“Henry?” He was incredulous. “Is that what this is? That’s what we’re fighting about?”
She shrugged.
He said, “I don’t believe you. You were mad at me that first night. The very first night. I must have missed something really big here because we don’t get mad at each other.”
She paused and he saw the first chink in her rage. “We don’t see each other for months and suddenly you’re deliberately picking arguments like you want to push me away. Tell me what’s going on.”
She said bitterly, “It’s not actually about you.”
There was a long silence.
He said, “I can’t read your mind.”
“Right now, you wouldn’t want to.”
The voices of Lucy and Henry became audible as they strolled back up the beach. Gil was at a loss. “Fine,” he said quietly. “You know where I am if you want to move on from this.”
She turned away from him, gathering up the bags to carry them to the car.
Henry called, “Hey, let me give you a hand.” He took the load from her, ambled away with her towards the prom.
Gil closed his eyes, felt a slap on his left buttock. “Come on,” Lucy said at his shoulder. “Bar’s still open.”
Chapter Seven
We have travelled as though blinkered through changing landscapes, from windswept lowland to vineyard valleys, across ancient bridges over flowing rivers. It’s beautiful, I know that, in the small part of my mind which still registers such things, but all we see is the road ahead and the space we can continue to put between ourselves and retribution.
It’s grown dark along this last stretch, undergrowth encroaching, trees hanging low, miles from the main routes. The car bumps and rolls to a halt. There’s a silence. I say, after a moment, “Are we lost?”
“I think you have to be going somewhere to be lost.” Gil’s been driving for seven hours on the wrong side of the road in a county he doesn’t know and his nerves are shot. Even more than they were to begin with. He looks at the dashboard. “Shit. Need to fill up again.”
“What do garages look like in France?”
“Not a clue.” He opens the door and gets out. “Like they do in England? Is that too much to ask? Did you notice anything on the way?”
“No.” I’ve followed him but hang back.
“I think,” he rubs his eyes with his finger and thumb, “there’s a village a bit further on. I think I saw a signpost. What’s French for petrol?”
“Le pétrol? Le gasoline?”
He stares at me.
“I don’t know.” I walk away, can hear him ranting –
“I might’ve paid a little bit more attention in school if they’d told me one day I’d be on the run and the language might come in fucking useful!”
“There is a village.” I can see, through a gap in the bushes, a distant church steeple, lights. He peers over my shoulder.
“And there is a god.”
There is also a garage. He fills the tank, pays with some of the euros we exchanged back in Roscoff. “It’s l’essence,” he says. “Petrol. For future information.” He pauses. I’m leaning against the car and neither of us can bear to let the darkness inside it swallow us up again. “Listen, this place might be bigger than it seems. Let’s see if there’s somewhere we can eat, spend the night.” He reaches for my hand. “Come on.”
Beyond the garage the road opens onto a sloping cobbled square with a stone monument at its centre. On three sides closed-up shops occupy the ground floors of tall buildings, iron balconies jutting from upper storeys. In the centre of the fourth side is an archway wide enough to take a carriage and at the railings to which horses might once have been tethered bikes are chained. Youths loiter in a corner of parked cars, the glow of their cigarettes and lilt of their voices one of the few signs of life. The building outside which they are gathered bears the words L’Étable café-bar.
It’s dark and low-ceilinged inside, yellow-green lamps in the booths, bright gold above the long polished sweep of the bar. There are a few glances as we enter but the room doesn’t fall silent, no one glares or comments, as far as we can tell. We slide into the nearest booth, the high-backed settles allowing us privacy. Gil picks up the menu and his hands are shaking.
“It’s okay,” I whisper.
He looks at me as if it is anything but okay, glances out into the café. A huddle of old men stand at the bar, their clothing dark and loose, the rolling grunt of their conversation punctuated by the knock of glass against wood. An overweight man and a sulky looking woman sharing a table eat their meals in silence. A young couple blow in, as we did, from the square, greet the barman with a string of looping, indistinguishable chatter. It is all hopelessly foreign and bizarrely familiar, as if we have strayed onto a film set full of extras from Gallic Central Casting. But Gil doesn’t look as if he’s distracting himself with desperately whimsical observations. Gil looks as if anyone taps him on the shoulder he will punch them.
