The Bed I Made (18 page)

I hadn’t been to Gossips since I’d been back. It was smarter than it had been when we were children, if slightly twee. The wooden floor was varnished and shelves displayed items of retro kitchenware – striped china jars and scales with weights – and black-and-white photographs of the town. I chose a table with views of the Solent at the front and the beach at the George to my left, sitting down just as a pair of gulls flew by the window, one holding something in its beak, the other giving chase. They landed on the shingle in a battering of wings, both issuing their ugly cry, the one in triumph as it swallowed its morsel, the other in indignant disbelief.

I watched the waitress as she worked. A couple of days earlier on one of my afternoon walks I’d seen a sign in the window of the other little café up the High Street advertising for someone part time and I’d gone in to apply. ‘Am I being mad?’ I asked Helen when I rang her that evening.

‘I don’t see why. If you’ve got a gap between books and you fancy it, why not? Give yourself a break from all that time on your own.’

‘I don’t think it’d pay much but that’s not really the point. It’d be fun – it’d remind me of all the waitressing I did when I was a teenager.’ In Bristol I’d worked on Saturdays and in the holidays at a café down on the waterfront, and I’d ended up saving a couple of thousand pounds towards my university fees. I’d also waitressed in a brasserie in the Marais during my student year in Paris. It was something I associated with happy periods of my life.

By the time I’d finished my lunch at Gossips and walked up to Totland, it was three. I tramped along, feeling fitter already, enjoying the heat I’d worked up inside my coat. The breeze on my face had a rinsing quality. There were other people on the beach, including a woman walking a large red setter. The fur on its legs and undercarriage was hanging in wet ropes where it had been in the sea and I hurried to get out of the way as it planted itself four-square and prepared to shake.

I walked to the end of the bay and then turned round to see how far I’d come. Everything was clean and sharp, as if it had been glazed: the buoys marking the lobster pots, the pebbly beach, the skeleton of the derelict pier. I took deep breaths of the chill air, feeling the weeks of close work lifting from me. I could see the way forward now. If I got the job at the café I would have a framework for my time. I could get agency translating work – brochures, catalogues – if I started feeling anxious about eating up my tiny savings account. It was mid-January already and with even a degree of structure, the weeks would pass more quickly. Then it would be time to go back to London and I would have done it, stuck it out.

Surprisingly, there had been no more contact from Richard since his text on New Year’s Eve. I’d been afraid that, along with the message at Christmas, it had been the vanguard of a new campaign but that didn’t seem to be the case after all. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned the second message to Helen; she would have asked again why I was worried and I would have been back in the same position, wanting both to tell her and to conceal it. Keeping quiet had been the right decision.

‘Hello again. Is it too late to wish you a happy new year?’ Chris looked at the books I’d handed him with the expression of assessment that I had seen before. ‘I was wondering if you’d left us, thought maybe the Island had got a bit much and you’d decamped back to the mainland.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m staying.’

He nodded. ‘Your reading rate’s dropped off, though. Been busy?’

I explained about the deadline.

‘Well then, now you’ve got a bit more time and I know you’re still here, why don’t you come for supper on Friday? If you’ve got nothing more exciting on.’

I was taken aback. ‘That’s . . .’

‘Nothing grand,’ he said. ‘A bite to eat and a bottle of wine. I’m just up the road from here.’ He found a piece of paper and sketched out a few lines, marking his house with an asterisk. I looked at it, unsure what to say. ‘Eight, eight thirty,’ he was telling me. ‘I’ll look forward to it. You can tell me more about your translating.’

I walked until I was out of sight of the windows before stopping. The little map was still in my hand and I looked at it. I’d been railroaded and it seemed like I was going to have to go – it would be too rude not to. Probably, I thought, he’d guessed how lonely I was and inviting me was an act of kindness. I felt my heart sink as I imagined myself there, making awkward conversation with him and his wife. Putting the map in my pocket, I started the walk back. I’d gone about a hundred yards when I got cross with myself. You’re pathetic, I thought; he’s being friendly and it’s only one evening. And anyway, think about it: if you go, the next time Helen asks, you’ll be able to say you’ve been out.

