The Bed I Made (3 page)

It was only a hundred yards before the surface of the water mingled with the dusk and the thickening fog. It lay still and glassy, the only movement in it the direction of the tide, invisible from this distance. From directly below, though, where it touched the shore, there came a gentle heaving like breath, a drawing back and forth as if it moved with the lungs of someone underneath.

Alice Frewin. This is where her boat had been found, floating in the Channel off the back of west Wight, the blank loneliest face of the Island. Had she still been with it by the time it floated past the cliff here? Or had she slipped over the side near the Needles and let the water take her? How long would it take to drown or die of exposure, for the temperature of the water to alter the balance of one’s mind, numbing everything out while one’s body shut down? Was it brave, what she’d done, to make the decision and carry it through? Or was it braver not to jump, to carry on?

A band of fog swirled up off the sea towards me, shrouding the view forward completely, so thick I thought I could taste it. A moment of sheer terror: the light was suddenly almost gone. I could see the edge and the monument behind me, but beyond that little more than the grass around my feet. I stood up and started back down the hill, running now, conscious all the time of the edge. The thought of falling – jumping – so compelling only seconds ago, was now horrific. I imagined it, the breathless rush of freezing air, frames of white and green and grey flashing past my eyes as I plunged, faster and faster and faster. Then my body lying smashed at the bottom of the cliff, the water coming to feel it, to lap at me and touch me.

The damp and mist made the grass slippery. I fell over twice, soaking the knees of my jeans and cutting my hands. The fog was growing thicker all the time. It moved in spectral swathes, like floating gauze. I stumbled on and came, I thought, to the place from which I would see the hotel. It was invisible now, swallowed up. In front of me there was only a shifting white wall. I spun around, hoping for a landmark, the monument, by which to navigate but the way behind was closed, too. I took some deep breaths, trying to suppress the panic. To my right, a long way below, there was the gentle hush, hush of the water, and for a moment it was as if I heard Alice Frewin’s voice in it, lulling and hypnotic, calling me over:
Kate, Kate
. I started humming aloud, making senseless noises to block it out.

At last I reached the bottom of the path, then the road and the car park. I got into the car and slammed the door. Reversing, I swung round too fast and almost hit the old silver Metro parked alongside. As soon as I was moving, I switched on the radio. I needed to hear music or a human voice, the babble of a DJ. I wanted to be reminded that somewhere a normal world was carrying on. Coming to this isolated spot in the dusk and the fog had been stupid beyond belief. That urge to jump, however momentary, had been real.

I didn’t go back to the cottage straight away. I had no idea where I was going; I drove for the sake of it, for the illusion of purpose and momentum. Where the road ran close to the sea, the fog rubbed everything out. It moved in patches so dense that at times all I could see in front of the headlights was an impenetrable yellow cloud. In the worst of it, I put the car down into second and crept forward, afraid of hitting something, an animal or a person looming up suddenly to be thrown on to the bonnet, seen too late.

Four or five miles further on, however, the road seemed to climb and the fog grew thinner and then dissipated altogether. In the very last of the light, the landscape here was a charcoal sketch. Everything was in shades of grey and black: strong upward strokes for trees, thick hatching for the hedges that bordered furrowed fields. The clouds hung overhead, unmarked by stars or the moon. This was an old darkness, out of time: it was never dark like this in London, where light poured out into the night from a million windows.

Chapter Three

Helen’s response to my decision hadn’t been a surprise. ‘The Isle of Wight?’ She’d put her hand out to stop me picking at the crocheted blanket and made me look at her.

‘I want to go away.’

‘This is really sudden.’

