The Disappearance of Emily Marr (10 page)

‘What about?’

‘Nothing in particular.’

And that was that. She had not told her mother and now here she was not telling her father either. Perhaps she’d known all along she wouldn’t. Perhaps she wanted to test him, to see if he would take her in for no other reason than that she asked him to.

Which he had. It would have to be enough that he nodded in protective concern, even though he probably thought the episode was something and nothing and that it was his place to err on the side of something until such a time as Tabby declared its nothingness and returned home. Until she was eighteen, home was always going to be where her mother was. Everyone knew that offspring remained with their mother after a divorce, even those old enough to have a considered preference and whose considered preference was for their father. Instead, ‘Mike’ went on living in a stranger’s house, with another man’s children, and just as he got Layla and Jessica to care for, Steve, who had no children of his own, got Tabby.

She stayed a week or so before returning, following pressure from both sides. Her only strategy was hope, hope that Steve would never again speak to her as he had done, hope that he’d not speak to her at all when they were alone but just go back to contenting himself with staring at her legs or her breasts or her lips, never raising his eyes to hers, just going on staring until she got up and left the room.

She fixed a bolt to her bedroom door. Only later did she find she’d barred the wrong door.

‘What’s your surname?’ she asked Emmie one evening towards the end of their first week together. She’d glanced idly at the mail that had come through their letterbox the last few mornings, but there was nothing for Emmie, all envelopes addressed to a M. and Mme Robert, presumably the owners of the property.

Emmie looked up from her book, a defensive cast to her face.

‘I just remember you saying Moira didn’t know it,’ Tabby said. ‘And I realised when I was talking to her that I didn’t know either.’

Since the first evening, when she’d shared her life story in a hysteria of soul-bearing so unchecked she could now scarcely remember what she had revealed and what she had kept to herself, she had not had a conversation with Emmie of anything approaching the same intimacy. Lack of opportunity was a factor, of course. Not only had both of them been busy working, but Tabby had continued with her walks too, completing circuits of the town ramparts and of the cycle paths to neighbouring villages. It surprised her how quickly she’d come to feel as if she’d been walking these routes for months, down the coastal paths where oyster shells crunched underfoot, inland through open country, past neat rows of vines and walled estates. Perhaps it was because her thoughts remained the same: thoughts of Paul that had to be suppressed, thoughts that she still needed him in exactly the ways that had driven him from her. What was becoming depressingly evident was that her love for him was enduring, and apparently in no way connected to whether
he
loved
her
; it was like an addiction or an eating disorder: she would never again live without it, but could only manage its dormancy. She was as defined by his absence as she’d been by his presence. And there were moments when it hardly seemed to matter which.

Returning from those expeditions to their shuttered house in its hidden lane, not wide enough for two to walk abreast, she’d trained herself into the habit of early nights, which prevented her both from spending money and from intruding on Emmie’s private time. Whenever in the same room with Emmie, she was careful to match the other woman’s mood, which, rather to her surprise, was more often than not silent and preoccupied. Twice, Emmie had spent the whole evening in her bedroom at her laptop.

But Tabby was naturally gregarious, some might say garrulous, and her self-imposed discretion could not last for ever. There was that inquisitive streak, too, the one that had already led her to investigate the more private corners of Moira’s clients’ properties, and she awaited Emmie’s answer now with real interest.

‘It’s Mason,’ Emmie replied at last, with an exaggerated sense of surrender.

‘Emmie Mason,’ Tabby repeated, to get a feel for the name. ‘It sounds like an old movie star or something.’

‘Well, that’s what it is,’ Emmie said.

‘Of course.’

This added one more item to the modest list of facts she knew about Emmie. Emmie had been in Saint-Martin for five weeks or so, staying at first in a guesthouse in the newer quarter of the village before finding this place inside the old walls thanks to an advertisement on the noticeboard in one of the supermarkets. The rent was low because the place was in urgent need of upgrading; nothing in the house worked properly, Emmie said (this, Tabby had found for herself, was true, or at least in so far as nothing electrical in the house worked at the same time as anything else). Though she appeared to have settled here for the foreseeable future, she had no plans to open a French bank account and had utility bills included in her rent, dealing only in cash and living ‘on the black’, as the French called it, an arrangement Tabby was keen to emulate. Her French was excellent, certainly strong enough for her to have found shop work, but she was happy enough to clean. Tabby had not asked her her age, but judged it to be early thirties. Nor had she yet voiced her theory that Emmie was suffering from – and had been driven into solitude by – the same critical illness as her own: heartbreak.

