WITH KATE AND Shadow both out, the house is strange and quiet, the sea mist spattering at the windows and the puddles from last night still drying on the dark, damp-stained boards.
In the mist, the Mill feels closer to the sea than ever, more like a decrepit, waterlogged boat run adrift on a bank than a building meant to be part of the land. The mist seems to have crept into the wooden boards and beams in the night, and the place is cold, the floorboards chilly with damp beneath my feet.
I feed Freya, and then, setting her back down to play on the floor with some paperweights, I light the wood-burning stove, watching as the salt-soaked driftwood flares blue and green behind the sooty glass, and then I curl on the sofa and try to think what to do.
It’s Luc I keep coming back to. Does he know more than he is letting on? He and Kate were so close, and now his love for her has turned to such bitterness. Why?
I press my hands to my face, remembering … the heat of his skin, the feeling of his limbs against mine … I feel suddenly like I am drowning.
It is late lunchtime when Kate comes back, but she shakes her head at the sandwiches I’m making, and takes Shadow up the stairs to her bedroom, and there’s a part of me that’s relieved. What I said, the suspicions I voiced, they were close to unforgivable, and I’m not sure if I can face her.
When I go up to put Freya down for her nap, I can hear her, pacing about on the floor above, even see her shape occasionally through the bare gappy boards as her silhouette passes across a window, blocking out the slivers of grey light that filter down through the cracks.
Freya is hard to get to sleep, but at last she’s slumbering, and I go back down to the living room to try to sit at the window, watching the restless waters of the Reach. It is not quite four o’clock, and the tide is almost at its height, an exceptionally high tide, one of the highest since we’ve been here. The jetty is awash, and when the wind blows off the Reach, water comes lapping in beneath the doors to the seaward side of the Mill.
The mist has lifted slightly, but the sky is still cloudy and chill, and it’s hard to remember the heat of just a few weeks ago as I sit, watching the iron-grey water slapping at the boards outside. Did we really swim in that estuary earlier this month? It seems impossible that it could be the same place as the warm, balmy water where we floated and swam and laughed. Everything has changed.
I shiver, and wrap my jumper around myself. I packed badly – shoving stuff into my shoulder bag without looking, and I have too many pairs of jeans and lightweight tops, and not enough warm clothes for the weather, but I’m too cowardly to ask Kate to lend me something. I can’t face her, not now, not today. Tomorrow, perhaps, when all this has blown over.
There’s a pile of books on the floor by the window, the covers curling with damp, and I walk across and pick one at random. Bill Bryson – Notes from a Small Island. The cover is neon-bright and incongruously cheerful against the muted colours of the Mill, damp-stained wood and bleached cottons. I go across to the light switch to try to brighten the place up – and it fizzes against my hand, making me jump. From somewhere behind me there is a loud bang, and the light flashes once, unnaturally bright, and then goes dead.
The fridge gives a shuddering groan, and stops its imperceptible hum. Shit.
‘Kate,’ I call cautiously, not wanting to wake Freya, but she doesn’t answer. I hear her feet pacing back and forth, though, and a check in the movement as I call, so I think she has heard. ‘Kate, a fuse has blown.’
No answer.
There’s a cupboard under the stairs and I put my head inside, but it’s pitch black, and although there is something that looks like it could be a fuse box, it’s not the modern installation Kate mentioned. It’s black Bakelite mounted on wood, with what looks like a tar-stained hank of cord coming out of one side, and some Victorian lead wiring coming out of the other. I don’t dare to touch it.
Fuck.
I pick up my mobile, and I am about to google ‘how to reset a fuse box’ when I see something that makes my heart stutter. There’s an email from Owen.
I click, my heart in my mouth.
Please, please, please let it be an apology for our quarrel – anything would do, any kind of halfway house that would enable me to climb down from the high horse I’m on. He must know, in the cold light of day, that his accusations were ridiculous. A bunch of roses and a trip to see an old friend equating to an affair? It’s paranoid, and he’s surely realised that.
