If any of it were true.
The gallery and workshop had been cleared shortly after Alex had died, his paintings now stored away somewhere – as carefully, Gil hoped, as he would have done so himself – and his acrylics and watercolours and pastels boxed up in the house. She couldn’t bear, Jem had told him, to walk in here and see everything as he had left it. She could hardly bear, those first few weeks, even to walk past. So the walls and the racks and the cupboards were empty and anything they might have revealed long gone. Gil checked the windows and back door on auto, his mind whirring on illicit affairs and how you would conceal one when you were well-known in a town as small as this. It occurred to him that if it had taken place when Marianne died, it had started at least fourteen years ago, and how did they know when it had ended, other than four months ago at the foot of Tintagel?
He stopped. Ahead of him, in a whitewashed tongue and grooved corner of the workshop in which he was now standing, was a door. It was also whitewashed tongue and groove and thus camouflaged in the general run of appallingly badly constructed panelling. Unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t notice. He had noticed, as he would, and Jem had said it led to the upstairs room her father had always said he was going to rent out and then never did. At the time Gil had been too preoccupied with wanting to take her to bed to pay much attention, but now his curiosity was piqued. He lifted the latch. The door swung open. Behind it a wooden staircase rose up into the light. He smiled faintly, thinking of stairways to heaven, and took the dozen steps to the top.
The room reminded him of his own, except the windows here were in the pitch of the roof with a view of nothing but sky. Against one wall was a brass bedstead with a striped mattress, opposite it an apothecary’s chest like the one down in the workshop, but this was neither scuffed nor paint-stained. A faded blue and cream rug covered most of the floor. It was a nice room. A bit small, maybe, for renting out, but nice. He gazed at the apothecary’s chest. Walked towards it and pulled out a drawer. It was as empty as everything else today. He realised he had been holding his breath and laughed.
What were you expecting, exactly?
Another drawer held a grey t-shirt, probably Alex’s. In another a couple of paper-backs: The Thorn Birds; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Further down, a black frilly g-string. All right, he told himself. You need to stop this now.
Except beneath the g-string was a sheet of paper. Several sheets of paper. He frowned. Hesitated. Lifted them out. Several sheets of thick white drawing paper, a dozen or so pencil sketches of the same woman. Gil raised an eyebrow, for in some she lay naked on a bed, in others half-naked sitting on a stool, a chair, the observed curves and lines of her body as beautiful and as true as though she were there beside him.
As she had been beside him.
His mouth dried. “Oh God.” His temperature soared and plummeted as he sifted through them. Alex had primarily been a landscape artist but Gil had seen from the drawings of Jem at the house that he could capture a likeness precisely.
As he had captured this one.
He spread the sketches across the top of the chest, his hand shaking. Fourteen years ago. Fourteen years ago she had lost her baby, whose father had been the love of her life. This summer she was angry, restless. She had seen Jem in Patrick’s last night and disappeared. He shook his head to dispel this madness. For surely it was madness. It couldn’t possibly be real. But the drawings, the specific shape of her hands, her lips, the uptilt of her breasts, the long sweep of her waist into her hips, where his own body had lain.
“Gil.”
He spun towards her voice as she stepped into the room. She was pale, this woman he had loved since he was nineteen years old and suddenly barely recognised. “Where have you been?” he cried.
“The cove.”
Of course, the cove. It should have been his first thought.
Cceily came towards him, saw the sketches laid out over the chest. “Oh God.” She touched them, shifting them about a little. “Oh my God.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice sounded thick, even to his own ears.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know you were seeing Alex’s daughter. I thought it was someone here for the summer. I thought she was called Jenny or Gemma. I didn’t make the connection.”
“Until last night.”
“Mm.”
He walked away from her to sit on the bed.
“Can I tell you about him? Do you want to hear it?”
He looked at her, furious, reeling. “Yeah. You tell me.”
There was a silence. “I was twenty-seven,” she said after a moment. “I’d just finished a long stint on tour and I was here on holiday. One day I walked into the gallery and it was … elemental. He was so attractive but also … something in him spoke to me. I just knew. We both knew. And we both resisted, for a long time. I went back to work. Nothing happened. And then … he called me.” She paused, remembering. “He came to London. It was October, dark, rainy. We went for a drink in a pub off Covent Garden. He told me all about Marianne – you know about Marianne?”
Gil nodded. “I know.”
“And Jem. He called her Puddle.”
“I know that too.”
“And it didn’t matter. I had to be with him. I came down to Cornwall and bought the café and we – well, we were very careful. This was our room.” She gazed round and he could see her imagining it as it had been then, maybe imagining Alex sitting where he was now. “It wasn’t easy. Most of the time he was wracked with guilt. Marianne was … she’d go missing for days and he’d be mad with worry, she’d lash out at him, at Jem, and then she’d be calm again. She hurt herself. She did bizarre things. His life with her was a nightmare. He needed me.” She held his gaze. “Gil, I wanted to give him everything she couldn’t. I loved him so much. I wanted to make him happy.”
