by Phil Hogan
‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘Just lunch. On this lovely spring day.’
In view of our history it probably wasn’t the best idea, but the truth was I felt the need for camouflage. A lone diner in a restaurant could attract a wandering eye. People were far less interested in couples. Not very gallant, I know, but effective, I hoped.
When we were standing in the car park of the Two Swans, her eyes widened at the thatched roof and picturesque setting. ‘Gosh, how lovely,’ she said. ‘We are pushing the boat out.’
‘Only the best for Heming’s,’ I joked. As we both knew, a sandwich wolfed down at the desk was our usual style. Business lunches, I had always argued, were unproductive and took too much out of the day.
‘It’s not your birthday, is it?’ she asked.
I smiled. In the office she had once asked when my birthday was, and I had held out, changed the subject, refused to tell. I’d made it seem light-hearted, but for me it was a matter of principle. But then she had dwelled on this ‘oddity’, as she saw it, returned to it and made a running joke out of it. She seemed somehow to enjoy calling me Mr Heming, as if – given our brief episode of familiarity – the two of us were now acting out some secret charade. On the whole I didn’t mind. Her occasional playfulness was an endearing trait, creating a little esprit around the office and providing a counterpoint to Katya, who was from Lithuania, and didn’t think there was anything amusing about formality. The others had no issue with it, Josh being young enough to do as he was told and Wendy old enough to remember when all bosses were called mister.
The restaurant was busy now. Zoe went to the ladies’ while I explained to the manager that there would be two for lunch after all.
‘No problem. And we’ve had a cancellation, so I will be able to put you in the sun lounge if you’d still prefer that.’
Zoe reappeared and a waitress showed us to our table. I insisted that Zoe have the river view. ‘How thoughtful, Mr Heming!’ she said.
The waitress took our drinks order.
‘Just tonic water for me,’ I said. ‘Best keep a clear head.’
‘Oh,’ said Zoe.
‘You go ahead,’ I said.
‘Should I?’ she twinkled. ‘Perhaps just a large glass of Rioja, then.’
She smiled, as though it was understood that I was trying to get her tipsy, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. I had seen Zoe tipsy on enough occasions to be wary of its effect on her – one moment highly affectionate and the next saddened beyond help, especially when she rightly began to suspect a lack of enthusiasm on my part.
‘How do you see me?’ she had once asked on one of our candlelit evenings out, her eyes quizzical, her chin propped up in her hand.
‘Like this!’ I said, opening my eyes wide.
More than once an evening out with Zoe had ended in tears. As considerate as I tried to be, the most innocuous remark could set her off.
The surrounding tables were filling up now. Zoe flattened her napkin across her lap, flicked back her hair and sighed contentedly. ‘I can actually see swans from here,’ she said.
Of course I wondered if she might be getting the wrong idea, but it was too late to worry about that. The important thing was that she was sitting between me and table three. And if we looked like a couple delighting in each other’s company, all the better. So we chatted about Josh’s progress with the website until the drinks appeared, then detained the waitress while she decided what to eat. I had picked the first thing on the menu and was already shooting nervous glances at the door. Zoe, clearly delighted to make the most of the occasion, was more leisurely in her choices, and was still deliberating when Sharp and Abigail appeared across the room, setting my nerves on edge as they were shown to their table. Abigail was radiant and demure. Sharp guided her into a chair, his hand almost on her bottom. I suddenly felt sick.
‘So what do you think, Mr Heming – langoustines or the soup?’
The print on the menu danced before my eyes. I couldn’t say what Zoe or I finally chose, or what we found to talk about before it arrived, but bread and olives were somehow on the table followed by some sort of fish and we were eating, and babbling about the O’Deay’s project – what Zoe thought about pricing on the bungalows, how we might squeeze O’Deay’s further in exchange for a lower commission. My eyes flitted back and forth, from Zoe’s mouth, alternately talking and chewing, to table three, where they were busy with appetizers and a carafe of wine.
