The Disappearance of Emily Marr (2 page)

‘Oh,’ she said, and as if hearing the instruction for the first time she wriggled upright.

What was his name? Either they’d only met yesterday or she really was suffering from amnesia this time, but she couldn’t have amnesia because she’d remembered France and anyway her mind held the same weight of knowledge it always did first thing in the morning: knowledge that her father was gone, her mother a lost cause, her friendships mostly lapsed; knowledge that the person she had most loved – and still did – had told her he didn’t want her anywhere near him. He didn’t even want to know which country she was in, only that it should not be the same one as he.

And now, this man did not want her either. It was as if she were some sort of pest, a liability, and sooner or later everyone she met understood that about her.

Don’t cry, she told herself. They’ve got it wrong. You’re fine.

‘The taxi will take you over the bridge. The airport is close by, or do you prefer the train again? The station is in the centre of the town, for Paris or wherever you want to go.’

What bridge? The centre of which town, if not Paris, where she was now certain she had woken up yesterday?
Wherever you want to go
: he made it sound like a romantic adventure, simply the next one after this, for theirs had been a romantic adventure, or a sexual one, certainly. Her mind began to sift recollections of the trip they’d taken to get to this blue bedroom: a dusk train from Paris, the journey involving a succession of drinks; the cool interior of a station building with soaring space overhead; a waiting taxi.

She had an image then of this man handing her backpack to the taxi driver. That was a detail worth celebrating because she had her whole world in that backpack, or what was left of it, and she wasn’t ready to relinquish it yet.

He was at the windows now, pulling the panes inwards, pushing the shutters outwards. He did it slowly and with deliberation, as if in ritual. Perhaps he hoped that when he turned around again she would have vanished, his problem solved. She heard the hushed murmur of the sea a fraction of a second before she saw it, and when she did she had to narrow her eyes, for it was more like a plane of light than a body of water. Chill air rushed to her skin, reminding her that the month was May.

‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘We are in a village called Les Portes. I told you this.’ He turned, regarded her form beneath the sheet with an ambiguous expression, and she saw she’d been wrong: he had not decided yet whether she had become a nuisance or remained a temptation.

‘Ah.’ Les Portes.
Le village à la pointe nord
… the village at the northern tip. She remembered that phrase from yesterday, and now came images of the backpack coming out of the boot of the taxi, an empty street with white walls, cash changing hands. Cash. The uneasy feeling of a moment ago returned, sickening her stomach, and she could no longer stave off the most crucial of all memories: she had no money. Not just none in her possession or in her bank account, but
no access to any
. As of yesterday the cash dispensers of Europe dispensed to her no more, her overdraft limit having been exceeded and her account suspended. If her phone had not run out of credit, she would undoubtedly have received a message from the bank’s call centre notifying her of the ruinous impasse. Her train ticket had been bought for her yesterday by this unnamed patron, as had the drinks. She’d come here with him because she’d reached the point at which anywhere would do, and on any terms. That wasn’t to say that she hadn’t been attracted to him when they’d spied each other in the bar near the Gare Montparnasse, before he’d picked up the bill and relieved her of the need to present a bank card guaranteed to be declined, because she had. He had an air of affluence and protection, the kind that women responded to generically, even those with homes to go to. She would have been happy to stay longer than one night if invited.

Instead, he was throwing her out. The only power she had at her disposal was what had brought her here in the first place and she reached out a bare arm and opened the bed covers in invitation. He moved towards her, sitting close to her on the bed, touching her thighs.

‘Your hands are cold. Come in and warm up.’

He sighed. ‘
Then
you must go.’

‘Don’t keep saying it, please,’ she said. ‘I get the message.’

This was a guest room, she thought as she drew his body against her own; not the room he shared with his wife. Someone – his wife, probably, or perhaps an interior designer – someone had once stood in the doorway and looked at the empty space and thought, Blue and white, that’s what I want. Like a house by the sea is supposed to look. In the bathroom there were probably white towels embroidered with fish motifs or perhaps anchors; a length of weathered rope for a handrail; a framed old photo of the village from the days when people covered themselves from head to toe for a visit to the beach, travelling
en vacances
by steam train; an oar with hooks to hang your clothes on.

