Authors: Lucie Whitehouse
‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’
‘Instant’s fine – great. Please, don’t go to any trouble.’
She brought the mugs over to the table and sat down. ‘Have a biscuit.’ She proffered the plate and I took one, largely from a sense that it would be rude to refuse. She took one herself and began to gnaw at the end of it. ‘Did you come to the Island for work then?’ she asked.
I explained about the translating, how I could do it anywhere. I wondered as I talked how many days it had been since I’d done any actual work. It was stretching to weeks now. I would have to be careful; before any of this had happened, I’d been ahead of schedule, as I always was, but coming here, the days when I’d been incapable of doing anything: I was losing ground, and I couldn’t afford to get the reputation of not being able to work to deadline.
‘That sounds interesting – much more interesting than my job. I’m a PA, for a company of solicitors in Newport.’
‘Translating has its downsides. It’s pretty lonely, for one thing,’ I said, feeling I had to offer some consolation. ‘This probably isn’t the right place for it, not in my situation.’
‘You don’t think you’ll stay then?’
‘Not permanently. I don’t know anyone here.’
‘You know Pete, though. Pete Frewin.’ She looked up from where her fingers were following the doily’s scalloped edge. ‘I saw you talking.’ There was a moment’s silence and then she laughed lightly. ‘That sounded terrible – as if I’m stalking you or something. What I meant was: I noticed you talking to him in the Square before I went into Wavells.’
‘That was the first time we’ve ever spoken. I was trying to stroke his cat – I used to have one who looked exactly the same.’
‘You know about his wife?’
‘Did you know her?’ The coffee was still very hot but I took a big mouthful, wanting to mask my face in case it gave away the extent of my interest.
‘Yes. She was my friend.’ She was looking down again now and I thought I detected a tremor in her lower lip. ‘Since sixth form. All three of us – us and Pete. She went to university on the mainland, in London, but when she came back, we just picked up where we left off. She was . . .’ She swallowed audibly.
‘I’m sorry. It must be very hard.’
A few seconds passed, then she sniffed as if fortifying herself and looked up again, resolute. Her eyes were watery, as they had been when I first saw her, but she blinked the tears quickly away. ‘If we knew for certain,’ she said, ‘that would help. Poor Pete – he’s being so strong but what must he be going through?’
I nodded. There were so many questions I wanted to ask but now it was near impossible. I couldn’t probe into her grief. I tried to imagine how it would feel if Helen disappeared and felt a wash of anxiety go over me. ‘Was there any warning?’ I said gently. ‘That she might . . .’
‘Not really. She’d been through a particularly bad patch recently and we’d been worried for her then but, if anything, she seemed calmer in the last few days, even excited – as if she’d sorted herself out, found some sort of answer to it all. Of course, it makes sense now,’ she glanced away and bit her lip. ‘She had found the answer. A terrible answer.’ She looked back at me. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear all this – and we’ve only just met and here’s me crying all over you.’
‘If it would help you to talk . . .’
‘You know what I don’t understand? She knew that we were here for her, whenever she needed us, Pete and me.’ She shook her head. ‘Pete was the best thing that ever happened to Alice. The way he loved her.’ She looked at me fiercely, as though I were trying to contradict her. ‘They were perfect. If he couldn’t make her happy, loving her like he did, then nothing would have done.’
To my horror, I felt my own eyes fill with tears. She noticed them and reached across the table to put her small hand on mine. Her nails were neat and painted with clear polish. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m upsetting you now. We won’t talk about it any more. Tell me about you instead. Do you have a partner?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There was someone but it went wrong.’ She looked genuinely troubled, as if it mattered to her. ‘How about you?’
‘I had Tom when I was eighteen,’ she said. ‘My father was furious, said I’d wasted myself. I didn’t care – Tom was worth every bit of the shouting then. The only thing that bothered me was that I split up from his dad quite soon after. I would have liked him to have a dad. Still, we’ve done OK, I think. We’ve managed.’
