The blood was pounding in my temples. ‘Does he know you saw him?’
‘Yes. I went over to draw the blinds – he was looking straight at me.’
‘How long was he there?’
‘I don’t know – five minutes, maybe. It was kind of creepy – he was just standing there, in the middle of the pavement, looking. And Steve’s out tonight.’
‘Did he ask you where I was?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he know?’
I took a silent breath and tried to make my voice sound calm. ‘I’m really sorry about this. I didn’t think he’d come round when he knew I wasn’t there. He’s OK; he’s just a bit . . . intense sometimes.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. I just thought you should know.’
When we hung up, I put my coat on and went out, leaving my mobile behind. I wanted to be away from it now. I’d known he would carry on ringing the flat until he found out I’d moved but I hadn’t guessed he’d go there once he did. He’d done it so that she would tell me, pass the message on.
I walked through the town for as long as I could but the lighted areas were small and I was going faster even than usual to ward off the cold that worked its way inside my coat. I did the circuit twice, along the harbour front, the Square, up to the common, back down again by the terraces that lined Tennyson Road, but I began to feel unnerved: it was a Friday night but there was no one to be seen. There were lights on behind the curtains of the pubs and in the cottages up towards the common but not one person on the pavement. Everyone was locked away. I felt like the only person alive, the sole survivor in a plague town. Or perhaps I was the ghost, wandering the streets alone, unable to break through and reach the living again.
When I got back to the cottage I checked my phone straight away, wanting to pre-empt the beep that would tell me he’d left a message. He hadn’t called but there was a text: Where are you? I wonder.
The first time he’d come to the flat, I’d waited for him at the sitting-room window, standing to one side so that I wouldn’t be visible if he looked up from the street. A little after eight, a taxi had pulled in and I watched him get out. My stomach turned over when I saw him: it had been real, then, that night. He came up the steps and I’d jumped at the sound of the buzzer even though I was expecting it.
I hadn’t known whether he would call me. Purposely I had said nothing to suggest I cared one way or the other. When I’d left his house that afternoon, I told myself that whether or not we saw each other again wasn’t the point. The night could be seen as an isolated incident, a brief step out of bounds, an adventure. It would be something to remember when I got old and needed to remind myself that I had taken risks and been daring. Nevertheless, it was true he’d intrigued me. He was different. It was there in the way he looked at me, eyebrows arching as if he were calling me out, and in his deep self-assurance. There was also the physical connection between us.
He hadn’t mentioned meeting again until I had been standing inside his front door. We’d spent the past four or five hours back in his bed, his body enclosed in the circle of my legs, his nails tracing lightly up the outside of my thigh while we talked. It was a strange bantering conversation, like a game of tennis between two people trying to assess the other’s level of skill, each registering their opponent’s best shots, producing their own. At the door I had turned awkwardly towards him and smiled, pretending to look for something in my bag. He took a step forward, tipped my chin upwards and kissed me lightly. I resisted an urge to lean into him. ‘Give me your number,’ he said.
He called two days later. I was at the table in the sitting room working at the computer, the blinds left up for the view of the flats opposite, as usual. The sound of the phone startled me but his voice carried me straight back inside the bubble which had seemed to surround us as soon as we met. He hadn’t called for one of the brief exchanges of information – a date, a time – that I’d sometimes had with other men and that left me with a transactional feeling; he asked how my week was going and listened to my answer.
He’d suggested dinner on Friday and I’d pretended to check my diary. When I hung up, the display told me that we’d been on the phone for half an hour. Too excited to start work again immediately, I stood at the open window and looked out. The couple in the top flat had gone to bed while we’d been talking. Though it was June and warm, there was a breeze and the wind caught the litter in the gutter and blew it in scudding gusts along the street, rushing, then settling, moving on again.
The restaurant he’d taken me to was in Kensington, a tiny place with eight tables, tucked away near a gallery and a boutique on what was otherwise a residential street. The chef and the one waitress chatted to one another through the serving hatch and it felt like another sign: they were French. Richard discussed the wine for two or three minutes before he ordered and when the bottle arrived, he examined the label before taking a sip and rolling it thoughtfully around his mouth. Whenever I tried the wine in a restaurant, I hurried through what I thought was expected of me, spinning it out just long enough that there was a chance people would think I knew what I was doing, embarrassed to keep anyone waiting. Richard, by contrast, was perfectly at ease with the idea that the waitress should stand by until he was satisfied.
While we waited for the starters to arrive, he reached over and took my hand. He looked at it as if it were something whose details were worth remembering. His own fingers were long and straight, with short dark hairs on the back of the sections before the second knuckle. He ran a single finger across my palm, his nail touching my skin, and the touch sent a shiver through me.
‘You told me you’re a translator. What language? Or languages? Not Spanish by any chance?’
‘French. Mostly English into French. I do some technical manuals, sales brochures, that sort of thing, but mostly it’s books – novels.’
‘Bright girl.’ He dipped his head slightly.
‘Did you doubt it?’ I raised my eyebrows in the way he did.