The view from Mary’s Café couldn’t compete with the one at Gossips; instead of the sweep of the Solent and the stripe of the mainland with the nest of masts in the Lymington River and the wooded foreshore up towards Beaulieu, the plate-glass window gave out on to the street. Even now, it amused me that this was the High Street; it was one-way only and not wide enough for two cars to pass.

I surveyed the interior of the café from my place behind the counter, enjoying the feeling of playing a game that came with the first-day newness of it all. I liked the way the room had been fitted out. It was the entire width of the building but still only large enough for eight of the pale oak tables. On the walls there were large framed photographs of the Island, not the typical tourist shots but long-distance views of the fields and the higgledy-piggledy roofline at Ryde and the estuary at Newtown. The counter was at the back of the room, another chunky stretch of oak on which were laid out bowls of salads and the three home-made cakes which Mary told me was the winter quota; in summer, she said, she’d make another two. When I’d been in for my interview the previous day, I’d suspected she was about to offer me the job when she showed me the heated pot in the small kitchen and explained that one of my responsibilities would be to take the soup out of the fridge and make sure it was hot by the time people were likely to start ordering it. The bread was delivered first thing and I would need to be in when the baker’s van arrived.

Mary was in her mid-forties, I guessed, with a laugh like a fox-bark and an abrupt manner slightly at odds with her warm eyes. Her curly brown hair was cut short, and her denim skirt and cream jumper clothed a figure padded in a way I found reassuring in a café owner. She’d had the place since the previous spring, she told me, her teenage daughter helping out in the school holidays and on Saturdays, but she wanted someone in the week so she had more time to spend with her elderly mother. She’d struck me immediately as someone leading a life so crammed with commitments that she was on the point of losing her grip on them all; this morning when she’d come to open up and show me the ropes, she’d had to go back round the corner to her house in Baskett’s Lane because she’d forgotten the keys in her hurry. I was amazed when she told me that she made everything apart from the bread herself.

I’d been wrong, I saw now, to imagine that working here would be much more sociable than translating at home. There had been customers, of course, but not many: five or six for coffee and cake over the course of the morning, another six or seven over a lunch hour that extended from noon until half past two. A couple of them I recognised as locals, people I’d seen in the Square or on the harbour, but the rest seemed to be passing trade. I wondered why the locals didn’t come in when the food was so good. Perhaps it was the prices: not extortionate but certainly more expensive than the cafés on the Square. Perhaps, though, it was the rocket and quinoa and alfalfa in the salad bowls.

No one had offered much in the way of conversation. In fact, beyond ordering, none of them had said anything at all: no pleasantries, not even a desultory comment on the weather. They came up to the counter, told me what they wanted, then sat at the tables, facing away, speaking to each other in low voices, reading newspapers if they were on their own. Oh well, I thought, at least it was a change of scene and Mary was nice enough, and another person that I could now legitimately claim to know in Yarmouth. And maybe people would start to talk to me over time, when my face became familiar.

Chris’s house was one of the imposing red-brick Victorians on the road up out of Totland towards the Needles. The short gravel drive was overlooked by a number of established yew trees, their shapes illuminated by the automatic light that had come on as I pulled up. The house itself, though, was in darkness, no lights showing at any of the windows. Perhaps he’d forgotten and I was off the hook; I could go back to the cottage and spend the evening reading instead. I’d been apprehensive about coming; even after I’d talked myself out of my initial resistance, it seemed an alarming acceleration of intimacy to go from being a customer at the shop to a dinner guest. I couldn’t just drive off, however, so I got out and went to ring the doorbell. The coloured glass of the fanlight was unlit, too, and there was no sound of movement from inside. While I waited, I looked around. Beside the iron boot-scraper, there was a box of newspapers for recycling: the
County Press
and
The Times
. I was standing on a tiled mosaic area like the one under the portico of my building in Earls Court and immediately my mind dealt me the memory of the evening that Richard had lain in wait for me there, to talk me into taking him back.

