Missing You (3 page)

The trouble was that he didn’t tell her how he felt.

He didn’t think he needed to tell her.

He thought, because they were married, because every aspect of their life was so intimate, because they were forever united emotionally and genetically by the incredible child they had created together, that he didn’t need to tell her that he loved her. He thought that fact was spelled out in every word he said to her, every action, every glance, every kiss and kindness. Everything he did was for Belle. Every mile he drove, every weekend he worked, every shitty, cold, thankless job he surveyed, every penny he earned, all of it was for his wife. She knew he was not good at articulating his feelings but wasn’t it obvious that he loved her?

She said it was not.

She said she didn’t tell him how unhappy she was because he didn’t ask.

He didn’t know it was something he was supposed to ask. He was happy and it never crossed his mind that Belle might not be. He didn’t know what to do then and he doesn’t know what to do now.

He knows one thing.

He cannot go on like this.

He needs to sort himself out.

One step at a time, he thinks, like an alcoholic. First things first.

He needs to escape these hotels. That’s the first thing he needs to do.

four

Lina tells Fen that she has given her telephone number to one of her colleagues. She says he’s a decent man who has had some kind of ‘major domestic’. Lina says she expects it will sort itself out in time, but, for now, Sean needs somewhere to stay.

Lina has known Sean for years. She says he’s OK.

So when Sean calls to ask about the room, Fen invites him round.

‘Hi,’ he says, shaking raindrops from his hair. ‘I’m Sean.’

He holds out his hand. Fen takes it. His fingers are red and cold but his handshake is firm. It is the first time she has touched a man deliberately in years and the feeling of his skin is strange. She lets go first and wipes her hand on the thigh of her jeans.

‘Come in,’ she says, moving aside. He wipes his feet on the doormat then steps through the porch.

‘You’re the one who . . .’ she begins.

‘Works with Lina, yes. She said you were looking for a lodger.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I guess you would have preferred a woman but . . .’

‘Well, it’s OK,’ says Fen. ‘Lina knows you. This house actually belongs to her and Freddie. I’m their tenant. And she knows you’re not . . .’

‘What? A murderer? A drug dealer?’

He’s smiling, although that’s not funny. Fen can tell he’s enervated. He’s trying to act normally but he looks exhausted. She tries to rearrange her face into a polite smile, and tugs at the sleeves of her jumper.

‘I didn’t want a complete stranger.’

‘Well, no,’ says Sean, ‘of course you didn’t.’

‘Would you like to see the room?’

‘Please.’

She motions him to go upstairs. It feels odd to have a man in the house. He takes up space that is usually empty. Fen climbs the stairs behind him in a wake of cool, outside air and an unfamiliar, masculine smell; she is aware of an energy that is, in some small way or other, disturbing. His masculinity corrupts the balance of the house.

His jeans are loose about the waist and legs; his brown hair, which is slightly greasy and needs cutting, curls about the collar of a worn old jacket dotted with dark spots where the rain has stained the leather. He pauses on the landing. He is unsure of the etiquette of the situation, as is she, and this, she finds, is comforting.

‘It’s the door to your left,’ she says.

He goes in.

It was a rather shabby room to start with, but now, with Lina’s help, it is brighter. The window looks out over the back gardens and the alley, down the hill, over the city and beyond it to the opposite hills, so that in daytime the view is gloriously long-reaching and it’s possible to track the progress of the sun, the cloud-shadows and the trains on the railway line way, way below. At night, the city of Bath twinkles and sparkles and shimmers like a girl dressed up for a ball. Fen has made new curtains, and she and Lina have painted over the woodchip on the walls. A fringed rug the colour of rubies, which Fen found in the Oxfam shop, hides the worst of the carpet; the old bed has been rejuvenated by new bedding; there are two lamps, both lit and casting egg-shaped pools of yellow light; a small, old-fashioned television is perched on a wall bracket.

‘It’s nice,’ Sean says politely but Fen suspects, from the self-consciously emphasized affirmative, that it is less than he is used to.