“Yeah. I see that.”
“But you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m … Jesus, Cecily. I can’t believe it.”
She came to sit beside him, crossing her legs beneath her on the mattress. “I can’t believe you’re with Jem.”
“I don’t know, maybe it was inevitable. I’d kind of worked my way through everyone else.” He glanced at her. “So what happened?”
“Sam happened. Alex was thrilled and distraught. We were happy, for a little while. And then Marianne found out, and she drowned herself. Can you imagine what that was like for him? What it must have been like for her?” She was stricken, even now, but he could only imagine what it must have been like for Cecily, and was appalled. She said, “We thought maybe we could salvage something from it all, atone somehow by becoming a family. But then … ” She swallowed. Gil watched her eyes slowly redden, her tears spill. “Then Sam died and I thought it was judgement on me. It tore us apart. We could barely look at each other in the end. I didn’t think I would ever get over it. It was a long, long time before I felt I deserved to have things again. Alex and I, we hardly spoke after we split up. There was so much lost between us. And now he’s dead too.”
He massaged her palm, trying to get his head round all of this, to feel something other than the tight ball of pain inside him.
She said, “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. It’s as though his death has cut me loose from this place but it’s fourteen years since we were together, Gil. And since then … Since him … ” She stopped. He gazed at her and the air between them became tense as a wire.
He said softly, “I knew.”
She stared at him.
“I knew there’d been someone. Some amazing guy, your true love. When you first told me about Sam, I realised that was who he was. And it was like he was away fighting a war or climbing a mountain or something. Something heroic. And I was your affair. The kid you were dallying with.”
She shook her head. “That’s not how it was. After Alex, I thought I’d never love any-one again. But five years went by, and I immersed myself in the café, and gr
adually it all began to hurt less. And then one summer night I was in Patrick’s and I looked across the bar and there you were. And yes, you were a kid, but … ”
“But it didn’t matter.”
She swallowed. She was crying; so was he.
He said, “You were the real thing for me.”
“Gil – ”
“You still are.”
“Don’t.” She touched his cheek. He caught her hand.
“You don’t feel the same?”
“I do. You know I do.”
He kissed her, drawing her closer until she was in his lap, holding back her hair, his other hand travelling up her thigh. He kissed her throat.
She broke away. “Gil, we can’t.”
“Christ.” How could he be governed by such desire and filled with such guilt? She said she didn’t want history repeating itself . Jesus! He got up, cried out in frustration. “What are we going to do?”
A thought struck her. “Does she know?”
“That Alex was having an affair, that’s all. Eve told her.” He gestured his despair.
“Eve didn’t know. She must have heard it from Marianne. We were especially careful because Eve had a massive crush on Alex when she was a teenager. Her antennae would’ve picked me up at a hundred miles if we’d let her.” She paused. “Is she devastated?”
“Just about.” He gazed at her, his chest rising and falling. “I can’t let her down.”
Cecily nodded. “I know.”
“I can’t lose you.” His voice cracked.
“I think you might have to.”
“No.” He came back to her, gathered her to him. “No, no.”
“We could carry on just being friends.”
He groaned. “Even when we were sleeping with other people, we were never just friends.” He could feel her crying against him and drew back to wipe away her tears. “Don’t. I’ll think of something.”
“Gil. There isn’t anything.”
“There has to be.”
Jem had run up from town and along the lane so fast her breathing was ragged in her chest. She flung into the house, dropping her bag, kicking off her shoes. “Jemima?” Her mother’s voice, lilting from upstairs as if from another dimension. “Is that you?”
By the time the stitch in her side had gone, Marianne was in the kitchen with her. “Oh my goodness. What’s happened to you?”
Jem shook her head fiercely. Marianne placed her finger beneath her daughter’s chin and lifted it, scrutinising her face. “You’ve run home.”
Jem nodded.
“Were you running away from someone?”
She shook her head again.
“Were you frightened?”
“No,” she muttered.
Her mother frowned. “All right then. Glass of milk? Biscuit?”
Jem slid onto a chair at the table, watching her as she drifted soothingly around the kitchen, fetching milk and shortbread, making tea for herself. It was almost winter and dark already outside. There were no lampposts in the lane and any other evening that alone would have had her running towards home. When she was little she’d thought that at night all the animals that had been run over and killed there lifted their grisly corpses from the tarmac to limp mangled and threatening through the dark.
Marianne put the glass down in front of her. “There you go.”
“Thank you.” She sipped some milk. Nibbled a corner of biscuit. After a few minutes she unbuttoned her coat and shrugged her arms out of the sleeves. Marianne switched on the radio, leaving the volume low, as she liked it, so the background babble of voices and music took the edge off the silence whilst barely impinging on their consciousness. The terrible thing Jem had seen without fully knowing what it was began to blur and fragment like a dream on waking. Only the feeling remained, the feeling which hardly made any sense but had been as real and shocking as a physical blow. She felt it in her chest, half expected there would be a bruise.
