The Bed I Made (7 page)

‘What do you want to know?’

Everything
, I thought. ‘Where did you grow up?’

‘Here – London. I did my degree here – economics – then I did post-grad in the States, at Harvard. I worked in banking for a bit, then I set up my property business. I’m not cut out to work for other people.’

Over coffee, he leaned in as if to whisper something. I leaned in, too, but realised that he was reaching for my leg under the table. His fingers slid up my thigh, pushing the hem of my skirt higher. Hidden by the tablecloth, his thumb caressed my flesh through the fine gauge of my tights. Memories of Sunday morning came back to me and I flushed. ‘Why are you single?’ he said quietly.

‘Why are you single?’

‘These things happen.’ He smiled, went on stroking. ‘Am I coming home with you tonight?’

I looked up.

‘You seem shocked. Surely you can’t be?’ There was a suggestion of laughter in his voice. ‘After all, technically, you’ve already
given yourself to me
, if I remember correctly. And I’m certain I remember that quite clearly, if not at all correctly.’ The smile was moving round his mouth and his eyes were full of it, too.

‘You were granted temporary access to my body,’ I said, giving him the same look. ‘As was I to yours. But giving myself to you – I’m afraid that’s much more complicated.’

His eyes, suddenly, were unreadable but then he grinned and slid his hand an inch higher.
Engaged
, I thought ridiculously, heady with wine and the sensation of daring myself and getting away with it,
one partner in a high-stakes game
.

In the taxi he traced his fingers lightly over the nape of my neck. I stopped talking and gave myself over to the feelings it sent running through me. As we climbed the stairs to my door, I was conscious of the weight of his stare on my legs and bottom. As soon as we were inside, he moved towards me and kissed me. We were standing directly under the main light in the sitting room and the blinds were still up. I wondered whether any of my neighbours across the street were watching and what they would make of this scene, so different from the usual one of the outline of my head bending into the yellow halo of the desk lamp.

Chapter Six

As he had known he would, Richard had frightened me by going to the flat. For much of that night I thought about him standing motionless on the pavement, looking up at the windows, and the image grew in resonance and power until it seemed to become symbolic, a statement of intent. Over and over again I had to remind myself that he didn’t know where I was and no one would tell him. Only three people knew, anyway, and of those Helen was the only one he would be able to find. I’d made her promise not to tell him and, however strained things were between us, I knew I could trust her. Richard’s going to the flat was a gesture of intimidation, born of frustration at not being able to reach me. I mustn’t let it work; I had to hold my nerve if I was going to get free of him.

The shadow of the image was still on me in the morning, though, and I knew that if I stayed in the cottage, it would leach the whole day. It would be hard to concentrate enough to work. On the drive to Freshwater, I’d seen a signpost to Totland Bay and I decided to walk there. Matt and I had loved Totland when we were children. There was a café down on the beach with tables outside where we’d sometimes had tea and we used to buy ice creams there, too, disgusting Dad by choosing the plastic cones with a red bubble-gum ball at the bottom. The little town above the beach had had a newspaper shop which sold penny sweets, buckets and spades, and nets for shrimping. The memory of being there with them gave me a feeling like homesickness.

The tide was in, covering the mud on the banks of the estuary, and as I crossed the bridge out of Yarmouth, the water dimpled with the breeze and refracted the light from the pale sun struggling through the cloud. The land lay low around the river but beyond it to the south there were gentle hills covered with fields which rose in stripes of late-autumn green and brown. In Norton someone had a bonfire, and the smell of burning leaves mingled with the cider scent of apples left to rot on the ground.

When I reached it, my Totland had gone. This was a different place. An air of neglect had settled over the town, which seemed to have aged away from the time of my memories just as I had. Autumn cast an unflattering light over the huge Victorian villas on the road to the beach; they looked empty and down at heel. The pub on the corner was closed, as was the fish and chip shop next door. Only the combined grocer’s and post office on the other side of the road seemed to be open. Everywhere I looked there was further evidence of dereliction: paint peeled; curtains sagged on their rails; weeds grew unchecked. It dawned on me that what I was seeing was not just a holiday resort out of season but poverty. And again, there was no one on the street.

What sort of lives did people live here? What sort of life could you have if you were young here? It wasn’t just money; in the poor areas of London that I knew there were people on the streets going about their business, talking, shopping for food, walking dogs; music filtered out from the windows of flats and passing cars. Here it was silent. I thought of Alice Frewin telling me how she thought that sailing had been the only thing that kept her sane. It had sounded like melodrama but I was starting to see how, if one’s mental balance was off, it could be oppressive here.

Surfing the internet the previous day, I had found myself typing her name into Google. I had been thinking about her a lot; if my mind wasn’t flooded with pictures of Richard, it returned to the cliff-top and how I’d imagined I’d heard her voice calling me, offering me her way. I’d shaken my head to get rid of the thought. Most of the entries that came up were part of genealogical surveys detailing Frewins of the nineteenth century in Australia and Canada. There had only been two for her, the
County Press
story I’d seen, and then another on the website of a magazine called
Wight Living
. The page had shown a collection of photographs taken at a charity fundraising dinner in Cowes and there was one of them, Mr and Mrs Peter Frewin. I’d clicked to enlarge it and they filled the screen. She was wearing a black dress in what looked like silk, the cowl neckline revealing the pale skin at the base of her throat and over her collarbone. Her hair had been blow-dried and hung from a side parting in a shining golden sheet which broke over her white shoulders. Her husband stood behind her in a charcoal suit and tie, his hand on her elbow. I compared his face to how it had been the night they had brought her boat in. On the quay he had been expressionless, only the wideness of his eyes hinting at the catastrophe that engulfed him. In the picture he was smiling a little for the sake of the photograph but the angle of his body, his hand, showed that his real attention was focused on Alice. She was looking more directly at the camera but it had seemed to me that there was something blank about the look in her eyes, absent, as if she was elsewhere and it was only really her body that had been there, going through the motions. Neither of them looked comfortable, I’d thought, but perhaps I was letting my knowledge of what had happened to them since then colour my interpretation.