That night, for the first time in a week, I had trouble sleeping again. For the past few days, I’d been falling into a dreamless oblivion so complete it was as if I’d been anaesthetised but now lying in bed, the faint glow of the streetlights along River Road coming through the thin curtains, I realised something disturbing: I was jealous of Alice. Not for what she’d done, of course not, but for the obvious love she’d had, both from her husband and from Sally. I envied her that. More disturbingly still, however, I realised that I was also jealous of my brother. When I’d put the phone down after talking to him that evening, the house had settled into near-silence around me again and I’d thought of him sitting down to supper in his kitchen with Mel, opening a bottle of wine, Charlie already in his cot for the night. I’d felt it then: the first pang of unmistakable envy. They’d been together four years now and before Melissa, Matt had had another girlfriend for years, too, a shy girl called Rebecca whom he’d met in the labs at university. He could have no idea of what it was like, I thought, to have to breathe life into a cold house every time you walked in, to come home to cook your own supper every night and to eat it alone, never even to have to look for something and find it other than where you’d put it.
This time last year Richard had been in France and had got into London late on a Friday evening. We’d spent most of the night awake, lying in bed talking and drinking the wine he’d brought back with him. The following morning I went to the newsagent’s on Earls Court Road to buy milk and a newspaper. Though I’d had almost no sleep at all, I’d felt euphoric. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ he had asked an hour earlier. He was lying behind me, his body tucked in behind mine, his fingers gently tracing over my hip bone.
‘I don’t know yet,’ I’d said. ‘Normally we spend it with Dad in Bristol but he’s moved now and Matt and Mel have just had their baby.’
‘Spend it with me then. Let’s have Christmas here.’
‘Here? What, in this flat?’
‘Why not?’
‘Yours is much nicer – and much bigger. Do you really want to spend Christmas picking your way around the edge of the bed to get to the window?’
‘Maybe I don’t intend to spend much time out of bed at all.’ He moved his hand, sliding it off my hip and along the top of my thigh instead.
I wriggled out of his arms and turned to face him. ‘You mean it, then? You want to spend the holiday here? With me?’
‘Yes. Is that so very extraordinary?’ His eyebrows twitched and I laughed and kissed him.
I’d been so excited that I’d had to stop myself hopscotching along the pavement to the newsagent’s. I knew that going home with him that first night had been reckless but I didn’t care. If I hadn’t taken the risk, maybe I wouldn’t have had this. Often in the past when I’d felt myself beginning to care about men, I’d experienced something like panic. It was difficult: I wanted to connect with people, I went looking for connections, but I struggled with the reality of getting close to men because I was afraid of losing my emotional independence, being made vulnerable. Even I could recognise the pattern: as soon as I began to see potential in a new relationship, it was as if a switch was thrown in my brain and I deliberately began the sabotage, picking fights, looking for faults.
It hadn’t seemed to be happening with Richard, though. Perhaps it was the mock-confrontational banter between us which made me feel as if I was playing a role in a film and kept things light. But perhaps, I’d increasingly thought, it was because we had so much in common. He understood me and my need to be independent. Certainly he understood my need to work and why it was important for me to prove myself; it was one of his defining characteristics, too. ‘Thank you for understanding,’ he would say sometimes, when he left for his office on a Saturday afternoon. ‘You’re different. You get me.’ I liked the idea of being the person who understood him. And perhaps, I’d started to think, perhaps this was the understanding, the easiness, people meant when they talked about how they knew they’d met the right person.
As I’d walked back up the stairs that morning, I’d heard noises coming from my flat and as I approached the front door, I realised it was music. Richard had put the radio on. The unexpectedness of it, something in the flat that I hadn’t done, was strangely thrilling. I put down the papers and milk and followed the music through to its source in the bathroom. In the time that I’d been gone, he’d run a bath and was now in it, hidden up to his chest by bubbles. The sight of him in there, the adult, masculine shape of his body emerging from the childish foam, made me so happy that I burst out laughing. Then I took off my clothes, left them where they dropped and got in with him, lowering myself gently in so as not to send water spilling over the side.
