Jonathan didn’t realize how far things had gone until he found himself saying yes to another beer in Tamsin’s flat at three o’clock in the afternoon. Even through the haze of lunchtime drinking, there could be no favorable explanation for them going back there after the wine bar. There hadn’t even been a truly favorable explanation for the wine bar itself.
“To say thank you for last weekend,” he’d said over the phone. “That’s okay,” she’d said, “you don’t need to thank me. I enjoyed it.” But they’d arranged to meet anyway. And Jonathan had lied to Sita for the second time. That for him was a habit.
Truth and lies swam around in his head like slightly pissed wasps. He swatted arbitrarily. Lie to Sita, swat. Toy with Tamsin, let it go.
He felt justified. He had tried hard to rekindle the brief foreplay he and Sita had enjoyed on the night of the party, but his wife had made it clear she was no longer interested, not since his ridiculous decision to go and get the post from the chapel in the pouring rain at eleven o’clock at night, not since the argument about the lime wash and his eyes, and certainly not since the traumatic house meeting, which had changed everything.
He didn’t want to think about the almost freakish vacancy in Emmy’s eyes throughout the whole gruesome deliberation. Actually, he didn’t want to think about any of it. Even then, at that silent, awful table, the idea of Tamsin had popped into his head. He was almost getting used to it, the way she came to him at the most vulnerable times, like a silent shrug at their joint failure to make the most of the Bodinnick dream.
But if he had to pinpoint the exact moment he’d decided to take the Tamsin thing to the edge, he would say it was Sita telling him about Niall and Emmy’s snatched moment of abandoned passion on May Day. She’d told him in their bathroom after the meeting, when he was standing in boxer shorts and socks rubbing cream into his chapped hands, and she was sorting the family wash into colors and whites. They had been pretending life was normal, that there was no significance in their decision to have the place valued, that it wasn’t really all over but the shouting.
The way she’d said it made it sound as if it were entirely his fault that those days were so far behind them. And his first reaction hadn’t been his usual acceptance of inadequacy, it had been anger: “Well, lucky old them.”
“Quite.”
“And what about Kat? Is it fair on her?”
But Sita had flicked one of Lila’s sleep suits angrily into the air and said something along the lines of “You’ve got to take your chances when you can, haven’t you?”
And so here he was now, taking his chance, already floundering. Not out of his depth, exactly, because being in Tamsin’s flat was more like swimming to the shallow end of a pool and standing up to find that the water doesn’t even cover your trunks. He was suffering from realizing he was overgrown, that he was too old for all this.
Nothing he could see in her twenty-something home had any reference to his life. In other friends’ houses, there were familiar signposts, like a CD collection that echoed your own, or the same out-of-production Habitat mugs, or letters from school about hair lice or sports day.
Here, their fifteen-year age gap was visible even in the packets of food on her open shelving: flavored rice in sachets, tacos, a bottle of Malibu. A knee-length coat with a furry collar and cuffs lay over a perspex chair, and an ice-cream tub full of bottles of nail polish sat on the bare floorboards by a bright blue sofa with metal legs.
Because he didn’t know where to look, he settled his eyes on a smooth oval boulder propping open a door leading into a room with cerise walls.
“I like your doorstop,” he said pathetically. Oh God, please spare me from this humiliation.
“I got it from the beach.”
“Is that legal?”
“Do I care?”
Until then he’d focused only on their similarities, of which, he was suddenly painfully aware, there was just one.
And yet for the past two hours Tamsin had laughed at his feeble jokes, flirted with him and flattered him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt funny or sexy or worth listening to. And although it almost pained him to see her in this light, he at last understood the clear message she was giving out. To use the ugly shorthand employed by Niall, she was telling him in no uncertain terms that she was “up for it.”
Her offer had been clear. “I don’t want to make you late back,” he’d said as they’d lingered over the last centimeters of wine in the bar. “Oh, I thought I’d take a long lunch,” she’d replied. “Do you want to see my flat?” She’d been quite assured. Yes, her intelligent pale blue eyes had said. This is a sexual advance. Don’t be shy. I’m not.
He had felt himself harden, but there was another dialogue going on in his head about quick fixes not being as satisfying as they used to be, about getting to the point in his life where he wanted to see beyond them, even if there was just an open vista or an empty space. But worse than all of that, the thought had occurred to him that it could all go terribly wrong. He was out of practice, big time.