I wished now I had taken a risk and tried for a table within range of theirs. I felt a desperate need to sample the atmosphere, the quality of their murmurings. The more I watched, the more I longed for it. And now Sharp was leaning towards her. Some unctuous endearment, no doubt. She smiled, her eyes downcast, as if inspecting her salad.
A trellis behind them bordered the greeting area and service hub. Would it be feasible to loiter there for a few minutes without being run down by waiting staff? Perhaps there would be an opportunity later.
We ate. They ate. I realized it was a mistake. I wished we hadn’t come. I felt I was drowning in the affable, tinkling hubbub of the place.
Zoe, on her second glass of Rioja, gazed across at me with ominous fondness. ‘Do you remember that beautiful bistro we once went to? The little French place in Constable country? And we stopped the car on the bridge on the way back and watched the riverboats moored up under the moon, with their lanterns rippling on the water? The way the music came floating up, and the smell of barbecue?’
I smiled and couldn’t find anything to say, though what I remembered vividly was the two of us squeezed into the front of my small car, Zoe’s head on my shoulder and the smell of her shampoo. I remembered having to wind the window down. How romantic she had thought the boats were, with their little red curtains lit up cosily from the inside. How smoothly she had then skated into the subject of family holidays on the Norfolk Broads with her younger sister, who was now married and had recently given their parents a lovely granddaughter, and how sweet and adorable she was. ‘I can’t believe I’m suddenly an aunt,’ Zoe had said, laughing. ‘I’m the old maid of the family!’
‘Congratulations,’ I had replied, without quite meaning to.
Amid Zoe’s reminiscing, my own thoughts turned to my anguished vigil in the street outside Abigail’s, the glow of her room. In my dreams, I had conjured myself into that space I could see from the street, her red curtain the only thing between us, my cheek brushing the satiny fabric as I listened to her settling in her white feather bed.
Zoe paused. ‘I often think of that evening,’ she said.
Across the room the abominable Sharp was offering Abigail a spoonful of something toothsome. Even at this distance I could see his phoney, simpering, ultra-considerate expression, his suspiciously white smile as he helped Abigail to more wine, touching her hand from time to time and staring into her face. Perhaps there was some other point to this occasion. Doubt and sadness clouded Abigail’s expression from time to time. Maybe they were breaking up! It was hard to see whether Sharp was trying to console or persuade. Perhaps a little of both.
‘Who do you keep looking at?’ Zoe said suddenly.
‘Sorry, I was miles away. What did you say?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It really doesn’t matter. Why would it? I need the loo.’
Was she cross with me? She left her napkin on her plate and weaved a path through the tables. But now I saw that Abigail had vanished too, leaving Sharp at the table. I tried to read his angular face, which had relaxed into a state of neutral watchfulness, offstage but ready for its next cue. He glanced around the room. I kept my head down.
Zoe was taking for ever. The waitress came to clear the table and brought a dessert menu. Should I order? Perhaps just coffee.
But the waitress had no sooner departed with my order than Zoe returned, moist around the eyes and sniffing. She didn’t sit down. ‘I’m going to head back, actually. Sorry, and thanks for lunch. I’m just not …’
‘But what is it?’ Clearly I had upset her.
‘Nothing. I’m just not feeling too good. And I need to get back to the office. I have a ton of things to do.’
‘Do you think it might have been the venison, or—’
‘No, I’m fine. Just …’
‘But how will you—’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She waved away my concerns and headed for the rear exit leading out into the car park.
