Authors: Lucie Whitehouse
The day after that, I had to go out. There was nothing left to eat. I wasn’t sure how many days it had been since I’d left the house – three? four? – but it seemed an incredible idea: inside, there was structure; outside, anything might happen. I had no choice, though. Talking myself through the actions, I put my long coat on over my T-shirt and found my ankle boots. My purse and the key were still on the counter from the last time. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
A strong wind was blowing, funnelling down the passage and biting at my bare legs. I put my hands on my thighs to stop my coat flying up. In the Square, against the cloudless petrol blue of the evening sky, everything seemed supernaturally bright, as if I had been wearing a blindfold which had now been removed. It all seemed so definite and beautiful but distant, too: alien.
At the checkout at the corner shop I waited with mounting impatience while the assistant, a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and round eyes that almost closed when she smiled, slowly scanned and packed the food. My hands were shaking with hunger as I took the notes out of my purse and when at last she gave me the change I dropped it and the coins rolled off in different directions, fleeing under the racks and spinning merrily away from me. I got down and scrabbled for them. The floor was cold on my bare legs but the coins now meant much more to me than their monetary value: they seemed to symbolise everything. Suddenly I was blinking fiercely against hot tears. The assistant came out from behind the counter and helped me, retrieving three coins and putting them gently into my hand. As she curled my fingers over to make sure I had them this time, she smiled at me again and in her face I saw the unmistakable softening of pity.
The following afternoon I got properly dressed for the first time since it had started. I needed more books. They had some at the newsagent’s, I had seen them tucked away in a corner at the back, but it was the Totland shop I wanted. There was something more than the books there; though the owner had identified me as an outsider, it had felt familiar to me, a like-minded place.
Passing the mirror on the landing, I caught a glimpse of my face and, despite my hurry, I had to stop. I looked hollowed-out. My skin was colourless apart from the rim of bruised purple in my eye socket, now subsiding into shades of rotten yellow and green, and the livid line under the spidery stitches that itched constantly. My eyes stared dully back at me, the pupils huge with lack of light. I touched my cheek and the skin felt dry and older than I ever remembered.
I was nervous about driving but I didn’t want to be out of the house for any longer than necessary. I went slowly, praying that I wouldn’t meet a situation which required a swift response. It occurred to me on the way that the shop might be closed – I wasn’t sure what day it was – but when I arrived, the lights were on. I took a minute to try to calm down before going in; I didn’t want a repeat of yesterday.
Inside, the atmosphere of unfussy order and peace was the same. The man behind the desk looked up as the bell announced my arrival. He recognised me and mouthed hello, and I turned to see another woman already browsing, her attention focused on the chunky paperback in her hand, shopping basket tucked into the crook of her arm. I nodded to him and moved out of view. Despite my determination to be calm, I felt the same overwhelming desire for the books that I had had for the food. I wanted to snatch them up and take them all back to the cottage. Five, I told myself; any more would look excessive.
I started scanning the rows, finding things I hadn’t noticed before. What would be more distracting, I wondered, old favourites or new stories? Behind me, the telephone rang and was answered. The man kept his voice low, as if we were in a library. Looking up, I realised his quietness was in deference only to me: the other woman had gone. A sudden urgency in his tone caught my attention.
‘Where?’ he said. A few seconds passed. ‘The coastguard? They didn’t bring her in themselves?’
Now I was straining to hear and I could just make out the sound of the voice at the other end of the line. I was too far away, however, to distinguish what it was saying.
‘And they think it is?’ Another pause. ‘Right. OK. You’ve tried his office, obviously? I may do – I think so, yes. If he is there, I’ll tell him – no, it’s all right. I’ll ring you. Half an hour?’
He hung up and I realised I’d been holding myself rigid, hardly breathing. The call was about Alice, I was sure. They’d found her body. For a moment I thought I might be sick, and I quickly put my hand over my mouth. The intensity of the feeling took me by surprise.
‘I’m sorry.’ The voice came from just behind my shoulder and I spun round as if he’d caught me stealing. ‘I have to close up now; I have to go.’
It took a second or two for the words to register. ‘No, of course. That’s . . .’ I remembered the books under my arm.
‘Have them.’ He was searching for his keys, patting his pockets, shaking his jacket to hear them.
‘What?’
‘The books – have them.’
‘I couldn’t; I wouldn’t feel . . .’
‘Please. It doesn’t matter at all. I’m sorry – I hate hurrying you like this but I really do have to go.’
He followed me out of the shop, turning the light off and locking the door behind him. I got back into the car and watched in the rear-view mirror as he went down the hill towards the war memorial, his slightly bow-legged stride quick for a man of his age. He was going to find Peter Frewin, I knew it.
Chapter Eight
I’d spoken to my brother less since he’d moved to America. The cost of transatlantic calls, especially from a mobile, meant that when we talked now there was a third party involved in our conversations, the clock ticking through the minutes, racking up the pounds or dollars. Most of the time, we kept in touch by email but today I wanted to hear the sound of his voice with the Bristol accent that it had retained despite all the years since he’d left home and the move to another continent.
I called him at midnight: seven o’clock in Baltimore. With the exception of the man in the shop in the afternoon, it would be the first time I’d spoken to anyone in days. I hesitated before dialling the number, nervous all of a sudden at the prospect of speaking to my own brother. The phone rang and rang but when at last he answered, there was delight in his voice.
‘How are you?’ he was asking. ‘How’s the Island?’
I swallowed quickly, not wanting him to hear the lump that had come into my throat. ‘It’s cold,’ I said. ‘And it was foggy and now it’s windy.’
‘But you’re enjoying it?’
The question was so far from the mark that I couldn’t think how to answer.
