The Memory of Midnight (21 page)

Very conscious of Luke’s fingers covering hers, Tess tugged her hand free and Luke sat back. Her skin felt warm where his had touched it. She cleared her throat.

‘I tried talking to Martin about a separation, but he wouldn’t discuss it, and in the end I just took Oscar and we got on a bus to York. I knew Martin would guess where we’d
gone, but I had nowhere else to go, and I was hoping that once I left, he’d realize that I meant what I’d said.’

‘But he hasn’t?’

‘No. He turned up at Mum’s house, and in his mind, I think, he let us come to York on holiday. But he won’t have liked it when I moved here and changed my phone and email
address. I know I sound paranoid, but Martin has all sorts of shady contacts through his work, and I don’t think it will have been hard for him to track me down. I keep waiting for him to
appear, but he’s playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game instead. I’m sure of it. That’s what the phone calls are about. He wants me to know that
he
knows where I am,
even though I’ve changed numbers.’

Luke scowled. ‘That’s harassment, Tess. Can’t you go to the police?’

‘I’ve got no way of proving that it’s Martin.’ She told Luke about the landline and how the calls had switched after a couple of days to her mobile. ‘I don’t
know what to do about it. I could buy a new phone, but what’s to stop him tracing it again?’

‘Nothing, if the paperwork traces back to you.’ Luke rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I’ve got an old phone you could have,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s
very basic, but it works. Martin would have a harder time making that connection. Do you want to try it?’

‘I . . . I couldn’t.’

‘Why not? It’s just sitting in a drawer.’

Tess looked at him properly for the first time. Really looked at him. Saw the lines edging his eyes, the tough mouth, the hard, exciting angles of his cheek and jaw. Saw the man he was, not the
boy he had been, and her throat tightened at the dangerous stab of hope. Not that they could recreate what they had once had, but that she had found a friend again.

‘It’s . . . hard for me when you’re kind,’ she tried to explain, but Luke was having none of it.

‘It’s hard for me when you’re brave and insist on doing everything by yourself,’ he countered.

‘I need to manage on my own,’ said Tess. ‘I can’t afford to rely on anyone else ever again.’

‘No harm in getting a bit of help now and then, though, is there?’

Tess gave in and let go of a shaky laugh. ‘No, I suppose not.’ She swallowed. ‘Okay, I’d like to give the phone a try. I think it might work. Thanks,’ she said as
she got to her feet. ‘And Luke – thanks for listening.’

‘Beats working,’ said Luke, making it easy on her. He drained his glass and got up to follow her out into the passage. ‘I’d better get on with Richard’s
shelves.’

Tess was grateful to him for bringing the conversation back to normal. ‘How much longer do you think you’ll be?’

‘I reckon a couple more days should do it, and then a day to put the books back once the varnish is dry. I’ve got some more picture-desk jobs coming up and I’ll have to fit
round them, but I should be out of your hair soon.’

He peered over her shoulder as she paused in the kitchen doorway. ‘You made a hell of a mess in there. You sure you don’t want help cleaning it up?’

‘I’m sure.’ Tess squared her shoulders as she regarded the kitchen. She had made the mess, she would put it right. ‘This is something I have to do on my own.’

‘Okay.’ Luke turned away, then stopped. ‘Tess, are you sure it was just the phone ringing that upset you? You looked as if you’d had bad news before it rang.’

The worst news. She was to be married to Ralph. The memory rolled queasily in her stomach. It had been awful remembering her life with Martin, but better than thinking about Nell’s
misery.

But she couldn’t tell Luke about that, not now. He had listened enough, and besides, she was wrung out. She couldn’t face another explanation.

‘It was nothing.’ Her eyes slid away from Luke’s. ‘Just . . . a lot of stuff happening at once.’

‘Hmm.’ Luke leant against the door jamb. ‘How long is it since you’ve had a break, Tess?’

‘A break?’ she echoed, as if she’d forgotten what the word meant.

‘You know. Got away for a day. Done something different. Forgot about things for a while.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ Tess tried to think. It had been a very long time, since before she met Martin. ‘Not for a while.’

