The Turning Tide (2 page)
Today. She was going to leave him today.
Erykah leaned into the catch of her oar as the low-slung rowing boat slid along the Thames. She squinted against the icy rain that raked her face and tried to concentrate on the back of the rower in front of her, synchronising her movements to Nicole’s movements. There was nothing but the sound of their blades hitting the water in unison, the rush of the river underneath, and one word in her thoughts.
Today
.
Today
.
The rhythm of the pair was constant and strong. Catch, drive, recover. Catch: two oars dropped into the water together. Drive: the push as two pairs of long legs stretched out, the blades snapping out of the water at the finish. Recover: slide forward, square up, get ready to repeat. Catch, drive, recover. The racing shell sliced through the water like a knife.
Today, today, today
.
Early-morning outings were the best part of Erykah’s day. Nothing else intruded on the physical pleasure of being competent, of getting something done. She indulged a glance at the water where the wash of their strokes bubbled up. The whirlpool puddles of her oars chased Nicole’s upstream, equally deep, equally strong.
The London suburb of Molesey was always quiet at this time of morning but today it was eerily still. Sleety rain from the February sky flattened the water and dampened all outside noise. The gardens were still bare of leaves, the pleasure boats tied up on the bank still shrouded in canvas for the winter.
On one side of the river were the reservoirs and nature reserve, beginning to rustle with the first stirrings of the dawn chorus. On the other side, in the houses facing the water, a few lights flickered in Erykah’s peripheral vision. The exodus of commuters from the suburbs into London was an hour or more away.
The rain soaked her clothes, ran down her arms and washed the sweat off her skin. Droplets hit the water, each sphere hopping like quicksilver before being swallowed by the river. Erykah turned her thoughts to the handbag in her locker and how much she might be able to pack into it.
She thought about the cash she had been withdrawing since last year, odd amounts here and there, so that it wouldn’t raise suspicion. She had sold a few pieces of jewellery, including two Swiss watches her husband hadn’t worn in years. She didn’t know yet how she would tell him: Rab, we’re done. Rab, I’ve had enough. Maybe she would walk in the door, the light framing her from behind. His face would crumple, maybe he’d wail, but he would be unable to stop her.
Today. Today was Valentine’s Day.
It was Erykah Macdonald’s twentieth wedding anniversary.
The anniversary was a date on the calendar, a silent odometer showing how much of her life she had wasted with her husband. Her unemployed husband, she reminded herself, not that he would admit it. He was still leaving the house and pretending to go to work in the City every morning, paying their bills on loans and credit. Credit that couldn’t cover his debts for much longer. And the longer the situation went on, the more obvious it became that he was hiding things from her. His darting eyes when he left the house and when he came home, the far-too-casual questioning of how her day had been. He didn’t know she knew, but she knew. She was not born yesterday.
She had watched Rab fossilise his morning routine over the course of months until it was a ritual. He prepared the same pot of coffee and soft-boiled egg every morning, cracked and ate it using the same egg cup and spoon, washed them up – he had never done his own washing-up before, not that she could remember – and left them in the draining rack. Left at the same time, to the minute, every day. She recognised the signs. He was secretly trying to keep things under control. Wasn’t it what she had done, as a child, primly lining up the few possessions in her mum’s flat as a talisman against future failure? Hoping that if everything on the shelf was neat, maybe everything else would be OK too? It was play-acting, a way of keeping up appearances.
Catch, drive, recover. Catch, drive, recover. Without saying a word Erykah and Nicole both fell into a longer, more languid rhythm. The boat responded and picked up in the water, raising the bow like a goose’s neck in icy air.
Most club members gravitated towards the team camaraderie of rowing in an eight, or the solo achievement of bashing up and down the river in a single scull. But Erykah loved the pair. The days when their eight was broken up into fours and pairs were her favourite training sessions of all. Without the constant staccato demands of a cox sat in the front broadcasting instructions to the crew, Erykah could really lose herself in the feel of the boat.