He hadn’t seen her offer coming, he honestly hadn’t. Or at least not quite so fast. He knew many marriages were peppered with discreet infidelities but he had never understood, until now, how they happened. You just stopped caring too much about the consequences.
He still found women other than Sita attractive. He was even prepared to believe that some women felt the same way about him, but he could never work out how on earth anyone took such feelings a stage farther. Or why, actually. He’d never considered his own loyalty because he’d never thought he’d have to. And now he was being offered the perfect chance to test it.
Even his car full of family disorder hadn’t seemed to distract her. What was going on in her head, allowing a man almost old enough to be her father, let alone anyone else’s, to take her back to her flat in the middle of the day? He knew what was going on in his own head. It was an exercise in seeing what it might be like to be someone else, which was the only enduring fantasy of his life to date.
His heart had thumped all the way with guilt and fear. Desire reared its head every now and again but it was a third-party thing, and only because any sex, extramarital or otherwise, seemed such a long time ago.
In the wine bar, Tamsin had made him believe anything was possible, but that had been back in the safety of licensed premises. He’d believed in there, with the outdated red glass oil lamps and blackboard menus, that he could have a secret life, a soulmate, someone to talk to about love and lime when no one else cared.
What he felt now they were on their own in her big empty flat with the perspex and the Pop Tarts was that anything, particularly escape, was impossible. He also felt that both her image and his were irreversibly tarnished. There was something tacky about it all. He wanted to go. His career as an adulterer was over before it had started.
“This is it,” she’d said breezily as she’d opened her front door, which gave straight from the street onto a flight of white painted stairs. Free newspapers, taxi flyers and three crushed cans of lager were piled on the floor. He’d imagined her sitting on the bottom step, waiting with her clubbing friends for a cab, drinking. Then he’d noticed his own brown brogues following her up the steps like a lost sheep. Or a lamb being led to slaughter, maybe. This is it, then. This is it. Immediately, he’d known it wasn’t enough.
He’d taken the beer from her because he needed something to do with his hands, but she was already suggesting other options.
“Would you like to see the bedroom?”
“I’m fine here,” he said.
“I know you are. I’m only offering to show you a few original beams.”
“Oh, of course.”
“I’ve got photos, if you prefer.”
He sat down quickly on the sofa between the two bay windows. She came to sit next to him, making sure her thigh touched his.
“It’s the same size as this. I wanted something old with good proportions.”
“Is there a joke coming?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said coyly, passing him a blue envelope of mail-order processed snaps.
He tried to look as if he knew the routine, pulling out a cushion, thumping it and leaning back. “Just being facetious. Yes, it looks great. Did you reveal it yourself?”
“Yes. I’m very good at revealing things.”
He wasn’t sure if she was being serious or not. He put his hands behind his head, thinking it made him look less like someone who was about to start hyperventilating.
“Well, what shall we do now?” she asked, twisting her body toward him.
Clearly, women took control of such situations these days. Actually, he acknowledged, as he clutched his stubby green bottle of Stella, they always had, as far as he was concerned. He had never made a sexual overture in his life. The number of women he had slept with equated exactly to the number of women who had made the first move.
He raised his eyebrows and put his hands palm up, but as he was trying to think of something suitably nebulous to say, she spoke again.
“I know. How about you kiss me?”
The effect on him was magical. He wanted to go home and make it all better with Sita, to cancel the appointment with the double-barreled chartered surveyor who was coming to value Bodinnick on the day ringed in red on the kitchen calendar, and to start all over again.
“I’d love to,” he heard himself say.
“I know you would.” She had even closed her eyes.
“But I won’t, if that’s okay.”
Tamsin pulled back no more than a couple of inches. Her face managed a smile. “Yes, of course it’s okay.” Rejection hadn’t ruffled her composure. Made her blush, maybe, just a touch.
“It’s not that I don’t…”
“Don’t you? I really thought you did.”
“No, I mean, I do, but…”
“Jonathan, it’s okay. No one’s died.”
“No.” He stared at the floorboards, wondering what he was mourning for.