‘Come to Bridlington tomorrow.’ Luke seemed almost as taken aback by the offer as Tess was. ‘I’m taking pictures of some kitesurfing competition on the beach,’ he
said. ‘I’ve got to go anyway. You could come along for the ride.’

‘It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’ll have Oscar.’

‘Bring him too. He likes the beach, doesn’t he?’

‘He’s never been,’ she had to admit. Martin didn’t do beach holidays. They were too messy, too noisy, too crowded.

‘Then it’s time he went, don’t you think? It’s a boring drive on my own,’ he coaxed when she hesitated still. ‘I sold out and replaced the bike with a
sensible car that can take all my gear, but it’s no fun any more. I could do with the company.’

Tess thought about a wide, blowy beach, and damp sand between her toes. She had always loved how big the sky seemed on the Yorkshire coast. She and Luke had gone on his bike. She remembered the
erotic thrill of it, the speed, the power and the danger of the machine between her thighs. Her arms clamped around Luke’s waist, leaning with him into bends, looking for the first gleam of
the sea in the distance. Climbing stiffly off the bike, she had pulled off her helmet and let the wind plaster her hair across her lips.

It had always been windy. They had a special place in the sand dunes where they would lie on a blanket, sheltered from the North Sea blast, and look up. Above them were only the tussocks of
marram grass, bent almost horizontal over the rim of the dune, and beyond that just light and air and space. Tess had sworn that she could feel the earth turning beneath them until she was giddy
with it.

She mustn’t expect too much from Luke. It would be a mistake to get too reliant on him . . . but it was just a day, Tess reminded herself. She thought about how much Oscar would love it,
about being away from this flat with its rasping walls and its atmosphere of crouching anticipation.

‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘If you really mean it?’

‘Did you touch the cat flap when you came in?’

Luke looked up, his arms full of books. ‘No. Why?’

‘I just found Ashrafar yowling outside on the roof. She was locked out.’

‘I haven’t been in the kitchen,’ said Luke, dumping the books on a shelf. ‘Could you have done it without thinking?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Tess. ‘I never lock it. Richard likes her to be free to come and go.’

‘Maybe Oscar’s been fiddling with it.’

‘Maybe.’

Tess left him a mug of coffee and carried her own back to the front room. She needed to finish another year of records today, but instead of pulling up the documents, she sat and stared
unseeingly ahead of her, gnawing absently at her knuckle.

The cat flap was only the latest in a series of inexplicable incidents. They were all tiny in themselves – a roll of kitchen paper in the middle of her bed, a bar of soap by the laptop, a
lamp left on when she was sure that she had turned it off – but Tess was beginning to get a bad feeling about them. Could they all really be down to absent-mindedness? She had never been
vague or ditzy, and the thought that she might be having memory lapses was a disturbing one.

Otherwise, life was much more under control. She had been using Luke’s old phone, and had been careful to give the number to the school and Vanessa and, reluctantly, her mother, but no one
else. Her relief now that the constant ringing had stopped was so great that it was only then that Tess realized how it had worn on her nerves. Luke had never referred to what she had told him, but
it felt good to have cleared the air, and although they were not quite friends again yet, that dreadful formality between them had gone.

There had been no more hallucinations either. Perhaps they really had been due to strain, after all. Occasionally a memory of Nell would surface – of her hair damp with rain on a lovely
summer day, or bare feet stained with mud from a paved street – but she pushed it away. There would be a rational explanation if she had the time to look for it. There had to be.

Just as there would be an explanation for the locked cat flap too. Tess was still puzzling over it as she walked to pick Oscar up from school. Vanessa was already at the gates. Dressed in her
usual Lycra, she was bouncing from foot to foot, as if eager to be off. Her energy made Tess feel guilty for the way she strolled through the streets and out through the bar at such a leisurely
pace.

It was impossible to walk to the school without thinking of Nell and how much she had loved the crofts, or how the tarm-acked roads had once been rough tracks. Of course, it was well known that
the area outside Monk Bar had been one of orchards and market gardens until the nineteenth century, Tess reminded herself. There was nothing strange about knowing that. It wasn’t as if she
remembered
it.