I’ve got no one to talk to and the day after I came here, I met a woman who drowned
. I could say it, of course I could, but I couldn’t really tell him how I felt; as soon as he’d picked up the phone, I’d known that. In Matt’s eyes, I was the one who knew how to handle things, the one who helped and solved problems. I’d been the person he rang when he was seventeen, at university a year early and out of his depth in London. A second-year by then, I knew my way around and enjoyed showing off my new sophistication as much as I’d enjoyed helping him out. If I told him how I really was now, it would reveal a side of me he had never known and it wasn’t just for his sake that I didn’t want that. His perception of me was important for me, too: I needed him to think of me as capable and strong. While I had that, I still had the façade of my old self at least. If I kept it, I could perhaps rebuild myself behind it; if I lost it, then there would be nothing left. There was another element to the feeling, too: pride. I couldn’t bear him to know that I’d made such a mess of things, especially when now, having always been the less worldly of us, he’d got everything right.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s fine, yes. It’s good.’
‘I was really surprised when Dad told me. I’ve been meaning to drop you a line but we’ve been doing trials at work and Charlie’s had a chest infection.’
‘He’s all right though?’
‘Getting better now but Mel was really worried – we both were. His temperature was so high. But why did you move? I didn’t even know you were thinking about it.’
‘You know, I felt like I needed a change.’
He laughed. ‘And you couldn’t just go on holiday like normal people?’
‘As if you’d know what normal people do.’
‘All right,’ he said, a little defensive but also a little pleased. I felt a flood of affection for him. I wished that he was here so that I could put my arms around him and press my face against the chest which had been parallel with my forehead since he was thirteen. He’d inherited Dad’s height, as well as his love of physics. It had been like growing up with a couple of tall aliens who communicated in a code beyond my ken. But the geek in Matt was accompanied by a kindly diffidence that, over the past four or five years and much to his bafflement, had made him popular with women despite his elongated frame and its tendency to stringiness. And here he was now, his life all in order: the research job at Johns Hopkins that he might have been born to do – something to do with magnetic imaging, as far as I could make out – marriage to Melissa and then, a year ago, the arrival of Charlie. I wondered how he had made it all happen.
‘Oh, and I split up with Richard.’ I tried to sound casual.
‘Shit. You OK? What went wrong?’
The lump was back in my throat, hard as baked clay. What had I told him? I tried to remember. The truth was so far buried under layers of lies and half lies that I couldn’t be sure what he knew. But anyway, of everyone in the world, he was the last person I could tell. The thought alone made me wither.
‘I’m fine. It wasn’t meant to be, that’s all.’
‘Come on, you really liked him. You loved him. You’ve never talked about anyone like that before.’
‘I’ll get over it.’
‘If it would help to talk . . .’
‘I said it’s not a big deal. Just leave it.’
He was silent for a few seconds, and I could tell that I’d hurt him. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘if you change your mind, you know where to find me.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
There was an awkward pause in which I felt bad.
‘Look, what are you doing for Christmas?’ he said. ‘We spoke to Dad and Jane last night and we suddenly thought, why don’t you all come out here? I’d love to see you – Mel would, too. We could have a big family Christmas.’
One side of me felt an immediate yearning. I’d only seen emailed pictures of his house, a two-storey white clapboard place with a screen door and a long lawn out front, but I imagined going there, spending the holiday with them all in a fug of family warmth, feeling part of something. But the other side recoiled from the idea: how could I go there, tainting their happiness with the hash I’d made of my own life, making light of everything to keep up the pretence but seething with it all behind the façade, simultaneously pleased that I could hide it and angry that they, the people to whom I was supposed to be closest of all, were fooled? And how could I go from this isolation to that? It would be like coming up out of a mine into bright sunshine. No, impossible.
‘Let me think about it,’ I said.
‘Dinner’s ready, Matthew.’ Melissa’s voice reached me at second hand.
‘Well, I’d better go,’ he said.
‘Yes, you better had.’
‘You should come, though. Do think about it.’
When he hung up the silence began to settle in the house again like snow and I felt a yawning disappointment. What I’d really wanted was to talk about Alice. I wanted at least to try to articulate to someone the intensity of what I’d felt earlier in the afternoon, the sense that there was some sort of connection between she and I, that we were two sides of a coin, heads and tails, and it was only that one moment on the down that separated us. I had pulled back, I had made that decision, but the moment had been so fractional, such a tiny blink of time, that it seemed only chance that I was still here while she was gone. I felt pity for her, pity that made my stomach ache, but it was tinged, too, with something else: guilt. Survivor’s guilt.
Of course I couldn’t have told Matt any of it – even the thought was ridiculous. Horrified, he would have rung Dad, who would have insisted on coming up from Cornwall and making everything worse. The only person it might have been possible to talk to about it was Helen but I couldn’t do that, either.
Because of Richard’s travelling, things between us never became routine. He could decide at such short notice that he needed to go abroad that I wouldn’t know until the day before or even, when there were emergencies, the same day. As well as the Spanish development, there was a plot of land on the Côte d’Azur which was coming up for sale and because he was also considering investing in a project in New Jersey there were occasional trips to the States. As a result and because it could never be taken for granted, the time we spent together felt more valuable. Sometimes, when he rang me from the taxi that was bringing him to me straight from Heathrow, I was sorry for the couple in the flat across the street with the baby and the settled routine. I wouldn’t have traded my excitement for anything in the world.
There were times, though, when he had to shelve supper with me in favour of dinner with investors or when meetings overran and he missed his flights. The disappointment then was like feeling the carpet drop away from under my feet and, the evening suddenly empty, I would open a bottle of wine and drink it. I almost always woke up the next morning to a string of late-night texts and I would be cross that I had let the alcohol depress me and make me forget that because what we had was not ordinary, there was a higher price for it.