The Bed I Made (27 page)

‘I can wrap up.’

‘OK – good. Saturday, if the weather’s decent?’

It was only as I was watching him stride back up the pontoon again that I realised what I’d agreed to. Oh God, I thought; why did I never think before jumping in with both feet? Surely if Richard had taught me anything, it was the need to be wary, and surely if there was anyone of whom to be wary, it was Peter.

Chapter Twenty-two

I asked you to marry me, you stupid bitch, and you think you can ignore me. You know, I always thought you were an intelligent woman. That’s one of your little fantasies about yourself, isn’t it, that you’re clever? Well, you’re being pretty fucking stupid now. I gave you the benefit of the doubt – I’ve given you days now – and still you don’t deign to respond to me.

I’ve sacrificed my marriage and access to my son for you and this is how you repay my trust? Nobody does that to me – I’d have thought you’d know that by now.

You said once that you saw us as two points on the earth’s surface, lit up by our connection. I think about that all the time, and do you know what, I think you’re right. You might not be talking to me (more playground behaviour – Helen’s idea?) but we’re still connected. I lie awake wherever I am and I imagine you lying in your bed as well, and I feel our connection.

I can be a very powerful enemy.

It was late afternoon on Tuesday when Sally came into the café, nearly quarter to five, and most of the customers for tea and cake – eight or nine people; a busy day – had paid their bills and gone. I was cleaning behind the counter, clingfilming the salads and idly eavesdropping on the two old ladies nearby when the bell over the door went. Mary must not have said anything to her, I realised; she would have been too embarrassed to come in if she had.

‘Hi,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’ve just been up the other end of town and I thought I’d come and say hello. It’s nice in here, isn’t it? Cosy.’

‘Would you like anything? A cup of tea? Cake? It’s very good.’

‘Oh no, thanks. It’s just a flying visit, to see how you’re doing. Any news?’

‘News? No – not really. Mary’s away this week so I’m here on my own.’

‘Me?’ she said. ‘No, nothing much. Tom’s had half term but that’s about all.’ She looked around the room and then again at the cakes, her gaze settling on the chocolate sponge.

‘Are you sure you won’t have a piece?’

‘I shouldn’t.’

‘Go on.’

‘No, really . . .’

It dawned on me all of a sudden that the reason she was refusing was nothing to do with her weight or spoiling supper. It was about money: she couldn’t afford it. I thought with a pang of the supper she’d cooked for me and the bottle of wine. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a slice home. The chocolate one’s lovely. I’ll get these.’

‘It does look nice.’ She looked at me with a guilty expression.

‘One slice won’t hurt; you’re slim as a bean,’ I said. ‘Go on – give the rest of us a fighting chance.’

After she’d gone, the ladies at the window table asked if it was too late for another pot of tea. It was, really; it was five already and I should have been closing up but they were sweet and I preferred to be here than back at the cottage where, however much I tried to distract myself, Richard’s emails played on my mind, growing in significance the later it got, and the quieter outside.

It was because of the emails, I’m sure, that it happened. By the time the women had gone and I’d cashed up and given the café a final sweep, it was past six. The last traces of the red and apricot that had streaked the sky as the night came down had been erased, and now there was only the rich velvety black that I never saw in London, the first stars pricking out against its absorbent darkness.

I locked the door, tugged twice on the handle and then slipped the keys into my bag. The walk home was barely five minutes but with no insulating cloud, the air was so cold it felt wet on my hands and face. I felt in my pockets for my gloves.

It was when I looked up from putting them on that I saw him: a man so like Richard that my breath caught in my throat. His height; the way he stood, the shape of his body – identical. I stopped still. He was no more than a hundred yards away, just where the High Street met the Square, looking in Harwoods’ window.

