‘And I came to your work.’
‘For the plate? I thought your wife sent you?’
‘I offered to go. I came another time as well, after the plate business, but you were on your lunch break.’
‘Oh? I didn’t get any message.’ I thought of Charlotte – or perhaps it had been Aislene – with rose-tinted fondness, knowing she couldn’t have been aware of the magnitude of her oversight.
‘I didn’t leave one,’ Arthur said. ‘I hoped I might see you in the street some time – which I did.’
‘You were happy just to leave it to chance like this?’ The thought that it might so easily not have happened was appalling to me.
‘It just seemed inconceivable that it wouldn’t,’ Arthur said.
I absorbed all of this. He had a very easy way of switching his tone between wry and serious that made it hard to judge which to respond to. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t exactly call that hot pursuit. Are you disappointed you didn’t have to work harder to get me?’
He smiled, the near corner of his mouth curving with feminine prettiness. ‘I’m not remotely disappointed. Quite the opposite.’
I pressed myself closer still, arms around his neck, fingers in his hair. As our body heat faded a little, I shivered, pulled a throw over us. The scratchiness of its fibres seemed to advertise the cheapness of me. ‘Do you have to go home? Will your wife phone from Sussex?’
‘No, we spoke earlier. She won’t call again, she knows I’m out tonight.’ He paused. ‘Besides, she’s working very hard at not giving in to her suspicions.’
‘Suspicions about me?’ I was alarmed enough by this to disentangle myself from him and sit upright.
‘No, not you. Any woman. All women. I haven’t exactly been a saint over the years.’
There was not a trace of arrogance in this admission, more a general air of melancholy regret. (I would learn that Arthur was not one of those people who claimed to regret nothing. That was a philosophy he and I shared, and one that went against prevailing fashion: you were allowed to have regrets about your life, it was conceited not to have them.) His remark made sense of those snippets I’d overheard between Sylvie and Nina in the café – ‘It’s almost two years now, isn’t it? That’s pretty good for him’ – and could hardly have come as a surprise in any case, for however special I felt that evening I had presumably been attracted by the same sexual charisma other women had, including Sylvie herself. Weren’t we all responding to the fabled godliness of surgeons? Offering ourselves on a plate one after the other – a perk of the job, perhaps, as it must be for any other high-ranking male, from captain of industry to household-name actor.
‘In that case, maybe she shouldn’t be working on not giving in to her suspicions,’ I said. ‘Maybe she should be acting on them?’
Amused by this – ‘Whose side are you on, Emily Marr?’ – he pulled me back to him and began moving his hands over my skin again. I could feel a sense of wonderment in his fingers that matched my own response exactly. It was as if possession of each other demanded proof in the form of constant physical contact, neither of us a shade less intense, less avid, than the other.
‘Your side,’ I told him. ‘I’m on your side. But you know that already, don’t you?’
He kissed me over and over, and then drew back again, regarding me with unambiguous delight, as if I’d been lost and recovered, a little miracle. No one had looked at me like that since… since childhood. ‘You are very beautiful, Emily, even more than I thought. You could have been a model.’
I pulled a face. ‘No chance. I’m too short, anyway.’
‘Really? I think of you as tall.’
I reached a hand for one of my shoes, discarded on the floor by the sofa. ‘Heels. Very high heels.’
He took it from me and examined it. ‘I like the very high heels.’
I held up my bra next. ‘Also, too curvy. I’m fat by fashion standards.’
‘I like the fat-by-fashion-standards as well.’ He groaned. ‘I like everything about you, as you can probably tell. I can’t stop touching you, Emily…’
We made love again – there was more of that wild euphoria I’d never felt before – and we drank and dozed and murmured ourselves awake, resuming our besotted talk. I wish I could remember every line, because it was the most entrancing conversation of my life, but most has faded now. This, I won’t forget: ‘You have something special about you, Emily. Something I’ve never seen before.’ And he was intent on defining it there and then. ‘You’re too innocent for your age, that’s what it is.’ Even now I don’t know if he meant my age in years or the time we lived in.
My head was filled with his compliments that night, with his star-maker’s favour, his connoisseur’s desire. But the next morning – he had left as I slept, when it was still dark – I warned myself not to expect anything more. It had been exactly the night of joyful spontaneity I had craved, a deficiency replenished, a self-contained piece of madness that I should treat as a catalyst for pulling my life into better shape. When Matt came home the following day I would tell him that when the first six months were up on our lease and the break clause active we would be parting ways. I would draw up a financial plan for myself and follow it, even if it meant starvation. I would begin looking for a retail management position, something better-paid than my current job that would allow me to keep the flat on my own or else rent a smaller place.
No, Arthur Woodhall was an important man who had decided he wanted me for the night, and by his own admission, he’d had many such adventures. And he was, after all, married. That could be ignored, if not excused, for one night, but certainly not indefinitely. I was not that sort of girl. It was going to have to be enough to be the woman he pursued down the street one Saturday night in winter, the girl he thought too innocent for her age.
