I remember that more than anything – the rough warmth of his fingers, the dryness I was to discover came from oil paint and white spirit, the cracks across his palm. I remember that more than his volubility, or the heavy overcoat or the ridiculous hat. He didn’t hold my hand stiffly, either. He rubbed it as we walked, massaging it back and forth with his thumb as if testing the flesh.
Later, when I knew more about him, when he’d explained about his childhood, the problems he had with trust, when he had gazed so deeply into my eyes I felt as if my insides were melting, he told me it wasn’t loneliness that had led him to the Internet. In the normal run of things, he met single women all the time. He was in search of a new beginning, that was all. He just wanted to start again.
I turn the key in the ignition and pull out. The traffic is heavy. It’s the dull end of a Saturday afternoon, locals are heading away from a football match. Dusk is beginning to roll out across the fields. I still have twenty miles to drive from here and I promised Jane, who knows how much I am dreading opening the door to Zach’s holiday house, that I would reach it before dark.
I keep going the long way – the Bodmin bypass and the main road into Wadebridge; two sides of a triangle. It’s the route Zach used to take to Gulls before he discovered the short cut. A year ago, according to Morrow’s analysis, Zach missed the junction and turned round at the next roundabout. Morrow said he’d probably been drinking. He would definitely have been tired, out late the night before with an art dealer in Exeter, a bad night in a B & B, and then a long day with his paints on the moors.
I think, before I can stop myself, about the last time I saw him – the morning before he died. We were in our small kitchen in Wandsworth. The radio was on, broadcasting the results of a by-election in Hampshire. I was late for work, wary of him, shrugging on my coat, finding a lead for the dog, stuffing on my hat. But as I passed by the door, he reached out and grabbed my sleeve. His pupils were smaller, the irises a lighter blue. His mood had changed. ‘I love you,’ he said intensely, tugging me closer. ‘You do know, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ I said. I never doubted that.
‘Because I do,’ he said. ‘I do love you.’
He kissed me full on the mouth. I tasted coffee, and mint, and last night’s whisky. I felt myself sink, yielding, as I always had. My stomach clenched. Tears began to prick. If he had moved his lips to brush the hollow of my neck, I’d have gone upstairs with him, however late I was for school, however scared I was.
I said: ‘I’m sorry the chicken had mushrooms in it.’
His voice was soft. ‘It’s just I thought you knew.’
I said: ‘I should have remembered. And I’m sorry I was late home. Peggy was in a state about the baby.’
‘She’s got you round her little finger,’ he said.
Howard came up then and nudged my elbow. I scratched behind his ears. He hadn’t been well and I put my hand to his chest, checking.
Zach looked away. ‘You love that dog more than me.’
‘I don’t.’
He rearranged the coffee pot and his coffee cup on the table so the handles faced the same way. He aligned the teaspoon on the saucer. ‘Do you promise?’
I’d been kneeling and I stood up, forcing myself to laugh. I had already decided to leave. I had written the letter and posted it. It would be waiting for him in Cornwall. I’d sent it there because I thought it would be better if he were a long way away when he read it. I was hoping this last breakfast would be normal. To my own ears my voice sounded too high, strangulated, the words squeezed dry on my tongue. ‘I promise I don’t love the dog more than you.’
I spoke to him twice before he died – once on the phone that night and once late the following afternoon. I wanted to hear his voice one more time. He was still on Dartmoor when I rang, at a point called Cosdon, painting a run of ancient stone tors. Bleak and funereal, he said, stretching into the distance like unmarked graves. He was after a dying light. He would reach the bungalow after dark. I told him to be careful on the last unlit stretch of road. It was the last time I spoke to him.
I pull off the dual carriageway, slow down, head over the bridge. The road narrows to a single lane. I put my lights on. I stay under the speed limit. I always do. Zach said I drive like an old woman. It’s the sort of thing I try to remember, his fondness for a casual insult, the way his jokes could tip into something nastier. I hope it will make me miss him less.