‘Have a look round,’ she says. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

She trots back downstairs in her socks and goes into the kitchen, where she peers at her face in the mirror by the door. She pulls open a drawer and rummages for a comb, but there isn’t one, just balled string, sticking plasters, odd screws and bolts, an ancient jar of Vick’s Vapour Rub, broken pens and stray pieces of Lego and Playmobil. She fills the kettle, switches it on and looks in the mirror again. Her face is a small, pale knot of anxiety. Her hair is lank. It has not been professionally cut for several years. Fen combs it with her fingers.

She can’t remember the last time she wore make-up.

She has run out of tea bags, so she makes instant coffee in her two best mugs. They don’t match. Sean does not look like the kind of man who would be bothered by uncoordinated crockery, but still, she wishes she could do better. She hears his footsteps in the bathroom above; there is the unmistakable, loud splashing of a man peeing and then the toilet flushes. She blushes at the intimacy.

She searches the cupboards for something to serve with the coffee, but there are no biscuits, no anything.

She times it so that she is coming out of the kitchen with the tin tray as he reaches the bottom of the stairs. He follows her into the living room.

‘The room’s great. Just what I need,’ he says, taking the mug from her and sitting down on the settee, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His face is tired, and the whites of his eyes are bloodshot. He blows across the surface of the coffee.

‘I don’t know how much Lina told you about me,’ he says, ‘only I have a daughter; she’s six. I look after her most weekends. Would it . . .’

‘No problem,’ says Fen. ‘I have a child too. Connor. He’s coming up to five.’

She pauses. Oh, she might as well have it over with now. ‘He has mild cerebral palsy,’ she says, ‘but you’d hardly know. He sleeps through the night. He’s no bother.’

‘Oh! Right. Fine, of course. And is he . . .’

‘It was a difficult birth. It’s not a big deal. He just has a little trouble with his right arm and leg.’

‘Right.’

‘And it can be hard to understand what he’s saying. He backs up his words with signs, sometimes.’

‘He sounds like a resourceful lad.’

‘Yes.’

There is a silence. They sip their coffee.

‘I could get a little bed, if you want,’ says Fen, ‘to go in the room. For your daughter.’

‘No, no, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

Fen tries to remember if it was always this hard to talk to somebody she didn’t know, and she thinks that it wasn’t. At one time she used to find other people easy. She had a nice way about her, that’s what people said. Conversation was intuitive; she didn’t even have to try. And now look at her. She shifts a little in her seat.

‘How long do you think you’ll want the room?’ she asks.

‘Not long, I hope,’ he says, and then he coughs and adds, ‘Sorry, that sounded rude. It’s a great room, but things will soon be sorted out and I’ll be back at home.’

She nods.

‘Did you want me to commit to three months or something?’

Fen shakes her head. ‘No, it’s fine, you can decide week by week, if you like. That suits me too.’

She feels she should explain. ‘It’s my brother Tomas’s room,’ she says. ‘Well, it’s earmarked for him when he comes back. Only I don’t know when that’ll be.’

‘Is he travelling?’ Sean asks, curious, but reluctant to probe too far.

‘Sort of. He’s been gone a while.’

‘Once you get the bug, it can be hard to shake it off,’ says Sean.

‘Yes.’

There is another silence.

Fen watches a daddy-long-legs quivering hopelessly against the wall. Sean follows her eye, stands up, cups the insect in his hand and slots it through the open fanlight.

‘Thank you,’ says Fen. ‘I don’t like those.’

‘My wife is the same,’ says Sean. ‘She says they’re purposeless. She worries they’ll get tangled in her hair and their legs will come off.’

‘Me too.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’m good with insects. Is there anything else you’d like to know about me?’

‘What do you do?’ she asks. ‘At work?’

‘I’m a surveyor.’

‘What do you survey?’

‘Old buildings, ancient monuments, bridges. Structures in need of restoration.’

‘Do you restore them?’

‘Not personally. But I work with the architects and the engineers and the craftsmen.’

‘Have you ever surveyed a building you couldn’t save?’

‘There’s always a way. Even if you have to take the whole thing down and start again.’

Fen nods.

She can think of nothing else to ask.

