The Bed I Made (10 page)

More and more often when I was with Richard or on the phone to him, I had to stop myself from blurting out that I loved him. I could feel the words inside, causing pressure in my chest and stomach, threatening to rise up my throat and out of my mouth like shaken Coca-Cola. However much I wanted to say them, though, I didn’t. The semi-combative game between us, the bantering exchanges about who had supremacy, appealed to him. He liked the challenge, the competition: it fired sparks between us and, for that reason, I liked it, too. It also appealed to my vanity that I could meet this clever, ambitious man and match him. I loved the thrill of daring to respond to his bait with indifference and firing back a challenge of my own. It hadn’t taken me long to understand that for Richard, things acquired value in direct proportion to their difficulty. I wanted him and so I gave him the impression that he would have to work for me.

I couldn’t resist trying to put claims on him in covert ways, however. The unpredictability of our relationship gave it an air of unreality; afterwards, the bubbles of time I spent with him could seem dreamlike. I wanted to plant them more firmly and make them feel like part of my real life and so it became increasingly important to me that he meet Helen again and get to know her, at least a little. Despite the tension between us, Helen was still the anchor of my life in London. I wanted her to acknowledge my relationship with him and put her seal on it but I also wanted her to understand. I wanted her to like him. Though I’d hoped she’d relent once we started seeing one another properly, she’d remained sceptical about Richard, which infuriated me. ‘It sounds all right,’ she said, when I talked about him, ‘just don’t rush it, OK?’

‘Can’t you be happy for me?’ I would ask. ‘I’ve met someone I really like.’

‘I just – oh, I don’t know. The guy who was with him that night said he worked him pretty hard. He made him sound a bit . . . ruthless.’

‘Of course he’s ruthless when he’s working – that’s why he’s successful.’

‘You know him better than I do,’ she said, and I heard resignation, as if she had decided it was pointless trying to argue with me.

It was important to me, too, that Richard liked Helen, and her opposition to him that first night hadn’t endeared her to him. I was sure, though, that if they met properly, things between them would come right. For a reason I couldn’t fathom, though, I’d been nervous about asking Richard, and his initial response hadn’t been positive. ‘What?’ he’d said, as he pulled me in under his arm, moving his head slightly so that there was room for mine on the pillow. ‘You’d rather we go out to dinner with her than on our own? Or we could stay in and . . .’

‘I want you to meet her. She’s my best friend.’

‘I thought I was your best friend,’ he huffed, smiling, and I felt his breath on my face.

‘Funny.’ I pressed my knee hard against his thigh. ‘But if you really don’t want to go out, I can cook for us all here.’

So in the end I made dinner at the flat. I was anxious beforehand and abandoned work for the afternoon to slow-cook the Moroccan lamb which I knew they both liked. I cleared the table I used as a desk and laid it up with three places, and vacuumed and dusted as though I was preparing the place for inspectors.

Actually, immediately afterwards, I’d thought the evening had gone well. Richard was great; I’d been worried that the bantering way we talked to each other would strike Helen as odd but he was softer and it came across as a fond sort of teasing. He didn’t talk about himself but focused his full-beam charm on her, asking informed questions about brand-management and how media buying was evolving with changes in technology, paying her subtle compliments. I watched her keenly for signs that she was thawing towards him and threw in encouraging remarks and leading questions from time to time, like a parent trying to arrange an advantageous marriage. The next day, after Richard had gone home, I rang for her verdict, excited. ‘He’s great, isn’t he? And gorgeous.’

‘Yes, he’s very good-looking,’ she’d said and, encouraged, I’d pressed her, wanting further confirmation. No matter how much I angled, though, she wouldn’t say that she’d liked him and eventually I gave in and hung up, in case my frustration boiled over and caused me to say something I might regret.

