“Well look at it. Clearly he wanted to keep it all.”
Gil was beginning to form a theory about that, which it was far too early to voice. Upstairs he glanced into a bathroom in which supermarket brand aftershave took up window-sill space alongside Sugar Crush body scrub. A pair of worn men’s slippers sat on the landing. He had understood last night that she was frozen in grief but seeing the physical evidence of it everywhere in the house was disturbing. His gut reaction was to flee.
She opened the door to her own room, luminous stars painted on a navy ceiling, fairy lights strung around the bedposts, the bed itself a nest of cushions and threadbare purple velvet. Transparent boxes on her desk were filled with necklace chains and cords, earring posts and wires, beads and semi-precious stones and various pieces of pewter and copper. He said, “It’s calm, in here. A kind of sanctuary.”
“It always has been.”
But a teenager’s sanctuary, he was thinking. She was mired here as much as any-where in the swamp of the past. “Let me show you,” she said, “the worst.” She stepped back out onto the landing, took the handle of the floor-to-ceiling cupboard doors. Inside each shelf was packed with boxes. At the bottom stood a large trunk, its key hanging from a length of string attached to the handle. “It’s their marriage,” she said. “Seventeen years of their life together crammed in a cupboard.”
Everyone, Gil told himself, had cupboards like this. Attics, cellars, spare rooms. This was no eerier than those. He shivered suddenly.
Jem looked at him. “Let’s have a drink.”
They sat at the kitchen table with mugs of tea. “Every time,” she told him, “I’ve gathered bin bags and recycling boxes and the moment I pick something up and try to make a decision about it I start to cry. Or I feel sick. It’s too much. Too … final.”
“But,” he reminded her gently, “you said you don’t want to live like this.”
“No.”
“So we need a battle plan.”
“We?”
“I’ll help. We can’t do it all at once and we need to do it alongside work and being together and all the normal things, so it doesn’t seem too overwhelming.” He added, “You might have to be a bit ruthless.”
“Gil. Why are you doing this for me?”
He hesitated. If there was ever a time to speak from the heart, it was now. He just hoped it would be enough. “Because I can’t bear to see you so upset and I wish I could turn back time for you, but I can’t. Because it’s all I can do.”
Her tears fell.
“Oh come here.” He shifted round the window seat to take her into his arms. “Your dad was an amazing guy and maybe we can find something to do in his honour. Something to … commemorate him.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Speaking off the top of his head again without thinking it through, but perhaps it was an inspired idea after all. He said, “I guess we’ll find out.”
Cecily, waiting to buy the glass of Southern Comfort she’d been promising herself all day, asked herself why it was she’d allowed habit victory over imagination. There were enough pubs and bars within walking distance of home that she could drink in a different one every night of the month, but during the summer months and whether she was meeting anyone here or not, she was drawn irresistibly to Patrick’s.
Back in the day, of course, and she had never admitted this out loud to anyone, she had come, indulging her inner Mrs Robinson, to look at Gil. She had thought him sexy and beautiful and when, to her astonishment one night after a great deal of alcohol-fuelled flirting, he had said he felt the same they had begun a relationship which had fluctuated between so casual it barely existed and as serious as it gets. Nine years down the line, he was her best friend. An unlikely consequence, perhaps, but she was grateful for it. And if she found him sexier and even more beautiful in his present maturity than he had been in youth and no one would or could ever replace him in her heart, well maybe that was how it was meant to be.
She bought her drink, knocked back half of it immediately, and ordered another. The barman – Lucy’s squeeze, Mark – laughed and said he would have to keep an eye on her tonight and as she was agreeing with him and glancing round for somewhere to sit, there he was. Gil. Alone in a corner with his saturnine face on. She picked up her glasses and wended her way towards him.
“Hello.” She perched on the only other stool at his table.
“Hi.” His smile was wry. He spotted her drinks. “Been that sort of day?”
“It has. For you too?”
He nodded.
“Do you want to talk?”
He sighed. “I can’t, really. It’s not my shit.”
“It’s hers? Your lovely lady’s?”
“Yeah.” He paused, settled for – “She’s going through a really horrible time.”
“And you’re doing your Gil thing and being there for her?”
“Isn’t that what everyone does?”
Cecily smiled. “No, it isn’t.” So where is she now? she wanted to ask. Have you abandoned her to her really horrible time to come to Patrick’s and get leathered? She decided she didn’t care. Time alone with him was a rarity these days. Questioning it and maybe annoying him wasn’t the way she wanted to spend it. She said, “Oh, I know what I was going to tell you.”
He smiled. “Go on.”
“Eve Callaghan accosted Henry in here yesterday, and under the guise of her saving the world gig, she was asking him about you.”
“About me? More about that kid I yanked out of the water?”
“No, in fact. It sounds as if she wanted Henry to spill the beans, but you know what he’s like. Garrulous and indiscreet are not his middle names.”
“What beans?”
“Any beans.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Jeez.”
“Maybe she fancies you.”
He laughed.
“Why not? It has been known.”