“Hey, come on. I got it wrong, that’s all. I thought you wanted me for something other than professional advice, and I didn’t mind that. But I don’t mind this, either. It’s really no big deal. I do it lots.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “I do.”
“I should go,” he said.
“Or we could talk about it while you finish your beer?”
“I’m no good at talking, Tamsin. Ask my wife.”
“Better not,” she said, getting up. “She might get the wrong idea.”
* * *
By sending all five letters, Cathal had made sure there was no chance of Emmy getting the wrong idea.
“Someone’s trying to tell you something, I think,” the chirpy postman said as he handed her the identical envelopes with their Irish stamps. He had a smirk across his gnomic face as if he had just cracked the joke of the century. “Or is it one of those chain-mail things?”
He cocked his head and waited for the answer that he could take to Mrs. Partridge at the farm. Eileen Partridge liked to keep abreast of what was going on, and he liked the coffee and the sugar and currant Cornish “heavy cake” she gave him in return.
“Thank you,” Emmy said quickly, shutting the back door in his startled face.
The first sight of the green harp was hardly a shock. In a peculiar way, it was almost a relief, since she’d been expecting it daily. But when she put it at the bottom of the pile to look at what else he had given her, she saw the second one and something hit her at the back of her throat. The third, fourth and fifth hit her somewhere much worse.
She leaned against the delicately fern-etched glass of the back door and stared into the dingy passageway known as the boot room, which still smelled of Toby’s dogs, into wellies and weedkiller, into ancient tins of axle grease and oil dispensers with long thin spouts, and old seedling trays.
For a split second she thought she might collapse in a heap on the floor and lie there until someone carted her off, but the thought that the someone might be Maya was just enough to make her stay standing. She breathed in through her nose, a long controlled intake. Then she blew slowly out of her barely open mouth. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. Her left hand went to her neck and she squeezed the glands below her ears, trying to collect her thoughts. Her right hand hung limply by her side, clutching the letters.
A door slammed upstairs and she heard raised voices. Somewhere in her head, she registered them as Niall and Kat’s but the fact that they were having a row did not resonate. It was a detail that belonged to another life.
She opened the first letter while she was still leaning against the door. It was a photocopy of the one she had already received. She tore open the second, which was the same. And the third. Instead of being relieved that Cathal hadn’t elaborated on his initial request, she felt chilled to the bone. Stalked, or hunted, or blackmailed. Had he gone mad?
She ripped straight through the fourth and fifth ones, once, twice, three times. She saw snatches of his photocopied words, and scared herself witless at the now familiar loops of his writing. The moment had something of the repetitive nightmare about it, as though she knew she was falling into it but couldn’t help herself. A shadow passed across the glass behind her and she leaped away from it, as if any minute now the handle would go down, the door would be pushed open and he’d be inside.
The shouting upstairs still didn’t sink in. Nor did the clattering of children in the kitchen just on the other side of the wall, the noise of cereal bowls and taps running, the sound of Sita calling good-bye twice.
Fury began to boil inside her head. Without thinking what she was doing or how she would explain it, she pulled from her trouser pocket a lighter which had lit her a cigarette every waking hour since the original letter had arrived, and set fire to the paper in her hand. As it caught and threatened to reach her fingers, she dragged out a coal bucket from between the boots and dropped the burning page in. One by one, the rest followed.
Standing over her pyre, she watched the long flames lick the Irish stamps, the typewritten address, Cathal’s brutal demands. Her eyes burned with a warning. You leave me and Maya alone. Just leave us alone. She felt witchlike and powerful while the fire burned, but when it died her potency died too, and when the paper was just a pile of black ash she was left feeling like a wet rag.
* * *
The flames were dead by the time Niall and Kat walked past ten minutes later. A thin curtain of smoke hung in the air, but Niall’s Camel cigarette rendered it invisible.
“I can’t leave him here on his own,” he argued. “He’s coming to see me, not anyone else. The Irish house stuff is just a pretext. I’ve told you, he’s got another agenda, I know him.”
He was doing his best to keep up with Kat as she tore through the house, but she was in a fast and furious mood. She had her London clothes on again: a tight large-cuffed tailored white shirt and black cut-off trousers. Her black leather sandals had heels on them like the bottom of a bumper car and her lilac lipstick made her look like a mini version of Cruella Deville.