The morning after I went to Totland again, I put on the television for the sound of voices and heard that the body recovered from the sea near Brighton hadn’t been Alice Frewin but a mother of two from Basingstoke who’d gone missing a month previously. I felt a soaring feeling behind my ribs and made a sharp sound somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. It felt like she’d been given a reprieve, a second chance. I went into the kitchen to turn on the hob and then turned it off again, too agitated now to make breakfast at the cottage. I wanted to go out and hear what the locals were saying. They must have known about the body being recovered; behind the town’s closed doors, news like that would have jumped from house to house like fire.

There were people in the Square today: a middle-aged man in paint-covered trousers on his way into the chandlery, and a couple of women by the delicatessen. I went along the pavement next to them and pretended to look at the display of preserves and chutneys while I eavesdropped but they were talking in tones of outrage about some obscene graffiti which seemed to have appeared at the bus stop. The wind of the past few days had moderated and the cloud which had been harried across the sky now lowered itself comfortably down to sit overhead. The flat light contributed to the strange sense of anticlimax which I felt, the crisis which had threatened but not materialised. I bought a newspaper and went to Mariners café where I drank a cup of coffee and listened but the handful of customers were waiting for the ferry and weren’t local. Eventually, running out of reasons to linger, I paid the bill and left.

Before making my way back to the cottage, however, I crossed the Square to look for a moment at the display of binoculars and compasses in the window of Harwoods. I’d been standing there only a few seconds when, in the shadow on the glass, my eye was caught by something moving quickly along the ground. I turned round just as it stopped and saw a cat standing about six feet away, quite confidently watching me. He was the image of Magpie, the cat we’d had growing up: spotless black with a white bib, a tendency to corpulence and, it seemed, the same inquisitorial manner – a feline Hercule Poirot. He wasn’t at all fazed by me; instead he turned his head analytically to one side and carried on staring. I felt a sudden urge to pick him up and press my face into his fur but, despite the paunch, he was too fast and presented me with only the final inches of a lustrous black tail as he disappeared under the car parked at the kerbside. I crouched down and peered but before my eyes could become accustomed to the dark underneath, I sensed rather than saw someone next to me. I got up quickly and found myself standing slightly too close to Peter Frewin.

I took a swift step backwards. I’d caught only a momentary glimpse of his face before looking away in shocked embarrassment but what I’d seen in that fraction of a second was an expression of utter exhaustion. The deep grey hollows under his eyes and the whiteness of his skin suggested that he hadn’t slept in all the days that she’d been missing. He looked frangible, as if the merest touch would shatter him. I’d remembered him as tall and I was struck by his height again; the top of my head was parallel with his shoulder and the neck of the grey jumper he wore under a navy Musto jacket.

‘You’re looking for my cat,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry – I didn’t know he was yours.’

‘Why would you?’ He ran a hand over his eyes and blinked widely, as if coming awake. His eyes were a startling aqueous green against the wanness of the rest of his face. ‘Is he still under there?’

‘I couldn’t see – the light’s wrong.’

He went down on his haunches and craned his head around sideways, just as I had done. I stayed standing, unsure whether or not I should help, but a couple of seconds later he put his fingertips on the tarmac and pushed himself back up. ‘He’s not there – must have run out the other side. He’s avoiding me; he hasn’t been home for days.’

My face must have asked the question.

‘He’s not mine, really. He’s my wife’s.’ He blinked again, and his mouth seemed to fold in on itself. It felt like an invasion of his privacy to look at him, as if, in his vulnerability, he couldn’t help giving away more than was right for me to see. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘thanks.’

I opened my mouth to say something as yet unclear to me but he was gone, already yards away, striding down towards the harbour.

Without thinking, I crossed the road and went into the shop on the corner. I walked up the narrow aisle towards the back and stood in front of the open-fronted fridge. I looked blankly at the cheeses and cold meats, my mind full instead of the image of Peter Frewin’s face, the pain etched into it like scrimshaw.

‘Excuse me?’

I turned around. In front of me was a woman in jeans and a jumper, a huge black woollen coat hanging heavily from her shoulders. She was about my age, maybe a couple of years older, lines just beginning to fan out from the corners of her eyes, which were pale grey and watering slightly. Her brown hair, made wavy by the damp, was parted to the side and tucked behind her ears. She put her hand up and smoothed it, as if she wanted to make sure she was presentable before talking to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you.’