Marianne said, “Have you got any homework?”
“French vocab.”
“Do you want to do it now, before we eat? I could help you.” She smiled. “ I was quite good at French.”
Jem slipped down from the chair, fetched her bag, dragging it across the floor and heaving it up onto the table. Marianne was making onion soup, the smell and the sound of the wooden spoon against the pan reassuringly familiar. Jem opened her exercise book at the words she had copied down from the board. She let them dance in front of her eyes for a while.
“Right,” Marianne said. “I’ll read them to you and you write them down.” She took away the exercise book. Jem found a pen and a scrap of paper. “La maison,” Marianne said. “Write down what it means as well.”
Jem wrote, la maison – house.
“Le jardin.”
Le jardin – garden.
“Le chat.”
Le chat – cat.
“This is so boring. Why do we have to learn French?”
“So you can speak to French people. You might go to France when you’re grown up, Jem. How would you feel if you couldn’t communicate with anyone?”
She didn’t know how she would feel. She couldn’t imagine it. Marianne continued to recite the words but her concentration had skidded away from her. She said suddenly, “Are we still going to let people stay in that room when they’re on holiday?”
Marianne was puzzled. “Which room?”
“The one on top of the gallery.”
“Oh, that. Possibly. In the summer. Why?”
“There was somebody looking at it today.” She shouldn’t be saying this. She knew she shouldn’t be saying it. Her skin was beginning to burn.
“When were you at the gallery today?”
“On my way home. I mean, not on my way, but – ”
“Was Dad there?”
“Yes,” she said faintly.
“So who was looking at the room?”
“A lady.”
“Oh, not anyone we know, then?”
Jem shook her head. Marianne had given up with the French vocabulary and returned to the soup. Jem saw, in her head, her father’s workshop, a large painting on the easel half obscuring her view. She’d been looking at the painting when she’d heard her father say, “Puddle! How lovely! I wasn’t expecting to see you.” His voice had sounded oddly loud and he was coming towards her from the door which led up to the attic room. The lady followed a moment later. She was pretty, Jem had thought. Smiling. And it was then that she’d seen something so quick she wasn’t sure she’d seen it at all. Maybe the lady had looked at her dad, maybe he’d looked at her. Had she touched him? Had he said some-thing? She just knew, beyond all reason, that there was something out of kilter, something she didn’t understand yet was seriously wrong.
Marianne said, “Strange though, looking at the room at this time of year.”
Jem said nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The sun cannot reach into these chill and shadowed alleys so when I unclench my fingers above a narrow green gully no light dances on the surface or dazzles off the blade. The bloodied knife drops silently into the water and I hurry away.
What I think is going to happen now is that I will return to the gallery, where Gil will still be immersed in the sculptures. I will suggest we go to a bar, where we will sit for hours while he talks endlessly about the genius of Livio de Marchi and I drink until I can no longer think, or see, or remember.
What actually happens is that I return to the gallery and Gil is hanging out of the door, his face creased with worry. “Where the hell’ve you been?”
I frame a reply – just for a walk – but my mouth won’t work and I realise what is obvious to him: I’m shaking and crying so hard I cannot speak.
“Jesus, what now?” He moves me aside, into a recess between Livio de Marchi’s building and the next. “What happened?” I shake my head. I can’t tell him. Can’t tell him. He looks at me as I gulp and hiccup and wipe my face with the heels of my hand
s. “What?”
I draw in a long, shuddering breath. “Henry.”
“He’s here?”
I shake my head, weeping again. “I killed him.”
Gil’s face is slack with disbelief. “You killed him.”
I nod, miserably.
“How?”
“With a knife.”
“What knife? You have a knife?”
“I threw it in the canal.”
“Jesus Christ. Show me.” Her grabs my arm again. “Come on.”
“But I don’t know … ”
“Yes you do.”
I stumble beside him as he strides along the street and I remember the point at which I’d stepped into the maze of alleys and lanes behind the buildings. “Down here.” My voice rasps. He looks at me. The passage isn’t wide enough for us to enter together.
“Go on,” he says. I step ahead of him, edging between the stone walls, past the bins and beneath the same lines of damp, limp washing. He is silent but I can feel him at my back, rigid with tension. A cat darts in front of me. I swallow. The last time I did this – five minutes ago? ten minutes ago? – is imprinted upon the present as if time has doubled back on itself. I half expect to glance down the next alleyway and see him standing there in his yellow polo shirt, holding his phone, peering out into the street.
At the thought of what I will see down the next alleyway the world tilts around me and I put my hand to a wall to steady myself, nausea rising again in my throat. Gil waits. “I can’t,” I whisper. He frowns. Looks into the entrance of the alley. “Down there?”