But it’s not an apology. It’s not even really an email, and at first I don’t understand what it’s saying.
There’s no ‘Hey love’, or even ‘Dear Isa’. There’s no self - justification or grovelling pleading. In fact there’s no text at all, and for a minute I wonder if he’s sent me an email meant for someone else.
It’s a list of offences, dates and locations, without any names or context attached. There’s a shoplifting offence in Paris, joyriding in some French suburb I’ve never heard of, aggravated assault in a seaside resort in Normandy. At the beginning of the list the dates are twenty years ago, but they become more recent as I scan down, though there are long gaps, sometimes spanning several years. The later ones are all in southern England. Drunk-driving near Hastings, a caution for possession in Brighton, taken into custody after a brawl somewhere in Kent but released without charge, more cautions. The last incident is just a couple of weeks ago – drunk and disorderly near Rye, a night spent in the cells, no charges. What are they?
And then suddenly I understand.
This is Luc’s police record.
I feel sick. I don’t even want to know how Owen got hold of all this, and so quickly. He knows people – police, MI5 officers – and has a senior position in the Home Office in his own right, with high-level security clearance, but this is a gross violation of professional conduct however you look at it.
But it’s not just that. It’s the fact that this shows he is not climbing down, he still believes Luc is the reason I’ve come down here. He still believes I am fucking another man.
I feel anger flood through me, making the skin on the back of my neck prickle and my fingers tingle with fury.
I want to scream. I want to phone him up and tell him he’s a bastard, and that the trust he’s broken may never be mended.
But I don’t. Partly because I am so angry that I’m not sure if I can trust myself not to say something unforgivable.
Partly, though, because I know, and a small part of me is ready to admit that fact, that he is not completely to blame.
Yes, he’s to blame, of course he is. We’ve been together for almost ten years, and in that time I’ve never so much as kissed another man. I’ve done nothing to deserve being treated like this.
But Owen knows I am lying to him. He’s not a fool. He knows it – and he’s right.
He just doesn’t know why.
I crush my phone in my fist until it makes a faint complaining buzzing sound to tell me I’m holding it too tight, and I force my grip on the plastic to relax, and flex my fingers.
Fuck. Fuck.
It’s the insult I can’t stand – the idea that I would reel straight from his bed to Luc’s – and if he wasn’t Freya’s father, that alone would be enough for me to end it. I’ve had jealous boyfriends in the past, and they’re poison – poison to the relationship, and poison to your self-esteem. You end up looking over your shoulder, second-guessing your own motives. Was I flirting with that man? I didn’t mean to. Did I look at his friend like I wanted some? Was my top too low, my skirt too short, my smile too bright?
You stop trusting yourself, self-doubt filling the place where love and confidence used to be.
I want to phone him up and tell him that’s it – if he can’t trust me, it’s over. I won’t live like this, suspected of something I haven’t done, forced to deny infidelities that exist only in his mind.
But … even aside from my own part in all this, can I do that to Freya? I know what it’s like, living without a parent. I know only too well, and I don’t want that for her.
There is a thick blanket of cloud covering the sky, and the Mill feels dark and chilly, the stove burning low behind its little door, and suddenly, as I hear Freya stirring from above, her wakening whimper drifting down the stairs, I know I have to get out. I will go to the pub for dinner. Maybe I can find something out, talk to Mary Wren about the police investigation. Whatever, it’s plain that Kate isn’t about to come down any time soon, and even if she did, I’m not sure if I could face her, if I could sit there over dinner, exchan-ging small talk, with the spectre hanging between us, and Owen’s email like poison in my phone.
I run upstairs to the bedroom and wrestle Freya into a coat. Then I make sure the rain guard is packed beneath the pram, and push her out onto the sandy shore, the wind in our faces as we turn to begin the walk to Salten.