He lifts the mug to his lips, tips back his head and drinks, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. She watches his jaw, the darker colour of his throat; he hasn’t shaved for a day or two. He catches her glance and she looks away. He puts the mug back down on the tray. He is graceful in his movements, comfortable in his skin.

‘Would you mind if I bring some of my stuff in now?’ he asks.

‘No, that’s fine,’ says Fen. ‘Move in whenever you want.’

Later, as Fen walks around the corner store with Connor, picking items from the shelves, she imagines what it will be like to buy enough food for three. She looks at a pack of minced beef steak, too much meat for her and Connor, and thinks of what she could do with it: lasagne or cottage pie, Bolognese sauce, chilli, burgers, meatballs. She plans a week’s worth of recipes in her head. She tells Connor about their new lodger, and Connor is pleased. He has reached an age when he wants to learn more about men and their world. Now there will be somebody in the house who knows the names of cars and, better still, knows more than a little about the heavy machinery that Connor adores: bulldozers, piledrivers, cement mixers and cranes.

Connor sits in his buggy to go back down the hill. His legs are tired. Fen pauses at the crest because she catches sight of somebody moving in the front garden of Lilyvale and her heart pounds, but it’s only the papergirl, a big yellow sack on her shoulder. The girl closes the gate behind her, picks up the bike that she had propped against the wall, and carries on down the hill.

five

The Gildas Bookshop, in Quiet Street, is a poky little shop which mainly sells new and second-hand history and culture books, subsidized by a lucrative sideline in novels in a variety of Eastern European languages. Maps of the city are pinned to the spare places on the walls, greeting cards and postcards are stacked in racks. The shop’s floors, ceilings, walls and windows slope, slant, dip and buckle. Everything is covered in a fine layer of white dust, the carpet is threadbare and faded, and countless spiders are enjoying life in undisturbed corners. Fen makes coffee in the tiny kitchenette, its window greened by climbing plants in the little courtyard behind, its creaky, lumpy old ceiling dusty with cobwebs. She stirs milk into Vincent’s favourite mug, the one with the reproduction of the Penguin Classics
Pursuit of Love
cover. Vincent always says he doesn’t care which mug his coffee comes in, but his eyes light up when she passes this one to him as he sits at his desk in its cubbyhole at the back of the shop, indulging in his favourite chore. He is rummaging through a box of old books which he has just bought from an apologetic, tired-eyed woman whose mother-in-law has moved into an old people’s care home.

‘You’re an angel. Thank you,’ says Vincent. He is old, whiskery, thin, too tall for the ceilings of his little shop, too elbowed, too jointed. What is left of his grey hair is combed over his head. He has a handsome nose and the confidence of the attractive young man he used to be. Photographs of the young Vincent leaning languidly and in a pseudo-aristocratic manner in the foreground of one exotic venue or another often turn up tucked into catalogues or at the bottom of drawers. Fen has seen him in front of the Taj Mahal, posing beside a lake at Band-e Amir, on the edge of Tiananmen Square and, in Arab clothing, sitting on a camel beside a palm-fringed water hole in the Egyptian desert. He used to write travel books at a time when travel beyond English-speaking countries was still the preserve of the wealthy, a small number of backpackers and sociologists. His books were very popular in their day, and first editions are highly collectible now. They are two of a kind, Vincent and Fen; their worlds have both closed in, although the passage of time and a wife he adores are what have tempered Vincent’s ways, while Fen has been conditioned by life and by what it has done to her.

She returns to the counter by the window, and tidies the leaflets. Outside, crowds of people pass by. It’s easy to pick out the workers on their coffee breaks: they skip on and off the pavement, check their watches, weave through the crowds. Little groups of tourists draw together like iron filings to a magnet, slowing down the locals, huddling over their books or listening to their leaders: Japanese, German and American guides identifiable by the coloured umbrellas they hold above their heads like flags.

‘Is there anything interesting in that box?’ Fen asks Vincent.

‘Ever read
The Moon’s a Balloon
? Very amusing, as I recall.’

‘I remember my stepmother reading that,’ says Fen.

Vincent picks up a book in a green paper dust-sleeve with the title in white and the author’s name below, in yellow. He turns the book over in his hands.

‘Was she a book-lover?’ he asks, peering over the top of his lenses.