In Too Deep (32 page)

Then, as she sits back in her chair, the sleeve of her cotton jacket rises up, exposing her watch.

My
watch.

‘I hate to see you so unhappy,’ Mum says. She’s standing at the end of the bed holding a tray.

‘You’re a fine example,’ I reply, not meaning to sound so cruel. I turn my head so she doesn’t notice my red eyes. I try to stop shaking, but I can’t.

‘I asked the chef to make you this.’ She puts the tray down on the bedside table. The tang of tomato soup hits my nostrils, making me feel even more nauseous. ‘Are you cold?’

It’s not just tomato soup I smell. Between them, Mum and the dish are doing a great impression of a Bloody Mary.

‘Yes, this bug’s getting worse,’ I say, trying to sound normal. I huddle my shoulders up to my ears.

Mum puts her hand on my forehead and frowns. Then, as she’s always done, she leans forward, placing her lips there instead. ‘It’s the only way to tell without a thermometer.’ She frowns. ‘I think you have a fever. What’s hurting the most?’

‘My stomach,’ I say, thinking,
My heart
.

‘I should call a doctor,’ she says, covering the soup bowl with a side plate. Then she flips through the hotel information booklet, finding a number.

‘No need, Mum. It’s just a tummy upset.’

‘You might have appendicitis or a blockage or . . .’ Mum tries to think of some other reason why my stomach could be in knots. ‘Shall I have a feel?’ she asks.

When I was little, it was often enough comfort to have Mum lay her hands on me in various ways. ‘That feels very serious,’ I remember her telling me in a silly voice, grinning, when I took a harmless tumble off the slide aged seven. The warmth of her hands was enough to soothe my grazed skin, a chewy sweet enough to take away the pain.

Over the years, she played nurse, sang her silly songs, diagnosing everything from water on the brain when I had a headache, to a rare tropical disease when I was hopping about with a stubbed toe. All were usually cured with Mum’s hugs, a hot drink, some junk food, and occasionally a paracetamol.

But she wasn’t able to mend Jacob, and I doubt she’s any good at healing broken hearts.

‘That boy,’ I blurt out, not meaning to. It’s as though it’s not even me speaking.

Mum puts down the booklet. ‘Go on.’ She helps me sit up, plumping up my pillows. Then she places the tray on my lap.

‘He was really nice.’ I clamp my teeth together to stop the tears.

‘The one from university?’

I nod.

‘Did you love him?’

I pick at a thread on my pyjama sleeve, imagining my life unravelling.

It takes a while for the second little nod to come.

‘
Do
you love him?’

I cover my face with my hands, desperate to hold back the tears. I can’t even stand to be inside my own skin when the third nod comes.

‘Oh love,’ she says kindly, laying her hands on my arms. ‘I just hope he was gentle with you when he broke up.’

Mum’s voice is filled with relief. She thinks she’s got to the bottom of my low mood, understands entirely why I’ve been living my life on a knife-edge since last November – that it’s not just because Dad went missing, but because I’m lovesick. Her relief is palpable.

‘He didn’t end it,’ I say, uncovering my face. ‘I did.’

Mum frowns. She doesn’t understand. Isn’t even close.

‘I’m sure you must have had good reason. You need to trust your instincts, go with your gut.’ She looks pensive, as if passing on some great secret that she never quite mastered herself.

‘Yeah, that’s what I did,’ I reply. My eyes sting.

What she doesn’t know is that me ending things with Tom was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, yet staying with him was impossible, too. These last few months, I’ve been drowning, frozen. Not least because
I’ve been waiting for the police to pay me a visit – listening out for the sound of a siren, a knock at the door, a pair of metal cuffs slipping round my wrists.

Many times I’ve thought of turning myself in. Many times I’ve thought of ending it all. Either way, I’m a coward, doing nothing, forcing Mum to live in agony.

If I told her the truth, would she still bring me soup?

‘There’ll be many boys come and go before you find the right one,’ she says.

No one will want someone like me.

‘Dad and I were on–off for a bit before we finally got together. Maybe you and . . . What’s the boy’s name?’ she asks.

I swallow it down. ‘David,’ I say quietly.

