The Bed I Made (6 page)

The waitress appeared at the end of my table and reached across for my plate. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ she said. The woman with her back to me turned a little to look at me, as if she’d only now become aware of my presence.

‘Another coffee. Thanks.’ I wasn’t ready to go yet. I lowered my head and wrote out the letters of an anagram on a paper napkin, hoping to disappear into the background again or at least to look preoccupied and oblivious. A minute or two passed and I thought they’d stopped. I worked out the anagram and was writing it in when the voices were lowered again.

‘That poor man, though,’ said the woman with the page-boy.

‘Poor? Do you think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Why would a woman up and do that all of a sudden – do away with herself? What made her?’ Margaret’s voice was full of wondering conspiracy.

‘You can’t think he had anything to do with it, surely.’

‘Well, something happened.’

‘He treated her like a queen. That was plain. That house, the boat, all those foreign holidays – money no object.’

‘How long have they been married?’ Margaret said. ‘No children.’

‘It’s that generation, isn’t it? They all leave it late; jobs, careers – that’s what’s important to them. My daughter-in-law’s the same – career, career, career. She’s thirty-seven now, been married for eight years. I’ve stopped asking.’

‘She didn’t work, though, did she? She wasn’t one of those.’ Margaret lowered her voice still further.

The waitress brought my new cup of coffee and in doing so drew the attention of the neat-headed woman. I caught her eye as I looked up from the paper and I saw her realise I’d been listening. Pointedly she turned back to her friend and changed the subject. ‘The bins were kicked over again last night – did you see? Rubbish all up the street. It’s time someone gave that boy a proper hiding.’

I left the café and went back down Quay Street. At the bottom, a few people were waiting by the gate to meet foot passengers from the ferry just arriving. I stood and watched as the handful of cars loaded for the return sailing and then crossed the road on to the quay wall. The water in the harbour was steely green today, taking its grey from the sky, and the wind rocked the boats on the moorings, making an eerie staccato music through their rigging. The lifeboat was in, tied up in its bay. Just ahead of me, a seagull landed on the path, its object an abandoned sandwich. It anchored the bread with its foot and tore at the crust, gulping down the pieces with a singular lack of elegance, regarding me all the while with suspicion, as if I might try and challenge it for the meal.

As I came back through the door of the cottage, my mobile rang once to tell me I had a text message. I took it out of my bag and looked at the envelope on the screen, hesitating. It was getting harder to ignore him. Now I wanted to dial his number and scream at him: ‘
How could you do this to me? This is
me.’ Shamefully, though, the ebbing of the fear had also left room for the insidious part of me that wanted just to erase the past week and go back to how we had been before. I wanted
my
Richard. The thought sent a stab of pain through my chest.

I locked the door behind me, sat down at the table and opened the message.

I’m at the airport now, coming back today, and I need to see you. What I did was wrong but let me apologise, Katie. I love you – you know I do.

Wrong? What he did was
wrong
? I threw the phone on to the table.
Katie
. He was the only person in the world who called me that apart from Dad and Matt. It was so calculated: in that one word he knew I would hear his voice, the low tone suggesting we shared things that no one else did, the echo of all the times he had murmured my name into my ear. I imagined him in the departure lounge only a few seconds earlier, thumbs moving over the keys of his phone with customary speed, the second of his early-morning double espressos in front of him. I sat back heavily, winded.

After supper, I sat in front of the television and tried to concentrate on the news. I’d been here for five days now but I still didn’t feel even slightly comfortable. During the afternoon I’d been at my desk again but it had been impossible to focus on work; instead I had surfed the internet, read halves of articles on the
Atlantic Monthly
site and looked at the programme of films I was missing at the BFI, all the time trying to work out where he would be, whether his plane would have taken off, whether he was halfway yet. He would certainly have landed by now, past nine o’clock, so where was the barrage of calls? I had pictured him going through his usual aeroplane routine: turning his phone on as soon as the wheels touched the tarmac, standing up before the seatbelt signs were off and then agitating around the baggage carousel, incensed at being held to anyone else’s timetable even for a few minutes, dialling my number over and over.

Why hadn’t he rung? My mobile was on the pine dresser by the sliding doors, moved deliberately out of my direct line of sight: while it had been on the arm of the sofa, my eyes were flicking on to it every few seconds. Now, suddenly, in the semi-darkness of the corner of the room, the screen started to flash blue. I stood up immediately, feeling sick. The number wasn’t his, however. It was Esther’s.

‘Kate?’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘There was a guy here.’

‘What? There – in the flat?’

‘He rang a few days ago – he thought you were still here. I wouldn’t have let him in just now but he surprised me – he buzzed, said he was passing and thought he’d try and pick up the book he’d left, to save you asking me to post it on.’

‘Which book?’

‘I didn’t see. Look, I probably wouldn’t even have rung you but – well, it was weird. He didn’t go straight away. He went downstairs but then he just stood on the pavement opposite, looking up at the window. He was fine when he was up here – quite charming, actually – just came in, took the book off the shelf, said thank you at the door and went. But then . . .’

The blood was pounding in my temples. ‘Does he know you saw him?’

‘Yes. I went over to draw the blinds – he was looking straight at me.’

‘How long was he there?’

‘I don’t know – five minutes, maybe. It was kind of creepy – he was just standing there, in the middle of the pavement, looking. And Steve’s out tonight.’

‘Did he ask you where I was?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he know?’

I took a silent breath and tried to make my voice sound calm. ‘I’m really sorry about this. I didn’t think he’d come round when he knew I wasn’t there. He’s OK; he’s just a bit . . . intense sometimes.’

