I Found You (18 page)

She rests the silk knot on Carl’s bedside table and concentrates instead on fixing the bloody phone. The piece of plastic appears to have snapped off from
somewhere – she can’t work out where – and the two sides of the phone refuse to click together without it. She holds it together with an elastic hairband and attempts to redial Carl’s mother, but there’s no connection. She has broken the phone. She lets it fall on to the bed and she groans. All the people who might try calling Carl – his mother, his sister, his office, Russ – have this number.

She showers, washes her hair and gets dressed. Then she picks up her mobile phone and texts Russ:
I have broken the house phone. This is my mobile phone. Please use this number if you need to speak to me. Thank you. Lily
.

Then she taps Carl’s mother’s number into her mobile and waits for the incessant ringing to begin again. But instead, within three rings there is a click and then a woman’s voice, uncertain and quiet, saying, ‘Hello?’

The time is six eighteen. The house is silent. Alice tries to go back to sleep but it’s impossible. She is too energised by the intense joy of waking with her hands entwined inside another person’s hands, the reassuring warmth of a body lying by her side: not the body of a small girl in loose-fitting pyjamas, not the bony parenthesis of an ageing greyhound, but a man’s body, contoured and solid, filling her bed from pillow to foot. The morning light catches the autumn tones of his hair, the glints of gold in his five-day stubble. He has a spray of reddish freckles across his chest, a soft covering of auburn chest hair, smooth arms, a deep dip down the centre of his back where there are more freckles. He smells of sea spray and her brand of fabric conditioner. He smells of them.

She thinks through the steps and stages that brought them together last night, the quiet walk back along the beach, the rawness of him after his revelation about thinking he might have killed someone. Alice’s own immediate and completely instinctive certainty that he was wrong, that those big, soft hands could never have hurt anyone and that she is not making a mistake letting him into her life. Her hand finding his, just to reassure herself, and the way he’d looked at her: surprised and touched and scared. But he’d squeezed her hand gently with his and then he’d brought it to his mouth and he’d kissed it. Not just kissed it, but inhaled it. He’d been shaking slightly, the way Griff sometimes did when a strange noise unnerved him. She’d drawn him towards her and he’d buried his face into her neck and tightened his arms around her waist and they’d rocked together for a while. It had not been too many steps between there and her bedroom.

‘You’ll have to go back to the shed,’ she’d said after, ‘I can’t have one of the kids walking in and seeing you here.’

‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘Of course.’ Then somehow he’d used this as an invitation to start all over again. She couldn’t remember falling asleep. She doesn’t know if anyone came in while they slept. She didn’t hear Kai coming home and suspects that he didn’t. Dawn is pink through her thin curtains and she can hear
the polite click of claws outside her room: Griff, waiting patiently for her to let him in. Sunday morning. She should wake Frank up, ask him to leave before Romaine gets up. But the soft warmth of his body is too tempting. She tiptoes from the bed and jams a chair underneath the door handle. Then she scurries back, the morning air cold against her naked skin, and throws herself back into her still-warm bed.

‘Hurry,’ she whispers into Frank’s ear. ‘You need to go.’

He rouses and grimaces and says, ‘Shit. Sure. Sorry. What time is it?’

‘It’s quickie o’clock,’ she says, pulling him on top of her and dragging the duvet over their conjoined bodies to hide them from unexpected visitors. ‘Be really, really quiet.’

He kisses her, morning breath and all, and she kisses him back, as though her life depended on it, as though it was the last kiss of her life.

By the time Romaine wakes up it’s quarter to seven and Frank is safely tucked away in the shed. Alice lies in her empty bed, sated and shell-shocked, Griff curled contentedly at her feet.

The atmosphere in the cottage that morning is hard to judge. Kai is hungover, Romaine is shattered, Jasmine is prickly and Frank is edgy. Alice, meanwhile, is full of sex; her whole body is wired with it. She’s showered
herself thoroughly but she knows she still smells of it. Her mind keeps replaying sections of the night before: his hazel eyes fixed on hers, his thumbs firm against her hip bones, gentle fingers pulling a loose hair from her wet lips, strong hands clamped against her skull pulling her face back to his, murmuring her name into her ear, the moon shining mercury-hot through the curtains.