‘I think you’ve got a talent for pleasure,’ he’d said, as I leant back against his chest.
‘And I thought I was only any good at languages.’
Chapter Nine
I knew that the way to pull myself together now was to work. Telling Sally about the translating had reminded me that it was there, not only an increasingly pressing obligation but also an escape route, a way I could make myself disappear.
Starting the day after I met her, I set out to establish a routine, getting up as soon as the alarm went off, putting on my old cord trousers and making a percolator of coffee. The first day, I only read through the notes I’d written when I’d begun work on the book – they might have been made by someone else for all the memory I had of them – but after that, gratefully, I found a rhythm again and within days I was working at such a pitch that I stood up from my desk at lunchtime feeling sick from the intensity of the concentration. While I was focusing on the text, on finding the neatest, most succinct and idiomatic way of turning the English words into French, I could lose my problems, shake them off.
In the afternoons I went out. Unless it was raining heavily, I walked, just setting out from the cottage and following my feet. On wet days I took the car, gradually expanding my knowledge of the Island, attaching images to the names in my new road map. I went to places we’d never visited with Dad or that I didn’t remember anyway. I took the straight road that ran down the south-west facet of the Island, and at St Catherine’s on the southernmost tip I parked the car in a lane and walked down to a cluster of low buildings and the single white tower of the lighthouse which presided over the Channel. I was there as darkness began to fall and the lamp came on, strobing across the water like a giant eye, not warning but watching. On another day I went further along the road and came into Ventnor, easing the car down its wet, narrow streets to the shabby centre just above a promenade of closed-up cafés and boarding houses. The palm trees in the beds above the beach were evidence of the town’s other, summer life, so remote I couldn’t imagine it.
I felt the history of the Island all the time, as if the past was so close to the surface that occasionally it broke through to the present. Nestled among the spongy woods on the slopes of St Boniface Down, white Victorian villas held themselves aloof from the cheap shops of lower Ventnor as if their time of reserve and rectitude had never passed. In Bonchurch I came across an eleventh-century stone church little larger than a garden shed. Rain had made its tiny graveyard verdant and darkened the headstones, many of which bore the names and Victorian dates of those who had come to Ventnor, I guessed, to take the cure I’d read about. A plaque told me that the church was mentioned in the Domesday Book and standing among the graves, listening to the rain dripping through the branches of the trees which pressed at the edge of the cemetery and threatened to overgrow it, I felt even that time wasn’t so very far away.
The days began to gather momentum, and November tipped into December. Christmas was inescapable suddenly. Everywhere I went there were signs of it: artificial trees covered with lurid flashing lights in windows and gardens, illuminated Santas leading teams of reindeer across the roofs of pebbledashed semis on the road out of Newport. In Yarmouth there was tinsel woven among the toys and teddies and plastic models that made up the newsagent’s window display, and the chemist’s blinking mirrors were joined by gift sets of soaps and talcum powder. Listening to the radio in the car or watching television meant subjection to heavy shelling by advertisement.
Ten days after we spoke, I wrote Matt an email to say that I’d decided not to come to Baltimore. I had a deadline approaching, I told him, and Helen had reminded me of a promise I’d made to spend Christmas with her. He would never find out it wasn’t true.
Since coming to the Island I had spoken to Helen once and even then only briefly. For the most part our contact, too, was via email; it was an easier medium for both of us. There was something forced about speaking on the phone now, as if we were trying too hard to go back and recapture the time when there was no awkwardness between us and we’d spoken every day as a matter of course. Email allowed us to tread water, to stop our friendship from fading out completely but to preserve the distance that seemed to be stretching between us. I kept my mobile with me all the time and checked my email several times an hour when I was working but the phone didn’t ring and her messages were so occasional that I jumped on them as soon as they arrived.