High Tide

by Veronica Henry

  He was already wasting too much time and energy thinking about it.

  With a flick of his thumb, Nathan deleted her text.

  And with it went her number. He had enough problems without making more of a fool of himself.

  17

  Kate stood in the middle of the kitchen. She was usually a strategic and orderly sort of person, who started every task with a plan, but today she didn’t have a clue where to begin.

  She’d put off the job long enough already, by having breakfast out and then going to buy things she didn’t really need. She didn’t have long. A week was the most she could get away with, to get it ready for whomever she sold it to. It would need to be empty and clean, with all the utility bills paid or suspended – although she would have to keep the electricity on, and the Aga on low over the winter.

  She needed someone to keep an eye on it. Maybe Debbie, she thought. She probably wouldn’t mind popping in once a week. Freshen the place up if there were viewings. She would pay her, of course. She had no doubt the money would come in handy. All those mouths to feed. Kate couldn’t imagine how much it must cost.

  She opened a kitchen drawer and immediately her heart sank as she looked at a tangled mess of wooden spoons, corkscrews, knives and chopsticks all tangled up with elastic bands and bottle tops. She had been telling herself that it was going to be an easy job, that her parents weren’t hoarders. Nevertheless, they had accumulated. The drawer was bursting, and no doubt there would be more drawers, and cupboards, and shelves, and the shed, and the attic …

  She could feel panic set in. She had no idea what to do, or how to establish order.

  One room at a time, she told herself. Focus. Kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, bathroom. She would start on her own bedroom. It would be easy for her to make decisions about her own stuff. She was pretty certain there wasn’t much she would want to keep. Once she had one room done, and could shut the door and tick it off, she would feel ahead of the game.

  One hour later she was sitting on the floor in front of her dressing table. She had only been through three drawers. She had thrown a few items into a black bin liner – old make-up, receipts, broken earrings, an old roll of Sellotape, an empty bottle of talc. Next to her was a pile of letters and cards she was still reading her way through. Each one brought a memory shooting back. Long hidden, the memories were suddenly as clear as if they had happened only yesterday. A forgotten argument, a birthday, an arrangement. There were photos, too, of another Kate, rounder of face, her hair five shades darker, her brows heavy and untouched, floating about in unstructured clothes that put at least half a stone on her, but she hadn’t worried in those days.

  She didn’t want to throw any of it away. It was her history. Fragments and snippets of her life she’d tucked away in a corner of her mind. If she jettisoned it, part of her would go with it. They were aides memoires. And she wanted to remember that other person, the old Kate. Who seemed softer. More rounded. Happier?

  Had she been happier?

  She hadn’t thought so at the time, of course. Teenage torment and the agony of being in your early twenties, when you suddenly realised that your future was up to you, brought their own pressures and stopped you appreciating what you had. Now, looking back, she thought she had been truer to herself in those days. She wasn’t so sure she felt like the real Kate Jackson any more. It was only looking at the photos and reading the minutiae of her life that made her realise how far away she was from her true self.

  Now, she was a construct. A carefully styled creation who did and said exactly what she ought, at work, in her social life and in her love life – not that she had much time for the latter. When had she lost her own voice? It wasn’t that she didn’t have opinions; it was that she only had the opinions she needed to have in the circles she moved in. Opinions which were totally irrelevant in Pennfleet. Who here cared about the best new club or restaurant in Manhattan, or who did the best blow dry, or which was the most efficient cab service?

  She might be a big noise in her own world, but her clout didn’t travel. And there were hundreds of other girls like her in New York: smart, well dressed, well connected, upwardly mobile. They were all after the same jobs, the same men, and the same apartments. They wore the same clothes and had the same hair-dos. Sitting amongst the detritus of her past, Kate realised she had become a clone. Putting that dress on for the funeral had been like slipping back into her own skin.

  She shook herself out of her reverie. She was never going to get the job done if she drifted off into self-indulgent navel-gazing. Maybe the personal stuff was holding her up.

