The Disappearance of Emily Marr (14 page)

Tabby digested this. Accused of being, not accused of doing. It seemed an important distinction. ‘What were you accused of being?’

‘A bad person.’

‘A bad person?’ It was curiously childlike phrasing. ‘Bad in what way? Did you commit some sort of crime?’

‘That depends on your point of view.’

‘What’s
your
point of view? That’s all I want to know.’

But Emmie would not say.

‘Why here, then?’ Tabby asked, determined not to lose the momentum of this breakthrough exchange. ‘At least tell me that. This place isn’t that well known in Britain, is it? Why not Paris or the south?’

‘It could have been anywhere, I suppose. But I knew about Ré. I’d heard about it from a friend.’ There was another pause, before she allowed, ‘We were going to come here together.’

‘We? This
does
involve a man, then?’

Emmie concurred, or at least implied doing so with that way she had of simultaneously dipping her chin and eyes.

‘Who? Why did you break up? Where is he now?’

But Emmie held up a hand: ‘Please don’t ask any more. I just want to rid myself of it. I need new words, new stories.’

‘But —’

‘No, please!’

Tabby did not have the first idea of what to make of these declarations. What new stories? What new words? Having finally extracted the admission of heartbreak she’d been so determined to win, she was rewarded only with a feeling of anti-climax. Then she reminded herself of the practical imperative for not irritating or distressing Emmie: to protect her position as beneficiary of Emmie’s good will. A good will all the more charitable now she had been given an inkling of how low Emmie must have been feeling.

‘We need to get on,’ Emmie said, and she resumed her scouring with an amiable air, as if they’d been passing the time in idle gossip, nothing to think any further on. ‘Thank you for the water. Could you make the beds next? According to the notes, the linen cupboard is by the door to the main bathroom at the back.’

‘OK, sure.’

Tabby approached the bedrooms in a tumult of remorse, not only for bullying poor Emmie into talking about events she plainly preferred to forget, but for the night of adultery that now returned to her as she entered the one room of the house she genuinely recognised. She’d thought it such a luxurious chamber and yet it was the smaller of two guest rooms, the most modest of the five bedrooms. Grégoire was a very wealthy man, clearly, and she had been a cheap and temporary acquisition.

Emmie was right, to want to free her mind. Our hearts shouldn’t have such a narrow focus she thought. Men, relationships, love: they shouldn’t be the only things that drive us to do extraordinary things like going to a different country and starting a new life. We should be here because we’re adventurers, not fugitives! There should be bigger, nobler things to motivate us.

For the moment she could not think what those big, noble things might be, but she felt utter conviction that she wanted to find them.

Chapter 8

Emily

Arthur was quite open about his womanising past, about how he had caused his wife pain not only by the infidelities themselves but also by his preference to spend the precious little time he had outside his work with someone – anyone – other than family. Had it been golf or rock-climbing or a mania for remote-control planes, it would have contributed just the same to his being a negligent husband and near-absent father. And while nothing to be proud of, his affairs were, he told me, nonetheless typical among his colleagues, some of whom lived separately from their families during the week, joining them only at weekends. Others were divorced, remarried, divorced a second time, the forgiveness of loved ones a luxury long relinquished. It was more than an occupational hazard, it was an epidemic.

‘It’s not the kind of marriage I set out to have,’ he said. ‘I didn’t aim to fail. I certainly didn’t aim to be the one who
made
it fail.’

‘Would you act differently if you could go back to the beginning?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. But I’d only need to do one thing differently – say no, not yes, that very first time – and the rest would never have followed.’

Instead, he’d said yes (to a colleague, predictably), and after that the women had come and gone, an easy reward for a gruelling spell, like having a drink on the way home from work; the lovers who lasted any length of time becoming the equivalent of a favourite pub. ‘I made the mistake of thinking that because it didn’t mean all that much to me, it couldn’t mean much to her either,’ he said, of Sylvie.

‘So what happened?’

‘Two years ago she gave me a final warning. She’d already found a divorce lawyer and had written the email instructing him. She just hadn’t sent it yet.’

‘And?’

