She looked at him. “I’ve run the place on my own for years.”
“You and an endless succession of useless assistants.”
“It was just a bad day.” She corrected herself. “A very busy day. You have to make the most of those and not fritter all your takings away on another pair of hands.”
“But if the economy doesn’t pick up and more people holiday in this country more regularly, most of your days could be like today. Another pair of hands would make you more efficient and more profitable.”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Who do you vote for, Henry?”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
She sighed. “No, you’re not wrong. It’s just … change, you know?”
“But you want change.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it again.
Henry said, after a moment, “What happened last summer?”
She looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“That makes it different from this one? Last year you weren’t talking about selling up, moving on. ”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m just restless this year. Wondering what else is out there. Maybe it’s a natural conclusion - were we all really going to be doing this the rest of our lives?” She swallowed the last of her drink. “Anyway, it’s this summer that’s different. Last year I wasn’t sleeping with you.”
He smiled. “Well this is true. Last year I wasn’t with anyone.”
“Really?”
“No one special.” He paused. “Were you?”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “The usual.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Appeared to make a decision. “Another drink?”
“Would be lovely.” She beamed at him. She couldn’t tell whether he believed her or whether he was just going to let it go. After this drink she would take him home to her bed, because it would make him happy and the sex would be comforting and because she had known for a very long time that the easiest way to side-step the past was to make the present count.
Jem was a genius, no question. Not only was her own artistry beautiful and original and expertly done, she understood how he worked best and what would work for him without his needing to explain it. He had shown her pictures of his sculptures and a few bits he had lying around the studio – a bowl, an otter, a symbolic piece he’d called Grace – but her instinct had come before that and she was absolutely right. And she was not just a genius, she was intuitive and lovely and he ached for her all the time they were apart and, to be fair, pretty much all the time they were together.
Except for this minute, when he was standing in the centre of his room glaring at the log.
“So what are you going for?” she asked. “A symbolic tree or a realistic one?”
“A real one.” It was the most important – the only – decision he had made about it yet. “I mean, I want it to be recognisable as a tree.”
“What sort of tree?”
“Well, it’s applewood, so … ”
“It’s going to have apples on it?”
He turned to look at her, lying naked in his bed, entwined with the fraying quilt, her hair still tousled from sleep, her skin warm and sweaty from the sex they’d had on waking.
He smiled. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Just a bit.” She laughed and stretched, the silver pendant she wore sliding on its leather thong between her breasts. “Will you make a start on it today?”
“With you here?”
“Why wait?”
He cleared his throat. “Jem, I really want you to stay … ” She stilled in instant alarm, and he saw again in her the thin shaft of vulnerability which revealed itself sometimes, like a mask shifting briefly out of place. He sat down on the bed to reassure her. “You are so tempting. And you know what I’m like with temptation.”
“You’re not saying you don’t want me here?”
“No. I’m saying I do want you here. Too much.”
“I want you here too.”
Their eyes held.
“Oh God,” he breathed as she swung up into his lap.
“We will have,” he told her afterwards, murmuring the words into her hair, “lunch and a walk on the beach and then I will do my work and you will do yours but separately, because clearly I cannot resist you.”
She laughed. “It’s the same for me.”
“Jesus. We’re going to be so bad for each other.”
They showered and dressed, descended the iron staircase into the sunshine of the square. The pavement tables outside Cecily’s cafe swarmed with families and Gil gently steered Jem away to the descending path. His once simmering resentment towards Cecily had been tempered now by guilt and distance, none of which he felt comfortable with, having never been much of a grudge bearer. They needed an air-clearing conversation, and they needed to have it alone. Besides which, he wanted to hold Jem close, not to expose her to the inevitable mockery of Cecily and the guys. Not to expose himself.
As if in tune with his thoughts Jem said, “There’s a great little place I know down in town.”
They walked, hand-in-hand, through the crowded streets and along the promenade, avoiding the beach’s minefield of windbreaks and sandcastles and games of Frisbee. “I try to come down here first thing in the morning,” Jem said. “Or when it’s beginning to get dark. Just me and the surfers.”
“You know them?”
“No.” She laughed. “Do you?”
“Some.”
“Do you surf?”
“Badly.” He laughed too. “So, no.”
“There’s something you do badly?”
“God, a million things.”
She was smiling at him, her beautiful, light-up-the-world smile. How quickly, he wondered, could you become enchanted by someone? Could it take just a meeting of eyes, the moment they spoke your thoughts? A kiss, an orgasm, an exhalation of their breath against your skin? How fast could you fall under their spell?
As fast as he was falling.
“Hello Gil.”
There, on the promenade, as if their lives were so closely aligned there were certain points every day when they would inevitably find themselves in the same space, was Henry.
“Hey,” Gil smiled, recalling the mood in which they had last spoken and unsure whether Henry would yet have recovered from it.
“Hey.” Henry was ambivalent.