But she was getting carried away now.

‘Before you get rid of me,’ she murmured, ‘do you even know my name?’

‘Of course I know your name. It is Tabitha.’

‘That’s right.’ Occasionally, since parting ways with Paul, she had used a different name, not because of any fear of entanglement or to conceal any crime, but because you could do things like that when everything was impermanent, when you were itinerant. You could use any name you liked because no one cared what your real name was; you could do it if only to see if it would change the story you told afterwards, or the actions you next decided to take.

But she’d used her real name with this man; not even Tabby, but her full name, one that she associated with teachers and step-parents and border patrol officials. She must have wanted to impress him. The thought made her arch her torso more urgently, not so much in desire as in gratitude.

The taxi driver spoke no English and she didn’t care to reveal her passable French just yet and expose herself to conversation. He knew he was delivering her ‘over the bridge’, but she would wait until the last possible minute before deciding which mode of transport she would pretend to be taking while knowing full well she could not afford to take it. And she could not face the humiliation of admitting that she was not sure where she was.

It was a beautiful place, wherever it was, remote and low-lying, the land flattened as if by the light itself, which was yellow and colossal, the vast sky wobbling with it. She squinted into the blue as she sought road signs with place names.

The first, Les Portes-en-Ré, had the diagonal red line through the words that meant they were leaving the village behind. Soon, a pattern had developed: Ars-en-Ré, Loix-en-Ré, Saint-Martin-de-Ré. They were in Ré, or
on
Ré, because one minute the water appeared in one direction and the next a seawall rose into view in another: a peninsula or an island, then. The bridge must connect it with the mainland.

Ré. Her brain had returned to full working order and she knew she had never heard of the place when her man – Grégoire, it had come to her just as they said goodbye – had proposed the trip, for he had been going to spend the weekend in his holiday home, arriving a day earlier than his family in order to meet with an artisan about his leaking roof. And why should she have heard of it? It was not on the checklist of the budget traveller, but clearly the location of expensive properties owned by people like him, Parisians, rich, established ones for whom weekend tranquillity was a birthright.

Presumably it was only in weaker moments that an interloper was picked up at the station and offered a bed for the night.

At last, after a smooth stretch between dark wood and flat field, the ribbon of sea visible once more on the left, she saw the bridge. It was a mile or so away, a long, curving black spine that made her think of the tail of a dinosaur, and in the distance, on the far shore, there were industrial buildings, cranes and huge ships. The parting village, by contrast, was delightfully small-scale, the water of its bay still and shining and massed with seagulls. The taxi passed a smart hotel weatherboarded in grey, a pier with sculptures on it, an expensive-looking
boulangerie
with terrace furniture in ice-cream pastels… Forget weekend tranquillity, Tabby thought, this was a place you might choose to live permanently if you had the luxury of choice.

‘Stop,’ she told the driver, and he did so without argument.

She had been given fifty euros by Grégoire for the taxi, the driver wanted twenty for the aborted trip, so she was up thirty on yesterday. Beyond this she had only her last loose change, the coins she might fish from the folds of her luggage.

She retraced her route to the hotel they’d passed and found in the lobby a map of France by which she was at last able to locate herself: Rivedoux-Plage on the Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle. It was about halfway down the Atlantic coast, south-west of Paris, north-west of Bordeaux. Calais was several hours away and Saint-Malo, which she knew had ferry services to England, was half as near. She refused to think of the distances to either in terms of hitchhiking.

At the reception desk, she asked how much the cheapest room was for a night.

‘One hundred and twenty euros.’ They had entered high season at Easter, the girl pointed out, which pushed the price up. Tabby only faintly recalled Easter, for one of the strange things about travelling was that you had no relationship with bank holidays or long weekends or annual festivals. You drifted through the calendar as you drifted across the map.

In any case, the tariff might as well have been one thousand and twenty euros as far as she was concerned.

