‘Not really. I mean, no, not at all.’
She turned to watch it. It was moving quickly enough for its progress to be visible against the line of the mainland. Already the mouth of the Lymington River where I’d caught the ferry the previous day was far behind it.
‘Do you?’ I said.
‘I sail.’
‘I should learn.’
‘Learn,’ she had said, turning to face me again as she stood up to go. The look in her eyes had been suddenly fierce. ‘Learn to sail. Sometimes I think it was the only thing that kept me sane in this place.’
I looked at the photograph for a while and then I folded the paper away and went upstairs. There was a second, even smaller bedroom next to the one I had been sleeping in and it had the same view. I’d decided I would use it for work and I’d pushed the single bed back against the wall and moved the table in front of the window. Now I sat on the chair I’d brought up from the kitchen and looked out. Visibility was closing down. The first of the fog the women in the newsagent’s had been talking about was already swirling round the tops of the masts in the harbour, and on the other side of the estuary the line that separated the wood from the sky was furred. I thought of her out there, gone for at least thirty-six hours. I hadn’t understood the significance of fog earlier but now I did: if there was any chance at all she was still alive, fog would make it almost impossible to find her.
I brought my focus back inside the room. My notebooks were stacked on the corner of the table and next to them was the manuscript. I pulled it towards me and turned the pages until I found the place about halfway through at which I’d left off a week ago, in what felt like a different life. I needed to start working again now, to bury myself in the analgesic detail of it, force time to pass. I planted my elbows on the desk, hands either side of my head as if to hold my eyes in place over the text, but though I tried to engage with the words, they swarmed on the page like bacteria. I tried again. The book was a crime novel which had won a number of awards, and I’d wanted to make a good job of it: I’d spoken to the author and been touched by how pleased he was about the French edition for which I was translating it. I read the paragraph again, trying to get a sense of how it would work, but now my eyes kept wandering towards my laptop. In the end I lifted the lid and booted it up. My mobile was switched off so that I couldn’t hear the calls and texts but it meant that I was out of touch for anyone else who might be trying to contact me: Dad, Helen. I should check my email at least, I told myself.
I felt my heart accelerate as I opened Outlook. Twenty-three new messages, about half from him. I deleted them without opening any. On most, the subject line had been left blank, as usual, but the final one, timed only half an hour earlier, had a title. At least let me talk to you. I clicked on it and pressed delete again.
By three o’clock, the air in the house was stale, as if I had sucked every particle of goodness from it. I needed to go outside and breathe the air off the sea, regardless of the cold or the mist. I knew, too, where I wanted to go.
I drove without the radio on, listening to the sound of the engine. The inside of the car with the rattle of cassettes in the door compartment, the nest of newspapers and road maps and old paper coffee cups in the footwell of the passenger seat was comforting, a capsule of the familiar. ‘I’ve still got you, car, haven’t I?’ I said and then felt foolish. As I crossed the bridge, the mainland was shut off from view by the shifting mist. The sea was a milky green now and the sky pale grey, the point where they met indeterminable. The light was fading; there was perhaps an hour of it left.
I had to look for signs to Freshwater Bay; I’d never driven on the Island. I had been too young, and my memory of how the various towns and villages connected was hazy, a collage of images of tracks and lanes and summer hedgerows with no practical particulars. I came down a hill at the top of Norton and found myself on a long street of semi-detached houses behind unkempt patches of garden, some of their curtains already drawn against the evening that was fast encroaching.
When at last I found the bay I pulled into the public car park and left the car next to the only two others there. It was pay-and-display but I didn’t bother with a ticket: I didn’t have time. No one would check anyway: the bay was deserted, not a soul on the pavement. There was no one on the stony beach either, and the café was closed for the winter, stacks of chairs visible through its lace curtains. I wrapped my coat around me, feeling the cold reaching into my bones.
The track I was looking for was behind the Albion hotel. Earlier walkers had turned the ground under the stile to heavy mud but they were long gone now; I was alone on the down apart from a few grazing cows. I watched my feet as I began the climb. In my memories, this place danced with sunlight and its blue reflection off the sea; now it was done up in flat shades of brown and green and grey, the grass punctuated with scraggy thistles. My heart began to beat faster, the slope steeper than it seemed. The morning’s breeze had dropped and the silence was so deep that I could hear the sea murmuring against the bottom of the cliff away on my left.
When I reached the fence at the top of the first incline, I stopped a minute to catch my breath. The Albion was below me now, shrunken already. In spring the bay would be inundated with people baring flesh on the first days of weak sunshine, buying ice cream and buckets and spades, but for now it had settled into timelessness, the view of dun fields back towards the north face of the Island the same as it might have been fifty years earlier or two hundred.
My thighs ached as I started up the next slope but I didn’t stop again: I had to get to the top before the light went. Now the grass had become the soft, mossy sort that never seems to grow and its surface was flecked with the shale of the white chalk underneath, as if the cliff’s scalp was showing through. To my left the land sloped away and I corrected my direction again and again to stop myself veering nearer the edge, which hid itself behind banks and folds in the cliff-top.