It doesn’t work.
You can love and hate someone at the same time. You can so pity them it’s like a fist in your stomach, be so resentful you want to hit them. They can be the best thing that ever happened to you, and the worst. You can have thoughts of leaving them and yet the memory of their skin, the pads of their fingers across your ribcage . . . these can take your breath away, even after a year.
The letter will still be there at the house. It has sat unopened for a whole year. I imagine it buried under the pizza flyers and the TV licence reminders, the Electoral Roll brown envelopes.
Thank God he died before he read it. That’s one thing to be grateful for. He never learned of my betrayal.
When I get there I am going to burn it.
I change gears for the hill. The car jerks. Howard, curled next to me, doesn’t lift his head from his paws.
I have driven past the holiday park, and caught, through a hedgerow, my first velvet glimpse of sea, when I see headlights glaring in my rear-view mirror. Undipped, right up close. I am on a slight incline and I accelerate until the lights have receded. Stupid idiot, I think, but then the lights are back. Dazzling, flashing. The car is on my bumper. Its horn is sounding. I think of the silver SUV in the lay-by. Is this an SUV? I can’t see anything else, not the sea, not the banks, not the road, just these insistent, blazing lights, and I’ve started driving faster and faster, hurtling down the hill towards the village until I reach the farm shop. I skid into the entrance and screech to a halt.
The car zooms past and is gone. I wait for a moment. Howard has got to his feet and is nosing at the window. It is dark out, the vegetable racks loom like gallows, and suddenly everything is very still.
The self-help books with their formal stages of grief, they expect a standard trajectory: shock, disbelief, bargaining, anger, depression, final acceptance. I think I’ve got jammed. The one Peggy gave me, The Flowering of Your Passing, had a chapter on ‘pathological grief’. It’s when a bereaved person finds it impossible to move on. I think pathological grief might be what I’ve got.
No one is out to get me. It’s pathological. Survivor’s guilt. Leaver’s guilt. Unfinished business.
If I had stolen the lilies, I could have them with me now. I would touch them, rub their dusty satin between my fingers, breathe their sickly scent and know that I hadn’t made them up.
It’s a short drive from here, along a web of rough roads that follow the contour of the hill. Gulls is on the outside of this network, close to the edge of the cliff where the properties begin to run out. I put on the radio and rattle the last pockmarked stretch of journey, singing thinly to Taylor Swift.
Chapter Two
Wheelie bins block the entrance to the studio Zach converted from the old garage next door. Rotten pears from last summer cover the steep pitch of grass. Decayed heads of hostas flop drearily along the path. The main limb of the climbing rose I tried to train across the porch two years ago has fallen backwards to the ground.
I approach the bungalow from the side, as you would a nervous cat. I never liked it here. It’s too remote for me. This end of the cliff road is run down and desolate; the other houses look shut up and empty, even when they’re not. Zach, who bought the house after his mother died, claimed to love the wildness and the isolation, but it felt like an affectation. I think it was what he thought an artist should say. The fact is he hated being alone.
The key snags and catches. I push gingerly against a pile of post. My letter will be under there. I’ll destroy it as soon as I can.
How stupid it is to be scared by a house. I begin to walk around, switching on all the other lights, looking in all the rooms. A tap drips in the bathroom. In the kitchen, mouse droppings are scattered along the base of the Dualit toaster and a tendril of ivy creeps through a crack in the window frame. The row of ash-glazed jugs along the shelf are neatly lined up, the handles at the same angle; the natural birch washing-up brushes sit stoutly in their pot. Something acrid curdles in the air. It feels damp, that’s all.
The bedroom is how it would have been left the last time we were here – pillows stiff, bare duvet folded like a body under the antique Durham quilt. The sheets are in the bottom drawer of the linen press – crisp, lavender-scented. I remember the last time we put them away: Zach’s broad hands as he folded, the look of concentration on his face, the small dance as we came together, the drop, the laugh, noses above the sheets, a long kiss. Moments of perfect happiness – I can never deny those.