The secret to the pair was syncing your movements perfectly with the person in front of you. Not that it wasn’t important in any other crew, but in a pair there was nowhere to hide. Pull too hard or too light, or be a fraction of a second too fast or slow in the water, and the boat would pull around, throwing the rhythm off and slowing them down. Nicole kept time like a perfect metronome; it was Erykah’s job to mirror her. But it was as much chemistry as physics. They knew each other, could read each other’s mood in the boat, often without even having to speak.
Nicole raised one hand off her oar as they reached the landing stage. Erykah squared her blade, slowing the boat and swinging it around. Nicole tapped her oar backwards through the water, bringing them parallel to the wooden dock outside the boathouse. Erykah held on to the planks while Nicole got out and steadied the boat for her. They took the oars out of the riggers, then crouching together, lifted the boat over their heads and dropped it to their shoulders.
They were smooth; from the minute the boat was lifted off the rack to the last stroke before they came up to the landing stage. They fitted together, with the boat, with each other, like a key in a lock.
Erykah didn’t want to jinx anything, but it had been a long time since a boat she was in had felt this good. Years. They had squeaked into the top twenty at the Pairs Head before Christmas. She hoped the coaches would put them together again once head season was over. There would be a few cups at the regattas to be won this summer – maybe national championships. Maybe more.
Erykah walked from the landing stage to the clubhouse of the Molesey & Hampton Anglian Boat Club, aware of the men’s squad standing in the rain. Their coach, Dom, was giving the men a bollocking for almost crashing into the weir. Eight heads bowed and ducked, trying to avoid the rain spattering off the roof onto the pavement. They stood quiet and guilty in their black splash tops. Eight pairs of eyes took in surreptitious looks of her and Nicole’s bodies.
Few of the men at the club ever tried it on. There was the age difference, for one thing. The top squad were fresh out of university, in their early twenties, twenty-five, max; the women were both over thirty, and Erykah was forty. Not to mention that Erykah was the one mixed-race member of the women’s squad in a sport that was usually whiter than white. No, none of them would ever have dared. Eight pairs of eyes followed the women all the way to the changing room door.
‘Fierce outing today,’ Nicole said. She loosened her pigtail of reddish-blonde hair with one hand and squeezed Erykah’s shoulder with the other. ‘That was good. Passionate.’ She turned on the shower and flinched as the first spurt of water came through ice cold. Nicole was once part of the USA squad and also had a few Henley medals under her belt. She might have been a decade or more off her best performances but she was still a cut above most of the other women at the club. Praise from her was praise indeed.
‘It all fell into place, I suppose.’ Erykah smiled and wrapped a towel around her long body. ‘Have to keep warm somehow.’
‘That’s not the only thing . . .’ Nicole peered around the corner to the lockers, but the women from the eight weren’t back yet. At the rate the other boat had been lagging up at Kingston it might be twenty minutes or more before anyone else came in. Seeing they were alone, Nicole’s hand strayed to Erykah’s towelled waist.
They kissed and she felt Nicole’s fingers tangle in the moist curls at the nape of her neck. ‘Not now,’ Erykah hissed, ignoring the warm lust rising inside her. She was still smiling, though, as she flicked the towel off and slipped into a pair of jeans and a soft cashmere jumper. She loosed the knot of curls from her head and combed through them lightly with her fingertips, pulling the hair back down from where it had shrunk against her scalp from sweat.
Nicole smiled and watched her lover primp. ‘I have something for you.’ She handed Erykah a thick, pastel-pink card envelope. ‘For my valentine.’ Her smile was part mocking of the silly holiday, but also part tender.
Erykah clapped a hand over her mouth. She had been so wound up, thinking about her anniversary and about leaving her husband that she’d forgotten to think of Nicole. ‘I didn’t get you anything!’
‘It’s only a little thing,’ Nicole said. She traced a finger along Erykah’s arm. ‘And I’ll see you later, anyway.’
