by Flynn Berry
The usher opened the door and nodded at them. Faye pulled the veil over her head so it hung before her face. Its hem reached to her chest, weighted by a line of broderie anglaise. She hadn’t wanted to wear it, but every bride in the Spenser family had for the past two hundred years. Her father took her arm and they climbed the stone steps. Faye felt the sun on her back, and the cold air of the church on her front. The veil fell against her face as she walked, and she imagined that she looked like she was emerging from under water.
When she arrived at the altar, Colin was smiling at her, and she knew he was thinking the same thing, that no one had found them out. They’d already been married for a year. They’d married at a registry office in Chelsea, two months after meeting at the Lanesborough. Faye had worn a suede miniskirt and high boots. She’d carried a bunch of lilies of the valley, their bells tolling as she walked.
After the second ceremony, Colin said, “Am I technically a bigamist now?” The wedding party crossed the wide lawn to the marquee. The tent was white, with three pennants. Faye took a flute of champagne. With its pennants, the tent looked like the camp of an invading army. Which would be her, she supposed.
Rose kissed her. “Well done,” she whispered, and the two of them huddled amidst the circling waiters, who were passing glasses of chilled prawns and king crab legs. She drank more champagne, enjoying the party as though she were a guest. At one point, she went into the house with Sabrina and Christy, and they lay side by side in a canopy bed drinking brandy alexanders.
“The first year of marriage,” said James in his toast, “is the most difficult. But I think there’s a good chance that at the end of it, you’ll be just as happy as you are today.” He knew, of course. He’d been one of their witnesses at the registry office in Chelsea.
The waiters served chicken poached in milk, then a cake with thick fondant etched to resemble lace. At her real wedding, they’d had a croquembouche, a tower of profiteroles in a sticky caramel glaze.
During the dinner, Faye felt private and removed. She noticed a wooden gate someone had left unlatched at the end of the property, and watched it blow back and forth in the wind.
“Did you go to Bedales?” asked one of the guests.
“No,” said Faye. “I went to a comprehensive school in Stafford.”
“Oh, well done, you,” said the woman. “Did you also attend university in the Midlands?”
“I didn’t go to university. I wanted to start working.”
“And where do you work?”
Faye looked at her and thought, She wants to know if we signed a prenup. She considered just telling her. Colin’s family had insisted, and Colin refused, which was good, because they’d already been married for a year without one.
A group of guests surrounded her and asked for the story of how they met. They expected more, thought Faye. They expected a great beauty.
“He picked me up at a restaurant,” she said.
After a pause, one of them said, “And you’ve been together ever since,” in a tone of wonder.
Tomorrow night they’d be back at the flat on Dean Street. They would have sex, and take a shower. He would put on a record, and she would wear one of his jumpers and the pair of soft knee-high socks he’d bought for her to wear at home. They would cook pasta with tomato sauce and drink a bottle of wine. They would read or talk or project a film on the wall, and she’d sit against him, cradling the glass on her stomach, her socked legs folded.
Faye left the guests to find her father, and they sat alone in a corner talking about his pub. “I’ve made some improvements,” said Gene.
“Oh Christ, no,” said Faye. For a while he’d had Free Tuesdays. It had not been a good idea.
Colin was across the tent, talking with James, his hands in his pockets. James shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. Faye wanted to hear what they were saying. Across the room, Colin closed his eyes, like he was wincing. She wasn’t the only person watching them. She’d noticed that before with Colin. At large dinners, people a few seats down would stop eating and lean over to listen to him.
Colin left James, and a moment later he appeared beside her with a bottle of wine and glasses for her and her father. He kissed Faye, checked his watch, and said, “When can we ask them all to leave?”
“Well,” said Deborah, once the guests were gone. “That was a success.” She had arranged for them to borrow her friend’s house in Provence for their honeymoon.
“Actually,” Faye had said, “we’re going to India.”
And on their honeymoon a week later, in a coracle spinning on a river in Hampi, Faye gripped the straw edges of the boat and she laughed and laughed and laughed.
* * *
—
AFTER THEY WERE MARRIED, my parents often went on trips abroad with his friends, to rented villas in France, Sardinia, Mallorca. I visited the one in Mallorca when I was twenty-two, after saving for months to buy the ticket.
I went in September, when the villa where they’d stayed was empty. A sign for a security system was posted on a fence in front, but I opened the gate and walked around the house to the pool. Cicadas rasped in the tall weeds. Lemons had fallen from the trees and lay scattered in the grass.
I was sick from the bus ride across the island, and picked a lemon from a tree next to the pool. Mum was pregnant with me when they came here, and had terrible morning sickness. She wrote in her diary that she tore lemons open with her hands and sucked on the juice. Apparently it helped with the nausea. My incisors dug into the rind, and the juice ran down my hands, burning on the raw skin around my nails. I pulled my teeth from the peel, feeling like a vampire. She was right, it did help.
The villa was on a cliff above the water. I walked down its steep stairs and out onto a rickety wooden dock. When I finished drinking its juice, I threw the lemon in the water, where it floated on the surface, caught in the foam beating against the rocks.
