Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  I read the little scrap of newsprint, limp and dispirited from repeated handling, over and over again. To meet on the sixth with no time specified. I tried to decipher it by considering the practicalities of this arrangement. Alan had evidently worked out that it was no use turning himself in to the police on the strength of a newspaper advertisement proclaiming his wife alive and well, since that proved nothing without the physical presence of the woman who had placed it. Obviously he had no intention of sitting all day in a pub in Nicholsfield where he might attract suspicion, or risk being recognized by somebody who would alert the police. It had to be a spot where he was not at risk of recognition: somewhere well outside his usual haunts, where a lone man could hang about all day if necessary, without attracting undue attention.

  When this line of thought got me nowhere, I began to play around with the words themselves, moving letters about, discovering words such as total and local, and coming up with enigmatic messages such as ‘Call at Fort Pols’ – wherever that might be. Alan had always been much better than I was at anagrams and puzzles.

  The deadline for Thursday’s edition approached and passed, but I was still no wiser as to what on earth he meant. If you can’t work it out then you can’t go, whispered the voice of treachery in my head. Maybe it’s a sign that you should stay here and keep your head down, wait for everything to blow over.

  I took the clipping home with me and laid it on the kitchen table while I prepared, then consumed my evening meal – not that I needed a visual aid, for by now I knew the words by heart. Knew them by heart and yet couldn’t work out the riddle he had set for me. I burned a little at the thought of Alan laughing at me. How could I be so dense? Solving conundrums, unravelling cryptic clues; it was another area of life in which he had been smugly superior. I felt all the old frustrations welling up. Alan had always enjoyed being smarter than I was. Well this time he might have been just too darned clever for his own good. Poor old Jenny, I thought. Never more than the foil for his ready wit, his stooge, his second in command … that was it! I blushed at my slowness, my stupidity. On boating holidays I had always been his second in command and we had, quite literally, called at ports – ports being Alan’s nautical speak for any stopping-off place during a voyage.

  Our last holiday afloat had been on the Broads, a long weekend which had begun and ended at the boatyards in Stalham. I had been an idiot, looking for something far too complex. Alan intended me to go to the boatyard at Stalham. A busy boatyard would provide good cover for our meeting. He could sit in the little café and await my arrival. The boatyard would be full of bustle, with people bringing boats in and out. Even so, they might spot a strange man hanging about … I began to consider afresh. It was very early in the season. Might not the boatmen, the cleaners, the various staff who are always busy about the yard, notice a man waiting around but never actually taking a boat out? The very last thing Alan wanted was to attract attention, and there is nothing so calculated to achieve that as a man skulking around to no apparent purpose. Perhaps he didn’t mean Stalham. Perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree entirely.

  If I could only work out what he meant, there was still time to place my advert tomorrow so that it appeared on the morning of the sixth, but I couldn’t signify agreement unless I was absolutely certain that I understood the bloody message.

  Port of call. Port of call. I was sure now that it had something to do with boating holidays. Alan had always enjoyed messing about on the water and we had spent several holidays on canal boats and a couple on motor cruisers.

  Last port of call. It wasn’t a boatyard. That was where you went to give the boat back at the end of the holiday. It must have been the last place before that: the place where we had spent our last night afloat, prior to handing back the boat. Where? Where the hell had we stopped last of all?

  There had been two separate holidays on the Broads: a long weekend, and a full week during which we had stopped at seemingly dozens of places, all of which had now merged into hazy recollections of wooden staithes and waterside pubs and herons – more herons than I had ever imagined existed – at every bend in the river.

  Think, think. Forget the herons. Look at the road atlas – that will show the place names. I marched into the sitting room and cast an impatient eye across the book shelves which stood in the alcove under the stairs. Where was the big road atlas? I was pretty sure it hadn’t been left in the car. I located the book on the bottom shelf and drew it out, carrying it back to the table where I could open the atlas right out at the page showing Norfolk and concentrate on the names of places which lay on the river. I knew the last port of call must have been somewhere not far from Stalham because you always had to get the boat back horribly early in the morning: so not Acle then, nor Ranworth, nor Potter Heigham, which I remembered because of the low bridge which we could only navigate with the aid of a pilot.

  I traced the tiny blue thread which marked the river, a wiggling blue line labelled R Ant – rant was about the right word, I thought. Rant at the obscurity of Alan’s message, combined with the paucity of my own memory. According to the map, Stalham wasn’t even on the river, which was a bit confusing. I followed the river south with my finger – not an easy task on a map where roads predominated and every bit of space seemed to be cluttered with symbols for campsites, historic houses and gardens open to the public. Long-forgotten names rang distant bells. Thurne I remembered for its pub and windmill – we had stopped there at least twice, but surely not on our final evening, with so many miles of river still to go before we reached Stalham and the boatyards.