  In a cupboard, she found piles of her old school books. She steeled herself. They were of no use: ancient drawings of oxbow lakes and pages of quadratic equations. Anyway, they were almost indecipherable, the covers faded orange and red and green. Any knowledge she needed now was either in her head or available on the internet at the touch of a button. She slid them into the bin bag. They landed with a thump at the bottom, more than ten years of education. She felt a sense of achievement when she saw the space on the shelf. She was starting to make progress.

  From her wardrobe, she saved a couple of cuddly jumpers, the velvet dress, a red silk skirt shot through with silver thread and her old Paddington duffle coat. The rest she put into the washing machine with a load of fabric conditioner. She would dry it over the Aga and fold it all neatly, to take to the charity shop.

  She put all the letters and photos in a box, to sort through at the kitchen table with a glass of wine.

  Then she looked at her books, and her heart sank again. How could she get rid of them? Her complete set of Famous Five adventures? Her Daphne du Maurier collection? The Jilly Coopers? She ran her fingers along the spines, and she could feel the words inside, the characters, their escapades – the escapades she had felt a part of.

  It would be crazy to have them shipped to New York. There was no room, amidst the few carefully selected New York Times bestsellers. These battered and faded volumes would have no place in her magazine-perfect living space. Yet these books had contributed far more to who she was than anything she read now. They had given her infinite pleasure. She put out a hand and stopped. If she pulled one out she would be lost for the rest of the day.

  She would leave the decision for now. Maybe she could cherry pick? But how could you choose between The Island of Adventure and Rebecca? Or Frenchman’s Creek and Riders? She decided she would go and sort through the kitchen. The paraphernalia in there would be less emotive. She could be hard-nosed about a cheese grater or a can-opener.

  Of course, the kitchen wasn’t that easy either. It was even more a part of her past than her bedroom, because she had shared everything in it with her parents. Kate found it eviscerating, sifting through all the long-forgotten memories. It wasn’t the big things; it was the little ones. Her mother’s pie funnel – the shiny blackbird with the yellow beak that had always peeped out from the middle of the pastry. Karen could taste the pastry now, crumbly and buttery against the sharp tang of apple. Although she never baked, she slipped the funnel in her bag to take home. It seemed to represent all the things she wanted to remember from her childhood.

  She felt exhausted. It was only five o’clock, but she honestly didn’t think she could carry on. What could she do instead? She didn’t know anyone to go out for a drink with – Debbie might, she supposed, but she had already taken up enough of her time. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the living room on her own, watching television. It was horrible. Half of her wanted to flee. The other half never wanted to leave. She had never felt so conflicted in her life. Maybe she should just go to bed. She could take two pills – sleep round the clock. She’d feel better the next morning. She was alarmed to find the temptation was greater than she would have thought possible. Lovely, lovely dream-free oblivion.

  Then she chastised herself. The answer didn’t lie in knocking herself out. When had she started thinking that was a solution? Had it becom
e a habit? Her way of running away from things she didn’t like? Shocked, she picked up her mother’s handbag, where it was hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. She held it in her hands. It was beige, with a long strap, bulging and scuffed. A market purchase, not even leather, bought entirely for its practicality. She’d had it for as long as Kate could remember. One Christmas, she had given her mother one of the bags that had been left over from a launch. Each guest had received one: a suede hobo bag, fluid and soft, in pale grey. It was still in its special linen handbag bag. It wasn’t that her mother hadn’t appreciated it – she had – but she was terrified of it.

  ‘Just use it, Mum,’ insisted Kate. ‘It’s designed to be used, and thrown around, and filled up with stuff. You don’t have to treat it like china.’

  Joy had stroked the suede in wonder. ‘It’s absolutely beautiful, darling. Thank you so much.’

  But the bag had never seen the light of day. And Joy had continued to lug around this abomination that offended all Kate’s sensibilities. The stitching on the strap was unravelled. The zip had long stuck. If anything was destined for the bin, it was this. Yet Kate knew she wouldn’t be able to throw it away. Inside it was Joy’s life.