‘No – you didn’t.’

‘I hope you won’t think this is weird but I’ve seen you around a bit and I’ve been meaning to say hello. It’s always good to have new people here, especially younger ones.’ She lowered her voice conspiratorially, as if we were surrounded by pensioners who might take umbrage. ‘I’m Sally Vaughn.’ She put out a small hand for me to shake, which struck me as a strange formality.

‘Kate Gibson.’

‘Have you got time for a coffee?’

In my surprise at being asked, I hesitated and she seemed to withdraw a little. ‘I’m sorry – you must have lots to do,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said, almost too quickly now. ‘Coffee would be good.’ Perhaps, I’d realised, being about the same age, she might have known Alice.

‘I’ll let you finish your shopping and then . . .’

‘I’m finished. I mean, I just came in for some cheese.’ I took a wedge of Brie from the fridge, wondering why I felt I had to offer a pretext. Looking to see what she was buying, preparing to be embarrassed by the evidence of effort-making home cooking, I realised she wasn’t holding anything.

There were two other people at the till, a veritable rush, and she waited out of the way by the door while I paid. The woman behind the counter was the one who had been kind to me before and she patted my hand now as she gave me my change. ‘You’re looking a bit better, love,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

Outside we stopped to let a bowed old lady pass, her Jack Russell briefly investigating our trouser-legs before his leash tugged him onwards. I wondered whether, as a local, Sally would choose Mariners café or Gossips by the pier but when she started in the opposite direction I understood that we were going to her house; there were no cafés this way.

I felt awkward and a bit cumbersome walking by her side; she was three or four inches shorter than me and moved lightly, as if she were tripping along on tiptoes. We went down St James’s Street, two of my steps to three of hers, past the church and the terrace of white-painted houses whose faces, with their small windows, always looked so closed. Being with someone else changed the feel of the streets; in company they seemed more real somehow, no longer just theatre sets constructed out of cheap wood and cardboard. A ferry was in and we waited for the end of the brief flow of traffic before crossing Tennyson Road.

‘How long have you been here now?’ she asked.

I had to think about it. ‘Almost a fortnight – though it seems much longer.’

‘Where were you before?’

‘London.’

‘God, you must be finding it quiet.’

‘That’s an understatement.’

She didn’t reply and I wondered whether I’d been rude or whether she was waiting for me to ask. ‘Me?’ she said, when I did. ‘Oh, I feel like I’ve been here for ever. I’m from Portsmouth originally but we moved here when I was seven. I never got round to leaving.’ She laughed but the sound of it struck me as hollow.

Her house was beyond the school on Mill Road, one of a red-brick terrace that I had passed before. I waited as she found her keys in her handbag and opened the door, giving the bottom of it a sharp kick with a small booted foot. ‘The damp,’ she said. ‘It swells up and then it sticks. Drives me mad.’

As in my cottage, the door opened straight into a small kitchen. The units and the painted wooden table were white and very clean, and there was a blue gingham blind in the window. She took my coat and ushered me into one of the pine wheel-back chairs at the table. On top of a pile of raffia placemats was a bowl of small, imperfect apples and a GCSE chemistry textbook, which she saw me notice. ‘Tom’s – my son.’ She turned to the sink and filled the kettle. ‘You don’t have any children?’

The question surprised me, as it always did. It was ridiculous but there was a part of me that still thought I was too young. The textbook made clear exactly how ridiculous: I’d guessed that she was only a couple of years older than me, thirty-four or -five, maybe, and her son had to be fifteen or sixteen if he was doing GCSEs.

I watched her as she took down mugs and decanted milk into a jug. Out of the coat she was as slight as I’d thought she must be, and her hands moved quickly, flitting back and forth between objects as if she checked things by touch rather than sight. She took a tin of biscuits from a cupboard and arranged some on a plate with a doily, and I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a doily in a private house.