Ian revealed Jack’s address, and as I waited on the doorstep, glad to be out of the way of the crowds heading to the market, I didn’t even consider that he might not have been alone. I assumed that I had already sabotaged his relationship with Sophia.

  He opened the door after ten minutes of repeated knocking. He was rubbing his eyes, and wearing nothing but a pair of pants. Even the sight of his old grey pants reassured me.

  ‘Evie?’ he asked, peering at me, confused. His face was puffy and sleepy.

  ‘Sorry to wake you,’ I said. He looked at me, and I saw his expression change.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, warily.

  I was about to ask if I could come in when I saw her behind him. She was small, but curvaceous, with thick dark hair and dark brown eyes. She was wearing his old green dressing gown.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, looking at her and sizing her up as she did the same to me. A large part of me was pleased to meet her. ‘Oh God, sorry, I didn’t realise.’

  ‘Evie,’ said Jack, clearly hating what he was having to do, ‘this is Sophia. Sophia, this is Evie.’

  ‘Hi,’ Sophia said, eyeing me warily.

  ‘Hello,’ I said back to her, unable to make my voice calm. I heard the catch as I said it and wondered how mad I seemed. I realised that only I could rescue the situation, and I tried to pull myself together.

  ‘Sorry, both of you,’ I heard myself say, and I consciously forced a smile. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you up or to barge in on you like this. I just didn’t know where else to go.’ At this, I crumpled, and the next thing I felt was Jack’s hand on my arm, leading me inside. ‘Sorry,’ I kept saying. When I was sitting on the sofa, I looked around for Sophia. She wasn’t in the room.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ I asked Jack, who was standing over me.

  ‘To get dressed,’ he said. ‘You look like you need coffee and breakfast, and you also need to tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, blinking. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re here now. It’s OK. Tell me what’s happening. Is it those letters again?’

  Sophia came back into the room, dressed in red and looking striking.

  ‘I’ll be at mine,’ she said to Jack, and gave him a kiss on the lips. Then she looked at me, sensibly distrusting my motives. I wanted to suggest that if she didn’t want to feel threatened by her boyfriend’s wife, she might like to consider finding a boyfriend without one. Instead, I gave her a weak smile. ‘Call me,’ she added, to Jack.

  ‘Sure,’ he told her, and she was off.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again, as the door slammed. J
ack relaxed visibly, and took me in his arms.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said again. He buried his face in my hair and kissed my neck. ‘Tell me.’

  I pulled away and breathed deeply. I looked around. His flat is the ground floor of a townhouse in a genteel street off the main road.

  ‘Nice place,’ I told him. He hasn’t made much of an effort with the decor, but I’m sure he will. ‘You live here on your own?’

  He looked at me. ‘Yes. Been here two weeks.’

  I sat on the sofa and played with the ring pull of my Coke. ‘Sophia doesn’t know about. . .?’

  He shook his head. ‘None of it. I wondered if she suspected, but she didn’t say anything. She never asked. What’s happened?’

  He sat next to me. I drained the rest of the drink, put the can on the table, and told him.

  ‘You have to go with them,’ he says, again. ‘Put as much distance between you and this nutter as you can. And give me that bloody can. I’ll put it in the recycling and make you a coffee. You don’t even like Coke.’

  I hand it to him. ‘I know. Have I screwed things up for you with Sophia? I really am sorry. I’ve been so confused about us, I thought it was best if I left you alone. I didn’t want to mess you around. I didn’t even know whether you were still seeing her. . .’

  Jack leaves the room. ‘Yes, Evie,’ he calls back. ‘I am still seeing her.’

  ‘That’s good.’ I’m not sure what else to say. The sight of her in his dressing gown has burned me to the core, and I am pleased to have something normal to worry about. Splitting these two up is a project. It beats worrying about the stalker, who is now a potential intruder. ‘I should have gone to Kate,’ I tell him, ‘but she doesn’t need to be worrying about me right now. And I haven’t really got anyone else. I’ve concentrated on work so much for years and years that I haven’t really got many good friends. Megan and I aren’t speaking. The people I’m on best terms with at the moment are PR people.’

  He calls from the kitchen. ‘Babe, it’s not just that you’ve been working too hard, is it? You don’t honestly work any harder than, say, I do. It’s more that you’ve always cut yourself off.’ He appears in the doorway. ‘Remember, we were together eight years. I’ve been thinking about this, about us, a lot. When we were together I was always out with work mates, or other mates, or off on stag weekends or whatever. And you weren’t. You’d groan if the phone rang in the evening. You’d put on your charming face when you had to, and chat to people, and you got away with it because there is something captivating about you. Everyone can see that. But you never gave anything away. Even to me, really. That night when we got together, last month. I felt I saw a part of you then that I’d never met before, and we’ve been married, you know, all this time.’ He goes back into the kitchen, then returns with a steaming cup, which he places carefully in front of me. ‘Try this. I got a new coffee machine like the ones they have in cafés. Makes a wicked latte.’

  I pick it up, but my hand is still shaking, so I put it down again. I push my hair behind my ears. It’s lank and greasy. I hope to God there wasn’t a photographer waiting for me outside this morning. I’m still wearing tracksuit bottoms, a denim jacket, and the T-shirt I wore to bed last night, teamed with a pair of flip-flops which are entirely unsuitable for March. I haven’t even got a bra on. If I’d known I was meeting Sophia this morning I would have paused at least to put on a half-decent outfit and to scrape my hair back. No wonder she gave me such a strange look. Still, if she relaxes about me she won’t bother to fight me for him. I will have an advantage.