  She opened it wide.

  Her purse, of course – this had been another present from Kate, but one Joy had felt she could cope with. It was misshapen and bulging with change. Two ten-pound notes and a fiver. Her debit card – Joy would never have a credit card; she just wouldn’t see the point. And a clutch of receipts.

  A cellophane packet of Kleenex and a half-eaten tube of Soothers – she must have had a cold recently. A tiny diary, its pages tissue thin: Kate put it to one side to look at later. A see-through rain-hood. A pink plastic comb, several of the tines missing. A lipstick with quarter of an inch of indeterminate pink. Three charity Biros. A mini torch. A packet of peanuts, of the type that hung behind pub bars on a cardboard holder. A spare set of house keys on a knitted frog key ring – she tried to imagine her mother buying it, but she couldn’t. Had it been a present? A secret Santa from the nursing staff?

  A bottle of perfume. Kate took off the lid and inhaled the spirit of her mother – a dense, powdery scent that made every nerve in her body tingle with nostalgia. It was as if she was in the room with her.

  Kate put the bottle down on the kitchen table sharply. She wasn’t sure if she could carry on. Memories and hopelessness and grief and love and regret all tumbled about inside her on spin cycle. Her heart felt sick; her stomach felt hollow. She wanted to walk out of the door and walk back in again to find her mother filling the kettle, the wireless on, a packet of Jaffa Cakes on the table, spuds waiting to be peeled in the sink, a casserole bubbling away in the Aga. Her dad ambling through in his overalls, hair wild.

  She drew the curtains to shut out the night and turned on the lamp, because the strip light was too bright. Then she dropped everything except the purse, the spare house keys and the diary into the bin. She ran her hand around the lining, just to check there wasn’t anything precious hiding in the folds.

  Her fingers touched on the edge of a piece of paper. She tugged on it, and it slid out from where it had worked itself inside a hole. It was a piece of notepaper folded into three, the creases almost worn through, so often had it been opened and re-folded. It was pale-blue Basildon Bond, and the writing on it was a slanting script, the hand of someone educated and confident.

  Straight away she had the feeling this was something she wasn’t supposed to read. Without deciphering a single word, she could tell this was an intensely personal missive: for Joy’s eyes only. She should throw it straight in the bin along with everything else. What right had she to delve into her mother’s private life now she was dead? There was nothing to be gained.

  She held it in the tips of her fingers. She breathed in and out while she thought. People in her world never wrote letters. She didn’t think she could remember the last time she had got one. Nowadays, people only really wrote letters when they had something very important to say. Something that could not be spoken. And the fact her mother had kept it, and referred to it over and over again, and carried it around in her handbag meant it must be meaningful. And it wasn’t from her father: his writing had been almost illegible, black Biro sliding all over the place with malformed letters, even before his mind had started to go.

  She sat at the kitchen table for some time, the letter in front of her. In the end, she decided no harm could come from her reading it. She smoothed it open: the paper was soft through over-handling.

  My dear Joy,

  Writing this letter is either the most brave or most cowardly thing I have ever done. I will never know. All I do know is that I have no choice if I am to live with myself. Please know that I did not reach this decision lightly. It has taken weeks of deliberation and sleepless nights. I have searched desperately for an answer that did not involve heartache, but it seems that is not an option.

  My feelings for you have grown to such a magnitude that I do not feel able to see you any longer. I cannot pretend that you are not all I think about. And as long as P is still alive, this is wrong. I cannot betray her, even though she is no longer the person I married, but a shadow, a ghost.

  Today she spoke to me, and it was as if that terrible disease had never happened. She asked me to pass the salt. She gave me a smile and held out her hand for the salt cellar, as she has done so many, many times over the years. My heart leapt into my mouth as my eyes met hers, and they twinkled at me – it was my P back again, and for a moment I had hope.