  The most obvious place on the map was called Irstead. It was marked as a tiny riverside settlement, yet the name was entirely unfamiliar. Then I spotted the thinnest of blue lines, branching away to the left of the main river, and I remembered. That thinnest of blue lines was Lime Kiln Dyke, a narrow twisting channel lined by trees which led to a dead end where Neatishead staithe stood at right angles to the dyke. That had been our last port of call.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Thoroughly absorbed in my clandestine world of cloak-and-dagger cryptic exchanges, I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else. It was almost a source of surprise to me, the way life in Lasthwaite went on just as usual, and on Thursday morning I was so preoccupied with ensuring that I got my confirmation of the rendezvous into the next day’s paper, I had completely managed to forget about the Luke Robinson issue, and so was caught off guard when I encountered the Trollop in the upstairs corridor.

  ‘I was coming to see you later,’ she said, her tone half confrontational, half conspiratorial. ‘To ask what you’d decided.’

  I regarded her blankly. Then the penny dropped. ‘I can’t discuss it just now,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to give me some time.’

  She nodded and walked on, half as if this had been what she was expecting. I watched her disappearing down the stairs, struck dumb by my own words. Discuss it? Any idea of a discussion was absolute madness. There was nothing to discuss. I had to give her an official warning about reading a patient’s records, instruct her not to mention anything more about Luke Robinson to anyone and put the file back where it belonged. Instead, I had promised her a ‘discussion’ and her nod had conveyed a suggestion of satisfaction. She thought I was on board with disclosure, or at the very least prepared to consider it.

  As I walked back to my own office, I reflected again that she was prepared to risk her job for a point of principle, while mine was probably as good as forfeit already. Even so, I did what I could to cling on. It was easy to arrange some time off work in spite of the short notice. At morning break I told the doctors that one of my aunts had died. I said it was all very sudden, and that because the aunt had no children of her own and we were such a very small family, it had fallen to me to go south and make the necessary arrangements. ‘Because it’s a sudden death, it might be a bit complicated,’ I said, mentally noting yet again what a plausible liar I had become. ‘So I’m not really sure how
long I shall have to be down there – probably a couple of days at least – but I will know better when I get there.’

  None of them commented on the oddity of my never having mentioned this ailing relative before, or queried my pressing obligation to take charge of the funeral arrangements and sort out my aunt’s affairs. Perhaps if I had been the sort of person forever seeking time off to bury grandmothers, an eyebrow or an objection might have been raised, but of course Susan McCarthy wasn’t like that. She scarcely took all her holiday entitlement, never mind swinging the lead for sickness or family reasons. The doctors were all kindness and told me to take as long as I needed, and as word got round the other staff sidled up and said they were sorry to hear about my auntie and just to say the word if there was anything they could do.

  I might not need to go, I told myself. Today might be the day when Alan turns up, or something happens to divert suspicion away from him. Even so I spent the afternoon wondering what I should take with me. Any form of identification to prove that I was Jennifer Reynolds was impossible – I had none by deliberate design. Susan McCarthy’s driving licence went into the bag, although I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to actually show it to anyone. Clothes were another worry. I wasn’t even sure how long I was going to be away because I still had no clear idea what giving myself up might entail. It would be awful if the police detained me and I ran out of clean knickers, and in any case I knew that my errand could not possibly be accomplished in a single day – it was too far from Lasthwaite to Neatishead and back – so overnight things would certainly be needed.

  This in turn raised the question of where I would spend the night. Ought I to book ahead – find a suitable bed and breakfast somewhere in Norfolk? Then again, suppose we had to travel back to the Midlands – if we reported to the police in Norfolk, would they just hand us on to the relevant force? In that case an advance reservation might prove to be an expensive nuisance, so I decided that the question of where to spend the night could be resolved when I got down there. From what I could remember Norfolk was full of pubs, and it was early enough in the season to turn up on spec.

  The biggest issue was Rob. If our world was about to be blown apart, at the very least I wanted to be the one to explain. He had called me once from the pay phone at the field centre, but I could barely hear him against a cacophony of high youthful voices, and every so often his words were drowned out completely by the rattle of coins dropping into something metallic close at hand. When I asked him what on earth was going on, he managed to tell me that the phone was immediately adjacent to the vending machines which sold drinks and confectionery, at which point his words were obscured as another series of coins cascaded down a metal chute and more voices piped up nearby. In such circumstances there was very little we could say to one another – conversations of an intimate or complex nature were definitely out.

  ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get home,’ he shouted.

  I couldn’t bear to think that this might be our final conversation before the dam broke and our relationship drowned amid the chaos wrought of my lies. He was due to return on the sixth but now Alan had named the sixth as the day for our meeting – it could hardly have fallen out worse. Rob wasn’t likely to call from the field centre again, and even if he did that only resurrected the impossibility of trying to explain things over the phone.

  Would he stand by me when I turned out to be a liar and a cheat … deserter and deceiver of a previous spouse? If only I could cling to the wreckage a little longer; at least hold everything together long enough to tell him I was sorry. As my mind raced in circles, I still clung to the hope that everything would work itself out. Maybe I should just sit tight and do nothing?

