The Bed I Made

by Lucie Whitehouse

  Though the washing up was done, of course – the J-cloth was wrapped around the mixer tap like a scarf, as he had left it – the table was still in the sitting room, the ashtray and the wine glasses I’d never refilled exactly where I’d put them down before it happened. I moved the table back, hoovered, and then went out in the car. I didn’t want to sit in the house all day and brood; it wouldn’t change anything.

  I drove without any clear idea of where I was going but found myself on the road to Newport and then heading for Cowes. I took the turn to Gurnard and went along a road lined with wooden houses of all shapes and sizes, some little more than beach huts, others Swedish-looking, with lots of glass. Coming into Cowes itself, I had the sea on my left, blue today for the most part, its more familiar military green only visible beneath the infrequent patches of cloud. On my right, built on a high bank, were the mansions of Seaview which I knew from the County Press were some of the most expensive properties on the Island. They looked out over the Solent with an imperious sense of ownership.

  In Cowes, I parked the car on the seafront and sat for a moment watching the small boats coming and going at the mouth of the river. A Red Funnel ferry, much larger than the ones which served Yarmouth, was making its way in, and through the open window I heard the announcement asking passengers to go back to their cars. People were walking on the esplanade, some with dogs, others just ambling. On the back of one of the benches two gulls perched side by side like an old couple.

  I got out, put some change in the parking meter and walked for a few minutes, past the hotels and apartment buildings on the front in the direction of the Yacht Squadron, whose flag was beating vigorously in the breeze. I leant on the balustrade and watched the water. On one of the moorings there was a wooden yacht like Beatrice and I felt a momentary pang. That was probably it now for sailing, unless Chris put his boat back in before I left and was kind enough to ask me. Another pang, stronger this time. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans and walked on.

  I couldn’t understand how Pete felt – how could I, or anyone? It wasn’t only that Alice was dead, which would be hard enough after so little time: he didn’t even have that certainty. How could he think about anyone else? It was wrong of me even to have had the idea. And I couldn’t blame him for his reaction. Thinking about the intensity of those moments, the hunger I’d felt on both sides, perhaps it had been best that he had gone, before things had got any further out of hand.

  On the way back I bought an ice cream and sat in the car to eat it, watching the seagulls swoop and dive over the water. The ferry had deposited its first lot of passengers, loaded those returning and was already halfway back across the Solent to Southampton. For a moment, I wished I was on it. I only had a few weeks left but now I would have to spend them worrying about running into Pete. Perhaps it would be simpler to go. But no: I’d nearly done it, stuck it out; I wouldn’t concede defeat at this late stage. And there was the question of where to go, anyway, now that London was impossible. I had no idea where to run to this time. I remembered the poor Canadian woman again, and quickly slammed the door.

  Before I set off home, I got out my phone and sent Helen a text: Feeling a bit insular. Do you fancy a jaunt out of London next weekend? Cornwall? The Cotswolds? Having sent it, I had another idea: I would sell Richard’s bangle and spend the money on a weekend for us both somewhere nice. We could go to a spa hotel: much more her scene than mine but that would be the point, if it was my treat. I left the phone on the passenger seat, expecting a swift answer, but none came, which surprised me for a Sunday when surely even she wouldn’t be in a meeting.

  In the end, her response didn’t come until after eight o’clock, when I was grilling bacon for supper and the phone’s single ring made me jump. Would have loved to but I’ve said I’ll go and visit my parents – their wedding anniversary. Damn! Another time?

  I’d warded off melancholy for most of the day but at about ten, I gave in to it for a few minutes. I poured the last glass of wine from the bottle that Pete had opened and took it outside into the yard with the cigarettes I’d bought in Cowes. What cloud there was moved swiftly, backlit by the moon so that it looked wraithlike and wan. The air was chill but refreshing, almost sweet. There was no ferry at the slipway and no traffic coming over the bridge on River Road: the night’s silence had settled. The first drag of the cigarette gave me a head-rush and I sat down on the step, feeling the cold of the concrete through my jeans. Tonight even the faint music of the breeze through the rigging in the harbour was muted. I took another drag and heard the next layer of tobacco crackle as it caught light.