“Believe me. Eve Callaghan does not fancy me. Are we really using the word fancy here?”
“So why,” Cecily said, “would she be asking questions about you?”
“I dunno.” He drained his glass. “D’you want another?”
“Oh go on then.”
When he returned from the bar she said, “So what do you want me to tell old Eve? When she comes asking me The Truth About The Real Gil Hunt?”
He grinned. “We could invent something, couldn’t we? What could I have done that she’d really go for? Espionage? Murder? Grand larceny?”
“You could be leading a double life. We could lay a fake trail to make her think she’s unearthed some momentous crime. You could be Lord Lucan.”
“Yeah, how old would he be now?”
“Well you know. Something equally scandalous.”
They both considered. Gil said eventually, “We must have really boring lives.”
She laughed. “They’re the best kind, I sometimes think. Interesting tends to be synonymous with tragic.”
She wished she hadn’t said it, for he was plunged back into gloom. “It’s moving on from the tragedy though, isn’t it? That’s what defines who we are.”
“Yes,” she said soberly. “Like, not the hand you’re dealt but how you play it.” He nodded. She watched his face. “Are you all right? I know it’s not my business, but if you’re not … ”
“Thanks. I’m fine. Really. It’s just it’s sometimes harder to see someone you care about in pain than to deal with your own, isn’t it?”
“It’s always harder.” She frowned, feeling her way. “Do you think she won’t cope?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I’d like to say, sure she will. A week ago – yesterday - that’s what I’d have said. But now … ” He shook his head. “Ah, take no notice of me. I just kind of didn’t see this coming.”
It sounded to Cecily like a tangled mass of riddles and sadness and if it wasn’t hers to unravel, that didn’t stop her wanting Gil clear of it. “She’s lucky to h
ave you to help her through it,” she said. He smiled ruefully. Later, when they were saying goodnight, he hugged her hard. “If you need a break,” she said, “from being a tower of strength, you know where I am.”
“I do. Thank you.” He kissed her forehead. “It means a lot.”
She watched him go. Maybe, she told herself again and with a heavier heart, this is how it’s meant to be. Her mobile buzzed with a text. On my way, Henry said. With wine chocs & dvd xxx. She raised her eyes to the spot where a moment ago Gil had been standing and wondered who would’ve thought that one day and with such huge regret he would be her road not taken.
Jem began with the newspapers in the sitting-room and the unopened circulars. Off the floor and the bureau and into the black bin liner. Easy. After that she stopped. What else was there that didn’t matter? Her courage quailed a little. Anything relating to his work she had boxed up into storage when the gallery had been cleared; now only his sketches and a couple of sets of paints and pastels remained. Her father had always been very good at separating work and home once he had acquired the gallery and her mother, she recalled, had been delighted at the space this freed up and which she had immediately filled with her boxes of the dead. She cast around for something else to dispose of which wouldn’t cost her too much in the way of composure. When Gil arrived she wanted him to see that she had made a start, that his promise of support yesterday had inspired her with the confidence to begin.
She felt shell-shocked, by the release of her own emotions after having guarded them so carefully for so long, by his compassion which she had wanted so desperately and which changed everything. Because if he cared this much, he might be around for longer than she had dared hope and she had a responsibility to him: shackling him to her own distress wasn’t it. So she had suggested that she spend last night here alone, releasing him to a world where no one was crying or making demands of him or needing comfort. She was grieving but she wasn’t stupid. Why should he stay, when what had begun as summer passion had darkened and twisted into something depressing and exhausting? She could see quite clearly that she had suddenly become a very different proposition.
But he had offered to help without being asked. And if she could show him how much that meant, maybe he would be able to see the old spirited and amorous Jem in the new weepy and feeble one and he wouldn’t want to run screaming for the hills.
It was one thing though, reasoning this out in her head. The reality of decades of her parents’ belongings was quite another. She went into her father’s bedroom and opened the windows, sat on the bed and looked hopelessly at his wardrobe and chest of drawers. I can’t do it, she panicked. I can’t open them and take out his clothes.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Alex said. “Just bin the lot.”
She looked at him, standing by the window, the curtain shifting behind him in the breeze. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to have gone.”
“Well I have. I thought you needed a bit of encouragement.”
“You didn’t tell me you knew Gil.”
“How could I tell you that? You hadn’t met him yet.” He looked at her fondly. “You need to get a grip with all this, Puddle.”
“I know. I am.”
“These things … ” He gestured. “That cupboard out there. It all has to go. Take it to the tip. Incinerate it. You need to be free of it all.”
She nodded. “I know that too.”
He smiled.
The doorbell rang. Gil. She ran down the stairs to let him in.
“Hey.” He embraced her. “You okay?”
“I am, I think. Look.” She showed him the bin liner she’d filled. “I made a start.”
“You did.” He smiled. She took him up to Alex’s room. “I need to bite the bullet in here. And I was thinking about what you said, about just keeping the things he’d want me to keep.”
“Okay.” He helped her to systematically empty the wardrobe and drawers. If it was creeping him out, he didn’t show it. Silently she began to take from the growing piles of wool and denim a couple of shirts, a few jumpers. They talked, with paper-thin conviction, of other things.
