It was December. The radio beside the bed came on at seven a.m. as usual and she heard someone talking about Christmas being only three weeks away. She reached over and switched it off.
‘Christmas,’ she groaned.
Beside her, Dan Cochrane stirred. ‘Christmas,’ he agreed, his voice husky.
He sighed, then slipped out of bed and she spread herself into the warm space left by his body. She did not have to go to work today but he had to get to Ardglass to open the shop.
She was drowsy, her limbs heavy. Somewhere in the wee hours they had made love again, blindly, silently in the dark, and she smiled to herself at the thought.
She watched him fumbling with his clothes. She looked at his strong shoulders, the silky dark hair on his chest, the thin track of it that ran from his navel to the thicket below, where his penis was timid now.
‘I haven’t heard you mention it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Christmas.’
‘I don’t want to think about it,’ she said but she thought about it nevertheless.
Christmas was a time when cracks in family relationships were laid bare. It had always been a bleak period for her. This year there would be lunch with her mother and she did not know what else. Her father would be in Scotland.
‘Have you any plans?’ she said.
She looked at him, wondering. Since that first night after the Fly, their relationship had developed but into what, she was not at all certain. It was sketchy still. Shutters came down when she asked too much.
She did know more about him but she had had to winkle it out. What she had discovered had gone a long way to explaining the inner gloom she sometimes saw. His father and his sister had been killed in an IRA explosion when he was young, leaving his mother to run the family farm single-handed. He had given up his job to help her but the farm had had to be sold to pay off debts. His life appeared to have gone into a kind of neutral after that. And now his mother was dead too.
But learning this from him did not erase the feeling that he was somehow managing to keep her at arm’s length, in spite of their physical intimacy.
When they were together at night it was always here, in Truesdale Street. She had never been to the flat above the pottery and he had never suggested going there. Was that where he would spend his Christmas?
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I might go away for a few days.’
‘What about the pottery?’
‘I’ll close on Christmas Day and Boxing Day anyway. I’ve got someone in to help at the moment. They could stay on if I wanted a bit of time to myself.’
‘So where would you go?’
‘Don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘You could come here,’ she suggested. ‘Christmas night. I could go to my mother’s, get that out of the way, and then come back in the afternoon. It would be nice. The two of us. Don’t you think?’
He was straightening a sock. He gave her a look. ‘Have you told anyone about – about you and me?’ His question didn’t answer hers.
‘Elizabeth,’ she said, ‘no one else. Why? Do you want me to keep you a secret?’
He said nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed to put the sock on and then unravelled the other one.
She sat forward and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘You look worried. Is there a problem?’
He finished and stood up. ‘No, there’s no problem. It’s just that I don’t like the idea of being seen as – as a kind of specimen. Your first – well, you know what I mean.’
He looked away. She sat up straight and pulled the duvet across her breasts. She was wide awake now.
There was a second or two of silence and then she said, ‘Dan, why don’t we have a party?’
‘What?’
‘Why don’t we have a party? You could invite your friends. You never talk about any of them, I know, but I assume you have some?’
He looked at her with an anxious frown. ‘What are you getting at? I’m not big on parties.’
‘No, I didn’t think so. I didn’t think you’d warm to that suggestion somehow. Which brings me to my next question. How come we never meet anyone? How come we hardly ever go anywhere where we might be seen together – the sort of thing normal couples do? Think about it – the cinema once, a concert once. In among a crowd. Apart from that we hang out here, eating pizza and fucking. Do you find me embarrassing, is that it? The crazy coma woman with the amnesia. Is that what you don’t want to have to explain to anyone? Could it be that you think of me as the specimen, Mr Psychologist?’
As he stood gawping at her, she got out of bed abruptly, grabbed her cotton robe from behind the door and slipped into it. She did not want to be naked in front of him. Not just at this moment.
She hurried down the stairs. She didn’t need this. She put water on for coffee.
He walked into the kitchen. ‘Meg, it’s not like that. I didn’t mean—’
‘Don’t bother trying to explain. I don’t want to hear.’ She opened the fridge. There was no milk. ‘Damn,’ she said.
He looked at the empty shelf in the fridge door. ‘I’ll go and get some. We’ll talk about this when I get back.’
She thought that right now she would prefer it if he did not come back at all. But she did not say it. She did not say anything.
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ll take your keys.’
They were on the kitchen table. It was the usual arrangement when he had to nip out to the van or to one of the shops. It saved her having to let him back in all the time.
He went to the door. ‘There’s a letter here for you,’ he called before he went out.
She sat with her indignation for a couple of minutes and as it subsided she thought of what she had said to him and began to wonder that maybe she had blown up like that not because of what he thought of her but because of what she thought of herself. Wasn’t it a fact that at the root of it all was her own desperate insecurity?
He had said something about a letter. She went to the hall and picked it up from the floor.
The first thing she noticed were the stamps – a commemoration of the centenary of the Klondyke gold rush.
She stared.
Her name and address were printed on the front in small, sloping handwriting. There was an air mail sticker.
She turned the envelope over and saw the sender’s name.
Everett.
Below that was an apartment number in a house on Eastern Promenade, Portland, Maine, USA – the address to which she had written.