I was a few feet from the mouth of one of the alleys that led down between the cottages to the sea. I ducked into it and pressed myself into the ivy that spilled over the wall. My heart was pounding, my armpits suddenly wet. I held myself rigid. Every sound was magnified: the waves lapping at the wall at the bottom of the alley, the low hoot of a ferry over towards Southampton, a car coming into town on the road from Shalfleet. I was terrified that my feet would move, and the loose shingle give me away.

Blood thundering, ears straining, every muscle tense, I waited for the footsteps. I pictured him walking up the road, hands in his pockets, looking in at the end of the alleyway to see me: ‘
Hello, Katie. Waiting for me?
’

I listened so hard that I almost imagined the footsteps but none came. No one passed the end of the alleyway at all. I stood there for five minutes, maybe ten, but then, as I gave a long, silent out-breath, I realised what I would look like to anyone who saw me: crazy. Paranoid.

Think, Kate
. Yes, he had been like Richard – the same build, the same dark head – but I’d seen him from a distance and the High Street was poorly lit. His coat, too, had been wrong, full-length. He didn’t have one like that and I couldn’t imagine him in one; he had a three-quarter-length coat for over his suits or his leather jacket for jeans. But why was I even grasping at these details, when I knew it couldn’t be him? He didn’t know I was here, there was no way he could, and the emails made it plain.

I knew I still looked for him. In Newport on my birthday, there had been a man with dark hair the same velvet texture as his, and as I’d stood behind him at the checkout, I’d remembered my old urge to reach out and touch. As I’d driven through Shalfleet after the storm at Christmas I’d caught sight of a man with a similar build waiting to cross the road by the church. It hadn’t been him – a momentary glance in the rear-view mirror had told me that – but on some subconscious level, I’d realised then, I was looking for him. At first I’d thought it was a vestigial thing, a hangover from the times when he was away and I’d sought traces of him in strangers, just to remind myself. Now, though, pressed into the ivy, I knew it was more than that: I was watching for him.

I waited a couple more minutes before gently standing away from the wall and taking two quiet steps to the end of the alley. I felt foolish doing it but I leant out and scanned the High Street, quickly at first and then again, to make sure.

The obvious route to the cottage was via the bottom of the High Street and the Square, but instead I took a circuitous one along South Street and back around by the church. My heart rate had slowed from its pounding panic but it was still beating much too fast, and now the sweat on my forehead was cold. I walked quickly, conscious all the time of the darkness behind me and the shadows that seemed to stretch and move in the corners which the street lighting didn’t reach.

On Saturday I waited for Peter on the pavement in Bridge Road. When we’d made the arrangement, he’d said he would come and pick me up from the cottage. I’d done a double take at that, wondering how he knew where I lived, and then remembered that Chris had mentioned it at dinner. Still, he wouldn’t know which house in the row was mine.

We had a decent day for the sailing. Earlier it had been cold enough for my breath to make clouds when I had taken my bottles and newspapers down to the recycling bins but it had warmed up a few degrees, and the sky was the crisp blue which faked summer. I’d felt anxious all week at the thought of today. The idea of it alarmed me in the same way that supper at Chris’s had, with its sudden and strange leap in intimacy. I was determined not to make an idiot of myself today, though, and determined, too, not to let my nervousness show. It was kind of him to offer the trip and it would be another chance to try to get the measure of him. I wanted to see if he would mention Alice. Since Richard’s emails had started, I’d spent less time thinking about her and I felt almost guilty about that, as though I was letting her down, starting to forget.

It was ten o’clock and several cars passed while I stood on the pavement, people who’d been into Yarmouth for Saturday morning shopping. Another one turned in at the top of the road now, an old silver BMW. The driver was wearing shades against the low sun and it wasn’t until he pulled in at the kerb that I realised it was Peter. He reached over and opened the passenger door from the inside.

‘Hop in.’

I folded myself down, the seat lower than I’d expected. I turned to look at him, slightly wrong-footed by the sunglasses, unsure whether I should try to make out his eyes behind them.

‘Sorry,’ he said, pushing them back off his face. ‘This low sun really gets me. Ready to go?’