“But the deal was never me always coming here. You said you would come up to London sometimes, too.”
“What are you talking about? What deal?”
Her car needed a new exhaust, the timer for the heating in her flat was refusing to work, and there was a party she didn’t want to go to on her own. He had to come to London. “You know exactly what deal I mean, so don’t be boring.”
She kicked the bucket of paper ash to one side and opened the door, forcing herself and her hugely expensive bag through the space and out into the courtyard. Three bicycles were heaped in her way, the pink one from the store included.
“You were the one who wanted the recreational relationship,” he reminded her.
“That was because you weren’t offering anything else.”
“I was. I offered this, full-time.”
“Only because you knew I wouldn’t damn well accept.” She stepped round the bikes, brushing against the oil tank and getting the arm of her white shirt soaked with the warm rain that had just fallen.
“Not true. The offer is still open.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, it doesn’t sound as if any of you will be here much longer.”
Niall had refused to talk about the house meeting. It was all too raw.
“I will come to London sometimes, but I can’t come just at the moment. Why are you making so much of it?”
“Look, if you’re not going to come with me, I need to know now. The train leaves in half an hour.”
“Kat, watch my lips. I’ve told you. I am not coming.”
“Is that your final answer?”
“Yes. It was my first answer as well. I don’t see how I can be more clear about it.”
“Well, you can live with the consequences then, you selfish bastard.” She whacked Niall’s legs with her suitcase.
“That was not necessary, Kathleen.”
“Just take me to the bloody station. And I’m not going on your bloody bike.”
“There’s no need to swear,” he said, knowing exactly how much he could wind her up. “It’s very eighties, sweetheart. Hasn’t anyone told you it has lost the power to shock?”
“Niall?”
“Uuh?”
“Fuck off.”
* * *
So he thought, once he’d dropped her off, that it might be time to take her at her word. It was a prospect that took less thinking about than he’d imagined, but he still felt it was a big enough decision to have to weigh up, and when he needed to weigh things up there was only one sort of place to go. It was no good going to the Cott Inn because people knew him there now—Roy Mundy the plumber, Jack Partridge the farmer, Jim Best the electrician—and they would want to talk to him, or, more likely, he would want to talk to them. The Aga was low, Partridge’s sheep were still getting out and finding their way into the garden, and the wiring up the stairs was an iffy job which Jim really needed to take a second look at. Even if they were only getting it up to scratch to sell.
Instead, he followed a brown tourist sign off the main road which he had seen and failed to follow until now, and ended up at a low, thatched, elongated, whitewashed cottage on a creek. It didn’t look much like his kind of pub from the outside, and he knew the menu would be more extensive than the beer cellar, but at least it would be totally and utterly anonymous.
The sky was a tie-dye affair of light and dark gray, confirming the forecast of rain. Boats bobbing on the churned and muddy water looked as if they’d had enough of the unsettled week. Across the creek, expensive bungalows with gardens running to the water’s edge stared snootily down as if they had enough of looking at the boats, doubly offended to be forced to gaze upon a place that served al fresco chips in plastic baskets.
The wooden picnic tables along the jetty were slimy with the wet, as was the decking underfoot, but a rope prevented access anyway. An unhappy dog was tied to one of the bench legs, and jumped to its feet eagerly when Niall walked by. He patted it and it looked grateful.
The doorway to the Ferry Gate was a foot shorter than he was, and as he lifted the latch, he caught sight of the four-letter word—Duck—just in time. A wood and glass partition between the flagstone hall and the snug channeled him straight toward the bar.
The big car park had been practically empty so he was surprised to see how many people there were, until he realized they were the sailing fraternity and their expensive transport was moored outside.
The Gore-Tex gaggle looked up momentarily, but they could tell by his gray urban clothes that he had no interest in boats, so none of them bothered to acknowledge him as they might have done if he’d been wearing something stormproof in a primary color. Terracotta dishes and napkins littered their tables, and they all laughed loudly at each other’s jokes.
The woman with bad highlights behind the bar looked relieved to see him, though.
“You a sailor, too?” she asked tentatively. She had on a low-cut long-sleeved white T-shirt and her breasts merged with the rolls of her tummy. Niall noticed a gold belt peeping out from among it all.
“No, why? Do you have to be to drink here?”