He returns his attention to the menu, scans the pages, shakes his head. After a moment he says, “I can’t read any of this.” He’s laughing but there’s more hysteria than humour in it. “I don’t know what any of it means.” His eyes glitter in the lamplight and he stands up – “Give me a minute” – and strides back out through the doors into the square.
My eyes are pricking too and I stare hard at the menu. In the jumble of words some seem familiar and I concentrate on translation because I don’t want to think about why he’s gone or where or whether he’ll come back. A waitress appears and I ask for une carafe du vin rouge because even I know what that means. Thankfully she leaves it with me and I pour myself a large glass, knock it back because oblivion feels like a good place to be. Planning, thinking rationally, belong to that other life now. All I can see is an inch or two into the dark.
Halfway down my second glass and my head already thumping, he appears, slides back behind the table. “They have a room for tonight.”
“How do you know?”
“The waitress remembers a few words of English.” He says it almost apologetically and I wonder what his part in the conversation was. Gil can look at you, touch you a certain way and if he wanted you to, you’d remember you were fluent in Swahili. “Sorry,” he adds. “I kind of lost it, for a minute.”
“I know.” I fill his glass. We order food, receive chicken with potatoes and onions which we chew and swallow as if it were tasteless, grimly finish the wine. When we leave the table my knees buckle and he grips my arm to steady me. We find the staircase at the rear of the café and stumble up onto the narrow landing. Gil unlocks one of the doors and I sway inside. There’s a sagging bedstead, a large mahogany wardrobe, an armchair. He draws aside a stained yellow curtain and finds in the recess behind it a toilet and a sink, a shower with a spider lurking in its cobweb above it. I lower myself too quickly onto the bed and it creaks beneath my sudden weight.
“I’ll have the chair,” Gil says. He takes one of the pillows from the bed, opens the wardrobe and finds below the clanking hangars a spare blanket.
“You can’t sleep in the chair.”
He almost smiles. “It looks as good a prospect as the bed.” He dumps the pillows and blanket on the floor and kneels before me, unlaces and removes my trainers, kneads the soles of my feet. “I’ll be okay.”
My spirits sink further still but I’m in no state to argue. We undress to our underwear and he tries to settle into the armchair. The mattress dips in unhelpful places and the sheets are cold. I close my eyes.
It seems a minute later. I wake in a great seizing rush of panic and roaring thirst. In my rucksack there’s water and I fall out of bed, unbuckle the flap and search for the bottle. Gil is asleep. I watch him while I drink, the line of his stubbled jaw, one arm loose from the blanket, his fingertips brushing the floor.
And something under the bed yanks at my foot.
I gasp, try to jerk away, but its grip is fast, and hard. As it holds me down i
t drags me under, so strong the carpet scrapes my knees, my thighs. I scream Gil’s name but he doesn’t stir. Its claws tear at my calves, my buttocks, and I kick, shrieking in terror, the room disappearing as it pulls me in to its lair of tensile limbs and dripping hair. It hauls me over onto my back, its weight and strength and the underside of the bedframe imprisoning me no matter how I wrestle, my arms flailing, fists falling short as wild-eyed and salivating it rakes lines of blood through my flesh, talons digging deep into my eyes, my throat.
I wake again.
I am wedged into the small space between the toilet and the sink, my knees and arms pressed tight together, my hands covering my ears, rocking.
“Jesus Christ.” Gil, horrified in the doorway. He comes to crouch on the floor in front of me, reaches for my hand. “What happened?”
“She came to get me.”
He stares at me. Lets out his breath. “It was a nightmare.”
I stare back. My heart is racing. He says, “There’s no one here. Only us. Come on. Come here.”
I uncurl myself, already stiff. He draws me out and up, his arm around my shoulders. “My God.” He holds my face in his hands, wipes away my tears.
“I was so scared she was here.”
He nods slowly, kisses my forehead, holds me for a moment. I can feel his breath against my hair, his warmth the length of me. When I lie down again he climbs in beside me.