  I had been carrying my phone around all day in the hope that there would be if not a call – I could understand that would be difficult – then a text, saying thank you for dinner or apologising even if he didn’t mean it or perhaps making a joke of what had happened, just to take away some of the bite in case we met, but there had been nothing at all. Helen’s had been the only message. I’d thought about texting him, making some self-deprecatory comment to assume the blame, but nothing seemed right. I also hated the idea that he might think I was pursuing him.

  All of a sudden now, in the darkness at the end of the yard, something moved. I froze, felt my heart tighten in my chest. I listened: nothing except the boom of racing blood. It moved again, whatever it was, this time close to the ground. I let out the breath that had caught in my throat and a second or two later, Pete’s cat appeared from under the car. He stood at the edge of the patio, his eyes and white bib bright in the light through the glass behind me.

  I stood up, expecting him to dart away, but he stayed still, watching me intently as I approached. When I was close enough and he still hadn’t run, I knelt down and put out my hand to stroke him. I’d only touched him three or four times when he moved but instead of disappearing, he came closer and brushed against my knees. I felt the same urge as the first time I’d seen him, that day in the Square when he’d reminded me so strongly of Magpie. Wrapping my arms tentatively around his body, expecting him to wriggle away at any moment, I lifted him up and held him, resting my cheek against the soft fur on the back of his neck. How long we stood like that I wasn’t sure but he didn’t struggle to get free. He was a solid presence, warm in my arms. I caught sight of us in the glass of the sliding doors and it was like seeing myself twenty years ago outside the patio doors at home in Bristol.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ignore it, I ordered myself, when I turned on the computer and saw a new message from Richard. Delete it – straight away. My finger hovered above the mouse, and kept hovering. In the end I got up and slammed out of the house, storming up the road towards Sally’s, then along the path around the estuary. I always walked quickly but now I was almost running, my feet beating out the mantra on the ground: ignore him, ignore him, ignore him. Still, however, there was the other voice, the one that came from my gut, not my head: what if he’s found you? What if he’s coming? You need to know. Back at the house, it was that voice that won out and I opened the email, furious with myself for letting him in again.

  Do you ever think about that night on Putney Bridge? Do you realise how close you came? You would have dropped like a stone. Remember how quiet it was? There wouldn’t have been any witnesses. Who would have known you weren’t just a lonely girl with problems who’d decided she couldn’t take any more?

  You would have done anything then to prove that you were right for me, a fit partner. That’s because I got into your head. You let me in, Katie, you gave me the key. Now I own you. The only reason that you’re still out there trying to lead your pathetic little life is because I’m letting you.

  * * *

  While it wasn’t warm, it was mild enough that week that when I got home from the café, I could drink a cup of tea at the picnic table in the yard in the last half-hour of daylight. The days were lengthening obviously now, each one longer than the one before, the moment of absolute darkness coming later and later. They were str
ange days, ones whose ends I was glad to reach when I got into bed. I accepted that Pete wasn’t going to get in touch and my disappointment began to dull but I was ambushed regularly by memories of the days out on the boat or the supper, memories which gave me a pain under my sternum. I distracted myself with work, that old failsafe.

  On Tuesday, I found myself looking at the empty planters outside the sliding doors. The bare soil looked forlorn so after work the next day, when I went shopping in Freshwater, I bought sweet-pea seeds and canes to train the shoots up when they grew. I wouldn’t be here long enough to see them flower but they would be there for the cottage’s summer residents, people on their holidays. Pete’s cat came every day. As if by appointment, he would wait until I was outside having tea and then he would squeeze through the gap by the gate and trot up the yard to wind himself around my feet. The first couple of days, he stayed only until I got cold and went inside but on Thursday, when I stood up to go in, he didn’t leave. Instead, moving round my feet so closely that I was afraid I would tread on him, he came with me into the house.