Of course, I didn’t know then that Arthur would not be willing to rationalise or subdue his instincts as I was mine; that he was not thinking in terms of self-contained pleasure or short-term conquests. I did not know that he would return that evening and we would continue headlong, never once closing an encounter without the promise of a next.
I did not know then that I was different from the others, different from his wife too, and it was a difference that would come to define me.
Chapter 7
Tabby
Having enjoyed the easy pace of the village in low season, Tabby was dismayed, if not surprised, when the place transformed itself in June into a seaside destination on which the whole world apparently demanded a foothold. Vehicles queued for the car park that had until then been a wasteland at the edge of the village, tour groups clogged the ramparts, cyclists passed in wobbling shoals, and tourists stood ten-deep at the ice-cream shop on the quayside. Suddenly there were oyster cabanas and waffle stands, donkey rides and vintage carousels. All the shops pulled racks of their wares into the streets, so that when you stood at the top of rue de Sully or rue Jean Jaurès you looked down on an open-air market of island apparel: silver sandals and turquoise sarongs, waxed jackets and sailor tops, scarves and pashminas, long pieces of soft cotton knotted in the middle, the two ends billowing in the breeze.
Tabby had not bought a new item of clothing for months and could not imagine being in a position to spend eighty euros on a beach kaftan or forty on a sunhat. Such sums were beyond the reach of someone starting again from scratch. The weekly budget structure she had devised for herself was simple: before all else, she had to earn fifty euros to give Emmie towards the rent, and then enough for food and bus travel; any surplus was saved towards her goal of the several hundred euros needed to travel back to England – preferably London – where she’d be able to find better-paid employment and tackle her overdraft. It was unthinkable to splurge thirty euros on one of the pale-hued North African foutas that were on sale everywhere. Still, she had to admit it was lovely, when passing, to touch the fabrics, to let the softness of washed linen fall over her hand and wrist.
Emmi
e appeared oblivious to the sudden influx of tourists, her sphere of influence contained in that tucked-away house, forays for work or food rarely yielding more than the most general observations. ‘I hope there won’t be too many English people,’ was all she said when Tabby reported her latest eavesdropping from the breakfast queue at the boulangerie (one euro a day for the still-warm baguette that she and Emmie took it in turns to buy).
‘I hear quite a few now,’ Tabby told her. ‘It must be the half-term holidays, maybe?’
‘I thought it was mainly French who came here,’ Emmie said, frowning.
At first Tabby had hoped there might be potential among the holidaying Brits for the kind of temporary friendships she’d enjoyed on her travels, but she quickly saw that these were not the type to be interested in her: affluent families with an air of self-satisfaction, parents calling out to one another as they rode their bikes across the cobbles, telling each other how glorious the place was as they took a terrace table by the water and ordered their children feasts of moules et frites. Sometimes whole families would dress in the striped mariner tops available in every shop in every size, and in the vintage tennis shoes that came in sun-bleached greys and pinks.
‘I’ve come across the type,’ Emmie said when Tabby described them. ‘I used to think that’s what I wanted for myself.’
Surprised by this exceptional offering of personal information, Tabby was slow to draw her questions. ‘What, you mean a husband and family? Money? Nice holidays?’
‘I don’t know what it was, really. Just… belonging.’ She spoke in the wondering tone Tabby knew preceded a withdrawal into her own thoughts, and Tabby used the silence to enjoy a brief reverie of Paul, of the two of them riding about the island together and calling out to each other in that enviably self-confident way, debating where to stop for a plate of oysters (not a food she had ever tried, admittedly). She was confident that Emmie was doing the same, the only difference between their fantasies the face of their respective former lovers.
‘Maybe you belong here,’ she told Emmie kindly.
‘Maybe,’ Emmie said.
The season for weekly lets now began in earnest and the two women had their first experience of changeover day. Though generally a Saturday, this was also scheduled in certain properties for Sundays or Fridays, which meant more work for both of them, more cash for Tabby’s savings fund. From now on she would associate weekends with the clatter of luggage on cobbles, a sound effect that began early in the morning and continued till late.
The work was strenuous and varied little. Moira had issued a schedule for the day to ensure that everything was completed in the correct order. Before all other tasks, beds had to be stripped and linen and towels put in the washer-dryer, which meant the beds could be made with the fresh linen at the end of the session. In between, the rest of the house had to be restored to the spotless, sweet-smelling standards required by the incoming holidaymakers, many of whom had paid thousands of euros for a single week’s rental. At first Tabby ran into unpaid overtime to get everything done, on one occasion still mopping the kitchen floor of her Saturday house on the rue du Rempart when the new arrivals’ taxi pulled up outside, but her efficiency soon improved enough to allow breaks. These she spent sitting in the garden or courtyard, admiring the ultramarine glow of the sky, absorbing the damp aroma of the sea in the air. Regarding the houses with a different eye, she would imagine how it felt to come to Ré as a holidaymaker, expectant only of pleasure. Did anyone ever consider who had lain on the mattresses the night before, drunk coffee from the mugs, wiped feet on the doormat, thumbed the folder of restaurant recommendations? Sometimes she thought she caught a scent, an energy, left in the house from the departed; it was her job to extinguish it, but she liked it, that heat of other lives lived.