Jem smiled brightly, pointedly. “Hey.”
“Sorry. This is Henry. Henry, this is Jem.”
“Hello,” Jem said demurely.
“Nice to meet you.”
Gil watched Henry’s appraising glance and felt a prickle of irritation. “So. How’s life?”
“It’s good.”
“Yeah? Mine too.”
“Clearly. Haven’t seen you around.”
He shrugged. Hesitated. “Sorry, if I was a bit out of order the other night.”
“No.” Henry looked at him askance. “It wasn’t you. Not just you.”
Fuck, Gil thought. The weight of what we’re not saying. “You up for a sesh at Patrick’s?”
“I was there last night. Life goes on you know, Gil, without you.”
Slightly stunned, Gil bit back a response. They were standing beside a grey Mercedes. Henry pressed a button on his key fob and the locks shot up. He opened the driver’s door. “See you around.”
Gil watched him pull away, disappear slowly through the crawling traffic. The smiley face stuck in the rear window watched him back. Jem said, “Am I reading too much into that or does he really not like you?”
“Yeah. I’ve become the kind of guy whose friends don’t like him.” He shook his head. “We had words. Something and nothing.”
She looked up at him, waiting for the explanation.
“Ah. Forget it.” He smiled, kissed her nose. “Where’s this great little place?”
For a small town, Cecily knew, this one could be very good at hanging on to its secrets. Sometimes a whisper of gossip bre
athed into the air at dawn, which anyone might reasonably expect to have infected a willing population by lunchtime, dissipated like sea mist. Sometimes she wondered whether people were too immersed in their businesses during the summer and exhausted during the winter to pay much attention to the petty dramas and scandals of their neighbours. Sometimes she had thought, thankfully, that they were all too dim or insular to care.
She wished that this time just one of those had been the case. She hadn’t wanted to know that Gil had been seen walking on the north beach with a girl called Gemma or Jenny, that he had looked happy and well. She hadn’t wanted that to be all the information available because no one quite knew who Jenny or Gemma was and Gil remained removed from her. She let Henry take her out to dinner – their third since she had succeeded in steering him away from anything involving the cove – and told herself repeatedly that Gil had never before abandoned friends for lovers, anymore than she was abandoning him for Henry. It didn’t mean she was never going to dance with him, or get drunk with him, or put the world to rights with him again. Except it had been almost a month now, which was unprecedented.
Henry was talking about Brisbane. She watched his mouth moving and let some of the words register in her head while she drank. He seemed to have been engaged in lengthy email conversations with his cousin, resulting in definite arrangements to fly out in October. She let her eyes glaze while he told her more than she had any interest in hearing about the watersports business and the standard of living in Australia and why Britain was financially, educationally and socially going down the toilet. She thought about where she would be in October, the prospect of a long and empty Cornish winter ahead of her without the most fleeting glimmer of hope or human warmth. Her head hurt and she closed her eyes for a moment.
“ … all right?” Henry’s pale blue eyes were fixed on her again, instead of on a new life on the other side of the world.
“I’m fine. Just tired and a bit pissed. My status quo,” she added wryly.
“I think,” he said, “you need a break.”
“I would agree with you, except you don’t ever get a break from what’s inside your own head.” Jesus, she thought, listen to yourself. Carry on like this and even Henry won’t want to know you anymore. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention to me. What did you have in mind?”
“A holiday, maybe? At the end of the season?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. South of France? Italy?”
Cecily smiled wistfully. “I love Italy.”
“So are we on?”
She looked at him across the table, across the remains of their meal and their wine glasses (hers empty, his half full), tea lights flickering in amber votives, and she thought, does he realise I’m with him by default? Am I prolonging false hope, agreeing to go away with him? But then he will be gone too, and I’ll be alone again, and where’s the harm. She felt that she could no longer tell wrong from right.
She heard herself say, “Why not?”
He paid their bill, which he always insisted on doing even though she felt she ate and drank far more than he did despite the size of him, and they wandered back through the dusky streets towards the square. He said after a while, “Did you ever see that film, Sliding Doors?”
She nodded. “Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah.”
“The story’s told in two time-frames – ”
“Yes.”
“– and in one she gets on a tube and in the other she doesn’t because the doors slide shut–”
“Yes.”
“ – and it’s about how you life can change in an instant, forever.”
“Yes! Jeez. I know the film. I understand the concept.”
He laughed at her impatience. “It’s sort of what’s happened with us, isn’t it.”
Shit. She heard herself, say, I love Italy, and, why not? and she thought, I’m regretting it already. She took a breath. “Henry … ”
“It’s what happens to us all, all the time, every decision we make.”
Okay. He was getting general. General was good. She wondered had he drunk more of the wine than she’d thought. “I guess,” she said. “We all have our roads not taken.”
“This time next year I could be living a life on another continent. It’s weird to think a choice which will make such a difference is just down to me.” He paused. “Like when you gave up dancing to come here.”