‘And so I stopped.’

‘Just like that?’ In spite of the absurd irony of his making this claim while his naked body was hooked around mine, I listened rapt, as if to a confirmed truth.

‘Yes, on the condition that
she
stopped with the constant accusations.’ As I raised my eyebrows, he continued, ‘I know how that sounds, I know I was the one at fault, but if I’d slept with as many women as she imagined, I would have had no time to do my job. Sometimes I was only in the pub because I was having a drink.’

‘Yes, while looking out the window for who might be passing by…’

‘That’s not fair.’ The arch of his right foot stroked my left shin. ‘Anyway, since then we’ve both kept our side of the bargain.’

‘Oh, come on, Arthur.’ The disingenuousness of his position could be ignored no longer. ‘
She
may have, but in case it’s escaped your notice,
you
’ve started again. And I’m not sure I like being compared to a pint of lager.’

‘Oh, but this is different,’ he protested. ‘Completely, fundamentally different.’

‘Why? It’s an affair like the others.’

‘It’s not an affair. It’s the real thing, the
coup de foudre
. It’s what makes me see how unnecessary the others were.’

I had not heard the phrase ‘
coup de foudre
’ before, but I had not had a relationship with a married man before, an exceptionally overcommitted married man at that, and it had taken me by surprise how intense and fast-moving it was, an expedited version of an ordinary one. We were propelled by the imperative to make every meeting count, as if we were foreign secretaries gathering at a moment’s notice to tackle the outbreak of civil war in a neighbouring territory. Critical decisions were reached in pillow talk, key announcements made as zips were refastened and belts buckled. Avowals, pronouncements, promises: they did not have to be fished for or extracted (or, in the case of Matt, forsaken), but came of their own accord and in thrilling flurries.

‘I’m falling in love with you,’ he told me, after only a handful of liaisons, and not even when we were in bed but afterwards, with minutes to spare, as we dressed and gathered up keys and wallets, ready to return to our respectable real lives.

‘Are you?’ I had halted midway back into my skirt, but quickly resumed wriggling it over my hips, telling myself he was teasing.

‘Yes,’ he said, very firmly, ‘I am,’ and when I looked across at him I saw that he was perfectly serious.

‘Do you think that’s wise?’ In the short time of our affair I had developed a composure that represented either a persona especially for him or a sudden steep development in my actual personality. Whichever it was, Arthur embraced it whole-heartedly, telling me he had been attracted in the first place by the ‘exceptional mismatch’ of me, that I was someone whose humility did not tally with her appearance and he wanted to help me realise how beautiful I was.

He smiled at me, tender and indulgent. ‘“Wise” isn’t the word I’d use, no. Nothing about this is wise, is it? Being here isn’t wise.’

Except for the first weekend, when Matt and Sylvie had been out of town, we had not been able to use the flat for our assignations and so we met in the only decent hotel in the neighbourhood, the Inn on the Hill. It was a boutique place on the high street near the station, a couple of bus stops from Earth, Paint & Fire and walking distance from Arthur’s hospital department. By accident or design we were always given the same room, ‘Marrakech’, which had a
riad
theme: terracotta walls, patterned kilims, a big wooden bed with carved posts; in the bathroom there were cobalt-blue mosaic tiles and a polished copper basin, high-end toiletries that we never used and I longed to pocket but was too ashamed to in front of Arthur. I wondered if it was the room they always gave to couples having illicit assignations: a simulated honeymoon in Morocco. I wondered if the hotel had sprung into existence expressly to service the affairs of the hospital consultants down the road.

‘I get the feeling you don’t feel the same way,’ Arthur said, and his face betrayed no disappointment, nor even bemusement. His was a character built to beat adversity; he did not acknowledge rejection.

‘Of course I feel the same way,’ I said, scooping up my shoes from under the bed without breaking eye contact. ‘But I think I can still stop it happening. Rein it back before it’s too late.’

His eyes widened a fraction – with interest, I thought, rather than doubt. There was never any reason with him to worry about being
too
honest. ‘Why on earth would you want to rein it back?’ he asked.