The images are vivid and hot and pulsate through her as she stands at the hob, turning slivers of bacon and filling the kettle and drying her hands on the worn tea towel and throwing words at her children. She glances at Jasmine. Does she know? Did she hear? Can she feel it in the very air? Is she, as she’s been told so many times, a bad mother?

‘I’m going to walk up to that house,’ says Frank, bringing his used coffee cup to the sink and rinsing it.

‘The one on the cliff?’ she replies.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m pretty sure it’s derelict.’

‘I know. You said. But I think it’s vital. I really do.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

She sees Jasmine arch an eyebrow.

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I really want to.’ It emerges almost as a groan; she’s still so full of desire for him.

She ignores the poisonous energy radiating from Jasmine and grabs her bag and a coat. ‘We’ll only be
an hour,’ she says, not giving anyone a chance to say anything, not giving the dogs a chance to realise that there’s a potential walk on offer. ‘I’ll get some fresh bread on the way back. Bye.’

It’s almost ten but the morning still feels new; the metal railings are covered with dew, the moon is a fading, Vaselined smudge on the horizon. Alice wants to take Frank’s hand, but all her bluster and bravura of the night before has dissipated and she’s vulnerable and unsure and remembering why she hates this shit. They walk separately for a while, breathing in the new air, breathing it out again in clouds of vapour. She takes him the back route, away from the sea, up the cobbled alleyways and the winding lanes to the main road that leads out of town. They pass the Hope and Anchor, the oldest pub in town, a smuggler’s inn that’s been there since 1651. Frank stops.

‘I’ve been to this pub,’ he says.

She looks at him with concern.

‘I’ve been to this pub,’ he says again.

‘Right,’ she says, ‘in which case, we’ll come here for lunch. OK? They do a brilliant Sunday lunch. Yorkshire puddings the size of footballs. I’m not kidding.’

He looks at her blankly.

‘You don’t know what a Yorkshire pudding is, do you?’

He squints. ‘Is it something to do with toffee?’

‘God bless you.’ She laughs and the awkwardness shifts and he laughs and takes her hand and they walk like that all the way to the house on the cliff.

Frank feels nauseous: lack of sleep, too much red wine the night before, too much strong coffee this morning, and on top of all of that, the stomach-turning vertigo of remembering. All that steadies him is Alice’s hand inside his, her strong presence at his side as they climb the hill outside the town together. It appals him how much he needs this woman. Was he like this before? he wonders. Would the ‘him’ from before have had any interest in this slightly worn woman with bags under her eyes and a stomach that flops over her waistband? Maybe in his own life, the adult life he’d lived for twenty or so years before he washed up on Alice’s beach, maybe he was a player. Maybe he had a young girlfriend – maybe more than one young girlfriend? Maybe he only liked a certain type of woman? Maybe the ‘real’ him would laugh out loud at the thought of the ‘fugue’ him rolling about in bed with a forty-something mother of three?

Or maybe he was a virgin?

No, he thought, remembering the previous night, no, he most definitely had not been a virgin.

Where will all this end? He’s pretty sure he killed someone. And if he has, it’s bound to come out eventually. It’s inevitable. There’ll be a body, or a missing
person. There’ll be a witness. The police will come for him. Then there’ll be a wife, or a girlfriend, possibly a child, or even a dog. There’ll be a flat or a house with his things in it, a job with a desk with more of his things in it. There’ll be parents, siblings. There’ll be a court case. He’ll go to prison. And then what will happen to this sweet, vital thing between him and Alice? Where will it go?

He puts his arm round Alice’s waist, pulls her closer to him, rests his cheek against the crown of her head. She yields to him; their bodies blend; they walk in sync.

The house is not quite derelict. It’s dusty-looking; last year’s autumn leaves are mulched on the gravelled driveway, cobwebs glittering in the hedges that surround it. The pale stonework is patched green and streaked brown. But there are curtains in the windows, flowers in the beds. It looks like a house that has been absent-mindedly forgotten about, rather than deliberately abandoned.

Frank stands for a moment at the entrance. There is a rusting, studded chain draped across each side of the carriage driveway. He steps over one and his feet crunch against the gravel. Alice follows him.

‘What a pretty house,’ she says.

It is a pretty house. Symmetrical, with generous windows and good proportions, Coade stone
mouldings and Doric columns, a half-cartwheel fanlight above the front door.