‘Do you think I’d be interested if you weren’t?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe you like daft women – some men do.’ I glanced away, smiling. When I was a teenager, I’d comforted myself for not being one of the better-looking girls with the knowledge that I did well at school and could meet the clever boys on their own terms, often beat them.
‘I like clever women. I need someone who can keep me interested.’
I took a sip of the wine, which was really good. I would never have said that: it sounded so arrogant. I thought it, though: I liked clever men and wouldn’t go out with anyone who couldn’t at least hold his own, if not beat me in arguments. There was an honesty in Richard’s saying it out loud that impressed me.
‘So why French?’
‘My mother was French.’
I saw him register the past tense. ‘You grew up speaking it then?’ he said.
‘Yes, until I was ten. I kept it up; I had a French friend and I did it at university, spent a year at the Sorbonne and then worked in Paris for a couple of years after that. Anyway,’ I said, feeling uncomfortable, ‘we’re only talking about me. Tell me something about your life.’
‘What do you want to know?’
Everything, I thought. ‘Where did you grow up?’
‘Here – London. I did my degree here – economics – then I did post-grad in the States, at Harvard. I worked in banking for a bit, then I set up my property business. I’m not cut out to work for other people.’
Over coffee, he leaned in as if to whisper something. I leaned in, too, but realised that he was reaching for my leg under the table. His fingers slid up my thigh, pushing the hem of my skirt higher. Hidden by the tablecloth, his thumb caressed my flesh through the fine gauge of my tights. Memories of Sunday morning came back to me and I flushed. ‘Why are you single?’ he said quietly.
‘Why are you single?’
‘These things happen.’ He smiled, went on stroking. ‘Am I coming home wi
th you tonight?’
I looked up.
‘You seem shocked. Surely you can’t be?’ There was a suggestion of laughter in his voice. ‘After all, technically, you’ve already given yourself to me, if I remember correctly. And I’m certain I remember that quite clearly, if not at all correctly.’ The smile was moving round his mouth and his eyes were full of it, too.
‘You were granted temporary access to my body,’ I said, giving him the same look. ‘As was I to yours. But giving myself to you – I’m afraid that’s much more complicated.’
His eyes, suddenly, were unreadable but then he grinned and slid his hand an inch higher. Engaged, I thought ridiculously, heady with wine and the sensation of daring myself and getting away with it, one partner in a high-stakes game.
In the taxi he traced his fingers lightly over the nape of my neck. I stopped talking and gave myself over to the feelings it sent running through me. As we climbed the stairs to my door, I was conscious of the weight of his stare on my legs and bottom. As soon as we were inside, he moved towards me and kissed me. We were standing directly under the main light in the sitting room and the blinds were still up. I wondered whether any of my neighbours across the street were watching and what they would make of this scene, so different from the usual one of the outline of my head bending into the yellow halo of the desk lamp.
Chapter Six
As he had known he would, Richard had frightened me by going to the flat. For much of that night I thought about him standing motionless on the pavement, looking up at the windows, and the image grew in resonance and power until it seemed to become symbolic, a statement of intent. Over and over again I had to remind myself that he didn’t know where I was and no one would tell him. Only three people knew, anyway, and of those Helen was the only one he would be able to find. I’d made her promise not to tell him and, however strained things were between us, I knew I could trust her. Richard’s going to the flat was a gesture of intimidation, born of frustration at not being able to reach me. I mustn’t let it work; I had to hold my nerve if I was going to get free of him.
The shadow of the image was still on me in the morning, though, and I knew that if I stayed in the cottage, it would leach the whole day. It would be hard to concentrate enough to work. On the drive to Freshwater, I’d seen a signpost to Totland Bay and I decided to walk there. Matt and I had loved Totland when we were children. There was a café down on the beach with tables outside where we’d sometimes had tea and we used to buy ice creams there, too, disgusting Dad by choosing the plastic cones with a red bubble-gum ball at the bottom. The little town above the beach had had a newspaper shop which sold penny sweets, buckets and spades, and nets for shrimping. The memory of being there with them gave me a feeling like homesickness.
The tide was in, covering the mud on the banks of the estuary, and as I crossed the bridge out of Yarmouth, the water dimpled with the breeze and refracted the light from the pale sun struggling through the cloud. The land lay low around the river but beyond it to the south there were gentle hills covered with fields which rose in stripes of late-autumn green and brown. In Norton someone had a bonfire, and the smell of burning leaves mingled with the cider scent of apples left to rot on the ground.
When I reached it, my Totland had gone. This was a different place. An air of neglect had settled over the town, which seemed to have aged away from the time of my memories just as I had. Autumn cast an unflattering light over the huge Victorian villas on the road to the beach; they looked empty and down at heel. The pub on the corner was closed, as was the fish and chip shop next door. Only the combined grocer’s and post office on the other side of the road seemed to be open. Everywhere I looked there was further evidence of dereliction: paint peeled; curtains sagged on their rails; weeds grew unchecked. It dawned on me that what I was seeing was not just a holiday resort out of season but poverty. And again, there was no one on the street.