My legs feel shaky. I sit down on the side of the bed and lean my head against the wall. We didn’t match, Zach and I. People used to wonder what he saw in me. His confidence, my diffidence. I’m nothing to look at. His were the kind of looks that drew the eye, that made shop assistants simper. What a catch he was. All my friends thought it. I’d lucked out – I could see it in their expressions. Jane was envious of the newness. But it was more about oldness. I felt tied to him, almost as soon as we met, caught at the ribs. Connections tangled beneath us, drew us together. He had been at school with my old boss. We had rented flats in the same block in Clapham, been unwitting neighbours. He voiced feelings I had had myself but hadn’t put into words. He stood up for me – no one had ever done that before. And he had this way of speeding things forward (‘How many children shall we have?’; ‘Where shall we retire to?’) to the point where I felt I’d always known him, and always would.
And in bed, with our clothes off, we fitted. The things I’d read about in books turned out not to be clichés after all. I would melt. I didn’t know where he ended and where I began. Whole nights would pass in a tangle of limbs. And he felt it too. I know he did, for all his experience. His hands in my hair, the breathless silence, the look of ecstatic anguish on his beautiful face as he came. His sighs afterwards, his weight pressing me into the sheets, the rasp of his chin in the crook of my neck. The small moan of satisfaction as he pulled me to him. I had my own power.
My eyes have closed, but I open them now and I realise I am staring down at a wire on the floor, trailing from a plug in the wall. I poke at it with my foot. It’s a dirty white in colour, half coiled, with an adaptor halfway along. I bend down and, reaching under the bed to where the wire leads, bring up a silver laptop – a MacBook Air.
I try and make sense of it, turn it over in my hands, feel the coldness of the metal.
Zach owned a MacBook Air. He wrote on it all the time, poured down his ideas, notes for paintings, for projects. He was obsessive about it. He never let it out of his sight. He had it with him when he left London. He would have had it with him when he died. His was destroyed in the fire. So this isn’t that one. This must be someone else’s.
I open it. Zach Hopkins flashes across the screen, with a space for the password. The screensaver is the view from the clifftop – low cloud, rolls of Atlantic Ocean, Zach’s favourite view. I snap the laptop shut and, hands trembling, lay it down carefully on the bed next to me.
Zach wouldn’t let me touch his laptop. I lifted it off the kitchen table once, just to clean underneath, and he yanked it so roughly out of my hands it fell to the floor. He picked it up, checking it over, swearing at me, and I left the room so he wouldn’t see my face. Later, when we made up, when he clung to me in bed, he apologised for over-reacting. ‘It’s just that my life is on it,’ he said.
I stand up quietly now, trying not to make any noise. I pull out the drawer where he kept a few old clothes. I think a pair of shorts is missing, navy ones, and a grey sweatshirt, and a worn leather belt that is normally coiled in the corner. I kneel down on the floor and look under the bed. There should be a holdall – kept here as it’s too bulky for the closet – but it’s gone. I run into the kitchen. I search the oven and the cupboards, shake out the tea towels. From the cupboard, a torch is missing, along with a stash of emergency money, £40 or so, that was kept in an empty box of muesli. I go through the house, room by room, searching for evidence with a different eye, with a different set of assumptions. On the wall in the living room, a dirty square below an empty nail. A picture has been taken down. It was an early work of Zach’s, an oil, simple, rough, of a woman in a doorway. His Hunter boots, in accordance with his strict sense of orderliness, should be in the hall closet, lined up in their usual place. My old blue Dunlops are there. But his – dark green, size 43, the left one chewed by Howard and mended by me in panicked secrecy with some special glue I bought online – are gone.
I sit down in the chair by the fireplace. My mouth is dry. I’ve started shaking. It’s beginning again. I’m back where I started. People have told me I’m mad, and maybe I am. Perhaps I am imagining it. But I’m not. He has been in this house.
My letter.
