“I could.” He looks at me. “What I couldn’t do is kill someone.”
“You were crying.”
“I’m knackered and scared and I can’t honestly see a way out of this. Tell me crying is a strange reaction.” His eyes are still holding mine. “You have to trust me. We have to trust each other.”
I nod, dumbly. Once upon a time he’d have held me now. He doesn’t.
“Because, you know, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the car was there and it was empty. It didn’t get there all by itself.”
I think about this, but I’m tired. So tired. “If he was there and he was waiting and he followed us to Nice – we have to change trains twice today. I think that’s a good thing.”
“Yeah. So do I.” His face relaxes a little and he almost smiles. “Come on. Coffee. Food. It’ll help.”
“All right.”
I go with him to the buffet and watch him order breakfast. Even now he does a good job of being charming, sounding normal. I should be grateful for it. And I want to trust him. I do. But when the civilised masks have been ripped away and the madness behind them unleashed it’s hard to trust even the people you love.
I don’t trust myself anymore.
I just want it to be over.
Chapter Twenty-four
His instinct had been to get her away from the house, as though the horror had been not lodged in her mother’s instability and her father’s appalling accident but emanated yet from stone and slate and wood. The nearest café was shabby without being chic; he bought pastries and strong coffee and returning to their table found her looking so much better, so much less likely to be on the point of complete meltdown, that it seemed his instinct was proved right.
She was watching him, said anxiously, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We were having such a lovely time and I’ve ruined it –”
“Jem – ”
“‒ but not telling you was like lying to you, all the time, and I couldn’t –”
“Stop, now.”
“I’d understand, you know, if you wanted to run a mile.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She shut up. He watched her face, stroked her hand across the table. “Tell me what happened, with your mum.”
She took a breath. “Well of course no one knows exactly what happened. Like with Dad.” Her voice wavered briefly. “There was no note, there’d been no warning. Dad said that she hadn’t even seemed particularly low. She disappeared … and then they found her. And then there was this endless, terrible silence, which we had to learn to live with.” She paused. “I always thought I’d accepted her death but that he had a really hard time with it. Then the last time we talked about her, I realised we’d coped, or not coped, the same way. We both shut it out. It feels so heartless now, when I can’t think about Dad, or the way he died, or what he meant to me, without … ”
Crying. Which she was on the brink of doing. Gil held her hand. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You were a child when she died.”
She nodded. “And it was her choice, if you believe taking your own life is a choice. But Dad … it feels vicious. Like he was torn from the world. He was my hero, Gil. I don’t know how to live my life without him.”
He squeezed her hand. He was without words. For what did he know about coping with grief? She drank her coffee, picked at the pastry. He watched her slowly, determindedly, regaining some degree of composure. After a moment she began, “Have you … ?”
“What?”
“Told anyone? Your friends?”
“Only one, and only that you’re having a rough time.”
“Will you keep this between us?”
“Of course. It’s private, I get that.”
“Okay. Thank you.” She paused. “So here’s what I think I should do, today. I’m going to pick up my stall and get out there on the pier and sell my stuff like Dad was always nagging me to do. Afterwards I’ll go home and pack up the rest of his clothes and then I’ll meet you and we’ll do something nice.”
It was a close call, he thought, but her courage wrenched at him almost more than her tears.
Business slowed, as it always did, around six. Cecily closed the café at seven but before then most of her customers had returned to wash the beach from their skin and their swimsuits before dining at their hotels and guesthouses or eating out in town. At this hour she was always occupied with filling the dishwasher, clearing tables, separating food which would last until tomorrow from food which wouldn’t, emptying the dishwasher, feeding last minute customers, gradually winding down the cycle until the door had jangled for the last time and the café itself seemed to sigh with the silence. Today as she cling-filmed cakes and pies and dishes of salad she remembered that a couple of hours back she had seen Gil heading to his studio alone. She lifted the receiver from the wall and dialled. “Hi,” she said in response to his grunt. “Free food downstairs if you’re hungry.”
“Free stale food?”
“If you’re quick. It’s like the Harrod’s sale in here.”
“Five minutes.”
Half an hour later he appeared. Brooding again, she saw immediately. “Help your-self,” she gestured towards the various platters on the counter. He looked at them without interest.
“Got any scotch?”
“Sure.” She frowned, poured him some from her secret stash which she kept meaning to move as Justine was bound to discover and plunder it before long.
“Thanks.” Gil sat down on the stool beside the counter and knocked back a mouthful.
She tilted the last two inches of Sauvignon Blanc into a glass for herself. “How’re you?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Okay.” She regarded him with sympathy.
“What about you?” He looked at her beseechingly. “Tell me something funny or annoying or just fucking normal, for Christ’s sake.”
“Still not asking.”
He groaned. “Ah, Cecily. Come here.”
She went, and he hugged her, hard, for a long moment. She tried not, given his distress, to enjoy it too much.
“Thanks.” He swallowed some more scotch. “It’s just, I feel such an arsehole. Jem’s going through such horrors, she’s distraught and trying to be brave, and there was a minute today when I thought – shit, I don’t know if I can deal with this.”