‘Why do you want to know, anyway?’ Emmie said, eyes restless.

Why do you want to know why I want to know? Tabby thought to herself, for it had hardly been an invasive question. What’s your
name
? It wasn’t like asking someone her blood group or preferred hair-removal method or tally of sexual partners. ‘No reason, I’m just interested. You know my name is Dewhurst, right?’

‘Right,’ said Emmie, as if humouring in Tabby an unnecessary and embarrassing compulsion to confess her fetishes. The contrast between this and that initial display of interest and compassion was marked, and in different circumstances might have hurt Tabby’s feelings.

Instead she gave Emmie a look of warm amusement. Whatever her own inclinations, she had no intention of finding fault with her new landlady. She opted for a joke: ‘You’re like someone on a witness-protection programme, Emmie. You know, make no eye contact, leave no paper trail. Are the mob after you or something?’

Emmie smiled, relenting a little. ‘I’d hardly have invited you to move in if I was completely anti-social.’

‘Maybe you thought you needed a bodyguard?’ Tabby said mischievously. ‘To protect you from whoever it is that’s after you?’

Emmie took this in better humour than Tabby might have expected, given the unpromising start to the exchange. ‘Yes, next time I find a stranger asleep in the spare room I’ll be sure to call for your support.’

They both laughed then, and Tabby revived the hope that the two of them were on their way to becoming great friends, discovering that crucial shared sense of fun in one another. What did it matter that Emmie was naturally rather more private? As she’d pointed out, she’d shared her home, hadn’t she? You didn’t get much more open-hearted than that. This reluctance to divulge personal information came from living alone for weeks on end, possibly months. Unlikely though their teaming-up was, it would do Emmie good to have Tabby’s company. She’d soon have her sharing war stories as single women usually did.

‘That’s exactly what
I
thought,’ Emmie said just then, though Tabby had made none of these comments out loud.

‘Thought what?’

But Emmie just returned her questioning look with one of her own, making Tabby wonder if she had spoken up after all and been too absent-minded to notice. Either that or Emmie was one of those people whose thoughts flowed so loud and clear in her own ears that she mistook them for having been part of general conversation.

Again, the sort of thing you might do if you’d lived on your own for too long.

And so Tabby did the decent thing and pretended not to notice. ‘Shall we open the shutters?’ she suggested. ‘It’s not dark yet.’ It was brighter longer here than in Paris and, even with the high wall beyond their windows, there was a well of natural light that she longed to expose.

‘I like them shut,’ Emmie said.

Chapter 6

Emily

I won’t spend time on my family background. I can’t work on this story indefinitely, but will soon need to find work and earn money again, and in any case, there isn’t any need for a full autobiography. I want this to be about Arthur and me, that’s all, and in all honesty I don’t believe my childhood is relevant. It goes without saying that I don’t agree with the media’s speculation about what kind of tragic, motherless upbringing made a man-eating sociopath of me – any more than I agree that I’m a man-eating sociopath in the first place. Nor am I interested in claiming some psychological condition that made me a victim-in-waiting. I fell in love: that was what happened. It was of itself, a one of a kind.

I suppose it
is
fair to say that as the year opened I was beset by strange new emotions. Knowing that I might lose my father during the months ahead was giving me previously unknown urges to seize the day, to make life count while I was young and healthy enough to appreciate the difference. Of course, I see now that I had my head up at exactly the time when I should have been keeping it down.

But I don’t regret it. Even now, I don’t regret it.

As Nina Meeks would tell it, I brazenly seduced Arthur. I was less a neighbour than a Venus flytrap positioned on the other side of his garden fence, carnivorous and hungry, every hair on the surface of me alert to his approach. But it wasn’t like that at all. The night it happened, he couldn’t have been further from my mind.