I’d broken the eye contact and focused instead on the orderly who was bringing round another trolley of tea. He moved slowly through the ward, handing out polystyrene cups to those who could take them. He brought us two and put them down on the table that Helen had pushed aside so that she could sit on the bed. Behind her a nurse was drawing the curtains. It was a week since the hour had gone back and it had been dark for some time already. The huge windows reflected the room back at itself, the rows of beds and lockers and vinyl chairs. Visiting hours were nearly over; I’d given up hope by the time I heard her voice asking for me and then her decisive steps down the corridor. She’d come straight from the office, as soon as she’d been able to get away, and it seemed she would be working at home later, too: I could see papers sticking out of her bag. She looked as stylish as ever – her outfit today a black woollen dress that traced her shape without clinging, and snakeskin pumps – but her eyes were tired.

She’d smiled a thank you for the tea and waited until the orderly had moved on. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Don’t make any decisions now. Wait till you’re out of here.’

‘I’m not ill.’

‘I know. And I’m sure you do need a break – you’ve been working too hard again, haven’t you? You look shattered, even apart from the rest of it. But why not just have a holiday?’

‘I need to go for longer than that. Six months, maybe a year . . .’ I couldn’t explain what I wanted without getting into the reasons. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’

She had frowned. ‘But why the Isle of Wight? You could go anywhere.’

‘Dad used to take us there on holiday.’

‘That was years ago. And it was summer, wasn’t it? It’ll be dead in winter.’

I’d refrained from telling her that that was one of the reasons I had chosen it. I wanted somewhere dead. Somewhere cut off and removed from my life.

‘God, your poor face.’

I’d felt the cut on my eyebrow strain against its stitches as I grimaced, and said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t start bleeding again.

‘And what about Richard? Won’t he mind if you suddenly disappear off the face of the earth?’ she asked.

‘He’ll understand.’

‘Will he?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve told him you’re here?’

‘He’s going to America today. He’ll be on the plane.’

‘I’ll ring him for you. Leave a message for when he arrives.’

‘No.’ My voice was louder than I’d intended and the vehemence of it caught the attention of the women in the two beds opposite, who looked and then quickly glanced away again, as if they’d witnessed something embarrassing. Helen drew back a little, too, and I felt guilty. I would have understood if she hadn’t come, given how things had been between us recently, and my heart had filled with gratitude when I’d seen her but now I wanted to be alone, to close the curtains round my bed and pull myself into a ball under the crisp hospital sheets.

‘At least tell me how it happened,’ she said, with a new stiffness.

‘I was on the Lillie Road on my bike and a van came up just before the bridge and knocked me off. I was thinking about something else, it was too close and it clipped me with the wing mirror. I didn’t have time to put my hands out.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘Taxi.’

‘Where’s your bike now?’

‘At that corner shop by the bridge; they said they’d look after it for me.’

‘Do you want me to go and pick it up?’

‘No,’ I said, slightly too loudly again.

She looked at me and I saw that she was debating whether or not to say anything. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ she said at last.

‘What?’

‘You’re doing it again – this is another of your over-the-top reactions. I don’t know what’s happened and you’re clearly not going to tell me but I can’t believe it’s worth dropping everything to go running off to some place where you don’t know anyone. I mean, do you know even one person there?’ Her voice was low but full of frustration. ‘Why does everything you do have to be so extreme?’

Exhaustion broke over me and I let my eyes close for a moment. When I opened them, she was picking up her bag. ‘I’m going to leave you to get some sleep,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the right place for this conversation.’ She waited, giving me one more chance to apologise, explain myself, but the moment passed. I lay back against the pillows and listened to the sound of her feet on the lino as she walked away.

The nurse came and drew the curtains round my bed. They didn’t meet in the middle but left a vertical sliver about four inches wide. Through it I could see the last few visitors saying their goodbyes. It was odd to be lying in pyjamas in this place filled with strangers, on public display at just the time I felt most vulnerable. I turned so that the undamaged side of my face touched the pillow. Ten minutes later, the night sister turned off the main lights. My Anglepoise lamp was bent all the way down so that it cast a circle scarcely larger than its own circumference on the pillowcase behind my head. I could feel its heat on my hair.

