The Turning Tide (3 page)

Erykah thanked the shop assistant for the coffee and continued home. She thought of the card from Nicole. It had been a long time since someone had made such a romantic gesture to her, and she was overwhelmed – in a good way.

Rab probably wouldn’t even remember it was Valentine’s, much less their anniversary. Not that she wanted him to. Even when things between them had been good he was more likely to bring her some petrol station flowers and rewrap a free mug from work than remember to buy her a real gift. Lately, he hadn’t even done that much.

Even before Nicole entered her life, Erykah had spent ages trying to figure out why she had married him at all. Erykah Macdonald and her husband hadn’t shared a bedroom in several years. They hadn’t shared anything of substance since well before that.

It was hard to remember, but when they met she had been bowled over by who he was. Or at least, by who he appeared to be. A dashing, tall officer type, lean and handsome with slicked back blond hair and a stilted, formal way of speaking. He could have walked out of a war film, all cheekbone angles, glowing skin and snappy, smart comments. And at a time of her life when it felt as if everything was crashing down around her, he made her feel safe. As if he really could whisk her away from all the worry about the press, about money, about what other people thought of her.

Then the mask started to slip. She started to see his patterns, as if he was a computer program looping through a script. He knew a lot of general trivia, but wasn’t as smart as his allusions implied. His healthy glow came from a tanning bed, not from sport. The witty comments she admired were a handful of lines and quotes he repeated thousands of times for effect. He could tell you the first four lines of
Macbeth
, but she came to doubt he had ever read it.

But that wasn’t the real problem. She assumed all couples go through a stage of discovering the gulf between who you thought someone was and who they turned out to be. No, it was the lying that troubled her. He had told her he was a former Army intelligence officer, but she learned he had been kicked out of his university’s Officer Training Corps for failing to turn up to training nights and hadn’t even got in to Sandhurst. She discovered he was born in Norwich, not Edinburgh as he claimed. Nothing about her husband was what he said it was. Not his high-pressure job in the City as a trader on the commodities floor – it turned out he was really an insurer.

‘A property underwriter actually,’ he’d said, peevishly, when she found his card in the pocket of a suit she was taking to the dry cleaner and confronted him. ‘Soon to be senior. Some women would be grateful to have a partner who can provide for them through honest work.’

That hurt, and he had said it knowing it would hurt her. The implication that her love life up until meeting him was populated by criminals and thugs. But what hurt even more was he had got her wrong – it wasn’t the job title that mattered to her, and certainly not the money, he earned plenty whatever it was he was up to and she didn’t need that much. It was the fact that he had felt the need to lie when there was no reason to. To juice things up, to make himself sound more interesting than he was, when the truth would have been fine. By then they were married and living in a nice flat paid entirely with his salary, and her mother was gone, and, as he reminded her, she had no one else; nowhere to go and lick the wounds of her humiliation.

The morning rain eased and the mist hanging over the river had lifted. It was the time of the morning when Molesey transformed from commuter-land into the Ladies Who Lunch belt, from Weetabix and coffee to long conversations over bresaola and Côtes du Rhône.

On any other day, Erykah might have joined in, but today things were different.

She could finally see her marriage through clear eyes. Gone was the frustration, anger, and guilt that usually clouded her thinking. Suddenly, being on the wrong side of forty didn’t matter. Maybe she would take Nicole out to dinner, their first date as a public couple. Did people still do that? Have dates? And in a couple of weeks they would be at the training camp in Switzerland with the rest of the squad, preparing for the Women’s Head. Anyway, it was a day worth celebrating. Her marriage had been seven thousand, three hundred and four days too long. Today was the first day of the rest of her life.

The snug suburb of Molesey had never seemed more unreal to her than it did today. Beyond each gravelled driveway and shiny painted door, who knew what was really going on? Couples and families playing their perfect parts, buffered from the reality of other peoples’ lives by money and geography.