Frank searches his psyche for the part of him that remembered living here when they were on the beach last night. He feels neural trails fizzing through his brain, pathways trying to re-form, flickering like lightbulbs with loose connections, then dying. Then coming back to life. Then dying again. He starts to feel cross, kicking at the gravel with the toe of his shoe.

‘You OK?’

‘I’m so sick of this,’ he says. ‘So fucking sick of it.’

‘Not remembering?’

‘Yes,’ he softens, ‘yes. Not remembering. I was so sure last night. And now . . .’

‘Come on.’ She tugs him gently by the arm. ‘Let’s go and look. You never know. The door might be unlocked. Maybe inside will open up some memories.’

He follows her down the driveway and then they are at the door. He plants his feet firmly on the stone steps, trying to root himself into the energy of the place, as though stone has memory, as though it might remember his feet. He clasps the large brass hexagonal knob that sits in the centre of the door. He holds it for a while. He closes his eyes. And then he sees it: dead lilies in a vase; a beautiful girl in a blood-red evening dress, fine blonde hair in a falling-down bun. She’s smiling at him, offering him her hand, pulling him through this door.

1993

Tony opened the door of the cottage and peered at the small crowd of drunken people standing outside.

‘Dad,’ said Gray, ‘I’m going to Mark’s aunt’s house. For a party. Kind of thing.’

‘Not a party,’ Mark interjected, sounding remarkably sober for someone who’d been drinking tequila shots for the last hour. ‘Just a gathering. Some friends.’

Tony gave Gray a look of utter confusion. He looked from Mark to Gray and then behind himself at Gray’s mum, who had just appeared.

‘What’s going on?’ said Mum.

‘Gray wants to go to a party. With Mark.’

‘Not a party, Mrs Ross. Just a gathering. Just us. These are old friends of mine from home. And my aunt will be there.’

Tony stared at Gray incredulously. Gray stared back at him steadfastly, his jaw set hard. He was going to this party if it killed him.

Then Izzy cut in with, ‘Does your daughter want to come too? It would be so nice to have another girl.’

Kirsty popped up then behind Mum and Dad and threw Gray a questioning look.

‘Ah, there she is,’ said Mark. ‘We’re whisking your brother off to a small gathering. At the house. And Izzy wants you to come, too.’

‘Er . . .’ Kirsty gestured at her pyjamas. ‘I don’t think so.’

But Gray could see her looking over his shoulder at the two glamorous girls in their high-street evening dresses and Mark’s equally handsome mate in his half-unbuttoned shirt and his Spanish tan. They made an impressive-looking group.

‘Come on,’ said Izzy. ‘It’ll be fun.’

Kirsty bit the soft part of her lip. ‘But it’s late,’ she said.

‘It’s only ten. Not even. Come on.’

‘I don’t know.’

Tony and Pam exchanged a look.

‘Please!’ said Izzy. ‘We’ll wait for you to get dressed. It’ll be fun.’

Tony looked at Gray sternly. Gray shrugged. If Kirsty wanted to come that was entirely up to her. He wasn’t about to persuade her. But neither was he going to dissuade her. He just wanted to go now, get to the house, have another drink, carry on the conversation he and Izzy had been having in the pub just now, the conversation during which she’d barely lost eye contact with him, had allowed their shoulders and their knees to touch on several occasions without attempting to reposition herself and had told him he was both ‘adorable’ and ‘fascinating’.

‘OK, then,’ said Kirsty.

Tony and Pam shot her a panicked look.

‘What?’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine.’ Then she turned back to the group. ‘Give me two minutes. Actually,
one
minute.’

‘We’ll get her home early,’ said Izzy.

‘And safely,’ said Mark.

‘Gray,’ said Dad, ‘I want you both back here by midnight.
Midnight
,’ he repeated.

Gray tutted. If Kirsty wasn’t coming they’d be more lenient. ‘Fine,’ he said.

‘And if you’re not I’ll be up at that house to humiliate you. OK?’

‘God,’ he muttered, ‘yes. OK.’

Kirsty appeared in a pink T-shirt, a hooded jacket and jeans, her hair combed to a shine and her mouth pink with gloss. ‘OK?’

Gray saw her exchange an awkward look with Mark. Then Mark looked at him and smiled.