“Oh he was hopeless!” she cried suddenly. Gil stopped emptying and looked at her. “He only ever wore the same dozen things. Everything else is like it was new. How can I bin it all? What do people usually do?”
“Well … I guess they take it to charity shops.”
The clothes of the dead. She stared at him, at the holey fishermen’s jumpers and corduroy trousers thin at the knees, at a pristine white dress shirt and black dinner jacket she’d never seen her father wear.
“Or not,” Gil said, watching her.
She swallowed. “I need some air.”
In the garden she took deep breaths, pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. I can’t do it. Can’t do it can’t do it. Gil, behind her, touched her shoulder. “Do you want me to go?”
She shook her head. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s my mum.”
He waited.
“She used to buy charity shop clothes by the ton and store them all in the house. She told us she was going to make things with the material but she never did. One day I came home from school and found her burying them out here. She said it was to free their souls.” She watched his frown of concern deepen into disbelief.
“Was she - ?”
She nodded. “Fragile.” The euphemism was unbearable.
“Always?”
“For – well, yes, forever really. I didn’t understand, when I was little, and there were times when she was fine and times when she hid it well and then there were times when it was just very frightening.” She shrugged. “We didn’t talk about it, me and Dad. It was as if it was too much for us to deal with. And time passed and … ” She stopped, gazing at the flower beds her father had, fourteen years ago, excavated again and again until they were no longer a burial ground.
Gil said, “What happened to her?”
She was quiet for a minute, gathering courage. She could see her father now, coming down the garden towards her in his old t-shirt and painty jeans, to sit with her and talk about barbecues and humanity. “I didn’t know, for such a long time. When she died I thought maybe she’d had something like cancer and they hadn’t told me, or there’d been an accident, and it was so terrible Dad couldn’t talk about it. It was like a door had suddenly closed, and it was just me and him, and everything was calm. But what happened, what actually happened, was that she walked into the sea.”
Chapter Twenty-three
We don’t dump the car, in the end. We return it to the Nice branch of the car hire company like we were normal people. They smile and thank us and give Gil his deposit back, like we were normal people. No sirens start whooping, no one rushes at us with guns. We step back out into the noise and traffic of a city we do not know, vulnerable without the carapace of the car to shield us. We’ve hardly spoken.
I follow him, since he seems somehow to know where he’s going, across roads and down long palm tree lined walks of hotels and shops. It’s warmer here, though it’s still early, the sky pale and clear, only a handful of tourists strolling in the sunshine. I’m desperately hungry but daren’t say so. Daren’t say anything. I want an alternative to trailing miserably at his heels but I can’t now imagine a world in which I have options.
After a while the signs for Nice Ville seem closer together and there it is, a huge grand pillared building with a curving roof, as if the French rail network were something to be proud of. I think of the Victorian stations at home and their squat modern concrete counterparts. Nothing at all to celebrate there. Gil heads towards the ticket office and I leave him to it, sit down on the edge of a bench. The station is busier than anywhere I’ve seen since we arrived in France, but we’ve mainly stuck to the countryside and the emptying holiday resorts. It feels lonelier here, lost in the rush and clamour of people who are at home, in the assaulting babble of a foreign language. I feel lonelier here.
Gil is
heading back to me, tucking his wallet into the inside pocket of his canvas jacket. “The train leaves at five to eleven,” he informs me. “We have to change twice, at Ventimiglia and Milan.”
Ventimiglia and Milan. The names should fill me with excitement. It should be a glamorous adventure, not a grubby and frightening flight from hell. Through hell. I have no idea what we’re going to do when we arrive in Venice, apart from search for the gallery of Livio De Marchi and even that has lost its appeal now. I want to crawl under the bench and sleep forever. He says, with barely concealed impatience, “Do you want to get some break-fast?”
I shrug and suddenly if he could hit me with impunity in front of all these people I think he would. He grabs my arm and jerks me to my feet, makes me walk fast with him to a quiet corner. I wilt against a pillar. “Now. You tell me,” he says furiously, “you tell me what the fuck you think happened back there.”
“At the petrol station?”
“No. In Disneyland. Yes, at the petrol station. Jesus!”
“I don’t know.” I rub my arm, which is sore from his grip. “You disappeared. I was scared something had happened to you. Then I saw the car with the smiley face and it was empty.”
“And you assumed I had – what?”
“I don’t know,” I repeat. “What did happen?”
He sighs. “I paid for the petrol. I saw the car. It was empty, like you found it. I took a look around. Nothing. Which was weird. I got back to the car and the rest you know.” He glares at me. “Why? What did you think?”
I swallow. He knows this anyway. He’s just bullying it out of me. “You said you wouldn’t be hunted down. You said you couldn’t answer for the consequences. I thought maybe you’d … maybe he’d … attacked you and … ”
“You thought I’d killed him.”
“No! Hurt him. Put him out of action.”
He laughes, disbelief tinged with hysteria. “Put him out of action?”
“You could do that.”