It was less than twenty miles from where Erykah was born but might as well have been another planet. She’d grown up in a one-bedroom flat on the third level of a council block where the lift, when it was working, only stopped at the even numbered floors. They kept a stack of pound coins inside the cupboard next to the gas meter, with a torch to find it when the meter ran out.

Sometimes as a kid Erykah felt brave enough to sneak a coin out of the stack and spend it on crosswords and second-hand books, but she always had to hide them in case her mother found out. Her mum, Rainbow, religiously switched off unused lights because, as she always said, at least sunlight is free.

Free. Now wasn’t that a funny kind of word?

Erykah came in through the back door to the kitchen, knowing Rab would have left by now, kicked off the wet trainers in favour of her sheepskin slippers. The stainless steel units and granite counters she’d had installed a few years ago still looked new because they rarely ate together, and rarely anything but takeaways. She switched on a talk radio show and turned the volume all the way up. The sleekly expensive Bang & Olufsen stereo system echoed through the large empty rooms and long empty hallways.

In the front room was a small cupboard where her collection of whisky bottles sat. Erykah opened the cupboard and poured herself a shot of Glen Ord. She grimaced only slightly at the first hit of alcohol, waited for the sweet finish of spice lingering on her tongue. A fine breakfast dram.

Was there anything worth packing here? Not the wedding photos, sitting on the mantelpiece above the fire they never lit. The booze was replaceable. The polished pewter cups won over years of rowing regattas would have to wait for now. She could always come back for more things later.

She caught her reflection in the oak-framed mirror above the drinks cabinet. On a good day, in the right light, she didn’t look too different from how she had looked the day she got married. With some make-up and generous backlighting, she could pass for a much younger woman. But that still didn’t give her the time back.

Twenty years. How did it happen? For so much of it, it had felt as if time was dragging so slowly. Then, before she knew it, two decades were gone.

The house was as still as a museum and, she supposed, not altogether different from one. They had bought it a few years after getting married with a down payment from Rab’s first big bonuses after getting a promotion. He had left any renovation and redecoration to her, and Erykah spent months poring over catalogues and magazines. What did people who lived in houses like this think looked good? Would they laugh at her for buying top end everything, or laugh at her if she didn’t? In the end she dumped the pile of magazines in the hands of a decorator whose final interpretation could probably only generously be called Hotel Lobby Chic. There were nice touches, but it had no soul. Such as the double-ended jet bath for two in the master en-suite. The catalogue showed a laughing couple, bath bubbles up to their shoulders, clinking champagne glasses. Erykah couldn’t recall a single time she hadn’t had a bath in it all alone.

Upstairs there were banknotes in her underwear drawer, rolled inside a stocking. Erykah counted it: about five grand. That would do for a start. She threw a large, buttery leather bag on the bed and started to pack what she would need to take with her.

The bag was a memento from a trip to Milan, a rowing camp when she and Nicole had snuck away one afternoon for shopping. It was huge and chic, and she loved it. She stuffed some underwear into the bag. A dove grey silk bra and knickers Nicole said she looked good in. A make-up kit, a notebook, a jersey dress. In a jewellery box she found her diamond engagement and wedding rings. She stopped wearing them because they got in the way during rowing – or that was what she had planned to tell Rab if he asked. He had never asked.

Erykah slid the bands on her left ring finger. Might as well take them; they would be worth a few quid. She looked around the room. There ought to be more. Two decades of marriage and all it boiled down to was a half-filled handbag? But so much of what they had together was a display, for show. She felt no real emotion about any of it any more. The photos of her and Rab together: she didn’t want them wherever she went next. The stacks of books on the shelves and the bedside table? Well, there were always bookshops.

She had fantasised so many times about leaving, and in her fantasies Rab always let her go. But she knew that wasn’t what would really happen. He wouldn’t take her at her word – he would browbeat her into submission. He would demand ‘his say’, ranting about how she was lazy, reliant on him, took him for granted. How no one else would put up with her. How no one else would have done what he did, how no one would want someone with her background, her history. How he was the only reason anyone in Molesey accepted her. He heard the way other people talked behind her back, he would say, things they would never dream of saying to her face. And he was her only defender, he would claim, the one thing standing between her life now and social ruin. She had heard it all so many times before.