She looked at the thing for a few seconds in disbelief, then she needed to sit down.
It was weeks, months, as a matter of fact, October, since she had sent the letter. She had given up watching for a reply. She took a deep breath, opened the envelope and began to read.
Dear Meg
Thank you for writing. We’re very sorry to take so long to reply but it’s been a question of finding the right words. We hope you’ll understand.
We feel a great loss. It’s a feeling that’s never very far below the surface and it welled right up again when we got your letter. But once we got over that, we got to thinking about you. We had no idea what happened to you after you were injured and we were relieved to find out.
Whatever happened that night when our son was murdered, we’re so pleased that you survived because that’s what Paul would have wanted.
The words seemed to jump out of the page. She read that last sentence again, feeling her skin go cold under the thin robe.
Some weeks before it happened, he called us on the phone, something he didn’t do as regularly as we would have liked although we used to get to see him from time to time when he came back to the Vectra headquarters in New Hampshire. He seemed very happy. He told us his job was going great and that he’d met a wonderful, young woman, a doctor, working in ER at one of the hospitals over there. Then about a couple of days before he died we got a letter from him. Now that was a rare thing. Letter-writing wasn’t ever something Paul had much time for. He told us your name was Meg Winter and that he was thinking of getting married. We were really very excited.
Unfortunately, we never got to talk to him again. His mother wrote him but before she had mailed the letter he was dead.
The thing is, Meg – this thing of you having amnesia, not being able to remember anything about him – it’s all so tragic. From talking to Paul, from that letter of his, we got the feeling that you were very close. You had to be if marriage was being discussed.
Then there’s the business of the drugs. You can’t imagine how badly that hit us, too. It’s hard for us to picture him being mixed up in something like that. It just doesn’t match up with the Paul we knew. Somehow we feel they must have got that wrong.
We hope this letter finds you well and that you are making good progress. Life can’t be easy for you.
We would like you to know that we don’t blame you for anything that happened. Perhaps we did feel angry at first and maybe, inside, we took out some of that anger on you, the woman who had come into his life. I suppose we needed somebody to blame. But we don’t feel like that any more.
Please write again. We would like that very much. We’ve got a lot to discuss and we should get to know each other better. Maybe we can even meet some day.
Yours sincerely
Laurence and Marcie Everett
She did not know how long she had been sitting there, reading the letter over and over again, when Cochrane came back.
He put a carton of milk down. ‘I took a walk,’ he said. ‘I thought you might need a little space before we talk.’
She looked up towards him, her eyes distant, her face like chalk. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
She held the letter out to him and pulled the robe tighter round her thin frame.
He took it from her and read in silence.
‘Jesus,’ he said when he had gone over it a second time. ‘This is incredible. But it’s a bit of a breakthrough at last, isn’t it?’
‘Breakthrough?’
‘Yes, of course it is. This means that even though you can’t remember, you must have known him after all.’
She stared at him. ‘What are you talking about? Must have known him. Damn it, I didn’t know him. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t you believe me?’
‘Meg, listen, it’s not a question of that. I believe that you don’t remember. Of course I do.’ He waved the letter towards her. ‘But this tells you more, doesn’t it? Meg, think about it. You forgot Noel Kennedy. You could have forgotten Paul Everett too.’
‘Just go,’ she said quietly, getting up and turning her back on him.
‘Look – wait – we have to talk.’
‘I don’t want to talk about anything with you.’
There was a pause. Then he spoke again, quietly. ‘I understand. Of course. This is difficult. You’ll need time by yourself to take this in. I’ll just—’
She faced him. ‘Just go!’
They stared at each other and she saw that he had retreated somewhere, away from confrontation. He gave a little nod of assent, then he turned quickly and walked out.
The sound of the front door closing shook her and for a second she wanted to run after him and tell him to come back. But she just stood there until she heard his van starting up and driving away.
She looked at the letter lying on the table. She shouldn’t have been like that to him. But what he had said . . . what the letter said . . . she couldn’t grasp any of it. She was trembling. She went upstairs and dressed but she still felt cold.
She had to think. Think. She whispered the word through clenched teeth. She read the letter again. It was in a strong, precise hand, the style articulate but simple. She read the grief and the coming-to-terms in it but she could not, just could not, accept what it told her.
She went round the house, searching through her things, some of which were in boxes she had brought from her mother’s.
Searching for what?
Something that told her the letter was right? She would find nothing to tell her it was wrong.
She unearthed the bloodstained shoulder-bag again.
Where had she bought that? She couldn’t remember. What if he had bought it? His face came to her, smiling in the photograph.
She had dumped Kennedy. What if she had dumped him for Everett? What if Dan was right and she had forgotten both of them?
No, damn it, no. She did not know him.
‘I didn’t know him,’ she said aloud, slamming the door of a wardrobe in an empty, echoing bedroom.
Wait – what had it said? She grabbed the letter again and read:
A couple of days before he died we got a letter from him.
She ran downstairs, found paper and a pen and then she sat for a few moments, forcing herself to become calm, to think straight.
He had written to his parents. If only there was some way of seeing that letter.
She had nothing to lose by asking.