All the other photographs showed what I took to be pillars of the local community in various attitudes of wine-sipping, laughing, sitting at tables adorned with extravagant flower arrangements. Most were in their fifties and sixties, seventies even, but there were three or four others in their thirties. Somehow, though, they seemed to belong to a different type. Alice was current, the length of her dress and the opaque tights right up to date; they wore outfits which had evolved over their journey from the catwalk to the high street, become domesticated, and their shoes were smart but not sharp like Alice’s, whose slim ankles were bound around with heavy studded straps. The older people, too, looked jolly, pleased to be having a night out with a nice dinner, the men in sports jackets, the women in matching floral two-pieces. If the backgrounds hadn’t been the same, I might have thought that the photograph of Alice and her husband was one of a different set entirely, included by mistake.

I walked on and a little further up the street I came across something that surprised me. One of the bay windows was filled with a set of shelves on which books were propped open to show their covers to the street. On the top level there were recipe books, a guide to dog grooming and two Jilly Cooper novels. In the middle there were thrillers by Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett, and on the shelf below that, there was a copy of
Bleak House
, two Thomas Hardys and a volume of Tennyson poems. A handwritten sign on the shop door said it was open.

Inside I found myself in an L-shaped space, the foot of the shape the front room in which I was standing, the longer part running all the way through to the back of the building. The walls were covered by shelves which reached almost to the ceiling and there were Turkish rugs in reds and ochres over the varnished floorboards. In front of the sash window at the far end was a pine table with a lamp and a laptop computer at which a man was sitting. He glanced up as the bell above the door announced my arrival and looked at me over a pair of steel-rimmed glasses balanced halfway down a straight nose. He had short silver hair which had retreated a little at the temples and was sixty, maybe slightly older, I thought. There was something rather patrician about him: he would have looked as at home in a toga as he did in his plaid shirt. I gave him a quick smile and moved into the part of the shop which was out of his line of vision, not wanting to be watched.

The window display had given a false impression of the stock, which was not in the jumble that I’d expected. The books were arranged alphabetically and though all were second-hand, they were in good condition. Theirs was not the unlovely used-bookshop aroma suggestive of house clearances but the library flavour of those that still had something to offer. Interspersed among the bestsellers there were classics – a complete set of Jane Austen and a fair representation of Dickens and Eliot – and also quite a few new titles. I looked up. The man behind the desk was typing, squinting at the screen over the top of his glasses, and I moved along the shelf. There was A.S. Byatt,
The Great Gatsby
, Alan Hollinghurst,
Portnoy’s Complaint
. It was like meeting old friends, small pockets of my former life, before the Isle of Wight, before Richard even. I couldn’t think now why I had left my own books in London. I had to buy some of these; I wanted them around me again.

It took a while to choose and when I glanced over, I realised that the man was watching me. His glasses had slipped still further and his sharp blue eyes were now completely visible over the top of them. His expression was serious and as I went towards the desk, my movement made him start. There was no till and he added up the prices pencilled inside the front covers mentally before putting the books in a pink-and-white-striped paper bag from a pile on the floor.

‘You’re not from the Island, are you?’ he said suddenly, as I turned to go.

‘No. I’m just staying in Yarmouth for the winter.’

He nodded. ‘Good. Well, enjoy the reading.’

Out on the street again my happiness at finding the books, the moment’s connection, quickly dissipated. Of course he knew I wasn’t from round here, though: my jacket, my shoes, even my bag made me conspicuous. And then there was the black eye.

By the time I got back to the cottage, it was dark. The cold had reddened my cheeks and my fingers were stiff where they had held the parcel of books across my chest. I made a cup of tea and went upstairs to my makeshift study to check my email. It was Saturday so I didn’t expect much, if any, but there was a message. It was from Richard and the whole of it was written in the subject line:
If you want to be alone, then be alone.

At the beginning, I had always slept better on the nights he was with me. Sometimes if I was on my own and I’d stayed up working so late that the street below the flat had finally gone quiet, I put off going to bed. I knew that as soon as the lamp went out, my ears would become hypersensitive and the near-silence inside the building would grow into a sound like the fizzing when a record ends. Then every small noise within it, in the flat and on the floors below, would become significant, evidence of the intruder who had broken in through the old back door on the ground floor and was now slowly working his way upstairs. My bedroom shared a wall with the top landing and though I told myself that the creaking I sometimes heard out there was just the sound of the wooden staircase settling as the temperature through the building dropped, there were nights when I had to turn the light back on, get out of bed and nerve myself up to look through the glass spy-hole in my front door to check that no one was there. Often on those evenings I would go to the kitchen afterwards and pour a glass of wine or brandy to take back to bed.

With Richard I didn’t even notice the quiet. Sometimes I tried to stay awake longer than him so that I could enjoy the feeling of security and listen to the sound of him breathing but by the time we turned off the light, it was always very late, often near morning, and I fell asleep immediately.

It was unusual for him to sleep longer than me. In fact, I was surprised by how little rest he seemed to need. Given the hours he worked, I thought that he would spend a significant amount of the spare time he did have catching up on missed sleep, but in fact it seemed as though his lack of opportunity for rest had lessened his body’s need for it.