Eventually the muffled sounds around me had stopped. I listened and beyond the rumble of the air-conditioning, I heard life going on outside on the Fulham Palace Road, the low whirr of a bus going past and the business-like trundle of a black cab. It was all so familiar but this evidence of the normal world had seemed then to be coming from a million miles away, like old starlight.

In the morning, satisfied I wasn’t concussed, they had let me go. I’d still felt too shaky to walk so although it was only two stops to Earls Court, I had taken the Tube. I had forgotten about the tide of morning commuters. It was five years since I’d been part of it, travelling to work every day in carriages packed so tightly that every journey required physical intimacy with strangers. The translating meant I was no longer subject to the same forces, the great flood into the offices of the City and West End, the staggered ebb home. I charted my own trajectory through the days. But Richard did this: suits, offices, meetings. Mostly he took taxis to work but very occasionally he went by Tube. I’d felt a surge of panic until I remembered that he was away. It was the wrong line for him anyway. I leaned my head against the glass partition, and the rhythm of the wheels over the track resolved into a chant in my head –
Whatever it takes; whatever it takes
– until I stopped it, imposed another over the top:
You lied to me; you lied to me.

Back at the flat I took off my coat and sat down at my computer. I brought up Google and typed it in: ‘Isle of Wight rental property’.

That evening, when I’d finished packing, there had been two boxes at the door of my flat: one with the dictionaries and papers for work, one with my coffee pot and printer. My suitcase, filled with the most basic of my clothes, waited only for my wash-bag in the morning. Everything else that was personal – ornaments, the rest of my clothes, those of my books with any sentimental significance – had been tidied away into the cupboard in the tiny hall and the highest shelf of the wardrobe. I’d phoned Helen to apologise for my behaviour at the hospital, skirting away again when she tried to ask about Richard. She was still against my going to the Island but she’d accepted that I wouldn’t be persuaded and put me in touch with her assistant, Esther, and her boyfriend, who had been looking for a new place and were going to take over my lease for six months. Esther had been around to see the flat after work and though I had always been fond of it, seeing it through a stranger’s eyes, I was aware all of a sudden of the phone-box dimensions of the kitchen, the ill-fitting carpet, the stain on the bedroom ceiling from the time the guttering had clogged with dead leaves and overflowed. I had felt defensive about my life here, as if its inadequacies had been exposed. Esther was ten years younger than me and the flat was much more suitable for someone her age, just starting her career and with a first-job salary, than for someone of mine.

I had known I wouldn’t sleep. Earlier the landline had rung. I’d hesitated to pick it up but thought it might be the woman from the cottage again.

‘Kate?’ Richard’s voice had been full of surprise at getting through.

‘No,’ I’d said and dropped the receiver as if it had burnt me. The phone rang again immediately so I unplugged it from the wall. My heart was thumping against my ribs and I went straight to the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine, hands fumbling at the foil around the top.

A little after midnight I poured the last of it and sat down in the wicker chair by the window. The room was full of shades: everywhere I looked there were versions of Richard and I still playing out what we’d done here as if we’d been leaving a slipstream of our own molecules all the time. It was familiar, this sense that we had layered up a history here. Before, when he’d been away, I used to look around at the sofa we’d had sex on, the table where we’d eaten dinner, the bed we’d slept in, and felt that I was among my accomplices, not alone. Now, though, overriding all those others, came the memory I was determined not to have. I shoved it away.

I turned my back on the room and looked out of the window instead. The blinds were left open, as they always were, for the view of the flats opposite. I felt as if I knew the people who moved around in them. I knew their routines and the hours they kept; I knew I’d worked too late if all their lights had gone out. Though I’d never spoken to any of them, I would miss them. In a strange way, they were my community here; they had given me the sense that there was life going on. At the same time, though, they had served to highlight my isolation. Sometimes, late at night, I had felt as if I was standing on a bank by a railway line, watching those lighted windows and the people in them as if they were racing past on a fast train that somehow I had missed.