Mum didn’t have an easy pregnancy, between her morning sickness, which was bad enough that she had to be hospitalized a few times for fluids, and her fear at how much would change. She’d become pregnant by accident, after the antibiotic she was prescribed for strep throat interacted with her birth control. My father was excited. During their trip, he went to the market in Deià and bought a wooden rattle painted with horses for me.
I was so tired. I’d booked the cheapest flight, which meant being at the airport at four in the morning. Before coming to the villa, I’d stopped at the hostel to shower and change into a navy dress with short sleeves. I’d chosen the dress carefully, because a part of me had expected to see Mum again here, like that would be my reward for having come this far. I’d pictured her looking up when she heard me and smiling, saying my name, my real name. Standing from the dock and holding out her arms to me.
The empty dock creaked as waves passed beneath it. I was crying now, though part of me still hoped that if I couldn’t see her, maybe I could at least feel something, a presence, that she might still comfort me somehow. After a long time, I wiped my wet face and leaned forward to dip my arms in the cool water. It was no use, she was gone.
From the dock, the water was so clear it looked gelatinous. Two boats anchored in the cove seemed suspended in air, above their shadows on the seabed. I could see the green and white barnacles on the rocks under the surface.
Mum went snorkeling here. She told me once that she’d loved swimming when she was pregnant, with her stomach below her in the water, like a submarine.
If I had been on this dock twenty-three years before, I would have seen her. The snorkel rising from the water as she swam farther out into the cove, the black flippers, the length of her body, her shadow following her, slipping over the rocks.
* * *
*
• • •
That night I went to the bar attached to my hostel. A table of backpackers invited m
e to join them, then we went to another bar. I walked next to Nick, who was from Australia, who was wearing a faded yellow shirt, who was teasing me the right way, affectionately, like we’d known each other for longer. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed his group before, that I hadn’t gone down to the common area hoping they would be there.
At the second bar, we drank beers and shots of tequila. Nick put his hand on my leg while making a point, then left it there when he looked across the table to answer one of his friends. When we went to the bar to order more drinks, he held me around the waist, and I brought him into the bathroom.
On the bus to the airport, I thought about the sex over and over, like it had been the real purpose of the trip.
8
MY PHONE DIDN’T RING on the heath. When I get home, I’m chilled and shivering. Jasper starts to whine when he hears my keys. I drop to the floor and he bows the top of his head against my chest while I scratch the soft fur behind his ears. The radiators hiss steam. Outside, the snow has stopped, and low bruised clouds are suspended over the city. I run a hot shower, and I’m still under the water when my phone starts to ring.
“Claire,” says DI Tiernan, in a careful, measured voice, as I stand dripping in the living room. My hand is over my mouth, and I’m almost smiling. A lightness is already swelling up from my legs, and I’m about to bow my head, press my hand to my chest, say, Thank you, say, What will happen now?
She says, “I’m so sorry.”
After the call ends, I set the phone down and stare across my flat. “He looked so much like your father,” she said. “We didn’t know until the DNA results arrived.”
Jasper’s leash is curled on the table. I have to remember to pay the dog walker tomorrow. This is the worst part, always. How difficult it is to return to my daily life, how impossible to fit back inside it, after a false alarm. I know, from the past, that for the next few weeks everything will be an effort. I’ll have to write lists to remember to do even the most obvious things. And this time will be worse, I think. It’s been longer since I’ve gone onto the forums or searched for his friends’ names. I thought I’d made progress.
I go back into the bathroom and take the can of pepper spray from its hiding place behind a row of shampoos and soaps. It’s illegal here. I order the cans online once a year and they arrive in an unmarked box. I’ve often wondered if I would be able to reach it in time. If, after hearing someone open the bathroom door, I’d be able to aim it before my head was cracked against the wall. I pick up the canister and thrash it against the side of the tub until the metal dents and crumples.
* * *
—
WORK HAS BEEN difficult today. My first patient of the morning had appendicitis, and I had to wait with her for the ambulance, and talk to a doctor at the hospital, and send on her history, which put me twenty minutes behind for the rest of the morning. Our practice manager told me a patient had filed a complaint about me for always running late. And my last patient was angry with me because the specialist we referred him to has a long waiting list. He shouted, jabbing his finger at me. I looked at him and thought, I’m just going to leave, I’m just going to walk out.
The paperwork is taking me twice as long as it normally does. When I finish with the pathology reports, I go over them again, convinced that I’ve made a mistake in my distraction. I’m still hearing our phone call in my head. DI Tiernan told me that the man had bought the flask at a pawnshop in Dorset twenty years ago. So my father had never brought it out of the country, it was probably boxed up and sent with the rest of his belongings to my grandmother, and lost or picked up by someone along the way.
I wonder if the newspapers will learn about the sighting, and the thought exhausts me. Their ghoulishness, their relentless delight in the story.
It was domestic violence. There was nothing uncommon about it, nothing mysterious, except for his incompetence. A woman is murdered by her partner two times every week in this country. Eight a month, more than a hundred a year. No one would have cared about my father, no one would know his name, if he hadn’t had money.