He pulled off and I put my seatbelt on, glad to have a couple of seconds to think of something to say. The radio was on – the news on Radio 4, a male voice that rumbled with a story about missile attacks on the Pakistani border, just loud enough to break the silence.

‘Good week?’ he asked.

‘Yes, not bad. We’re a bit busier at the café though I’m feeling a bit funny about that.’

‘Why?’

‘Not about the café itself, that’s fine, but it’s time I got another book to translate, I think. Working there feels like playing.’

‘Nothing wrong with having a bit of time off. That’s the only thing I regret about being self-employed. I would have liked to have gone away after . . .’ he stopped.

There was a moment’s silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you do.’

‘We make a system for containing oil-slicks. Basically, it’s a series of long air cushions that lie on the surface of the water round a slick and keep it from spreading.’

‘Like a bolster down the middle of the bed?’

‘Exactly.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the side of his mouth lift.

I turned to look out of the window as we went along the top of the common. The Solent was glittering with the hard light today, the view of the mainland so precise it looked closer than I’d seen it before; I could make out the occasional house up the coast from the Lymington River, even individual trees. I thought of Richard over there; he really wasn’t far away. What was a couple of hours in the car and half an hour on a ferry? The distance was all psychological, hardly an obstacle at all. For a moment, staring at the strip of land, it seemed to shimmer with the potential energy of his presence. I blinked hard and looked away.

Peter took his hand off the gear-stick and turned up the radio. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I’m a bit of a news addict. It’s nearly finished.’

‘No – of course.’

We were out of Yarmouth now and along the stretch of road bordered on both sides by the old natural wood. He slowed right down all of a sudden to avoid a pair of kamikaze rabbits that flung themselves into the road at our approach. I glanced sideways at him. His forehead was furrowed as he frowned at them, the lines at the corners of his eyes deep where they were visible at the edge of the sunglasses. There was something Slavic about the height of his cheekbones, I thought; they gave his face an elegance that otherwise it lacked. The sleeve of his navy jumper was pushed up, revealing a muscled forearm covered with dark hair. His hands were large with long straight fingers, the nails cut short.

I’d driven through Shalfleet lots of times but I’d never been down to the river. Peter took a left and we went along a narrow lane between the New Inn and a couple of pretty stone cottages. A few hundred yards on, the tarmac road ran out and we came on to a shingle track whose potholes the heavy rains last month must have done nothing to improve. On our right beyond a long grassy bank rimmed with scraggy hawthorns was what looked like the top of the river, not more than forty or fifty feet across. A great number of Canada geese obscured the surface in a moving, honking carpet of black and brown and white. Even where the water was visible, it wore a layer of feathers.

‘Bloody things,’ he said, noticing me looking. ‘They’re thugs – huge gangs of them intimidating other birds, eating all the vegetation.’

The track led past a garden bordered by oak trees. In it I could see a green wooden hut with sun-leached curtains at the window and three caravans – one with the rounded shape and windows of the 1950s – that seemed to be shrinking back into the woods behind them. There was another caravan, this one dilapidated to the point of near collapse, at the end of the boatyard in which Peter pulled up and parked the car. Its door was open and he said hello to the men in overalls sitting inside having a tea break. Their ‘morning’ came back rich in the Island accent that I recognised now, with its elongated rural vowels.

I looked around while Peter took an outboard engine from the boot of the car. The yard was full of boats on struts for the winter, their decks covered by tarpaulins on which pools of rainwater and a scurf of dead leaves had collected. Beyond the yard was a stone-built quay, the top covered in shingle, with a small slipway and ladders to the water. There the river was broader and there were boats on moorings. Gulls rode the breeze-chequered surface. On the other bank, the land lay low and flat, punctuated here and there with trees whose growth was stunted by the salt-poisoned earth. Oddly, it reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Africa, the same palette of mustard yellows, faded greens and browns.