Sometimes, it was true, the pavements felt precarious, the past very close. Then Tess would keep her eyes down. She didn’t want to look up in case she saw that the streets had closed in,
the houses leaning inwards with their overhanging jetties. A blink and the plate-glass windows of the modern shop could be replaced by stalls and shuttered workshops; by women spinning in doorways.
Turn her head, and the delivery vans could become carts and wagons. Lose concentration for a moment, and she could find herself amidst the clutter and clamour of the Elizabethan street. Once or
twice she had risked a glance up and it seemed that the faces she saw were disturbingly familiar.

But why wouldn’t they be?
Tess reasoned. She had grown up in York. It was a small city. She was likely to recognize all sorts of people.

Vanessa looked pointedly at her watch when Tess arrived. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Tess said automatically, and then wondered why she was apologizing. There were other children in the
playground with teachers to supervise them. She wasn’t accountable to Vanessa.

‘I suppose you’ve been buried in those records again,’ said Vanessa, who for some reason disapproved of Tess earning money in such an unconventional way. In Vanessa’s
world, you worked in an office, or a school or – at a push – in a hospital until you got married and signed up to be a full-blown yummy mummy.

She was being a bitch, Tess scolded herself. Vanessa was kind and generous and she should remember that. Still, she turned with relief when Oscar spotted her across the playground and came
galloping towards her.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ His face was pink, his hair tousled, and his shirt had come loose from his trousers. Tess felt her chest tighten at the sight of him looking so messy, so normal.
Martin would have made him stop and tuck in his shirt. He would have had to smooth down his hair and straighten his sweatshirt. Pick up the jacket that trailed along the ground behind him.

‘Hello, pip,’ she said, unable to resist pushing his hair back anyway. ‘Have you had a good day?’

‘I drawed you a picture.’ He thrust the piece of paper at her, and Tess took it and made a show of inspecting it.

‘That’s the sea,’ she guessed, looking at the blue scribble. ‘And Ashrafar.’ The cat was unmistakable: black, sling-backed, with a bushy tail and teeth like a
shark. She pointed at the two stick figures. ‘And is this you and me?’

Oscar shook his head. ‘That’s me and Luke.’

The trip to Bridlington had been an unqualified success. They had watched the kitesurfing while Luke took photographs, and afterwards they had had fish and chips on the promenade and paddled in
the sea, and Oscar had been tense with excitement the whole day. His wariness of Luke had turned overnight into slavish admiration, and he rushed home after school if Tess told him that Luke was
going to be at the flat, and slid into the study, Bink under his arm, to watch him work. He hung by the door at first, but gradually moved closer and closer, until Luke let him sort out screws or
hold the end of the tape measure. As far as Tess could tell, they had no conversation, but the silence didn’t seem to bother either of them. It was bittersweet for her to see her son forming
a tentative bond with Luke, a bond he had never had with his own father.

He was going to miss Luke when the shelves were finished.

Tess was going to miss him too, but she was trying not to think about that. She had got used to having Luke around. She’d make coffee for them both and perch on the books while he finished
planing a board or fitting an awkward corner. There was usually sawdust in his hair and his clothes were stained and shabby, but his fingers were deft and his movements easy and unhurried for a man
who had once been so restless. Tess liked to watch him concentrate, liked the way he set his jaw and lined up his sight, the way he rolled his shoulders and relaxed when it was done.

Then he would hunker down beside her and take the coffee she offered and they would talk about nothing in particular. Sometimes she’d even make him laugh, and whenever those stern features
lit up, something in Tess would twist and tighten dangerously. She was being careful not to rely on him – she
was
– but yes, she would miss him.

‘Luke?’ Vanessa didn’t even pretend that she wasn’t listening. ‘Luke Hutton?’ Her voice was blade sharp, and Tess felt a ridiculously guilty flush prickle up
her throat.

‘Yes. I told you he was making some bookshelves for Richard, didn’t I?’ Tess was carefully casual. She laid a hand on the top of Oscar’s head. ‘He took us to the
seaside, didn’t he, pip?’

Oscar nodded importantly. ‘An’ he lets me help.’

‘I thought you weren’t going to have any more to do with him?’ Vanessa’s mouth was pinched as she drew Tess aside.

‘It was just a day out, Vanessa, and it was great,’ said Tess with an edge of defiance. ‘I needed to get away.’

‘You could have asked me.’