Lily and Russ have left the south-east and are on a motorway heading north.
‘So,’ says Lily, ‘how did you and Jo meet?’
‘Oh, God, now you’re asking.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I am.’
He smiles and says, ‘At work.’
‘The same place where you met Carl?’
‘No, the place I worked before that. She was my boss.’
‘Ah,’ says Lily. ‘Yes. That makes sense.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes. Because she is bossy.’
Russ laughs out loud. ‘She is not!’
‘She is! She doesn’t want you to have breakfast with me. She doesn’t want you to take me to Yorkshire. She throws your lunch at your head!’
‘Oh, seriously. That’s just . . . she’s just tired a lot. That’s what that is. And she gets a bit kennel-mad during the week—’
‘Kennel-mad?’
‘You know, like a dog in a cage. Desperate to get out. She lives for the weekends, when I’m at home, so we can share the childcare. Do nice things together. Spend time with Darcy.’
Lily shudders slightly. She does not want a child until she is thirty-five. She told this to Carl and he said he’d wait as long she wanted him to wait. But she can relate to this woman, Jo, now. She has felt ‘kennel-mad’ too at times these past two weeks. She would have been extremely unhappy if Carl had left her for a whole day on the weekend to drive another woman across the country. And she doesn’t even have a baby to look after. She nods and says, ‘I understand. Please will you tell her that I’m very sorry? That I am very grateful. And that I will buy her a gift.’
‘Oh, no need, no need. But I will tell her. She’s not scary, really. She’s a sweetheart. She’s the best girl ever. I’m so lucky to have her.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘She’s beautiful,’ he says and she wonders if he means beautiful like her, or just beautiful compared to him. ‘Red hair. Green eyes. Stunning.’
Lily looks at Russ, at the glow that emanates from him when he talks about his wife. This is how she feels when she talks about Carl. As though she has been enchanted.
‘Here.’ He reaches into the inside pocket of his sensible jacket and pulls out a wallet. ‘There’s a photo in there. Have a look.’
She takes the wallet from him and opens it. The photo shows a nice-looking woman in spectacles holding a blob of a baby. She passes the wallet back to him. ‘Very beautiful,’ she says. ‘You are very lucky.’
She feels inside her coat pocket for the keys she found in Carl’s filing cabinet, for the reassuringly solid sphere. And then her fingers find the roll of twenty-pound notes she’d brought, just in case she needed to take a room in a hotel or buy a train ticket home. In her carrier bag she has the wedding photo album to show Carl’s mum and some pictures of her own family, back in Kiev. She is holding on to the hope that the woman will soften once Lily is there, on her doorstep. That she will invite them in, pour them tea from a pot, take an interest.
‘How about you?’ says Russ. ‘How did you meet Carl?’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
‘No. Need-to-know basis, as with everything.’ He laughs. ‘Just got back from the Ukraine and told me he’d met someone special.’
She tells him the story about the conference back in February, about the cash-in-hand job she’d taken as a favour to her mum, about the first time she saw him and how she’d just known.
‘So when did he ask you to marry him? Was it then?’
‘No. No, he came back a week later.’ Her face softens at the memory. ‘With a ring. It was the best moment of my whole life.’
‘And what . . .?’ He hesitates, begins again: ‘What is he like? You know? Day to day? I’m just – I can’t imagine him as a domestic being.’
‘Day to day he is wonderful. He brings me things, every day, a chocolate truffle, a rose, a hairslide. He sends me texts, with words of love. When he comes home he looks after me, he cooks for me, he runs me a bath and brings me towels. He worships me.’
‘Wow,’ says Russ, peering into the wing mirror and the rear-view mirror before pulling into the middle lane. ‘That’s amazing. I kind of can’t imagine.’
‘I can’t explain it,’ she says, ‘it’s like nothing I ever experienced. It’s more than love. It’s obsession.’
‘Which can be, well – there’s a dark side to that, isn’t there? To obsession?’
‘There’s a dark side to everything, Russ.’
‘Ha!’ He smiles. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true. I suppose it is.’
‘I am a very dark person.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that . . .’
‘No, because you don’t know me. But it is true. I am dark. That doesn’t mean I can’t have fun. I can have lots of fun. But when it is just me, alone, with myself – there is no sunshine.’
Russ nods and moves the car back into the fast lane. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘Yes,’ says Lily. ‘It is.’