  Just before leaving work I extracted all the relevant reports from Luke Robinson’s file and took them to the big photocopier which stood on the landing. No one was likely to question what I was doing, but even so I breathed a little easier when the task was accomplished without the appearance of any potential inquisitors. Back in my office, I replaced the originals in the file, which I then locked inside my desk drawer to guarantee its inaccessibility to any other self-appointed crusaders. I slid the copies I’d made into a blank manila envelope, which I carried openly out of the building, as coolly as if I purloined patient records every day of the week.

  Hopes regarding the ‘do nothing’ option were further dashed by the nightly news, which brought confirmation that the police were continuing their fruitless investigation of Alan’s garden. A brief flicker of excitement had run through the waiting media encampment a couple of days earlier when rumours of a find had reached them, but it soon died down again with the confirmation that the bones unearthed in Alan’s flower beds belonged to a small animal – no doubt the remains of some long-forgotten pet buried there by previous occupants.

  With no other discoveries in the garden and no fresh leads on Alan’s whereabouts, the story had descended into that middle section of also-ran items which come before the silly story at the end: the one about the dog who has been skateboarding along a seaside promenade, or the batty old bloke who intends to push a doll’s pram around Europe for charity. The always leave ’em laughing principle, I supposed, although I never felt much like laughing at the end of the bulletins myself.

  The realization that I had to go through with meeting Alan the next day induced a similar state of disbelief to that which I had experienced when I originally left him. The same air of unreality overshadowed my preparations, which on one level seemed no more than playing a game, until having put one foot inexorably in front of the other, you find that the moment has come for the step from which there is no drawing back.

  And what about Rob? I couldn’t just go off without saying a word. The obvious solution was to leave a message at his cottage for him to find on his return. He had given me his spare front door key, so it would be easy enough for me to let myself in and leave a note for him – which was all very well, except for the fact that I had no idea what to write. I was determined to tell Rob the whole truth. I owed it to him to tell him the truth because love without complete honesty is no sort of love at all. At the same time if there was one thing I was sure about, it was the need to sit down with Rob and explain everything face-to-face – no letter or note was going to suffice – but with no hope of seeing him until after my rendezvous with Alan, there seemed little choice but to formulate some kind of interim message which accounted for my sudden absence.

  The dead aunt story had been good enough for my colleagues, but Rob was going to know at once that the dead aunt was a phoney. I tried to think of something that was roughly comparable which did not involve yet more lies. I toyed with telling him that I had to go and sort out some ‘family problems’. This had the attraction of being more than partly true, since Alan and I were, technically at least, still ‘family’, but it would surely puzzle Rob, who until now had thought me singularly bereft of family to have any problems which needed sorting out. There was also the risk that he could easily bump into someone who had bought into the dead aunt story, at which point he might blurt out, unthinking, that I didn’t have any aunts to bury, leaving me with a lot of explaining to do on my return to work. The last thing I needed just now was problems for taking time off under false pretences. (Oh, really? What was one more misdemeanour on a very long list?) Whichever way I looked at it, the hole I had been steadily excavating for myself these past few years had turned into a bottomless pit.

  In the midst of all this, one tiny rainbow shone on the far distant horizon, for a meeting with Alan opened up new possibilities. If Alan agreed to a divorce that would free me to marry again: I could revert to my single name, or maybe even change my name officially to Susan McCarthy. I could be a legitimate person again. There must be ways of doing these things and although I didn’t know what was entailed, if Rob was on my side I might at least be brave enough to ask the right questions.

  I was getting quite carried away with this hazy, optimistic future in which ever
ything was straightened out following the rendezvous at our Last Port of Call, when I abruptly remembered all the other sink holes that littered the path ahead. Better try to focus on one step at a time, which meant formulating the message for Rob to find when he got home. I made numerous false starts, covering sheaves of paper in hopeless drafts as I discovered that the more I tried to say, the more I needed to say, in order to explain what I had said already. I eventually opted for brevity. The final version was not particularly satisfactory, but it was the best I could do.

  Dear Rob,

  I have to go away on a very private matter, but I promise I will explain everything as soon I see you again. I have told everyone at work that one of my aunts has died and I have to go and sort things out. Please don’t let anyone know that this isn’t true.

  I love you.

  Sue

  I wrote out a fair copy, then drove to his cottage with the note lying beside me on the passenger seat. The sky was tinged with sunset pinks and golds, and the birds were offering up a hymn to the beauty of the English countryside. As I walked up his garden path not a vehicle was audible, not a sound betrayed the century as the twentieth.

  I had hardly ever been inside Rob’s cottage when he wasn’t there, and I let myself in rather hesitantly, stepping quietly as though to avoid waking sleepers. The sun had been shining steadily all day, warming the sitting room, drawing out the smells of dust and books accentuating some lingering scent of aromatic candles, which reminded me of a church in which the incense of many services still lingers long after the congregation has gone. I placed the note where he couldn’t miss it, on the pine table in the centre of the living room atop a small pile of post, which I had picked up and carried in from the doormat.