Chapter Eight
Cecily ran barefoot up the iron staircase and knocked at Gil’s door. It was warm, she thought, waiting for him to answer. She had braced herself against the early morning chill but the sun was shining and the air was actually, properly, warm. She tipped back her head and gazed up into cloudless blue sky. Summer at last.
After a moment she realised there had been no response, not even an irritated grunt at having been woken. She rapped again, on the glass this time, her words of apology running through her head like a ticker-tape message. I’m sorry, she read … such a cow … don’t know what’s the matter with me … forgive me? This last delivered with a rueful smile and a kiss planted on his stubbled cheek. He would hug her and tell her to forget it, probably apologise too. They would go down to the café, grab some breakfast and pretend they didn’t both know that something was seriously up and she was choosing not to tell him what it was. The least she could do, she thought, was keep it safely locked inside. It wasn’t fair of her to throw her despair in his path like so much acid waste. None of this was remotely Gil’s fault.
Still nothing. “Gil!” she called. “You in there?” Maybe he had risen anatomically to her challenge and secured his first shag of the season. Lucy, she imagined, with her enviably long and slender limbs and flawless skin and wheat coloured hair. Not that they were a breed, Gil’s women. They were characterised by their differences rather than their similarities, as if he were trying out every possible variation. “Gil!” She gave him another minute, then skipped back down the steps and into the café, where Henry was helping himself to coffee.
“If you’re not going to put a shirt on,” she told him, “you might stay in the kitchen.”
“Oh, sorry. But there’s no one here.”
“Even so.” She glanced across the empty tables – still early yet – and back at him. He had spent last night on her sofa, which given the size of Henry and the size of the sofa was no mean feat. Now, bleary with lack of sleep and excess of drink, he leaned against the counter with one hand wrapped around a striped Cornishware mug, his belly lolling comfortably over the waistband of his shorts. His shoulders had bulk and heft, his smooth skin a carelessly gained golden tan. If she were to go to bed with him at some point in the very near future, was that going to be the answer? Would week after week of mind-blowing, no-strings sex blot out everything else? Would it even be mind-blowing with Henry? She thought of Gil, muscled yet lean, of the spread of dark hair across his chest, a line of it stretching the length of his taut stomach to his navel.
“Was Gil not in?” Henry asked and she wondered were her thoughts visible in bubbles above her head.
“No. Well, there was no answer. Unless he’s choosing not to speak to me.” The idea came to her suddenly and filled her with dismay.
“Nah, he’s not like that.” He looked at her. They had spent an hour or two last night skirting round the issue of why she and Gil had been snarling at each other on the sand. Henry hadn’t wanted to know any more than she had wanted to tell him but it had been in the air between them nonetheless. “Don’t let him get to you. We all fall out with Gil now and then, he’ll get over it.”
She smiled. “Do we? All fall out with him?”
“You bet. He can be a bit of a twat when he wants.”
She laughed. “Henry.”
“Sorry. Any message, if I see him?”
“No, just … I’ll catch him later.” She heard the tinkle of tubular bells, the voices of her first customers of the day. “Maybe much later.”
Gil lifted the applewood log, which he had driven halfway across Cornwall to buy, from the passenger seat where it had sat companionably beside him for the duration of their journey home, carried it up the staircase, into his studio, set it down with some ceremony on the workbench and examined it from as many angles as were available to him.
“Right,” he said to it eventually. “You tell me. What do you want to be?”
Eight or nine months of the year Gil toiled in his Bristol workshop building cabinets, tables, chairs and any other bespoke item of furniture customers could afford to commission. When he applied himself, it paid the bills. Very nicely sometimes, scarcely at others. But three or four months of the year he took to his seaview studio a hunk of wood which had been whispering to him all through the rain and the dark of the city and created something which made his heart sing. This year, the hunks having been either silent or unappealing, he had driven out to a supplier he’d heard of who specialised in reclaimed timber and wood from fallen trees, spent most of the morning waiting for a piece to choose him, and surveyed it now with excitement rolling like incoming waves. He loved beginnings, when everything was still possible, when the mystery of the shape inside the wood was still his to find.