‘In this country, I think, people spend a lot of time worrying about the darkness. We all want to be sunny. We’re scared if we’re not.’
‘You are sunny.’
‘Yes, I am, or at least I try to be. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of . . . introspection.’
‘This word? Looking inside?’
‘Yes, looking inside. Wondering who I am and why I’m here. Questioning everything.’
Lily absorbs this and then nods. ‘I think Carl is also very dark,’ she says a moment later.
‘Yes,’ says Russ, nodding emphatically. ‘Yes. I think you’re probably right.’
She turns then, to look through her window. The scenery is a blur of green fields and blue sky and occasional blasts of golden rape. A big green road sign says ‘THE NORTH’. She thinks of Carl’s darkness, of the moments when he would become silent, when he would shrug away her hand, or not reply to a question. She remembers the nights when he would talk in his sleep. Thrash from side to side. Call out. Once he strangled her, in his sleep. She awoke to find him above her, his eyes not looking at her, his arms raised, then his hands meeting together around her throat and squeezing and squeezing and her eyes filling with tears and the blood pulsating through her temples and her knee at his groin and then the shock in his eyes as he awoke and looked at her, the expression of sickening realisation, his hands loosening around her neck, his fingers finding her face, groaning, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it was a nightmare, I was having a nightmare,’ kissing her, holding her, then making love to her more tenderly than ever before.
There was a necklace the next day, with a simple diamond pendant.
She knows nothing of his childhood, of his past. She knows nothing of his scars. But she knows they are there.
It’s sunny as they pull off the main road towards the town called Ridinghouse Bay. But it’s cosy in here, the radio tuned into something easy listening, the heater breathing out warm air. And Russ is very good company. Lily feels relaxed with him, as if she can say anything. On the next bend the town comes into view: a C-shaped jumble of tiny houses spilling down towards the sea, small boats bobbing about in the sparkling harbour. But they turn away from the town and down a shadowy road where bowers of darkly nodding trees meet overhead like a corridor.
The lady on Google Maps says: ‘In fifty yards, on your left, you have reached your destination.’
Lily feels nervous now. She grasps Russ’s sleeve and says, ‘I’m scared.’
‘It’s going to be fine,’ he says. ‘Chances are there’ll be no one here. Chances are we’ll be turning straight round and going home again.’
‘I am scared of that, too.’
They pull off the road and have to stop because there is a rusty chain across the driveway. Lily jumps out of the car and unclips the chain, pulls it across and stands back to let Russ bring the car on to the driveway. She has never seen such a beautiful house. It is built from a cream-coloured stone, or maybe it has been painted cream. There are gargoyles and busts built into the plasterwork, fluted columns and a set of smile-shaped stone steps leading up to a huge black wooden door with a brass knocker at its centre. Behind the house is the sea and a royal-blue sky full of pale-gold puffs of cloud.
She goes to the door of Russ’s car and waits for him to get out.
‘This house is very beautiful,’ she says. ‘I have never seen a house like this before.’
‘Georgian,’ says Russ, brushing sandwich crumbs from his lap and stretching out his arms. ‘Or maybe neo-Georgian. Looks a bit neglected.’
She follows him towards the front door, her heart thumping hard, the carrier bag with the photo album in it clutched tight in her hand. There is no sign of life and now that they are closer to the house Lily can see that the building is tired and scruffy, that the cream walls and the windows are dirty, that the rose beds outside the front windows are overgrown and filled with dead leaves.
It is not a fairy-tale palace after all. But still, it is a fine house. She cannot imagine why Carl would not have wanted to bring her here. To share this with her.
She rings the doorbell and it chimes, just as she had imagined it would, with the elegant sound of copper tubes. No one comes. No lights go on. No voice calls out. Russ rings it again. He looks at her and frowns, then rings again. They try for five minutes, until it is obvious that no one is here, or that if they are here, they do not want to come to the door. Then Lily puts her hand in her pocket and pulls out the key fob.
‘This,’ she says to Russ, holding it out to him in the palm of her hand. ‘It was in Carl’s filing cabinet.’
He takes it from her and examines the keys. Then he looks at the keyhole carved into the big wooden door and says, ‘It might be.’
He inserts the strange-looking key, the one Lily had been planning on taking to the key-cutter at the station tomorrow, into the lock and turns it. There’s a low click as it unlocks.
Russ and Lily look at each other. Lily nods. Russ pushes open the door.