Because of the long human history of love triangles, I thought: all the triumphant wives, all the mistresses brought low. There was a good reason it was not the other way around. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Because I don’t want to be one of those women who hangs around for years waiting for her married man to leave his wife and then he doesn’t, of course, and why should he? He already knows he can have her as an extra – that’s why they call it a “bit on the side”, isn’t it? But by the time she realises that, it’s too late for her to start something with someone else, too late to have children, too late for anything. She’s totally wasted her best years.’ The use of the third person did not provide the safety net I’d intended and for all my bravado I experienced a direct hit of despair – a visceral recognition of how it would feel to be the woman I described, waking up at the age of forty or forty-five and seeing that only the beginning had been sensational: the rest had been no more than the aftermath of a mistake.

Evidently feeling no such neurosis himself, Arthur leaned across the bed and seized my hand to draw me to him, steadying me as I lost balance. Our faces were now close enough to kiss and I could feel my breath coming harder. ‘That’s what you think is going to happen? That I’ll string you along, just use up your best years and then spit you out? Because that’s what I do?’

‘I didn’t say
that
.’

‘But you think it, don’t you?’ He was growing amused. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a positive mental attitude, Miss Marr?’

‘I’ve heard of falling in love with the wrong man, a man who openly admits he’s a serial adulterer and who has no hope of changing his ways as long as he lives.’

I expected him to protest the insult, but instead he crowed, ‘So you do admit that’s what you’re doing? Falling in love?’

This was so far removed from any discussion I’d had with a boyfriend before, it was a brand-new language. ‘Yes, I admit it,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how it helps me, though.’

‘Look,’ he said, and I sensed the building of deliberation that came whenever he was about to say something crucial. It wasn’t in any correction to the eyes or even the tone; it was to the breathing, which became concentrated, undetectable. ‘The scenario you’ve just described is from the Dark Ages. Divorce is as common as staying together now, especially when the kids are growing up, like mine are.’

I felt uneasy at the reference to his children. Having focused to date on the chemical rush of our sexual attraction, the sensation of flying above ordinary mortals, I had not considered his two sons at all. To me they were
among
the ordinary mortals, the ones we’d left on the ground. I knew their names, of course, Alexander and Hugo, I knew they were eighteen and almost seventeen, just one school year apart, the elder taking A-levels the coming summer and beginning a gap year soon after, the younger to repeat the sequence twelve months later. Though Arthur admitted he hadn’t spent a great deal of time with them when they were young, not compared with the current hands-on breed of father, there could be no doubt that he adored them, in the primal, unconquerable way of all good parents. He never spoke negatively of them, only of his own deficiencies. And they had had Sylvie for their everyday needs, I thought:
she
had not had to earn a living as the new generation of mothers invariably did. In retrospect, it sounds callous, I know, no more than a convenient excuse, but the truth was that to me it was natural to need only one parent, to have no choice in the matter.

‘You didn’t want to leave last time,’ I said, finally, ‘when she gave you the warning.’

‘Forget last time. Last time wasn’t you. How I feel now only makes me realise how miserable Sylvie and I have been for a long time. But this is it. I’m clear about that.’

I could hardly believe what he was implying, that he intended to leave her to be with me, and I certainly could not allow myself to trust it.
Last time wasn’t you
: I would be a fool not to consider the possibility that he’d made such intoxicating declarations to previous lovers. That the possibility existed that, however pretty my face, however individual my personal style, I was still the same as every other woman who’d fallen for him: fallible, flawed, and never more so than when in love. Because I
was
in love, of course I was.

‘Please, Arthur, don’t try to trick me, don’t tease me. I’m not stupid: I know you have far too much to lose if you split up with her, you’d be mad to do it. I’m the one who’ll lose, I know that and I accept it. But please don’t pretend it’s going to be any other way.’

His expression did not alter. As far as I could see, he was no longer even blinking. ‘I’m not pretending anything,’ he said in that grave undertone of his. ‘You don’t know me well enough yet to know that I don’t say things I don’t mean. And what I’m saying is I
will
be with you. You don’t need to “accept” anything less.’