Erykah felt Nicole’s green eyes on her as she drew out the card. Affixed to the front was an antique-looking key, secured to the card with a pink ribbon. The weight of the key sat in Erykah’s palm and she caught her breath. It looked like the key to Nicole’s cottage along the towpath. A short walk from the boathouse, they had spent many stolen afternoons there.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I can’t take this home.’ If Rab found the card she would have questions to answer. She didn’t want to start a row about infidelity while she was walking out the door, and she definitely didn’t need him to know where she was planning to go tonight.
‘I know,’ Nicole said. ‘Let’s not talk about him.’
‘All right,’ Erykah said. ‘How about . . . when are you going to give me the photos from the Star Club Head Race so I can upload them to the website?’ she teased.
Nicole laughed. It was a shared joke: they hadn’t gone to any such race, as it had been cancelled at the last minute. But it was the excuse Erykah had given her husband to justify being away from the house. For a glorious forty-eight hours, the pair hadn’t left Nicole’s cottage at all. And any pictures wouldn’t have been suitable for the club’s website anyway.
Erykah tucked the key and card back into the envelope and wedged it in the corner of her locker door. They had talked about running away, wrapped in the afterglow of sex, so many times. You can walk away from him anytime, Nicole would say. And Erykah would make some excuse. She didn’t want to put pressure on the relationship to become more than what it was. Erykah knew from bitter experience what could go wrong when things went too far, too fast.
Eventually, though, her resistance started to wear down. They stopped talking about someday and maybe, and started talking about how, and when. Erykah set a date: her anniversary. She started taking cash out and saving it, just to have a buffer until things calmed down. She would pack her bags, break the news to her husband, and walk out. She didn’t want to move in with Nicole straight away, but the cottage was close and Nicole assured her she was fine to crash there while she looked for her own place.
There had been a connection from the start with Nicole. Maybe it was because they were both outsiders in Molesey. Maybe it was the way Nicole saw her,
really
saw her, after years of indifference, bordering on outright hostility, from Rab.
Erykah closed the locker door, her fingertips lingering on the cool steel. She watched Nicole dress and felt a swelling in her chest. Nicole was an ex-Radcliffe girl, one of those healthy American types with freckles and muscular thighs and tan lines that extended only as far as the edge of her Lycra shorts. Nicole was someone who had grown up with orthodontist checks, being driven to tennis lessons, and apples for a lunchbox snack. The casual confidence about her place in the world showed, from how she walked and talked, to how she treated other people. Like nothing could stand in her way, be it a powerful opposing crew, or a lover’s difficult husband. Like nothing had the right to stop her.
Nicole caught her staring and smiled. ‘I’ll pick up the wine for tonight,’ she said. ‘Or whisky for you? Ring me when you’re on the way.’ She brushed her lips against Erykah’s neck. ‘I love you.’
Was what they had love? Erykah didn’t know. What she did know was it was like lungs full of fresh air after being trapped inside.
Erykah walked home the long way, through Molesey village instead of along the river towpath. She felt buoyant, as light as the boat in the water. Even though it was still cold enough for there to be patches of frost in the shadows, the few shards of sunlight seemed to her like high noon in the middle of summer.
There was some work she needed to do on the club website. Members had been asking for the training schedule for the weeks leading up to the Head of the River, not to mention all the photos from recent events stacking up in her inbox. They would have to wait for now. Managing the club’s site wasn’t a paid position – Erykah had volunteered herself as web admin – but normally she did her best to keep it up to date and professional.
She stopped in a corner shop to pick up a post-training coffee and scrolled through some tasks on her tablet while the assistant got her drink. The website admin never ended. This morning, it could wait.
Most of the website work was just a matter of cleaning house. Like last week, when she logged in one morning to find a queue of troll comments about the club’s latest blog update. Only registered commenters could post directly to the page; everything else went to her inbox for moderation and three unapproved comments claimed to be from three people. The comments used different pseudonyms, but according to the IP addresses, they were all coming from one person using a rival club’s Wi-Fi. Or possibly it really was three different people all sitting in the same club at the same time, but she found that unlikely. Trolls talking to nobody but themselves. Erykah had sighed and deleted all three comments. Weren’t these people bright enough to realise that she could see where they were posting from?