“That’s not being an arsehole, that’s being human.”
“You think?”
“Oh Gil, no one’s strong all the time. Does she expect that of you?”
“No.”
“But you expect it of yourself.”
He put his head in his hands for a minute, then looked back up at her. “I expect as a grown man to be able to handle the shit life throws at us without wanting to do a runner. I know I can be all shallow charm when it suits but … ” He paused, said with difficulty, “I can generally see what is the right thing to say or do in a situation, and in times of need I can usually pull it out of the bag. I’m starting to wonder if that makes me a good person or if it just makes me a fucking opportunist.”
She said, “It isn’t opportunism. Even if it makes you feel better about yourself, and through helping her you get your lovely girlfriend back, that’s only the self-interest we all have in performing apparently unselfish acts.”
“Kind of a by-product.”
“Yes. Or a reward.”
He shook his head. “There’re no rewards here. Nothing’s ever going to make it all right. It’s about doing what has to be done and then living with it.”
“I understand about that,” she said.
“Yes, of course you do. I’m sorry. Bit blinkered at the moment.”
He looked so dispirited her heart went out to him. “Another hug?”
“Please.”
She did register the tinkle of the door chimes, in a part of her head which wasn’t focussed on Gil’s arms around her and the smell of his skin, so when Henry said, in tones of forced jocularity, “Not interrupt
ing anything, am I?” she wasn’t entirely surprised.
They moved apart. Gil said, “Hey, Henry.”
He looked, expectant, from one to the other. No explanation was forthcoming. Gil cleared his throat. “I need to get going. Thanks, Cecily.”
“Any time. Let me know, how things are.”
He nodded, his eyes more eloquent than his words. “I will.”
Henry cut himself a slice of pie from one of the platters and said, when Gil had gone, “What’s the matter with him?”
“Oh, he’s just really down at the moment.”
“Has he split up with whatsherface?”
“No.” She decided to open another bottle of wine.
“So what’s he thanking you for?”
“For listening,” she said crisply, “and giving him a hug when he needed one.” Don’t, she thought. Don’t take that tone and make me voice any of the thoughts churning through my head at the moment. Just don’t.
He said, “Right.”
She glanced at him but he was preoccupied with the pie and some of the bean salad. “Fancy a drink later?” he said. “Down at Patrick’s?”
“Yes all right.” Her heart sank a little. He will move to Brisbane, she thought, and he will join his cousin’s watersports business and find a bar he likes and recreate the life he has here and nothing will change. Except the accent. And the sunshine. If she had ever been tempted she knew at that moment and with absolute certainty that she would not be going with him.
Jem folded away the last of her father’s clothes and sat back on her heels. That’s it, she told him in her head. It’s done now. He didn’t reply. She pushed to her feet, padded through to the kitchen and made herself a mug of tea, which she took upstairs to her room. More than an hour until Gil would be here and she felt strangely empty. No great gulping sobs. No edge-of-hysteria rambling. Only drained and tired and a little bit calm. It has taken nearly four months, she thought. Four months and Gil, to get me to this point. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to talk to him rationally about something other than me. Maybe he’ll look at me with desire again instead of a mixture of pity and panic.
On her desk, beside the tubs of jewellery paraphernalia, sat the raffia-tied pile of books. She trailed her finger down their various spines. Her mother had recorded her thoughts in a range of formal five year diaries, flowery notepads and school exercise books. Jem took a deep breath. She knew they had been erratically kept, months of blank pages followed by tiny illegible scrawl. She knew that deciphering it would reveal to her things she would rather not know. She tugged one at random from the pile and opened it in the middle. The year was 1988. Jem had been four years old.
To her surprise there were entries in handwriting she remembered, her mother’s round cursive script from birthday cards and shopping lists, detailing here the progress of her pupils’ piano lessons, her pride in or exasperation with their efforts. Jem recalled the plinky plonky sounds from the living room, the children trooping in and out while she sat at the kitchen table with her school reading books and a tray of plastic beads. Later that year, Marianne had written of a trip to London, Easter holidays, the domestic events and trivia anyone might reasonably expect from their mother’s diary. She sounded by turns content, excited, bored. Jem raced on, speeding through the snowfields of empty pages in search of further instalments. I never had a grip of who she was, Jem thought, when she wasn’t at one of her extremes. I was too young and I didn’t know her well enough. Maybe these diaries, if she only read the rational extracts, might give her that, an insight into the woman her mother had been. She looked at the pile which now represented to her the truth. And the question, suddenly, was no longer how could she bear to read them, but how could she not?
For the first time since the beginning of the season they had arrived at the opportune moment and some of the wicker seating on the boardwalk outside Patrick’s was free. Cecily curled into one of the wide Colonial style chairs and threw her shawl over another while Henry queued in the growing tumult of the bar for their drinks. As usual he could glance around and see a dozen or more people he knew; a dozen or more people who knew him. Henry was tired of people who knew him, knew what he thought, what he wanted, which way he’d jump. Tired of being judged on the way he looked, and spoke. Tired of being judged on what he wasn’t. He flipped a beermat over while he waited. Over again. And again. It was time for a fresh start. Not that he imagined the Australians applied a policy of non-judgement to their immigrants but by then he would be three stone lighter, dynamic, positive and full of self-belief. He would be a different person.