I’d been to visit Dad after work. Visits were never more surreal than on a Saturday evening, when that contrast between the outside world, which throbbed with the heartless energy of young lives being led, and the inside one, a muted, ageing, heartbroken realm, was at its most pronounced. Saturday night was also when I was at my most tired, too tired sometimes to raise the bonhomie required to make the visit enjoyable for Dad.

The hospital was just outside London, in Hertfordshire, well over an hour by tube and train from my neighbourhood south of the river, and the dementia unit was a sobering place to visit at the best of times, as I suppose would be any medical facility where security was strictly monitored. With some patients liable to wander out of bounds, it was necessary to ring and wait for a member of staff to admit you through several sets of locked doors. Sometimes, if they were short-staffed, you waited ten minutes simply to gain entry.

Something had happened on this visit that had unsettled me, though I tried not to let it. Making my way to Dad’s ward, I smiled at an approaching nurse and her elderly charge in a wheelchair, who I recognised as Ronnie, a one-time neighbour of Dad’s at the nursing home. Though his dementia was not so advanced, his physical health was fading fast and he had the frail skin-and-bones frame I was accustomed to seeing here.

‘Hello, Ronnie,’ I said, though I knew not to expect him to recognise me. Even so, I was not prepared for what he did do as we came close to passing: reached up towards me with startling abruptness and ran outstretched fingers over my breasts, finishing with a quite painful squeeze. As I cried out, the carer gently removed his hands.

‘
Sorry
about that,’ she said, in a jolly tone that would curdle any crisis. ‘They lose their inhibitions. Impulses we know not to act on, they act on them.’

I’d been told about this – ‘disinhibition’, they called it – many times and in all sorts of contexts, often to do with personal habits we all indulged in alone but which patients gave rein to publicly. Damage to the frontal lobe meant Ronnie, my father and every other patient here, to a greater or lesser extent, were no longer the socialised, civilised creatures they had once been. All the work Ronnie’s parents and teachers must have put in when he was a child, the tens of thousands of reproaches and corrections, had now unravelled and returned him to square one.

‘It’s absolutely fine,’ I said. ‘Please don’t worry about it.’ And I smiled at Ronnie as if I were not thinking what anyone in my position would think: does the person
I’m
visiting do things like that, too?

At the nurses’ station I was told that there was a surprise for me. For the first time in two weeks Dad was out of bed and seated in the lounge. He’d been tucked under a blanket, like an injured fox cub someone had found in the woods and put in a warm corner to build up his strength. Even though he’d been bedridden with infections for some time now, I still felt the same slicing wound of disbelief every time I saw him. It was the physical depletion as much as the mental deterioration: once, he’d been muscular and forceful and undefeated, had raised two children on his own. Now, he was feeble and could not raise himself. I stooped to kiss him on the cheek before settling next to him and giving my name as I always did. He seemed to know who I was or at least not to think I was a stranger.

‘You don’t need the IV any more?’ I made a point of asking him and not the nurse, for I’d developed an aversion to conversations across patients’ heads in which the subject was presumed deaf or unconscious.

‘He’s been eating a lot better, haven’t you, Vince?’ she said, because someone had to answer.

‘That’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Well done!’

Dad looked momentarily pleased, but soon anxiety seized his face. ‘I was looking for Lesley,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find her. I looked everywhere.’ Lesley was my mother. I knew, of course, that I should not tell him she was dead, it would be a bombshell as devastating as the twenty-year-old original and he was in no condition to handle the grief of new widowerhood. The same went for his own parents, both long passed away but often sought by his dislocated mind.

‘Do you remember when we had that day out in London and sat on the steps in Trafalgar Square?’ I said, plucking an occasion from infanthood. Occasionally he connected with those, though most of his reliable memory was of his own childhood. ‘And the pigeons kept landing on Phil’s sandwich and he freaked out, and Mum laughed and laughed. He couldn’t stop screaming and she couldn’t stop laughing.’