  Cupboard love, I thought, as he ran ahead and stood expectantly at the door of the fridge. ‘I can’t feed you,’ I said, kneeling to stroke him. ‘I’m sorry. You aren’t mine. If I feed you, you’ll think you live here, and I’m going soon.’

  Undeterred, he stayed. I lit a small fire – surely one of the last of the year – and for two hours he curled up in front of it on the rug. When I put the oven on for my supper, however, he got up immediately and came into the kitchen, where he resumed his vigil by the fridge, looking up at me with imploring eyes. In the end, I caved in and poured him a saucer of milk.

  I spent a lot of time that week thinking about where I could go next. It made me so angry that Richard was dictating my plans. On the other hand, however, a small part of me was relieved that I wasn’t going back to that lonely life in the flat in Earls Court. I had started to dread it.

  In Yarmouth I had begun to feel part of things in a way I never had in London. Admittedly it was only among a small group of people – I remembered what Pete had said about overners and the real locals taking a couple of hundred years to defrost – but when I went to work at the café now there were people who nodded and said good morning, there were Mary and Chris, Sally. And there had been Pete. I could do it again, move somewhere else and, over time, begin to build another network.

  The question was where. I had no ideas.

  I was in the back yard on Saturday afternoon when Pete knocked. I’d been watering the pots and came into the house to see him standing on the other side of the glass. My hand fumbled slightly as I turned the key.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hi.’ My face was burning.

  The breeze riffled through the ivy on the wall behind him, revealing the pale undersides of the leaves. He looked especially tall today, even though I had the advantage of the step. He was in another dark jumper – blue again, this one – and the usual jeans. Looking down to avoid his eye, I saw sand in the stitching of his shoes.

  ‘Are you doing anything?’

  ‘What?’ I looked up again in surprise.

  ‘Now, I mean. I’m going to Brook, for a walk on the beach. I wondered if you wanted to come.’

  It was a mild day but the cloud which had been thickening gradually since the morning hung low over the cliff-top, creating a humidity, a sense that something was brewing. There was no seismic activity under the Island but there was something volcanic about the atmosphere at Brook. Walking along the beach, I was aware all the time of the red-and-grey cliff that bordered the dark sand. It wasn’t a static part of the landscape but alive with constant movement. Water trickled down it as if it was gently weeping, and tiny stones and lumps of clayish rock tumbled on to the beach to join the piles of larger chunks that must have come down in the fall that Chris had mentioned at supper. On my other side, the sea was muted, the dull sunless green disappearing to a steely line at the horizon. At Compton, as we’d driven past, I’d seen kite-surfers but no one was on the water here.

  Pete walked a few paces ahead of me, eyes trained on the ground, occasionally stopping to pick up a chunk of stuff that he crumbled between his fingers and then tossed away back up the beach. Among the children and the casual enthusiasts, there were several real fossil hunters out, dotted here and there along the length of the beach, easily identifiable by the leather bags strung sideways across their bodies, the trowels and tiny hammers protruding from the pockets of their trousers and jackets. The hammers were hardly necessary, I thought; the stuff that lay on the beach, uncovered after thousands of years, was scarcely rock; it was little more than compacted mud. No wonder the cliff fell in so easily.

  In other circumstances I would have been irritated by Pete’s behaviour, the invitation to come with him and then this. Actually, though, I was happy to walk slowly, listening to the water, watching him. It was good to have the opportunity at least to try and order my thoughts. His car had been on the double yellows at the end of the passageway and I was putting my seatbelt on before I’d even realised what I was doing. We’d hardly spoken on the way here either, though it was a good quarter of an hour’s journey. Radio 4 had been on and that had taken the place of conversation as it had done before. The only time he’d really broken the silence was when we stopped at the roundabout in Freshwater and he looked at me, puzzled. ‘Do you always keep your door locked when you’re in?’ he’d asked.