For now, though, he was still inescapably himself. So when he sat down crushing Cecily’s shawl his first words were, “So what’s going on between Gil and the new woman, then?”
Cecily said, “I don’t know.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“I didn’t ask him.” She had that don’t-diss-Gil look in her eyes which drove him insane. When he’d come into the café to find them in each other’s arms he’d wanted to knock Gil to the floor. She added, “Much as I would love to know, it’s none of my business. It’s hard, isn’t it, when your friends start seeing someone and suddenly there’re whole areas of their life which’re off-limits.”
He chose not to say that it hadn’t looked as though there was much between them which was off-limits. “He still talks to you though.”
“Sure. We haven’t vanished from each other’s lives. But Henry, it works both ways. He doesn’t tell me private things about her, I don’t tell him about you.”
“But he knows me. There’s nothing to tell.”
“If there were, and it was something you didn’t want him to know, he wouldn’t hear it from me.” He could hear the deliberate patience in her voice. She thought he was being tiresome. Perhaps he was. He couldn’t help it. She said, “You promised you’d stop being jealous of him.”
He had. He had promised her that. She uncurled her legs to rest her bare feet on his thighs and he smiled. “I’m sorry. I let him get to me.”
“You were friends before we started seeing each other.”
“Well we were, but he always got under my skin.”
“Why?” She smiled too. He was massaging the ball of her right foot hard with his thumb, just the way she liked.
“Oh you know. The way he looks. The way he acts. The way he is with you, as if he owns you.”
“Nobody owns anybody, Henry.” She sipped her drink. “Nobody gives a massage like you do, either.”
He wished they could spend all their time together free of the impingements of other people, of Gil and Buz and Radar, of her customers and his watersports kids. If he could transport her with him to a hospitable desert island for the rest of their lives he wouldn’t want for much. They talked, of other things, the music and voices from the bar muffled behind them, the fairy lights strung around the wooden frame bright in the evening sky. In so many ways, he thought, this final summer had been the best he’d ever spent here and he could see its numbered days dwindling too quickly into autumn. The thought of anything spoiling them was more than he could bear.
It was the third or fourth time he’d waded back into Patrick’s for more drinks that he saw her. She was sitting at the bar, as Cecily did sometimes, chatting to Mark and Lucy as they filled glasses and returned change. Observing the crowd. As the man beside her moved steadily away, precariously balancing three drinks in the triangle of his hands, Henry jostled his left arm and half his chest into the small space left behind. “Eve Callaghan,” he greeted her.
She smiled. “Hello Henry.” She had yellow teeth.
He indicated her nearly empty glass. “What can I get you?”
“Oh, thank you. G and T.”
“Ice and a slice?”
She laughed. “Please. You having a good evening?”
“I am. Just sitting out on the boardwalk.”
“I know. With Cecily Ward. I spotted you earlier.”
There couldn??
?t be much, he thought, that she missed. There couldn’t be many people in this town whose names she didn’t know, with whose lives she wasn’t at least passingly familiar. He thought of the conversation they’d had in here a few days ago, of the interest in someone she’d pretended not to be taking. Of the way he had felt tonight and for weeks now. He said, “You were asking me the other day about Gil Hunt.”
“I was,” she agreed.
Henry smiled. “What would you like to know?”
Alex had taken down every painting from the north-facing wall of the gallery and stood surrounded by canvases old and new, kneading the muscles in his shoulders as they loosened for the first time in he didn’t know how long. Jem was away for three days on a school camping trip. Eve Callaghan had swooped into town and plucked Marianne from the house, bearing her away for the weekend to listen to the sorry details of Eve’s divorce proceedings. Alex felt some sympathy for Eve, but if she would insist on marrying a man who was quite clearly the biggest toe-rag this side of the Tamar valley, what could she expect? Marianne had been far more partisan, providing hours of patient listening, pots of tea and a succession of gin and tonics. Her excitement at the prospect of a girls’ weekend away had only been equalled by Alex’s relief and unspoken gratitude that she wanted to go. He knew Jem was safe, trusted Eve, and never got time off. He wasn’t sure he’d know how to conduct himself.
So here he was, somewhat predictably, playing to his heart’s content in his gallery. Later he might amble up to the inn on the square and sink a couple of pints. Steady on, he smiled. Living on the edge there. Was he too old, at thirty-eight, for wild behaviour? He didn’t know. He had barely had any practice. He frowned at the whitewashed stone in front of him, different arrangements of paintings appearing in his mind’s eye. Large seascapes tended to draw the tourists, great washes of endless ocean and empty skies. He wondered sometimes where they put these pictures when they took them home. Were they hung on the chimney breasts of narrow terraces? In the darkened halls of suburban semis? He couldn’t envisage his paintings being viewed in anything but the space and clarity of light in which he had painted them. Perhaps they were imbued with some of that space and clarity of light and took it with them into the terraces and semis. Perhaps they were hung to cover a stain on the wallpaper.