Now I saw Abigail and Sharp preparing to leave too and I tried to catch the attention of the waitress, who seemed to see me but swept past twice. It was several minutes before I could cancel the coffees and get the bill. I paid in cash and hurried to the exit. I had to stop for a couple who were entering, and I got outside just in time to see Zoe leaving in a taxi. Abigail and Sharp, though, were nowhere to be seen. I started my car and pulled out on to the main road. They surely couldn’t have got very far, but there was no sign of them on the almost empty road. I saw Zoe’s taxi turning into a filling station, and sped past. Just when I thought I’d lost them, I rounded a bend and caught sight of Sharp’s vehicle some way ahead, delayed by a large flock of cyclists. I kept my distance. After a few moments he seized the opportunity to overtake, somewhat dangerously, leaving me behind. He was getting further ahead, but then instead of staying on the road to town, he took a left turn. I reached the turning and followed, but couldn’t see him. A narrow lane now took me winding through copses and fields. Perhaps he knew a short cut. I put my foot down but could see nothing on the bends visible ahead as the road ribboned down towards the valley. They seemed to have simply vanished, but then, as I passed a wooded area on my right, I saw a glimmer of white amid the trees and bushes.
I slowed and pulled into a gravelly bay some way down the lane, then walked cautiously back to the spot. There was a track into the woods, the entrance almost concealed with hanging branches and undergrowth. It was probably used – though evidently not often – by forest rangers. I crept in, not too badly camouflaged in my brown-green tweed suit. The track didn’t go very far and I spotted it immediately through the thicket of branches and thorns, squatting darkly in the green shadows – its mirror chrome, its curve of halogen lights set like precious stones, its inscrutable smoked-glass windows. I didn’t dare get any nearer. I just waited and watched, until the body of the car began almost imperceptibly to tremble, and I could watch no more.
LET’S SAY I’M TEN years old. My father is at his office, so it can’t be the weekend. Perhaps it’s the school holidays. Directly below my window I see Aunt Lillian standing by the Austin calling for cousin Isobel to hurry. I don’t know where they are going – it’s too early for a dance class and her piano lesson is Saturday – but Aunt Lillian has said they won’t be too long. I’m allowed in the park on my own. It’s only a short walk, but I haven’t decided whether to do that or not. The scariest part is the walled stone steps that turn halfway down so that you can’t see what bigger boys or fierce dog might be coming up, or waiting at the bottom. A garden of evergreen bushes and shrubs rises to the side like a dark jungle. Beyond is the huge, bright square of the bowling green and the safety of its old men playing on Sunday. But today isn’t Sunday. I sense its quietness from the top of the steps and decide to go no further.
At home, from my window I look down at the Damatos’ house. Mrs Damato is busy upstairs. The bedroom window is open and, below it, the door is propped open, as it always is on a sunny day. I can hear music. The Damatos, my aunt has told me, are Italians. In the front garden little Anthony is playing. Who is that with him? I can’t see because of the hedge, but they have toys with them.
When Aunt Lillian said ‘You know what you did’ in her dramatic way, I suppose this was the day she was talking about.
I steal into Mrs Damato’s kitchen. There are no cakes cooling today but she has a huge biscuit tin. Distracted from his play, Anthony watches me enter and then re-emerge, a smile of wonder on his dark little face. His friend has blonde-white hair, white socks, new white leather sandals. Her name is Angela. She holds a small stuffed bunny-rabbit to her chest and looks up to Anthony as he looks up to me. I have a delicious coconut biscuit for them both. The sunny day is ripe for adventure. The street is deserted. I tell them to hold hands as we walk along. At the top of the stone steps I can smell the grass, hear faintly a motor mower. We skirt the empty bowling green, a forbidden square of perfection held by white stones. No one is using the putting green; likewise the tennis court, which has weeds emerging at the crumbling edge of its asphalt surface. On the distant field boys are hoofing a football, their cries just audible; and beyond them, in a dip of the land, the protruding giant ‘A’s of the swings and slide, too far away to discern activity.
We’re not going to the swings. I have a little house, I tell them. We can play there. Excitedly they chat together as we walk, or rather they each issue small announcements about themselves.
‘I’ve got a bunny-rabbit,’ says Angela.
‘What’s for tea in your house?’ Anthony asks me.
‘Wait and see,’ I say.
The truth was, my aunt knew little about what I had done. Guessing at it was enough to horrify her, to feed her imagination, her fear of what I might one day do.
