The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Let me think about it for a week or two.’ Again, I tried to raise a smile between us. ‘There is one other possibility: I could pay someone to marry me. Or change my surname by Deed Poll? See, I do have options.’

  ‘Yes, Emily.’

  ‘Not Emily, Emmie. I told you. Emmie Mason.’

  We exchanged small, rueful smiles.

  You read all the time how people want to be famous. ‘I just want everyone to know my name,’ they say. ‘To walk into a room and for everyone to know who I am.’ They don’t care what it is that gets them attention, they just want the attention. ‘I’ll do anything,’ they say.

  And then they find it’s a different feeling from the one they expected. They never think it through, you see, they never consider that ‘who I am’ might be open to interpretation and that the number of people ready to accept the worst portrayal of you will far exceed the number willing to believe the best. The moral, the message, is always the same: be careful what you wish for.

  But I never wished for this and that’s the truth.

  I never asked for this.

  Chapter 22

  Tabby

  Though hours must have passed while she read, Tabby found Emmie exactly where she had left her, on the sofa, the room saved from darkness only by the dusk light entering through the glazed panel of the kitchen door. She switched on a lamp and approached uncertainly. As her gaze came to rest once more on Emmie’s face, she knew she could never think of her in the same way again.

  At last the cat was out of the bag – but she could never have imagined such a creature as had emerged.

  She lowered herself on to the seat beside Emmie, the laptop in her arms, document still open on the screen. ‘Oh, Emmie, this is such a sad story. I can’t believe you’ve been through this terrible situation. I think you’ve done incredibly well to survive it.’

  ‘I’ve tried,’ Emmie said, in a voice so small it was hardly audible.

  ‘I’m really sorry about your father. It’s so recent, you must still feel very raw.’ It seemed important to say this first. Somehow, in Emmie’s recent history, her bereavement had been classified as a secondary tragedy, but Tabby knew very well the complicated sadness the loss of a father caused in a daughter. At this stage – even now it was for Emmie only six months after the event – Tabby had still been crying herself to sleep at night. Had she had any idea that Emmie’s loss had been so fresh, she would have… She allowed the thought to sink before she could consider it properly. The truth was, she did not like to imagine what she would have done differently, whether she would have been capable of meeting the challenge of selfless compassion.

  She glanced through the door pane to the wall of the neighbour’s courtyard. If chatter filled the lanes outside she could not hear it; if there was ocean beyond she could not smell it. The house had never felt so sealed into itself as it did in that moment, and yet to Emmie it must have represented safety and freedom. ‘So this was why you came here,’ she said. ‘Like you say, you had no choice but to leave the country, so you used the name you joked about with your brother and you chose the part of France that he said he was going to take you.’ She was cautious about using Arthur’s name, not wishing to presume ownership of a figure so critical to Emmie’s past. ‘It must have felt unreal,’ she added, ‘to go from being the centre of attention like that to living underground like this.’ She’d laughed about Emmie behaving as if fleeing the Mafia; in fact, it had been the media, the flight quite real. ‘I see why you took the work you did: it’s so you never have to meet anyone. If you’d worked in a bar or a shop or something, you might have been recognised by English people on holiday.’ A connection struck her. ‘Those guys at the port that night, they must have realised who you were, mustn’t they? Especially dressed as you were, in the dress from the photo?’ How reckless that public display seemed now, entirely out of character for Emmie; she’d been lucky not to blow her own cover more disastrously. ‘Why did you dress like your old self, Emmie? Was it because you missed being you? Do you still miss it?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Emmie murmured. Though she looked Tabby’s way, her eyes were not focused. She had listened to Tabby’s deductions as if under hypnosis.

  ‘But the press haven’t tracked you down here, have they? The journalists who staked out your flat and the ones who followed you to your brother’s place?’ The clues continued to fall into place for Tabby as she spoke, leading her back through the months to the beginning: ‘Is that who you thought I was when I came? A reporter or some mad Emily Marr hater who’d broken into your house?’ Of all the houses on the island she could have chosen to break into, she had found the one in which someone was already hiding. ‘Had you thought you’d been discovered before? I can’t imagine what it’s felt like all this time; you must have felt like you could never lower your guard?’

  To all of these questions Emmie only nodded, her body growing limp before Tabby’s eyes. When the nodding stopped, she closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the sofa as if unable to support it with her own neck. It was not quite what Tabby had expected of the debriefing, especially in light of episodes such as the one the previous day – how ancient an occasion that seemed now – when they’d sat at the table with the folder before them, the atmosphere sparking with the tension between what was known and what was withheld. Perhaps, by releasing the whole story, Emmie had also surrendered the last of her energies. For Tabby, the opposite was the case: knowing the truth, being delivered from intrigue, it invigorated her, freed resources previously employed in darker contemplation.

  ‘Is that why you don’t have an internet connection? To stop yourself from reading all the hate stuff on the web? What about your phone, can’t they reach you on that?’ But Tabby remembered that, of course, Emmie’s phone was a French one. She must have given up her English one when she came here, eliminating any last ways in which she might be traced.