She changed her approach: did they happen to have any job vacancies at the hotel?

‘What sort of work can you do?’

‘Any sort. Bar work. Cleaning. I could be a chambermaid?’

The receptionist shook her head. ‘But there are many more hotels and restaurants in La Flotte and Saint-Martin. You should try there.’

She gave Tabby a tourist map and a bus schedule. The next bus for the proposed villages, which were back the way she’d come, was not due for an hour and so she began to walk along the main road, soon detouring along cycle paths through the pine woods she’d earlier passed in the taxi. She felt strangely fearless, charmed, like a character from a fairy tale, safe from the wolf’s eyes thanks to some invisible protector. No one knows I’m here, she thought, enjoying the sensation of secrecy and solitude. I am completely alone. Free to start again.

As a waitress or a chambermaid, if she was lucky.

She reached La Flotte. It was a larger place than Rivedoux, with a pretty port, cobbled quayside and windswept promenade. No doubt life here was busy by its own standards, but it ran at a fraction of the pace she’d been used to in Paris and the other cities that had come before. There were, however, dozens of bars, cafés and hotels and she tried every one she came to, only to find that none needed an English worker with broken French.

Flagging, she continued to Saint-Martin, the capital village, but by now her legs and spirits ached too much for her to resume her search straight away. Besides, the port here was intimidating in its smartness, its bistros and art galleries reminding her of the chi-chi neighbourhoods of Paris that had had no place for the likes of her – and with rows of pristine yachts and speedboats to reinforce the divide. She sat on a bench on the waterfront and watched the people, out-of-season tourists, some in furs and designer sunglasses, with pre-schoolers wearing coats more costly than any she’d ever owned. Thirty euros was not going to buy a hotel room here, either, and only a miracle would produce any sort of hostel. She was going to have to make alternative arrangements.

‘Alternative arrangements’: how coy that sounded! She’d never done it before, slept rough. Two Australian guys she had met in Paris had said they’d done it all the time on a Greek trip the previous summer, and they made it sound like camping without a tent. You stayed up as late as you could bear, they said, then kipped in some secret nook for a few hours until sunrise, which was all very well in August and with old fishing boats strewn conveniently at the foot of sheltering cliffs, but did it work on the Atlantic in the first week of May, too? Would she be at risk of hypothermia or, in a place like this, police arrest? Instinct told her to head from the exposed and populated edges of the island to its empty interior: what about the woods she’d passed through, might there be a little hut or barn she could slip into there? The thought was half-hearted, however. The hours remaining till dusk might be shrinking fast but she still clung to the belief that something would save her before they disappeared completely. Something.

Thirty euros. She wasn’t a vagrant yet.

Hungry, she struck off from the waterside and into the pedestrianised heart of the town in search of a
boulangerie
or supermarket. She bought a small stick of bread and settled halfway up a street of souvenir shops to eat it straight from the paper sleeve, her backpack at her feet. It was not high season, no, but there were numbers of shoppers. She watched one group come out of the nearby linen shop, tried to imagine how it must feel to be on holiday here and not near-destitute, up on your luck and not down, with the money – and the desire – to buy table runners and bathmats, cushion covers and oven gloves. For the twentieth time, she wondered what she had in her pack that she might sell.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, come on!’

Her attention was caught by the sound of English being spoken – and in clear annoyance. Just a few feet away, down a narrow passageway to Tabby’s left, a woman was standing at a green door, stabbing with her index finger at the security pad on the wall, saying letters and numbers aloud in what was evidently an attempt to remember the correct entry code. She cursed when she got it wrong a second time, gaining access only at her third attempt (‘
B
one one nine oh three N,
thank
you…’), and the sound of her native, unaccented tongue released in Tabby the same peculiar flare of emotion that came with catching your favourite song in an unexpected place: here, at last, was hope! She could knock on the door and ask this woman for help, ask to borrow some money, one Englishwoman to another. But that was absurd. Why would anyone, compatriot or otherwise, lend a stranger money?