‘Maybe you and David will get back together. Sometimes a break is all it takes. Anyway, you’re still so young. There must be hundreds of lads wanting to take a gorgeous girl like you out and—’

‘Mum, don’t,’ I say, shrugging away as she strokes my hair. I hate that she thinks she knows the truth.

She freezes, looking hurt and bemused, making me want to smash everything in this perfect room. In this beautiful hotel. In this idyllic location.

The faultless lives it contains.

Lives that aren’t ours. Aren’t mine or Mum’s. Lives that go on as we sleep.

Oblivious.

‘I’m not going back to university.’

Mum recoils. It’s a punch in the face.

‘No. Oh
no
, love, you mustn’t overreact just because of a boy.’

Her expression tells me she thinks that I’ll come round, that my broken heart will soon heal, that I’ll pick myself up.

I put the tray back on the bedside table. Then I slide down under the duvet and turn on to my side, pulling the covers up over my face. I close my eyes, forcing myself to focus on oblivion. The place where none of this exists. The place where
I
don’t exist.

It’s ages before Mum gets up off the bed and slips quietly out of the room.

Susan is a good hostess, gliding between groups of guests who are having pre-dinner drinks, laughing in all the right places, nursing only a glass of sparkling water. Her head tilts back from time to time, an infectious smile exposing her super-white teeth, her neck elongated and elegant.

I’ve been watching her from where I sit at the darker end of the bar, quietly working my way through a double gin and tonic as she does her job, making sure her guests are happy, that they’ll come back time and time again.

And she touches people – not just with a hand placed warmly on elbows and arms, or lightly round a waist – but she touches their hearts. It’s what I’ve noticed most about her. An inner warmth radiating out. Something I’ve lost since Rick went.

One by one, the groups and couples drift off to eat, leaving their aperitif glasses littered on the bar, on tables, the sound of their chatter hanging in the air. A waitress busies about with a tray in the crook of her arm.

Susan notices me then, lurking in the shadows. She comes up to me, sitting down on a stool to my left. She gives a big sigh, as if she’s only just realised she’s exhausted.

‘Are you eating?’ she asks.

‘Hannah’s not well,’ I say. ‘I’ll just get room service.’ I turn my glass between my hands, staring at the semicircle of lemon.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing your watch earlier,’ I say suddenly, pointing at her wrist. My heart thumps. I hate confrontation, but I want it back. It was a gift from Rick.

Susan smiles. ‘It’s cute, isn’t it?’

She asks the barman for more water.

I try to control my breathing. I’m making too much of this. It was probably handed into the hotel’s lost property, and then Susan took a shine to it, deciding to keep it for herself when no one claimed it.

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘God, now you’re asking,’ she says, thinking. ‘I’ve had it ages. It might have been a Christmas gift, or a birthday present.’ She flashes it at me.

I don’t believe her.

‘The thing is, I have one just the same. And I lost it in the pool changing rooms a couple of days ago.’

‘Oh, that’s such a shame,’ she says. ‘Did you check with housekeeping?’

I give a vague nod, hoping to catch sight of the watch again. Mine had a tiny scratch on the glass front, about
one o’clock, but Susan doesn’t keep her arm still long enough for me to get a close look.

‘I asked one of the cleaning staff. She said she’d keep an eye open for it.’

‘Hopefully it will turn up. We’ve never had anyone with light fingers around here.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ I say, feeling confused and deflated. I take a big sip of my drink.

Susan suddenly smiles, standing up, greeting a late guest with a kiss on each cheek. It’s as if she’s switched to a different persona – one character for her guests, another one reserved especially for me.

‘Do you know the estate agency Watkins & Lowe?’ I ask when she sits down again.

Susan looks at me a beat too long. ‘Yes, I do,’ she replies. ‘Why?’

It means admitting I was in the office, but she already knows that.

‘I work for them. I couldn’t help noticing our letterhead in your office.’

Susan glances around the bar, perhaps hoping for a distraction.

‘I didn’t actually know that,’ she says, as if she knows other things about me. As if she’s been collecting snippets of my life.

‘Are you interested in a property?’ I ask, horrified at how pushy I sound, wishing I’d got through to Steph so she could check. Adrian’s signature at the bottom of the letter makes me uncomfortable. After everything that’s
happened, there’s no way I trust him, though I realise it could just have been a marketing circular. We send them out in batches regularly.