‘No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. I just thought you should know.’

When we hung up, I put my coat on and went out, leaving my mobile behind. I wanted to be away from it now. I’d known he would carry on ringing the flat until he found out I’d moved but I hadn’t guessed he’d go there once he did. He’d done it so that she would tell me, pass the message on.

I walked through the town for as long as I could but the lighted areas were small and I was going faster even than usual to ward off the cold that worked its way inside my coat. I did the circuit twice, along the harbour front, the Square, up to the common, back down again by the terraces that lined Tennyson Road, but I began to feel unnerved: it was a Friday night but there was no one to be seen. There were lights on behind the curtains of the pubs and in the cottages up towards the common but not one person on the pavement. Everyone was locked away. I felt like the only person alive, the sole survivor in a plague town. Or perhaps I was the ghost, wandering the streets alone, unable to break through and reach the living again.

When I got back to the cottage I checked my phone straight away, wanting to pre-empt the beep that would tell me he’d left a message. He hadn’t called but there was a text:
Where are you? I wonder
.

The first time he’d come to the flat, I’d waited for him at the sitting-room window, standing to one side so that I wouldn’t be visible if he looked up from the street. A little after eight, a taxi had pulled in and I watched him get out. My stomach turned over when I saw him: it had been real, then, that night. He came up the steps and I’d jumped at the sound of the buzzer even though I was expecting it.

I hadn’t known whether he would call me. Purposely I had said nothing to suggest I cared one way or the other. When I’d left his house that afternoon, I told myself that whether or not we saw each other again wasn’t the point. The night could be seen as an isolated incident, a brief step out of bounds, an adventure. It would be something to remember when I got old and needed to remind myself that I had taken risks and been daring. Nevertheless, it was true he’d intrigued me. He was different. It was there in the way he looked at me, eyebrows arching as if he were calling me out, and in his deep self-assurance. There was also the physical connection between us.

He hadn’t mentioned meeting again until I had been standing inside his front door. We’d spent the past four or five hours back in his bed, his body enclosed in the circle of my legs, his nails tracing lightly up the outside of my thigh while we talked. It was a strange bantering conversation, like a game of tennis between two people trying to assess the other’s level of skill, each registering their opponent’s best shots, producing their own. At the door I had turned awkwardly towards him and smiled, pretending to look for something in my bag. He took a step forward, tipped my chin upwards and kissed me lightly. I resisted an urge to lean into him. ‘Give me your number,’ he said.

He called two days later. I was at the table in the sitting room working at the computer, the blinds left up for the view of the flats opposite, as usual. The sound of the phone startled me but his voice carried me straight back inside the bubble which had seemed to surround us as soon as we met. He hadn’t called for one of the brief exchanges of information – a date, a time – that I’d sometimes had with other men and that left me with a transactional feeling; he asked how my week was going and listened to my answer.

He’d suggested dinner on Friday and I’d pretended to check my diary. When I hung up, the display told me that we’d been on the phone for half an hour. Too excited to start work again immediately, I stood at the open window and looked out. The couple in the top flat had gone to bed while we’d been talking. Though it was June and warm, there was a breeze and the wind caught the litter in the gutter and blew it in scudding gusts along the street, rushing, then settling, moving on again.

The restaurant he’d taken me to was in Kensington, a tiny place with eight tables, tucked away near a gallery and a boutique on what was otherwise a residential street. The chef and the one waitress chatted to one another through the serving hatch and it felt like another sign: they were French. Richard discussed the wine for two or three minutes before he ordered and when the bottle arrived, he examined the label before taking a sip and rolling it thoughtfully around his mouth. Whenever I tried the wine in a restaurant, I hurried through what I thought was expected of me, spinning it out just long enough that there was a chance people would think I knew what I was doing, embarrassed to keep anyone waiting. Richard, by contrast, was perfectly at ease with the idea that the waitress should stand by until he was satisfied.

While we waited for the starters to arrive, he reached over and took my hand. He looked at it as if it were something whose details were worth remembering. His own fingers were long and straight, with short dark hairs on the back of the sections before the second knuckle. He ran a single finger across my palm, his nail touching my skin, and the touch sent a shiver through me.

‘You told me you’re a translator. What language? Or languages? Not Spanish by any chance?’

‘French. Mostly English into French. I do some technical manuals, sales brochures, that sort of thing, but mostly it’s books – novels.’

‘Bright girl.’ He dipped his head slightly.

‘Did you doubt it?’ I raised my eyebrows in the way he did.

‘Do you think I’d be interested if you weren’t?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe you like daft women – some men do.’ I glanced away, smiling. When I was a teenager, I’d comforted myself for not being one of the better-looking girls with the knowledge that I did well at school and could meet the clever boys on their own terms, often beat them.

‘I like clever women. I need someone who can keep me interested.’

I took a sip of the wine, which was really good. I would never have said that: it sounded so arrogant. I thought it, though: I liked clever men and wouldn’t go out with anyone who couldn’t at least hold his own, if not beat me in arguments. There was an honesty in Richard’s saying it out loud that impressed me.

‘So why French?’

‘My mother was French.’

I saw him register the past tense. ‘You grew up speaking it then?’ he said.

‘Yes, until I was ten. I kept it up; I had a French friend and I did it at university, spent a year at the Sorbonne and then worked in Paris for a couple of years after that. Anyway,’ I said, feeling uncomfortable, ‘we’re only talking about me. Tell me something about your life.’