The log looked back at him.
Sometimes it took a while.
Patrick’s was no less busy at lunchtime than it was at night; only the clientele differed. Most of the clientele. Gil said it was their responsibility to maintain some sense of continuity and bagged a table overlooking the pier while Henry – freshly surfed – paid for their drinks.
“Great day for it,” Gil commented, the heat of the sun burning his shoulders through the glass.
Henry shrugged. “Bit calm out there.”
Gil sipped his drink, trying to decide whether he wanted to voice the words in his head when Henry beat him to it.
“Cecily was looking for you this morning.”
“She was?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When?”
“Around eight. We thought you must’ve gone out.”
We? Gil managed to swallow his mouthful of beer without choking. We? “Yeah,” he said. “Took a drive out to that reclaimed timber yard near Redruth. Bought a log.”
“She asked me to give you a message.”
Gil waited.
“She said, she’ll catch you later.”
He laughed. “That’s it, that’s the message?”
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. ‘Fuck off, dickhead’?”
Henry said coolly, “Look, I don’t know what you two were arguing about last night – ”
“No,” Gil agreed. “You don’t. And you know what? Neither do I. But you don’t have to get all bristly on her behalf. Cecily’s quite capable of standing up for herself.”
Henry shook his head. “See, that’s where I think you’re wrong. I think she needs some support at the moment.”
And you’re the man to give it to her? Gil let his gaze travel to the pier beyond the open
French windows. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “I’ll drop by later. See how she is.”
The scrape of chairs, thunk of glasses. Radar and Buz, in from the beach. “Hey.” Gil smiled up at them, relieved. Their good natures combined with their heightened sense of the ridiculous meant acting morose and difficult in their company became laughably adolescent. Which was ironic, he thought. “How’s your day going?”
“Just took a turn for the better.” Radar grinned. “Big party going down Saturday night.”
“Oh yeah? Whose?”
“Windsurfing guy we know, Phil. Has this amazing place with his girlfriend down by the cove.”
“Everyone’s invited.” Buz smiled over the rim of his beer glass. “Bring a mate, bring a bottle. Well, two bottles.”
“But don’t bring the guitar?” Gil suggested.
Buz threw him a glare. “So where’s Lucy today? She working?”
Gil shrugged. “I guess.”
They looked at him, all three of them. He raised his hands. “Nothing happened. We had a drink, I walked her home.” Though he could hardly blame them for their scepticism. On her doorstep she had pulled him close and kissed him with intent, which had been very nice, but he’d felt no inclination whatsoever to take things any further. He didn’t understand it himself.
Radar said, with awe, “You’re getting old, man.”
Buz shook his head. “It’s that bust-up with Cecily. Isn’t it, Gil?”
Gil, who never remembered Buz was capable of perception until the next time he surprised him with it, opened his mouth to reply, realised he didn’t know which way to go with the response, and sighed. “Gonna go for a walk,” he said, standing up. “And then I have work to do. I’ll see you later.”
Jem was not the only stallholder on the pier. Three of the others were old friends: McDowell, the thin man with the grey ponytail who sold leather belts and purses, bags and wristbands, punching patterns into soft tan hide as he waited with apparent indifference for customers; Annika, her stall fluttering with designs of henna tattoos ranging from flamboyant to barely discernible – Jem had been mesmerised by them one summer and counted fourteen separate works of art lacing her own skin by the end of it; Pavao, the shy Croatian who painted tiny, detailed fantasy worlds and mythical creatures onto slabs of rock and pieces of drift-wood, worlds which had nothing to do with the surrounding sea and sand and everything, she had always thought, to do with Pavao’s inner landscape. There were new stalls too, she could see their owners and glimpses of their wares from her customary pitch halfway between the bar above the beach and the lighthouse. She wondered would Annika mind her stall for a little while when it grew quiet so she could check them out. For now, the sun had brought the crowds. Typical that as soon as she’d let Alex bully her into trundling up here again, the day had dawned as close to perfect as she had known it yet this year. “Do you control the weather now?” she’d asked him as she left.