‘I tell you what,’ Susan says, ignoring my question. ‘Let’s do something crazy.’

‘Crazy?’

‘Come with me,’ she says, getting up and taking me by the hand.

As I stand, a wave of dizziness hits me. I have no idea if it’s because my mind is fabricating things I want to believe – that all these cruel coincidences mean nothing – or if, deep down, it’s because I’m wondering if Susan knows something about Rick. It’s this last thought that makes me follow her.

The water is smooth and still with the moon hanging low over the trees. It casts a shimmering runway across the lake, as if there’s a silver bridge from one side to the other. I imagine Rick standing on the other side, beckoning me across.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘I had no idea it was here.’

After we left the bar, Susan led me by the arm into the restaurant kitchens. We harvested pâté, cheese and crackers, plus deep red grapes and a bottle of wine. She packed them into a basket and we set off, grabbing a couple of coats on the way out of the back door. We walked past the stable block garage, but I looked the other way.

‘It’s worth it, I promise,’ she said as we climbed a steep
hill, breathless. She turned back, beckoning me on with her smile.

And indeed it was worth it. Once we crowned the wooded rise, we were greeted by an amphitheatre-like dip filled with a lake, and a starry skyline beyond.

We walked down a winding path and crumbling stone steps, ending up at a small boathouse and jetty, which stretched out across the water. There were a couple of battered wicker chairs on the deck and a small table between, upon which Susan set the food. She opened the wine and poured it into plastic beakers. I sipped gratefully, already feeling tipsy.

‘It’s my guilty pleasure,’ she says now, pushing a knife through a wedge of Brie. She cuts several slices and opens the crackers. ‘I love to escape here, to think about things.’

‘I see why,’ I reply. The twilight has brought an entirely different palette to the countryside. Bats scull the air above our heads, and I hear an owl in the distance. Beneath the wooden slats, fish break the surface of the lake, making a gentle plopping sound every now and again.

I shiver, even though I’m warm inside my borrowed coat.

‘When I come here,’ Susan continues, ‘I realise just how much there is to think about.’

I feel her staring at me, though I don’t turn. There’s something about the burn of her eyes that I don’t like, as if she’s boring holes in my cheek. I watch as a bat swoops and turns, avoiding the little building’s roof at the last minute.

‘Soon after we took over the hotel, Phil set about renovating the boathouse.’ She admires the wooden structure as if her husband were actually there, building it, pulling off his shirt as he works in the hot sun. ‘It was hardly a priority and he never uses the boat,’ she says, laughing fondly. ‘The hotel had a load of other repairs that needed doing, not to mention Phil’s regular job. It took him a couple of years, fitting in the odd hour here and there when he was home. Sometimes he’d even pop back to bang in a few more planks while travelling from one airport to another.’

‘That’s dedication,’ I say, trying not to conjure up an image of Phil. I don’t want someone else’s husband filling my mind when I can’t have my own.

Even in the half-light, it’s obvious that the little hut has seen better days. Peeling paint, curled boards and a cracked window pane show me it’s both old and well loved.

‘We call it a boathouse, but it’s more a summerhouse really.’ Susan hands me a cracker thick with pâté. ‘We keep the rowing boat tied to the jetty.’ She points to a red-and-white-painted boat bobbing gently at the end of the boarded walkway. A pair of oars have been left inside.

‘It’s all lovely,’ I say, trying to imagine Rick undertaking such a project. With the best intentions, he’d sweat over plans and designs and materials for months, probably never getting started. Much of Rick’s life was spent agonising rather than doing. That’s why his career never really took off.

I feel ashamed for thinking about him like that, as if only his flaws have been left behind.

‘What do you think happened to your husband, Gina?’ Susan says, knocking the breath from me. She tops up our tumblers and offers me more cheese. I take a large sip of wine. ‘
Really
happened to him?’

This time I take her stare head-on. Her eyes are silver in this light – shiny coins under her glistening hair. She’s the kind of woman Rick would have described as untouchable.

‘I like my women real,’ he once told me after I’d teased him about crushing on an actress. He’d grabbed me around the waist, pressing me against him, telling me I was more real than he could handle.