  ‘I just wanted to shut myself away from it all,’ Emmie said, her voice dreamy.

  ‘Of course you did.’ Had their positions been reversed, Tabby knew she would have spent every waking moment reading what people were saying about her, she would have become obsessed, maddened. What strength it must have taken for Emmie to turn from it, resist its pull. ‘What I don’t understand is how it caught on the way it did. It’s not like he was the Prime Minister or a movie star or someone really famous.’ But then she remembered the pictures she’d seen online, the handful in circulation: in each one Emmie had possessed an ethereal glamour that seized your eye and held it on her. It wasn’t easy to believe now, but the enervated woman slumped next to her had once been beautiful, and maybe in a slow summer for news that beauty, along with Arthur’s minor fame, were enough – that and the fact that it had led, however indirectly, to death. ‘It must have been one of those viral things that takes on a life of its own, d’you think? You know, a phenomenon, like those clips on YouTube that get ten million hits and then they report it on the news and the next day it’s up to fifty million.’

  ‘I only want Arthur to forgive me,’ Emmie said. ‘That’s all I ever wanted. Only he can bring me back.’ It was odd for Tabby to hear the phrases she’d just read on the computer file repeated aloud in this way, like a mantra. Losing him still feels brand-new to her, she realised. It still is. And with this came the first inkling of doubt that exposing the truth might not have been the best course of action.

  ‘What if he’s been trying to get in touch with you, Emmie? Do you at least have the same email account?’

  Emmie did not blink. ‘There’s been nothing.’

  ‘But have you actually checked? How?’ She had not been aware of Emmie using the internet bureau as she did, but perhaps she had done so secretly, better apprised of its opening hours.

  ‘Sometimes, in clients’ houses, I look up the password and use their computers.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Tabby said, almost as disarmed by the notion of Emmie as a breaker of M
oira’s rules as she was by the extraordinary recent history just unveiled. ‘And you’ve heard nothing from him?’

  ‘I have to accept that he doesn’t want me. It’s an absolute rejection.’

  ‘Oh, Emmie,’ Tabby said again, ‘I can sympathise with that.’ But what had once been a whole-hearted belief in their common ground had now been exposed once and for all as false. What she had had with Paul was not like the relationship Emmie had described in her story. She and Arthur had had some kind of rare passion, one of those one-in-a-million forms of human alchemy that had made him willing to risk his whole world for her. Married men were not supposed to be like that, they were supposed to be like Grégoire, happy to take what was offered, willing to walk away again when it was withdrawn. No hard feelings – or at least none to cause lasting damage. What had torn Arthur and Emily apart was probably the only thing in the world that could have: the death of his children. Maybe that was what Nina and her colleagues had responded to, not glamour or beauty, but something you couldn’t see, a kind of fatal charisma, something that had made Arthur chase her down the street, something that compelled those who didn’t have it to destroy it, before it diminished their own lives, their own loves. And yet it was doomed already, doomed in itself.

  ‘To have everyone reading about you like that – and some of it not even true! It must have been so frustrating to not be able to correct all the lies.’

  ‘It didn’t really feel like me,’ Emmie said, and Tabby remembered her description of the drawing of a wild animal made by someone who had never actually seen one.

  ‘Even the basic things they got wrong, didn’t they? They said you didn’t get good qualifications at school, as if you’re some sort of dunce, but look how well you write! And your French is perfect. It’s amazing you’ve become fluent so quickly, especially when you don’t have much chance to practise, keeping yourself to yourself the way you do. Maybe that’s what you should do next, Emmie, when you go back? Go to college and study languages. You must be some kind of natural linguist.’

  But Emmie was not engaged by Tabby’s enthusiasm, every visible part of her depleted, wasted. Noticing the time – close to ten-thirty – Tabby admitted defeat. ‘Let’s talk more tomorrow, shall we? We should both get some sleep.’

  ‘Yes.’ Emmie closed the laptop and rose to her feet. Having her talisman back in her possession seemed to power the movements required to get her upstairs to bed. Tabby followed, weary in body if not brain.

  Only as she undressed for bed herself did it strike her that Emmie had stated in her story that she had written it while staying at her brother’s house in Newbury, before she came to France. She’d poured it from her in a matter of two or three weeks. What, then, had she been doing during the hours she’d spent on it here? Refining the text, night after night, adding little details, or simply re-reading what she had written months ago? Tabby was not sure how helpful, how healthy, either of those activities could be for a woman whose declared aim was to forget.

  I only want Arthur to forgive me… But he had not and it tormented Emmie, haunted her. Would it always?

  Tabby struggled to fall asleep that night and, when she finally did, there was precious little rest in it.