After finishing the forms, I turn off the lights and leave the practice. If he were innocent—if I didn’t need to make a point—would I still be a doctor? I’m not like Laila or Rahul. Both of them have an intuition that I’m missing. Laila trained as a wilderness first responder when she was a teenager in Northumbria, Rahul became a paramedic while he was still at university. Neither of them has ever really considered doing anything else.
When I arrive home from work, I take Jasper to the canal. We stand in the dark, looking at the boats trapped in ice. I don’t want to live here anymore.
After medical school, I was accepted by two hospitals for my foundation year. One was in London, the other in Edinburgh. We’d moved to Scotland after the murder, to Crail, a village on the east coast, and I’d done my degree at the University of Edinburgh. I had to decide whether to stay in Edinburgh, which I loved, or move to London, where, by living in the same city as my father’s friends and the officers who’d investigated him, I might learn where he had gone.
I made the wrong choice. I should have stayed in Edinburgh. In different circumstances, I have a flat now in one of the terraces off Easter Road. I work as a journalist or an editor at an office in Merchiston. In the evenings, sometimes I go to the cinema and sometimes I meet my friends or my brother at a pizza restaurant by the Leith quays.
I’ve had these ideas since I was twelve. They’re slightly pathetic, I know, and based on a few images seen on my first visit to Edinburgh. A bright open-plan office, a crowded restaurant, a woman standing under the marquee of a cinema.
London has such a hard polish, after Edinburgh. It’s not crooked or mysterious. It doesn’t have people silhouetted on the ridge of Arthur’s Seat, or the sooty terraces, or the storms rolling in from the Firth of Forth. It doesn’t have the same cheap, strip-lit fish shops with cursive neon signs, or the trattorias opened decades ago by Italian immigrants. It doesn’t stay light until eleven in the summer, it’s not close to the Highlands, it doesn’t get as much snow. Though London never stood a chance, really. It reminds me of my father and Scotland of my mum.
9
MY FATHER PUT DOWN his newspaper and asked Mum to go for a walk with him. They did two loops through St. James’s Park, then stopped to sit on a bench by the frozen pond. He said, “We don’t have fun anymore.”
Faye laughed. “What about last weekend?” A group of them had rented a villa in Mykonos, leaving their children at home with nannies or grandparents.
He shrugged.
“You seemed to enjoy yourself,” she said. The villa had a pool, and scooters to ride into town, and a hammock, where he pulled her down to sleep next to him after they finished a bottle of ouzo.
He sighed. “We never do anything new,” he said.
Sam had brought a few girls to Mykonos. On the first day, Sam stood by the deep end of the pool with an open bottle of champagne. The girls swam over to hold on to the ledge, and Sam said, “Open your mouths.” The girls tilted back their heads. Sam poured the champagne into their mouths, a long white jet, then tipped the bottle so the champagne foamed onto their breasts.
“Like what?” asked Faye.
“Anything,” he said.
“Is this about last night?” she asked. A senior partner at the bank had invited them for a kitchen supper at his house in Barnes, a long, dull night. He’s just scared, thought Faye. He’ll say, I don’t want us to ever turn into that.
“No,” he said. “The dinner was fine. I like Edward.”
“Right.”
Robbie was only five months old. That’s what this is about, she thought, the responsibility of having a second child, the ordeal of his birth. Two days of labor, then her blood pressure dropped and they had to perform an emergency caesarean. She had been on the other side of the curtain, awake, while her body was tempo
rarily disemboweled. No one had explained that part of it to her until afterwards. It had been difficult on Colin, too. He’d seen both sides of the curtain, he’d watched as she and the baby nearly died.
She was cold in the park, and wondered when they could go back inside. “Things will be easier by the spring,” she said, and stamped her feet to warm them.
He looked at her then, and her legs went slack. Without the clatter of her boots on the ground, the air around them turned quiet. Her heart started to beat against her back.
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s not how it used to be.”
* * *
*
• • •
Near the end of the month, when he still hadn’t come home, Faye sat in a chair with her eyes closed while a dentist worked in her mouth. Her jaw was numb, but she could still feel him tugging. Two of her wisdom teeth had become impacted and needed to be removed. She’d never even had a cavity before, but she was unsurprised. Her luck had run out.
Afterwards she walked down Belgrave Street with a raw, bleeding mouth. There were cotton pads in her bag, she’d need to switch out the current one when the blood soaked through. The dentist had warned that her mouth would start to hurt as the anesthetic wore off. Already she could feel twinges, thin wires of pain deep in her jaw.
The house would be empty when she came home, when she stood in the bathroom and changed the soaked cotton pads, when the feeling returned to her jaw and she tried to distract herself from the pain with an old film.
She’d always worried that he might meet someone else, but that would have been better. Colin hadn’t fallen in love with another woman, as far as she knew, he’d just started to find her a bit boring.
She wanted to be alone so she could think of him. It was like the beginning, in that way. She looked forward to going to bed every night, so she could go over it without any interruptions.