After perhaps fifteen minutes, I reached the top and the stone cross set up in memory of Tennyson, who had lived at Freshwater. Even here, where wind stole the heat out of the warmest summer days, the air was still. I circuited the monument and then, without knowing I was going to do it, I turned and walked to the edge.
Even from a few feet away, it looked as if the grass was disappearing from sight to incline gently to the sea but four or five steps further uncovered the truth: a sheer drop of three hundred feet. The grass simply stopped, became air. I leaned out, made myself look. There was no beach below, just a few feet of rocky rubble and then the sea, lapping insistently away at the back of the Island. The nearness of it, the dizzying possibility, took my breath away. Here it was, available to anyone who walked up here, unmarked and unfenced, raw as a knife. It would be so easy. In my knees there was a sudden urge forward.
No.
I took a couple of quick steps back and sat down. The wet grass was cold through my jeans at once. My legs were shaking and a wave of nausea swept over me, bringing a rush of saliva into my mouth. The ground seemed to tilt under me. I looked at the view to try to steady myself. People said you could see France from here on a clear day. Could they see us, too? Do you see this, Maman? a voice cried out in my head. Can you see me now?
It was only a hundred yards before the surface of the water mingled with the dusk and the thickening fog. It lay still and glassy, the only movement in it the direction of the tide, invisible from this distance. From directly below, though, where it touched the shore, there came a gentle heaving like breath, a drawing back and forth as if it moved with the lungs of someone underneath.
Alice Frewin. This is where her boat had been found, floating in the Channel off the back of west Wight, the blank loneliest face of the Island. Had she still been with it by the time it floated past the cliff here? Or had she slipped over the side near the Needles and let the water take her? How long would it take to drown or die of exposure, for the temperature of the water to alter the balance of one’s mind, numbin
g everything out while one’s body shut down? Was it brave, what she’d done, to make the decision and carry it through? Or was it braver not to jump, to carry on?
A band of fog swirled up off the sea towards me, shrouding the view forward completely, so thick I thought I could taste it. A moment of sheer terror: the light was suddenly almost gone. I could see the edge and the monument behind me, but beyond that little more than the grass around my feet. I stood up and started back down the hill, running now, conscious all the time of the edge. The thought of falling – jumping – so compelling only seconds ago, was now horrific. I imagined it, the breathless rush of freezing air, frames of white and green and grey flashing past my eyes as I plunged, faster and faster and faster. Then my body lying smashed at the bottom of the cliff, the water coming to feel it, to lap at me and touch me.
The damp and mist made the grass slippery. I fell over twice, soaking the knees of my jeans and cutting my hands. The fog was growing thicker all the time. It moved in spectral swathes, like floating gauze. I stumbled on and came, I thought, to the place from which I would see the hotel. It was invisible now, swallowed up. In front of me there was only a shifting white wall. I spun around, hoping for a landmark, the monument, by which to navigate but the way behind was closed, too. I took some deep breaths, trying to suppress the panic. To my right, a long way below, there was the gentle hush, hush of the water, and for a moment it was as if I heard Alice Frewin’s voice in it, lulling and hypnotic, calling me over: Kate, Kate. I started humming aloud, making senseless noises to block it out.
At last I reached the bottom of the path, then the road and the car park. I got into the car and slammed the door. Reversing, I swung round too fast and almost hit the old silver Metro parked alongside. As soon as I was moving, I switched on the radio. I needed to hear music or a human voice, the babble of a DJ. I wanted to be reminded that somewhere a normal world was carrying on. Coming to this isolated spot in the dusk and the fog had been stupid beyond belief. That urge to jump, however momentary, had been real.
I didn’t go back to the cottage straight away. I had no idea where I was going; I drove for the sake of it, for the illusion of purpose and momentum. Where the road ran close to the sea, the fog rubbed everything out. It moved in patches so dense that at times all I could see in front of the headlights was an impenetrable yellow cloud. In the worst of it, I put the car down into second and crept forward, afraid of hitting something, an animal or a person looming up suddenly to be thrown on to the bonnet, seen too late.
Four or five miles further on, however, the road seemed to climb and the fog grew thinner and then dissipated altogether. In the very last of the light, the landscape here was a charcoal sketch. Everything was in shades of grey and black: strong upward strokes for trees, thick hatching for the hedges that bordered furrowed fields. The clouds hung overhead, unmarked by stars or the moon. This was an old darkness, out of time: it was never dark like this in London, where light poured out into the night from a million windows.
Chapter Three
Helen’s response to my decision hadn’t been a surprise. ‘The Isle of Wight?’ She’d put her hand out to stop me picking at the crocheted blanket and made me look at her.
‘I want to go away.’
‘This is really sudden.’