Of course, some clients only needed their house preparing for themselves. They did not offer it to paying strangers, it was a second home, une maison secondaire. The mere notion of this staggered Tabby: houses that were fully furnished and stocked, right down to dustpan and brush and aerosols of stain remover, tennis racquets and pétanque sets. So many people with a reserve set of equipment for life, when she did not yet have the original one.
She did not permit herself to think about the flat she’d rented with Paul in the years before their trip; that could only lead to the shameful admission that she would swap France, the salty Atlantic air, this second chance she’d been so serendipitously awarded, swap it all in a heartbeat to return to that small flat in Guildford she’d shared with him. Back when he still loved her.
For the larger properties, Moira needed two girls, and it was not long before Tabby was asked to join Emmie on a job. She was pleased by the mid-week bonus: not only was it unexpected extra earnings, but there’d also be some company – cleaning involved a solitary confinement she did not always relish. The disadvantage was that, with only one bike between them, Tabby would have to get the bus, which was busy now with tourists village-hopping or travelling to and from La Rochelle. She had started to wonder if it might be an idea to keep her eye out for an old bike being sold off by one of the hire outlets, and it surprised her that she was thinking in such terms, that she might intend staying on the island long enough for the investment to be worthwhile.
But, examining the address details Moira had texted her, Emmie said, ‘This place is much too far to cycle, we’ll both have to get the bus. It’s right up near Trousse-Chemise.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Miles away, past Les Portes. I’ll check the timetable.’
Tabby was happy to let her take charge.
Walking together to the bus stop, she called out greetings to the shop and restaurant staff she recognised. She enjoyed the exchange of civilities that was customary here. Emmie, however, walked on without saying a word, waiting for Tabby at the corner with her eyes cast to the ground. She’d lived here two months now and yet gave little impression of wanting to be anything but an outsider in the village.
‘Do you think you’ll get any visitors here this summer?’ Tabby asked her as they reached the bus stop.
‘Visitors? The place is packed with tourists.’
‘No,’ said Tabby, suspecting Emmie had deliberately misunderstood. ‘I mean will you get visitors? Family and friends from England?’ Then it occurred to her that if visitors came she could lose her bed and so she shifted the emphasis. ‘Where do your parents live back home?’
Emmie looked towards her but not quite at her before replying, ‘Nowhere. They’re both dead.’
Tabby was taken aback. ‘Oh, Emmie, I’m so sorry. I had no idea we have that in common. I mean my father, of course.’ She wanted to take Emmie’s arm or even give her a hug, but Emmie was not the tactile sort and she thought better of it. ‘Is that the trauma you mentioned before, your parents passing away? Did it happen recently?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Emmie said.
‘Of course. I understand.’
They waited in silence. As personal details went this was an important one for Emmie to have omitted to mention; it was also one on which Tabby was qualified to advise, were Emmie ever to decide she wanted to confide in her. Her father had died following a stroke three years earlier and she had cried herself to sleep for months afterwards, struggling for over a year with insomnia and anxiety. Gradually she had learned to detach herself from the sense of loss, to hold at bay the memory of hearing the news from her mother that Tuesday afternoon and being engulfed almost instantly by a darkness she grew so used to that she’d been astonished when it finally lifted, unveiling once more the sensory world she had forgotten was there.
She rarely thought now of the faces at the funeral, the ones that had once haunted her: her stepsisters Layla and Jessica, devastation so raw on their young faces she feared it might permanently disfigure their still-forming features; and Susie’s, too, a more mutinous grief, the type that was quick to transform into blame. At first, Tabby had felt relief that she had
not seen her father in the days before his death and so could not be held responsible for the stroke in some way, but this was quickly replaced with a terrible regret that she had not been there. Either way, Susie didn’t want to share him in death any more than she had wanted to in life. Tabby felt the same. After the funeral she had made no attempt to see Susie or the girls again.
Her mother and Steve had been there, of course. She’d avoided his eye, though it had been difficult, her glance attracted to her former tormentor like a ghoul’s at the scene of a road accident. How grateful she’d been to be leaving with Paul, to be no longer under her mother’s jurisdiction or Steve’s sordid surveillance.
She was jolted by the memory of confiding all of this to Emmie in their very first conversation, of telling her, ‘He didn’t suffer. It wasn’t one of those situations where he hung on in agony for years, not being able to do anything for himself. Everyone said it was better the way it was, quite merciful, really.’ She had not heard the word ‘merciful’ much before in her life and it had never come up since, except, just possibly, that very night, the night Emmie took her in. ‘Any one of us could be struck down at any moment. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true.’
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 10