I was just about to go when I heard footsteps behind the door and it opened. ‘Kate, lovely to see you.’ Chris stepped forward out of the gloom to kiss me on the cheek. ‘Come in.’

He stepped aside to let me pass. Behind him the hallway was unlit and smelled of dust. In what light reached in from outside, I could make out the shape of a dresser against the far wall and a rim of light around a door which now swung open a little. His wife, I thought, but instead there was the skittering of claws across the tiles and a thump against my thigh as a large dog made contact. I looked down and made out two huge eyes in a golden Labrador face.

‘This is Ted,’ said Chris, as the dog spun around me, sniffing vigorously, the thick cable of his tail sweeping from side to side. I reached down to stroke his head and he pointed his nose towards the ground to allow me access to the soft place between his ears. ‘He has his limitations as a guard dog, as you can see.’ He got hold of him by the collar. ‘Come on, you, let Kate take her coat off.’

‘Sorry about the light – or lack of it,’ he said, going in the direction of the door through which Ted had appeared. ‘The bulb blew earlier on and I’d forgotten to get any spares. But we’re a bit brighter in here.’

My spirits revived a little when I saw the kitchen. It was a large room, the units which made up the L-shaped working area wooden-fronted and topped with marble. A long farmhouse table occupied the far end, which had been extended into a sort of conservatory, its wall made up of a series of glass doors which looked as though they folded back in a concertina to leave the room open to the garden. There was no sign of the Belling cooker I’d been imagining seconds earlier and instead of the dry pork chops and furry boiled potatoes I’d begun to picture, the air was full of the scent of a rich garlicky sauce. Two bottles of wine were breathing on an island counter surrounded by stools; the papers which I guessed usually covered it were gathered at one end into a shaggy pile topped by a pair of half-moon reading glasses.

I handed him the bottle I’d brought and he looked quickly at the label. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very nice. Now, what can I get you?’

‘Wine would be great.’ I ventured further into the room, closely marked by Ted. In the light, I could see the distinguished white of the elder statesman around the muzzle which he was pressing into my hand. There was white in the fur above his eyes, too, and a slight stiffness in the movement of his back legs.

Chris handed me a glass. ‘New friends,’ he said, raising his own.

I took a large mouthful, slightly embarrassed. Especially now, seeing him in context at home, I was aware that though he was probably in his sixties, he was still a man people would describe as handsome. There was an elegance about his face, a fineness around the eyes and the bridge of his long straight nose. ‘This is a lovely room,’ I said, making a show of looking around.

‘Thank you. I spend most of my time in here; I like sitting at the counter – it’s good for thinking. And it’s very nice in summer with the doors open.’ He walked over to flick a switch on the far wall and the garden was flooded with light. I went to the window and cupped my hands around my eyes. A soft-looking lawn sloped away from the house towards a rim of tall pine trees under which the grass petered out.

‘It’s low maintenance, which appeals to me.’

‘You’re not a gardener then?’

‘My wife was – Miranda. She died seven years ago. Breast cancer.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He smiled gently. I came back over to the counter as he picked up a dish of olives which he offered to me. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, as I bit into one.

‘Officially, no.’

He smiled again, this time more broadly. ‘Miranda begged me for years to give up but I started again when she died and I’ve found it hard to stop completely since then. Shall we?’ He slid a packet out from its hiding place beneath the pile of newspapers.

‘By the way, I’ve asked another friend of mine along tonight,’ he said, lighting my cigarette and then his own. ‘Peter. I hope you don’t mind; I thought it might be a good idea. Before he gets here, though, I should tell you that he lost his wife, too. Rather more recently – in the autumn.’