“Feels like that sometimes.”
“Well, I hate boats. I felt a bit sick just walking in here from the car park, actually. I couldn’t work out if it was the boats bobbin’ up and down, or me, or the ground or what.”
“You’re all right, then. What can I get you?”
“Pint of Guinness, please.”
She dropped her voice and glanced at the sailing crowd. “They’re a noisy bunch, this lot.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“They’re rude, too. I don’t think one of them has said please or thank you yet.”
“That’s bad.”
“I think they think the Cornish are thick.”
“I bet you say that to all the Irishmen you get in here.”
She smiled and gave him his Guinness, and because he sat at a stool against the counter she assumed he wanted to carry on talking. He looked like a man acquainted with the unspoken rules of country pubs. If you wanted to be left alone, you retreated to a table. If you wanted company, you sat at the bar.
“So what brings you here then? On holiday?”
“No, I live here. We moved down a month ago.”
“And who is ‘we’?” She picked up a beer towel and began to wipe between the pumps.
“Well, that is the golden question,” Niall said mysteriously. “That is the golden question.”
* * *
Emmy picked up Niall’s mobile phone, which was charging on the Welsh dresser and pressed the Menu button. Information. Phone Book. Messages. She pressed OK.
I’m going to do this. I really am. Call Voicemail. Received Messages. Select. Even as she typed in the text, she didn’t believe she would send it. She thought she was going to remain immobilized forever by fear. “PLEASE DO NOT SEND ANYMORE LETTERS AND PLEASE DO NOT COME TO CORNWALL. EMMY.”
Enter number. She tapped it in from the piece of paper she had pulled out of her pocket. She could still scrub it. Send message. Would she? She pressed OK. Message failed. Resend? OK. Message failed. Another breath. Resend? OK. Message sent.
Oh my God. Her decision to make contact was now irretrievable. She put the phone back on the dresser as if it was about to explode, and her legs turned to jelly. The little green light flashed back at her. She stared at it, waiting. Nothing happened. She stared some more. Still nothing happened.
Five minutes passed and the world had not fallen in. She boiled a kettle and shook some coffee into a mug because she was too lazy to find a clean teaspoon. She drank the coffee, even though it was too strong, and then forced herself to go and find Maya and apologize.
As she was on her way out of the kitchen, feeling for the first time in more than a week that she might have brought a small amount of control back into her life, the phone shrieked. Three sharp tones which pierced the silence.
She dived back to it. Message. Read Now? She didn’t know about that. A door banged somewhere in the house and it shook her into realizing she had no choice. OK. His message flashed up. (1—New) “AM ON MY WAY. I COME IN PEACE. CATHAL.” View Options? Delete Message? It was Niall’s phone and it would be a cruel way for him to find out the truth of something he didn’t even doubt. Select? OK.
Then she forgot about finding Maya and instead went straight to her bathroom, locked the door and threw up, holding onto the cold enamel rim of the lavatory as if her life depended on it.
* * *
“Thought of the answer yet?” the barmaid asked Niall. “Three pints of Guinness should be enough to lubricate even an Irish brain.”
“Yes, but I’ve forgotten the question.”
“It was the golden one.”
“Oh, that one. I remember. It’s either 3.4 or Val Doonican.”
She laughed and was summonsed by an angry ring of the brass bell at the other end of the bar. “See what I mean?”
Niall nodded and went back to the thought he’d been having before she’d interrupted him.
The tape of Elvis Costello playing in the background had triggered it. He and Emmy had seen him at the Glastonbury Festival once, years ago, before she’d got pregnant, before the mud.
He could remember them parking the bike in a dusty summer field and, as the thump of airborne music from a faraway stage pumped through him and she had humped her sleeping bag over her shoulder and walked through a swirl of tiny glittering particles of hay, he’d thought he could never love anyone more. They had slept in a one-man tent and one night they had built a fire near the pyramid stage and curled up in their bags like padded silkworms, stoned and happy, and fallen asleep to the sound of some now-forgotten band. So far, he hadn’t been proved wrong.
He put his empty glass down on a brass drip tray, waved to the barmaid and walked out. He did know who he wanted to live with. He’d always known. And this morning Kat had given him the perfect opportunity to make it all a lot clearer.