  Then she took the salt and sprinkled it all over her food until the cellar was empty. I sat and watched in hopeless despair. I couldn’t bring myself to stop her. In the end, I had to take the plate away before she began to eat, and replaced it with a fresh one.

  She is still my wife. I cannot betray her with another woman. It would not be fair on either of you. It would be a half-relationship, cursed from the beginning, unable to take a natural course or flourish. It would run on guilt, not love.

  And so, my Joy, I have to step away. I have valued our time together so much. I have valued your wisdom in helping me find ways to cope with this burden. I value the hope you have given me. Most of all, I value the laughter you have given me: there has been little to laugh about over the last few years, but you made me forget that, just for a moment.

  Who knows what the next years will bring? I dread it, but I must bear it. It will be a lonely journey, but it is my duty to care for the woman I love, the woman I married, even if she is no longer really there. I know you understand, because we have spoken about it so many times. And that is why I know you will understand my decision.

  I shall think of you often, dear Joy. Please don’t think me a coward. I am doing what I hope is the right thing.

  With all my love,

  R

  Kate put the letter down on the kitchen table.

  Somewhere, there was a man who loved her mother. A man who, reading between the lines, was married to a woman who suffered the same condition Kate’s father had. A man whose loyalty had been tested to its limits.

  A man who possibly didn’t know her mother was dead.

  There was no date on the letter. No address. No accompanying envelope with a helpful postmark. No way of telling how long it had been in her mother’s bag – days, weeks, years? And of all the initials for it to be signed with, R must be pretty common. Roger? Richard? Ralph?

  She wondered if her mother had ever replied to the letter. It must have meant a lot to her – it had clearly been read a hundred times. Had she sat at this very table and composed an answer? And if so, was it robust and reassuring? Or crushed and bitter? Kate assumed the former, because her mother had always been such a positive force, yet who knew how she might have felt underneath?

  Who was he? Where did he live? And what should she do?

  18

  Vanessa was stretched out on the sofa in the drawing room. Somehow going back to actual bed felt wrong. A bit sl
uttish. And she suspected that if she got back under the covers she wouldn’t get out again. She was drained from the emotion of the last twenty-four hours and all the tension, not to mention the surfeit of alcohol. So she wrapped herself up in a chenille throw, rested her head on a cushion and fell asleep within moments.

  She was awoken by a loud rapping, and realised she had been out cold for three hours. She jumped to her feet and ran to the front door, flinging it open.

  There she was. Her mother. Squirrel. In her uniform of jeans, loafers and cashmere cardigan, her ash-blonde hair in a smooth bob, pearls in her ears, her handbag hooked over one arm, a Waitrose carrier bag in the other.

  As soon as she saw her, Vanessa knew it was going to be all right. Squirrel would tell her how to feel and what to do. How to manage the rest of her life. She didn’t know what to say, though.

  ‘You didn’t need to bring anything,’ said Vanessa eventually, pointing to the carrier. ‘There’s heaps to eat here.’

  ‘I didn’t fancy eating leftover funeral food.’

  Squirrel looked at her daughter, dropped the bag and put her arms round her. Vanessa breathed in Caleche. The smell of her childhood. The last smell before she went to sleep, after Squirrel had kissed her goodnight.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Vanessa held on to her mother. ‘I think so. I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not feeling much at all.’

  ‘Come on.’ Squirrel scooped up her things and walked inside. ‘Tea by the fire. I know it’s not that cold yet, but there’s nothing that can’t be made better by a proper log fire.’

  Vanessa put some logs in the grate in the drawing room, along with some kindling, and set them alight, crossing her fingers. Spencer had been military about fire building. No one else had ever been allowed near it. But she had watched him so many times she thought she knew the rudiments, and soon the logs were blazing away. And Squirrel was right. The fire changed the atmosphere in the room completely, melting away the stiff formality of the drawing room and softening its harsh edges. Vanessa drew the curtains against the dusk, and brought in tea and shortbread.