THINGS STARTED TO MOVE. I saw Sharp’s dog again while walking back to town on the Friday, having been to see a client. For no good reason I had decided on a route that would take me down Boselle Avenue, and there he was – Barney, a Jack Russell cross, cartoon-cute and staring from a fading poster fastened to a lamppost. MISSING, it said. REWARD. The Sharps’ name and number was written beneath in marker pen. Further down I could see a second poster and a third, leading my eye to the uphill path that led off Boselle and eventually to the town’s Victorian cemetery with its iron railings and shady trees. Even in their polythene envelopes, the posters were weather-beaten and sodden. Clearly they had been up for weeks. My hand automatically reached out to take one – an act indistinguishable from the routine, omnivorous collecting that had been a part of my life’s work and pleasure since childhood. It was a scrap of colour in Sharp’s blizzard of moments. How easily I was sucked into this. I thought about Abigail – a prize to be wanted above all others – and felt myself losing focus, allowing what I felt for her to be drowned in the mundane fact of Sharp. I felt the need for purity and my senses tingled at the thought of her. She was a pinhead of light, pulsing through the tumbling cumuli of events, constant but no nearer.
At the office, Zoe was working with studied care at her desk. She had barely spoken to me directly since our lunch together, and only two mornings before I had seen her perhaps twenty yards ahead of me walking past the entrance to the Common, quickening her step as if she had eyes in the back of her head. At work she maintained a level of cheer that hung around the office like static. Her behaviour reminded me of the time immediately following our break-up – the same grim scrupulousness in the brightness of her speech and demeanour that signalled one thing but meant another. I could say nothing to her that she would want to hear.
Wendy buzzed through with the news that a tenant had been found for the Damato flat.
‘Let’s hope he, or she, is more reliable than the last one,’ I said.
‘He’s a he,’ Wendy said. ‘Name of … Mario? Something foreign. Contract’s in the file, three months in advance, and the key’s on my rack if I’m out when he comes. I’m on my lunch break soon.’
I waited till she’d gone, then lifted the key – labelled Marrineau – from the hook and headed for the riverside apartments. I rarely went down there. That whole affair seemed like something from a different era now. I had bought one floor of the development – or, rather, Damato Associates had – as part of the original deal, and had acquired the freehold to the building when the property company ran into trouble two years later. I still let out the middle floor, to single professionals or couples. This flat – an open-plan space with a view of the rear of the bowling alley and cinema – was shiny an
d anonymous and smelled of cleaning products. The furniture, now absent, had left prints in the carpet. I stood at the window. Another fine day. On the opposite side, people were eating at café tables the bowling-alley people had put out on a deck. It was a fine apartment. What had brought me here under this amusing alias? I could easily have re-let the place. Perhaps I sensed the need for a safer refuge from Zoe’s inquisitive gaze. Standing there I thought about Marrineau and the time I had looked out from his window. Where was he now? What had become of his famous fringed rawhide jacket?
Perhaps you think I am haunted by the past. On the contrary, I draw from its proximity and heart. All the lessons I have learned are there. You will recall that I took Mrs Luckham’s name for the tenancy of my flat; now Marrineau’s for this one; and of course Damato for my company. It’s not significant, but I cannot help but think of them sometimes. How we leave our passing imprint on the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. I have woken from dreams of Mr Stamp searching in vain for his ball of rubber bands, or Mrs Wade flummoxed to find a new wing mirror on her dented but otherwise well-cared-for cherry-red car. It’s not so much remembering as wondering how I am remembered, even as a phantom, by others.
My phone started ringing. Being caught here, it made me start, but it was Wendy calling about a valuation.
‘What, now? Is Katya not around?’
‘No, it’s her afternoon off.’
‘Zoe?’
‘She said she would, but now she’s too busy.’
‘Well, is it urgent?’
‘That was my impression. The lady wants to sell. But, no, she’s at work right now and I said we’d get back to her. She wants to know if we can come at seven this evening.’
And then she told me the address.
For a moment I was speechless. It seemed like a nonsense, or a trick. But then I remembered the flyer I had left on the doormat.