“London is a foreign country,” she admitted.
“How long ago was that?”
“Sixteen years.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Yeah.” I’m sure, she thought, we have had this conversation. “But like I said, dancing kind of gave me up.”
“So why Cornwall? Why here?”
She remembered another set of questions not so very long ago, questions about last summer and who she had been with, and her spine prickled. He couldn’t know, she thought in dismay. Had she said something, given herself away somehow? He couldn’t possibly know. She said, “Because it’s beautiful.”
“Oh sure. But it’s such a life change.”
“It was.”
“A really brave choice.”
“It wasn’t about being brave.” Enough, she thought. Enough already. “Do you think going to Brisbane is about being brave?”
“Oh definitely. Much easier to stay here and stagnate.”
She imagined him in ten years’ time on the brink of English middle-age, more ponderous and grumbling and larger still. Life on an antipodean beach might be the making of him. On her doorstep she kissed him goodnight and reminded him she was tired and a bit drunk and he was, as always and thankfully, a gentleman. She thought as she climbed into bed alone how persuasion and passion from one man could arouse and from another repel. She lay awake a little while, thinking of Gil and his mystery woman, of Henry and his questions. Was his intent as innocent as his tone had been? Was she, hyper-sensitive, reading too much into it? Henry didn’t do manipulation or artifice and how could he have the faintest inkling? No matter how things were between them, she would trust Gil to the ends of the earth.
She lay awake.
“Dad!” Jem pushed the back door shut behind her and called into the empty rooms. From somewhere above her she heard a bump, a clunk. “Dad?” She laid down her display board and her takings and went into the hall.
“Hello.” He was at the top of the stairs, the cupboard doors open wide, her mother’s trunk lying across the landing.
“Hey.” She smiled. “I guess we’re doing this now.”
They sat, mugs of tea beside them, Alex on the edge of the old-rose slipper chair, Jem cross-legged on the floor, the trunk before them, unopened. “It’s a kind of treasure, isn’t it?” she said.
“Kind of.” A key hung on a length of string from the handle and he turned it in the locks on either side. Neither of them made any move to lift the lid. There was a sobriety in his manner which she knew well, a constraint which she didn’t. She touched his knee.
“Are you okay with this?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Shouldn’t make such a big deal of it.”
“Then we won’t.” She opened the lid.
It might have been treasure, for the colours inside were as rich as jewels. Piles of soft fabrics in emerald velvet, scarlet satin, sapphire silk. Jem lifted them reverently out. “She used to scour the charity shops,” Alex said. “If the clothes were no good she’d keep the material. She was going to make cushions and bedspreads, sell them at the market, keep some of them for us. For you.”
“But she never did?”
“There was so much. She hoarded it all, boxes and cupboards full of the stuff. In the end I only kept the best.”
She had a dim recollection of the spare room inhabited by supermarket boxes, boxes which overflowed onto the landing, stood stacked in the hallway, boxes packed with other people’s cast-offs. As a child she had believed her home crammed with the clothes of the dead. “I thought i
t was weird.”
“It was weird.”
She was aware of his gaze on her as she reached deeper into the trunk, her hand closing on a series of small books tied together with raffia. Diaries, it transpired, from her mother’s teenage years to a year or two after Jem was born. “Can I read them?”
“If you want to.”
Jem slipped one from beneath its binding, flicked through the pages, weeks of blank sheets followed by screeds dark with tiny, slanted handwriting. “Were there any more?”
“None that I’ve ever found.” He took a suede patchwork bag from the trunk. “This is where she kept her jewellery.”
They spread the contents onto a square of scarlet satin, the tangled chains of necklaces, bracelets on over-stretched elastic, odd earrings. Jem trawled through them, sadness rolling inside her. “Did you give her any of these?”
“A couple of things. This … ” He separated a string of malachite beads from the chaos. “Again, most of it’s charity shop. We never had the money for good stuff.”
“What about her wedding ring?”
“It went with her.”
He hadn’t wanted to keep it. She couldn’t meet his eyes. After a moment she said, “I was twelve when she died but I might have been three or four, for all I remember. Why doesn’t any of this mean anything to me?”
He frowned. “You have memories of her, though?”
“Distant ones. I remember her music lessons, and watching her ride her bike down the lane. Fragments of memories like … I don’t know. Like a sense of her more than a solid reality.”
He was silent for a minute, rubbed his eyes. “You did spend more time with me.”
She lifted a trailing knot of chains into her lap, began to try to unpick them. After a long moment she said, “When was the last time we did this?”
“When you came home from uni. We opened the trunk, and we looked inside, and we talked a little, and then we put it all away again.” He paused. “You know we’ve only done this two or three times since she died.”
She nodded.
He said, “Until you were about fourteen you wouldn’t look at any of it, wouldn’t speak about her. I thought – I think – it’s how you’ve managed losing her.”