  ‘Have you really been thinking about us?’ I haven’t the energy to take in what Jack just said. ‘You do know me, Jack. Why do you think you don’t?’

  He smiles. ‘I love you, Evie. I can’t help myself, but I still don’t believe I completely know you. I think you’re holding something back. I’ve always known it, but I’ve never known what it was.’

  I manage to pick up the coffee and take a sip.

  ‘But you love me all the same?’ I ask, with my best smile.

  ‘I’m afraid I do.’

  ‘I love you too, Jack.’

  ‘So what shall we do?’

  I put the cup down and look away from him. ‘I don’t know. The last thing I want to do is to mess you around. You mean so much to me. That’s why I’ve kept away. With these letters, and a few other things that are going on, I want us to get back together for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.’ I am scarcely aware of how much I am manipulating him. I am too shaky to think about it. It just comes naturally.

  He looks at me, hard. ‘Is that true, Evie?’ I nod. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Invite myself on the New York trip, like you said. Go along for the implantation. Extricate myself from a charity concert in Brighton and an interview on Woman’s Hour.’ I look down at myself. ‘Meanwhile, I suppose getting changed would be a good start.’

  Jack bites his lip. He looks happy. ‘I suppose it would be bad form to offer you Sophia’s clothes,’ he says. ‘Plus you’re too tall.’ He passes me the phone. ‘First things first.’

  I sigh, and dial the number of my local police station, which I know by heart. I ask for Eleanor, but she’s not there, so I talk to the duty sergeant instead. I stutter out my story again, trying to tell it logically this time.

  ‘So you’re saying that you saw him?’ he checks.

  ‘No. I didn’t say that,’ I say as clearly and as patiently as I can. ‘I’m saying that I heard him. Someone was trying the door to the flat this morning. They rattled it and I’m sure they tried to get a key into the lock.’

  ‘We’ll need to come to visit you, if there’s been an attempted break-in.’

  ‘You can’t do that. I’m not there.’ And Megan is, and I don’t want her to know about any of this.

  ‘Can you meet us there? We’ll need you to make a statement. He didn’t succeed in gaining entry?’

  ‘No. I called out, asked who was there. He rattled the door again and then I heard footsteps walking away.’

  ‘And you know it was the writer of the anonymous letters?’ He sounds sceptical. I am furious.

  ‘The fact that he left one behind would suggest so, yes,’ I say icily.

  ‘Sweetie,’ says Jack, ‘do you have the letter with you?’

  I feel in my pocket. I was so frantic when I left that I can’t remember what I did with it.

  ‘No,’ I tell him.

  ‘Do you want me to take you home? I’ll stay with you. You know you need to be there if the police are coming over. And you need to be able to show them the letter. I’ll take you home and sort everything out for you. I won’t leave you.’

  I look at him. ‘Thanks, Jack. It means everything to me. If we go back, I can change into some decent clothes and stop looking deranged.’

  ‘Evie?’ he says. ‘It takes more than this to make you look deranged. You look wonderful.’

  Jack pays the taxi, and holds out an expectant hand for my house keys. I hand them to him, feeling unusually ambivalent. I’m relieved that Jack will look after me, that he still loves me, that the option of Jack is still available to me. Yet I hate the fact that my dependence on him, right now, is genuine. I preferred it when much of my life was a charade, and when I looked after myself and relied on no one.

  Does Jack know, I wonder, that I am struggling to hold myself together? Even though he knows what is happening to me, he has no idea how I’m feeling. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he doesn’t know me at all. More and more, my self is bound up with Elizabeth. Jack can never know me unless I tell him. I have no desire whatsoever to tell him.

  But I feel terrified about the letters. I am trying to think of anything but the man who is writing them.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, passing through the door before me, looking around the hallway, and motioning for me to follow him. He takes my hand, and we walk up the four flights of stairs together. My hand feels small in his. I have missed human con
tact.

  Jack opens the door and goes in first.

  ‘Megan?’ he calls. ‘Are you there?’

  Megan and I have not said a single word to each other in the past week. She doesn’t reply now. ‘She might be out with Guy,’ I say, my voice falling away into nothing as I hear it breaking the silence of the flat. ‘Or even in Bristol,’ I continue in a whisper. ‘I don’t know what her plans were.’

  Her bedroom door opens. I tense up, certain that it will be Guy.

  It’s not. Megan looks from one of us to the other, then down at my hand in Jack’s. She looks away. She is wearing her pyjamas and dressing gown, but she has clearly been awake for some time. She is pale and unsmiling. Her hair is loose down her back, and she looks like an ill child.

  ‘Meg!’ I say, walking quickly to her. I force myself to overcome my pride, because I know I have wronged her, and I want Jack to carry on liking me. ‘Are you OK?’ I ask her. ‘I’m sorry, about everything.’

  She pushes me away when I try to touch her. Jack comes closer.

  ‘Megan?’ he says. ‘Talk to me at least, even if you don’t want to speak to Evie.’

  She looks from me to Jack, and back to our hands, which are still clasped together. Then she shakes her head abruptly, and turns away. I start to go after her, but she is in the bathroom with the door locked before I have a chance to get close. I tap on it a few times.

  ‘Megan?’ I say, desperate for her to talk to me. ‘Please, Meg,’ I call. ‘What’s happened? Please tell me. Has something happened? Has he come back?’

  The door flies open, and she is staring at me. ‘Has who come back, Evie? Who?’

  I look at her. She is distraught and confused. I’m not sure what to say to her. ‘I don’t know.’