  It was low tide and though the accessible area of sand was longer than it would be at high water, it wasn’t a large beach even now. We’d gone maybe five hundred yards when Pete seemed to give up on the rocks and waited for me. There was a piece of sea-washed glass on the sand by my feet and I picked it up before going over, wanting to make the point. I brushed the sand off it and held it so the light shone through. I’d seen that particular shade of toffee brown before. I skimmed it hard into the sea – four jumps, not bad – and caught him up.

  We walked side by side for a while. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I recognised from other times that I’d dreaded what was coming. I watched our feet. I was nearer to the sea and the difference was visible in the amount of water that flooded our footsteps when we left them: his softened, the pattern of his soles disappearing, but mine jellified, the shape of my feet lost completely.

  ‘The other night,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, keeping my eyes trained on the ground. ‘There had been drink taken, as they say. These things happen – chalk it up as a mistake.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t a mistake. But I couldn’t . . . I’ve always been faithful.’

  ‘You don’t need to say any more.’ I glanced at him and saw his grim expression. ‘It’s forgotten.’

  ‘I do – I did need to say it. I needed you to understand.’ There was frustration in his voice, barely masked, and he kicked up an arc of sand, the clumps of it large enough to be audible as they fell back on to the beach. ‘I’ve spent the last week feeling terrible – guilty and just . . . I don’t know.’ He took something from his pocket and held it out to me. ‘Anyway, I found this for you,’ he said. ‘Not today – in the week.’

  It was badly damaged and darkened from the rock in which it had been hidden for millennia but it was still recognisably a tooth like the one which Matt had found, about two inches long, its point broken. I turned it over in my hand, not sure what to say. ‘I can’t guarantee it’s from the same dinosaur, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  I smiled, though my throat was suddenly tight. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to keep it, though?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s for you.’

  We were quiet again on the way back. The quiet was different, however, as if something had been settled. I fought a bitter disappointment and made myself acknowledge that there had been part of me that had still hoped, even this afternoon, that there might somehow – miraculously – be a chance. Alic
e. For a second time I found myself hating her with a force of which I was immediately ashamed.

  It had been past four already when Pete had knocked on the door and by the time we climbed the uneven steps back to the car park above the beach, the light was fading quickly, casting the fields on the far side of the road into a penumbrous gloom. The land rolled away, ancient and imbued with that strange quality I’d felt here before, the timelessness which I’d rarely felt anywhere else. Today, I found it comforting. Endure, I imagined it whispering to me; endure. Next to me, Pete was solid in the near-dark. I couldn’t look at him directly but I was aware of his hand on the gear-stick, the tightening of his grip on the wheel as he slowed to take the car into the steep corner. The engine was the only sound as we went through the lanes, and the hedgerows passed us in a black blur.

  My hand, the one Pete couldn’t see, was in my jacket pocket, clenched into a tight fist around the fossil. It was an old habit; as a child, I had often found something small to hold on to and would shove my hand into my pocket or under my pillow at night and grip as though whatever it was – a pebble, a conker, a piece of our Meccano set – had talismanic powers and could keep me safe, ward off the bad.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I watched the mist coming, rising up from the sea, thickening second by second, leaving no room for oxygen in the air it moved through. It would suffocate me, I knew. The first tendrils of it were on my face already, touching me like little fingers, damp and cold. I tried to step back but my feet were too heavy – I couldn’t lift them.

  Now I was surrounded, the white wall behind me as well as in front, shifting all the time but impenetrable, unbreathable. How long would I last on the air I had? Through the fog there came a light, a single beam which raked from right to left then was extinguished, and then came again. And a bell, low and mournful, tolling somewhere below me on the water. Invisible.