What sort of lives did people live here? What sort of life could you have if you were young here? It wasn’t just money; in the poor areas of London that I knew there were people on the streets going about their business, talking, shopping for food, walking dogs; music filtered out from the windows of flats and passing cars. Here it was silent. I thought of Alice Frewin telling me how she thought that sailing had been the only thing that kept her sane. It had sounded like melodrama but I was starting to see how, if one’s mental balance was off, it could be oppressive here.
Surfing the internet the previous day, I had found myself typing her name into Google. I had been thinking about her a lot; if my mind wasn’t flooded with pictures of Richard, it returned to the cliff-top and how I’d imagined I’d heard her voice calling me, offering me her way. I’d shaken my head to get rid of the thought. Most of the entries that came up were part of genealogical surveys detailing Frewins of the nineteenth century in Australia and Canada. There had only been two for her, the County Press story I’d seen, and then another on the website of a magazine called Wight Living. The page had shown a collection of photographs taken at a charity fundraising dinner in Cowes and there was one of them, Mr and Mrs Peter Frewin. I’d clicked to enlarge it and they filled the screen. She was wearing a black dress in what looked like silk, the cowl neckline revealing the pale skin at the base of her throat and over her collarbone. Her hair had been blow-dried and hung from a side parting in a shining golden sheet which broke over her white shoulders. Her husband stood behind her in a charcoal suit and tie, his hand on her elbow. I compared his face to how it had been the night they had brought her boat in. On the quay he had been expressionless, only the wideness of his eyes hinting at the catastrophe that engulfed him. In the picture he was smiling a little for the sake of the photograph but the angle of his body, his hand, showed that his real attention was focused on Alice. She was looking more directly at the camera but it had seemed to me that there was something blank about the look in her eyes, absent, as if she was elsewhere and it was only really her body that had been there, going through the motions. Neither of them looked comfortable, I’d thought, but perhaps I was letting my knowledge of what had happened to them since then colour my interpretation.
All the other photographs showed what I took to be pillars of the local community in various attitudes of wine-sipping, laughing, sitting at tables adorned with extravagant flower arrangements. Most were in their fifties and sixties, seventies even, but there were three or four others in their thirties. Somehow, though, they seemed to belong to a different type. Alice was current, the length of her dress and the opaque tights right up to date; they wore outfits which had evolved over their journey from the catwalk to the high street, become domesticated, and their shoes were smart but not sharp like Alice’s, whose slim ankles were bound around with heavy studded straps. The older people, too, looked jolly, pleased to be having a night out with a nice dinner, the men in sports jackets, the women in matching floral two-pieces. If the backgrounds hadn’t been the same, I might have thought that the photograph of Alice and her husband was one of a different set entirely, included by mistake.
I walked on and a little further up the street I came across something that surprised me. One of the bay windows was filled with a set of shelves on which books were propped open to show their covers to the street. On the top level there were recipe books, a guide to dog grooming and two Jilly Cooper novels. In the middle there were thrillers by Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett, and on the shelf below that, there was a copy of Bleak House, two Thomas Hardys and a volume of Tennyson poems. A handwritten sign on the shop door said it was open.
Inside I found myself in an L-shaped space, the foot of the shape the front room in which I was standing, the longer part running all the way through to the back of the building. The walls were covered by shelves which reached almost to the ceiling and there were Turkish rugs in reds and ochres over the varnished floorboards. In front of the sash window at the far end was a pine table with a lamp and a laptop computer at which a ma
n was sitting. He glanced up as the bell above the door announced my arrival and looked at me over a pair of steel-rimmed glasses balanced halfway down a straight nose. He had short silver hair which had retreated a little at the temples and was sixty, maybe slightly older, I thought. There was something rather patrician about him: he would have looked as at home in a toga as he did in his plaid shirt. I gave him a quick smile and moved into the part of the shop which was out of his line of vision, not wanting to be watched.
The window display had given a false impression of the stock, which was not in the jumble that I’d expected. The books were arranged alphabetically and though all were second-hand, they were in good condition. Theirs was not the unlovely used-bookshop aroma suggestive of house clearances but the library flavour of those that still had something to offer. Interspersed among the bestsellers there were classics – a complete set of Jane Austen and a fair representation of Dickens and Eliot – and also quite a few new titles. I looked up. The man behind the desk was typing, squinting at the screen over the top of his glasses, and I moved along the shelf. There was A.S. Byatt, The Great Gatsby, Alan Hollinghurst, Portnoy’s Complaint. It was like meeting old friends, small pockets of my former life, before the Isle of Wight, before Richard even. I couldn’t think now why I had left my own books in London. I had to buy some of these; I wanted them around me again.
It took a while to choose and when I glanced over, I realised that the man was watching me. His glasses had slipped still further and his sharp blue eyes were now completely visible over the top of them. His expression was serious and as I went towards the desk, my movement made him start. There was no till and he added up the prices pencilled inside the front covers mentally before putting the books in a pink-and-white-striped paper bag from a pile on the floor.
The Bed I Made Page 5