I’d broken the eye contact and focused instead on the orderly who was bringing round another trolley of tea. He moved slowly through the ward, handing out polystyrene cups to those who could take them. He brought us two and put them down on the table that Helen had pushed aside so that she could sit on the bed. Behind her a nurse was drawing the curtains. It was a week since the hour had gone back and it had been dark for some time already. The huge windows reflected the room back at itself, the rows of beds and lockers and vinyl chairs. Visiting hours were nearly over; I’d given up hope by the time I heard her voice asking for me and then her decisive steps down the corridor. She’d come straight from the office, as soon as she’d been able to get away, and it seemed she would be working at home later, too: I could see papers sticking out of her bag. She looked as stylish as ever – her outfit today a black woollen dress that traced her shape without clinging, and snakeskin pumps – but her eyes were tired.
She’d smiled a thank you for the tea and waited until the orderly had moved on. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Don’t make any decisions now. Wait till you’re out of here.’
‘I’m not ill.’
‘I know. And I’m sure you do need a break – you’ve been working too hard again, haven’t you? You look shattered, even apart from the rest of it. But why not just have a holiday?’
‘I need to go for longer than that. Six months, maybe a year . . .’ I couldn’t explain what I wanted without getting into the reasons. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’
She had frowned. ‘But why the Isle of Wight? You could go anywhere.’
‘Dad used to take us there on holiday.’
‘That was years ago. And it was summer, wasn’t it? It’ll be dead in winter.’
I’d refrained from telling her that that was one of the reasons I had chosen it. I wanted somewhere dead. Somewhere cut off and removed from my life.
‘God, your poor face.’
I’d felt the cut on my eyebrow strain against its stitches as I grimaced, and said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t start bleeding again.
‘And what about Richard? Won’t he mind if you suddenly disappear off the face of the earth?’ she asked.
‘He’ll understand.’
‘Will he?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve told him you’re here?’
‘He’s going to America today. He’ll be on the plane.’
‘I’ll ring him for you. Leave a message for when he arrives.’
‘No.’ My voice was louder than I’d intended and the vehemence of it caught the attention of the women in the two beds opposite, who looked and then quickly glanced away again, as if they’d witnessed something embarrassing. Helen drew back a little, too, and I felt guilty. I would have understood if she hadn’t come, given how things had been between us recently, and my heart had filled with gratitude when I’d seen her but now I wanted to be alone, to close the curtains round my bed and pull myself into a ball under the crisp hospital sheets.
‘At least tell me how it happened,’ she said, with a new stiffness.
‘I was on the Lillie Road on my bike and a van came up just before the bridge and knocked me off. I was thinking about something else, it was too close and it clipped me with the wing mirror. I didn’t have time to put my hands out.’
‘How did you get here?’
‘Taxi.’
‘Where’s your bike now?’
‘At that corner shop by the bridge; they said they’d look after it for me.’
‘Do you want me to go and pick it up?’
‘No,’ I said, slightly too loudly again.
She looked at me and I saw that she was debating whether or not to say anything. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ she said at last.
‘What?’
‘You’re doing it again – this is another of your over-the-top reactions. I don’t know what’s happened and you’re clearly not going to tell me but I can’t believe it’s worth dropping everything to go running off to some place where you don’t know anyone. I mean, do you know even one person there?’ Her voice was low but full of frustration. ‘Why does everything you do have to be so extreme?’
Exhaustion broke over me and I let my eyes close for a moment. When I opened them, she was picking up her bag. ‘I’m going to leave you to get some sleep,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the right place for this conversation.’ She waited, giving me one more chance to apologise, explain myself, but the moment passed. I lay back against the pillows and listened to the sound of her feet on the lino as she walked away.
The nurse came and drew the curtains round my bed. They didn’t meet in the middle but left a vertical sliver about four inches wide.
Through it I could see the last few visitors saying their goodbyes. It was odd to be lying in pyjamas in this place filled with strangers, on public display at just the time I felt most vulnerable. I turned so that the undamaged side of my face touched the pillow. Ten minutes later, the night sister turned off the main lights. My Anglepoise lamp was bent all the way down so that it cast a circle scarcely larger than its own circumference on the pillowcase behind my head. I could feel its heat on my hair.
Eventually the muffled sounds around me had stopped. I listened and beyond the rumble of the air-conditioning, I heard life going on outside on the Fulham Palace Road, the low whirr of a bus going past and the business-like trundle of a black cab. It was all so familiar but this evidence of the normal world had seemed then to be coming from a million miles away, like old starlight.
In the morning, satisfied I wasn’t concussed, they had let me go. I’d still felt too shaky to walk so although it was only two stops to Earls Court, I had taken the Tube. I had forgotten about the tide of morning commuters. It was five years since I’d been part of it, travelling to work every day in carriages packed so tightly that every journey required physical intimacy with strangers. The translating meant I was no longer subject to the same forces, the great flood into the offices of the City and West End, the staggered ebb home. I charted my own trajectory through the days. But Richard did this: suits, offices, meetings. Mostly he took taxis to work but very occasionally he went by Tube. I’d felt a surge of panic until I remembered that he was away. It was the wrong line for him anyway. I leaned my head against the glass partition, and the rhythm of the wheels over the track resolved into a chant in my head – Whatever it takes; whatever it takes – until I stopped it, imposed another over the top: You lied to me; you lied to me.
The Bed I Made Page 2