And the threat that came up most often? How, if she left, he would tell everyone the whole truth about her. A part of her believed him when he said these things. He had said the words so many times over the years, so convincingly, that she had started to see herself as the trash he insisted she was. ‘You and your Jeremy Kyle family,’ he said with disgust, and she felt it was the truth. His words had become part of her own head and her own heart. Even with a new life waiting, with a bag packed and Nicole in the river cottage along the towpath, would Erykah be able to forget it all, walk away that easily, and just be fine? She wasn’t sure.

Maybe she shouldn’t wait until he came home. She should go now, so she didn’t have to hear it all again. Leave a note. Send a text. Or just disappear.

Her finger grazed the spines of the books, organised – her own idea – by colour. Covers of black, blue, orange and red grouped together, an undulating continuum of shades. Her hand paused on an older paperback, slim, the cheap card cover yellowed with age. She felt a pang. It was the last birthday present Rainbow ever gave her, one of the few her mother could afford to give.

It was a book of puzzles and brain-teasers, the type of book that mixed up riddles with history, in the style of
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
. There was a page about the mystery of the Pyramids in Egypt, a page about Stonehenge, how to solve a Rubik’s cube, how to pick a lock. It was a book Erykah would have loved when she was ten. It was an odd gift for a teenager on her way to university.

Rainbow had been trying. She knew her daughter liked maths, even if she hadn’t paid much attention to what Erykah did at school for a long time. She had been hoping to make a belated connection, in her own way.

Maths was Erykah’s spiritual home. Numbers had always come easily enough, but the first time she sat in an algebra class, it was like someone was finally speaking her language, thinking the way she thought.

Maths up to that point had been like any other school subject – easy and not engaging. Multiplication tables and spelling tests both were simple feats of memorisation. She could conjugate French verbs without much thought, though no matter how much vocabulary she swallowed, the knack of conversation still eluded her. But algebra was different; a puzzle to be solved. There was a map of how to get from where you were to where you wanted to be, there were logical steps, and if you happened to follow the wrong path all you had to do was retrace your work to the point where you had made a mistake, and correct it. Proofs and solutions were patient, they would wait until she found them.

She was put in the top set, but her work soon went far past even that. On parent’s evening her mother had asked Mr Allinson whether he thought Erykah might go on to college. Rainbow was shocked when his reply was she would probably go on to get a Ph.D.

It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

‘And finally, an unidentified body was discovered in Scotland late last night on the Isle of Raasay, near Skye.’ The smooth voice of Diana Stuebner oozed from the radio speakers. ‘Sources close to the investi gation suggest the body was found inside a bag. Circumstances of the death have not yet been confirmed by Police Scotland, as the post-mortem examination is still pending. And now back to our next caller . . .’

For some reason now the book seemed like something Erykah couldn’t leave behind. She put it on top of her bag. A link to her old self, maybe? The person she had been before she met Rab and before she became . . . well, whatever it was she was now.

‘. . . Sarah from Islington, you’re on the Stuebner show.’

‘Erykah,’ said a voice behind her.

She jumped.

She hadn’t heard anyone come in the room. The radio must have covered the sound of the car in the drive, of the key in the lock, of the front door closing, of the footsteps on the stairs.

‘Rab,’ she said. Her husband’s features were arranged in a state of permanent exhaustion. Once almost handsome, now her husband most resembled a photocopy of a photocopy of a good-looking man. ‘You’re home early.’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘I have news.’ He glanced over the scene in the master bedroom, the open drawers with clothes pulled out, the bag on the bed.

Not good news, not bad news. Just news. ‘Oh?’ Erykah wasn’t in the mood for news. It wasn’t the way she had pictured this going.