The pile of mail is still lying by the front door. I pick it up and take it to the table, push through the brown envelopes and free newspapers and flyers for plumbers and electricians, gas bills and TV licence demands, then drop it all at my feet. There’s no letter from me.
Howard is still out the front, in the garden. I move to the door and call him. It’s a cold Cornish night, with a wisp of warmer Gulf wind. It’s completely silent. He’ll have gone further down the lane, on the nose of a scent, perhaps looking for Zach. I shout louder.
Phrases spool over and over in my head. My beloved, I’d begun. I need space . . . a little time apart: pat sentences, the kind of fake sentiments Zach hated, received ideas. I was too scared to write the truth. ‘Be honest,’ he used to say. ‘Look at me. Tell me how you feel.’ Panic rises within me, remembering that. Often, I didn’t know how I felt. Sometimes, frozen by the ferocity of his desire to know, I didn’t feel anything at all.
‘You’re everything,’ he used to say. ‘I couldn’t live without you.’
You love that dog more than me.
Howard still doesn’t come, and I go back into the house, into the kitchen. The bin is Brabantia, top of the range – Zach insisted. It has a vintage look to it. Details were so important to him. I click open the lid.
My letter and its envelope are scrunched up at the bottom.
‘HOWARD!’ I’m out the front, screaming now, too loudly, filled with trepidation.
My dog comes bounding, skidding across the dank grass, falling over his own feet. He knocks into my legs and then passes me into the house. His dirty paws, the white boards, the pale rug. The old panic sharp in my chest: I’ll have to clean up before Zach sees.
In London, at night, I leave the light on since the accident. I don’t trust myself. I double- and triple-check windows and doors. My brain is unreliable. When I am with people, I have a thought and then I don’t know whether I have actually said it out loud. I repeat myself, Jane says. Other times I am unnaturally silent. I feel as if I’m waiting. My limbs turn heavy and uncooperative. If I’m not careful, I think, I will fall down the stairs, crack my head, break all my bones. I’m scared I might die.
I see Zach everywhere. I’ll see a man in the street or along the platform on the Tube and my heart will st
op. I’ll run, pushing people out of the way and then I’ll reach him, or he’ll turn, and it won’t be Zach at all, but a stranger with the same gait or messenger bag, the same floppy dark hair.
Peggy is always telling me to clear out his clothes. But it feels wrong. How can I get rid of his shoes, his shirts? He’ll need them when he comes back.
PC Morrow assures me this is common. The brain needs to forge new synapses. It hasn’t caught up with the heart. I am like a soldier, she said, experiencing phantom sensations in an amputated limb. It is neuropathic confusion. It will stop, she said, when I am more myself.
I am still waiting. But my mind seems to be getting more confused, not less. I sense his breath on my neck. Once, at work, I was alone in the library, putting books back on the shelves, and I smelt his aftershave. Acqua di Parma – Colonia Intensa (not Assoluta: I made that mistake once). The light in the room changed, as if someone were blocking the doorway. When I got there and looked out, the corridor was empty.
We had a break-in. I had a break-in. Although ‘break-in’ isn’t quite the word. No busted lock or broken window; nothing left on its hinges. My handbag, the television, the loose change on the kitchen table, were untouched. They took Zach’s iPod. ‘It’s all kids want these days,’ Morrow said, ‘small electronic gadgets they can sell on.’ Even so. The front door tightly closed, the post neatly piled on the table in the hall – did I leave it like that? I couldn’t remember. Morrow said I must have left the door unlatched. An open invitation. I make that sort of mistake all the time. Was it dread or longing that sent quivers up my spine, that made me imagine he had let himself in with his key?
At night I hear noises. A car pulled up in the street in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. Elvis Costello, ‘I Wanna Be Loved’, his favourite song, leaked from the rolled-down window. The car stayed there, engine running, right outside the house. The music was loud enough to reach me, even in the back bedroom where I sleep. By the time I got to the study window, the car had pulled off. I saw its lights at the end of the road.
Remember Me This Way Page 2