  The next day was Saturday, her rue du Rempart day. Usually, she put on music as soon as she arrived at the house, to bring energy to reluctant muscles and help the hours pass, but this time she began her work in silence, Emmie’s story filling her mind to the exclusion of all else. To think what the poor woman had lived through! Not only the media persecution that drove her from her home, but also the anguish of knowing that the man she loved had suffered – was still suffering – the very worst pain that life could subject him to, and that she could do nothing to alleviate it. And for her father to have passed away so soon afterwards, it was the height of cruelty. Tabby could not bear it for Emmie, and as she worked she surrendered to a violent fit of tears.

  Clear though she was that Emmie’s losses far exceeded her own, it was impossible not to identify closely with certain elements of the story. She was, after all, sleeping with Grégoire, an older, married man, if not a father figure to her then certainly a father, and to two boys, just like Arthur. And just as Emmie had, she had chosen to take a self-regarding, short-term position and ignore the existence of those sons. ‘Are you disappointed you didn’t have to work harder to get me?’ Emmie had asked Arthur, while she herself had been no more than a foregone conclusion, as hard to get as half a dozen oysters at the quayside. She’d even deluded herself that she was not to be deluded: it was pathetic.

  Only now was the true criminality of her behaviour clear to her. Her adulterous affair was far less forgivable than Emmie’s for its very casualness. She did not love Grégoire, but was using him to distract her from the pain another man had caused her and to assuage her loneliness. How often she had thought to herself that they were all consenting adults, that she deserved a little pleasure as much as the next woman, and yet there was nothing ‘consenting’ about Noémie’s position, was there?

  Nina Meeks should take a look at my set-up, she thought. She was combining three clichés in one: a rebounding broken heart, a holiday romance and an affair with a married man. She was far closer than her poor, hunted friend to the poster girl for feckless immorality Emmie had been cracked up to be.

  Such were her thoughts when Grégoire rang at the door that she wished she’d thought to cancel him. Belated feelings of guilt aside, her connection with him seemed cheap and dirty now that she had shared Emmie’s descriptions of how love could feel. If she hadn’t had the willpower to resist starting up with him again, then she should at least have had the decency to end it before now. In he came, heading straight for the bedroom. She was conscious of rushing through the sex to get it finished, out of the way so they could have a few more minutes’ conversation. But it was far too late to hope to build a meeting of minds. Lying on the mattress, she explained to him the basics of the scandal, careful not to make any link to Emmie, and asked if the sensation had ever reached France.

  ‘I have not heard about this news,’ he said, examining his fingernails. Any minute, he would persuade Tabby to have a cigarette with him, even though its pleasures would not be worth the feat of room-airing required after he’d gone. His ironic detachment was the very opposite of what Emmie had described of her lover: Arthur’s earnest intensity, the rapt way he had looked at her, listened to her, desired her. ‘This is very English to me,’ he added. ‘The way the newspapers are there.’

  ‘What,’ Tabby demanded, ‘hounding a woman from her home, from her country, maybe, when she’s done nothing wrong? Organising a witch-hunt?’

  ‘Believing that sex is such a bad thing,’ he corrected. ‘When it is always good.’ He began to tell Tabby about the French privacy laws, the understanding that what a man did in his personal life was his own affair. Tabby found she was growing tired of hearing how sophisticated the French were, how much more pragmatic than the English in their sexual politics. How, even if someone were not indulging in extramarital adventure, he or she would accept the need for it in a spouse and, in making that acceptance known, waive any rights to express pain.

  Well, she did not believe a word of it. Not when there were stories like Emmie’s in the world. And just because you played the game of concealing pain it did not mean you did not feel it. For the first time since their liaisons had begun she found herself getting angry with Grégoire, found herself itching to get back to her cleaning.

  It took her by surprise, the knowledge that being in possession of the truth about Emmie was going to be enough, an end in itself. Her burning curiosity had been slaked, the discovery had been made, and that was that: she had no interest in exposing Emmie’s hiding place or making reference to her history to anyone in the outside world. And even in their private one she was soon satisfied: after one of two more discussions, neither of which yielded any more than she already knew from the compelling written account, she had used up all
her questions. She had only a renewed admiration for Emmie, a determination to support her.

  Any light this cautionary tale might have shed on her own relationship history was a fringe benefit worth taking. I’m thinking about Paul much less, she decided. I’m thinking that one day I might see how events between us occurred as they did. I’m thinking there may have been issues I laid at his door that I should have taken elsewhere. Personal growth, indeed! She was free now to get on with the remains of the summer and with making plans for the rest of her life.

  The problem was that she had not considered how the urging of a confession would affect Emmie.

  At first she put the change of atmosphere in the house down to the one outside. It was by now early August, the height of the season, torrid and oppressive, the village overpopulated to the extent that moving among pedestrian traffic on the shopping lanes was a grievous experience. In their narrow alley, the air swarmed with tiny insects, the dust rising and falling in slow motion, the hollyhocks drying on their feet. The sun had at last warmed the terracotta tiles of the roof, the heat they’d till now been able to escape by stepping between cold thick stone walls suddenly following the women indoors, slowing them as they moved. In her sleep, Tabby dreamed of a house on stilts, right out on the water with the gulls where there was still a breeze to be caught.