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She turned on the radio for a further boost but the nimble-fingered riff of Dire Straits’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ conjured a heart-tugging combination of jauntiness and despair. She turned the dial blindly, desperate for another song, one she hadn’t listened to endlessly as part of the compilation tape Bounce Back that she’d made around the time of Rob and Sally’s wedding. As she flicked between stations, she laughed at her misplaced fury with the station programmers. They hadn’t chosen to mock her with their selections. There was no conspiracy: this was the Island getting on top of her.
As the road rose she found a French station, which was accessible from various points on the Island. The song that was playing was the one she had chosen as the climax of that tape, a song as high in the air as ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was down on the floor.
Baby look at me,
And tell me what you see,
You ain’t seen the best of me yet,
Give me time I’ll make you forget the rest.
For some reason it unlocked within her a deep-hidden joy. She slapped up the volume and jigged in her seat, beeping her horn in time with the music, partly out of the need to warn any oncoming drivers of her presence as she rounded fern-laden corners, and partly out of an unexpected frenzy of optimism that could not be held back. As she sang along, ‘Fame! I’m going to live for ever’, she started to believe it, only a kernel of her feeling ridiculous, but that was part of her revelry: the ridiculous was far more fun than moroseness. Rob was just something she was working out of her system. She’d needed to go back to him to grasp that she didn’t really want him. Their affair was benign, a boon to her marriage as it would help her see the good in the husband with whom she lived on a beautiful island. She would not be drowned by the past. She would spring on top of it, laughing as it drained away. She stopped the car, her elation snatched away, as if a magician had pulled off a tablecloth leaving everything on it in its place.
She had driven this lane before. She must have. There in front of her was the farmhouse that Rob and Sally were having renovated. The same farmhouse that Rob had promised her when she was seventeen. Sally had taken her round the empty shell at a celebration barbecue following the successful purchase, pleading with Rob to replace an oak on the front lawn with a circular drive and a fountain, and expounding on the dilemma of deciding between a swimming-pool or a tennis court or both, but then having a limited garden space. Emma had been inclined to make sure she was not around for the work’s completion.
Builders were plodding around the house now: it was coming together. Emma leant her head against the car window, crushed by the epiphany that it wasn’t just the ghosts of the past that she had to wrestle and evade but the ghosts of the future. She could fool herself no longer. She had to leave, this time for good.
As she trudged up the stairs to the flat, with nothing to look forward to except sitting in the tainted glare of framed wedding photos, wondering if she’d ever smile like that again, Mrs Le Boutillier’s door opened. Emma’s mood deflated further.
‘Hello, Mrs Bygate, not at work today?’
‘No.’
‘Have you got that bug that’s going round?’
‘I think I probably have, so best keep back. I don’t want to give it to you.’
‘Very thoughtful of you – got to be careful at my age.’
Emma turned to put her key in the lock.
‘Oh, silly me, I’ve got this for you – you must have just missed him,’ Mrs Le Boutillier went on.
‘Colin?’ replied Emma, confused.
‘No, the boy. He had a letter for your husband. I said I’d make sure he got it. Things get awfully messed up in the pigeon-holes. Not everyone in this block takes as much care as I do, making sure the right letters go in the right places.’ She held up an envelope with ‘Mr Bygate’ handwritten in the centre.
‘Right, thanks.’ Emma tried not to sigh, but was weighed down by yet further proof that any interaction with her neighbour took at least five times longer than she might have predicted.
‘He was ever so helpful. I’d just got back from the market and he helped me in with my trolley. I offered him a cup of tea to say thank you but he said he was in a rush. Maybe I put him off, talking too much. That’s the thing when you live alone. If you get the chance to talk you probably do it too much …’
‘Right. I’ll make sure Colin gets it. Did he say who he was?’
‘He said he was a pupil.’
‘He should be at school then.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. I get so confused by what holidays they have, these days. Not like in my day …’
‘Wonder how he knew our address.’
‘Well, it’s an odd name. Only one in the phone book.’
‘I suppose. Thanks again.’
‘Let me know if you’re feeling up to a cup of tea later. I bought some currant buns at the market that need eating up …’
Emma had shut the door.
4
LOUISE
Saturday, 10 October 1987
The first coffee had pierced the fug of her hangover. The second had helped her assemble the jumbled pieces of the previous night. The third unbuttoned the Scouse lip that Louise O’Rourke had used sparingly since she’d come to the Island.
She had held back yesterday morning when she’d been fired from the Bretagne halfway through her first day. Initially this was because she was reeling from the shock. She had just about got used to the fact of having landed a job at one of the Island’s top hotels, the first rung on a ladder that would take her to higher levels previously denied. For a moment she had thought she was about to cause a monumental scene, but as she processed what was happening she decided on a cannier move.
Though she knew him by name and reputation, she had not met Rob de la Haye before she started working on the front desk of his hotel. She’d caught his eye as he walked up the main staircase that Friday morning, but she had recognised him as Doug, the yacht salesman, ‘in the Island for one night only’, who had bedded her at the end of a day’s carousing at the Bouley Bay Hill Climb in July, an annual event in which bikes and cars took turns to roar up the tree-fringed bends from the harbour to the top of the bluffs.
She hadn’t been sure it was the same man so once she’d finished dealing with a guest she had checked the register for anyone staying named Doug or Douglas. There was none. Later that morning the inscrutable Christophe had taken her into his manager’s office and told her that, due to circumstances beyond his control, he would have to ask her to leave. He offered her three months’ wages, a glowing reference and a hint to refrain from pursuing the matter, which she declined to take.
‘Shame. I never even got to meet Mr de la Haye. Or his wife.’ She still wasn’t sure whether Rob was the man she had slept with.
‘I could make it six months’ wages, if your need to meet Mr de la Haye or his wife were to disperse.’ That was all the confirmation she needed.
She’d taken the money, met some friends at lunchtime, told them she’d jacked in her job after a modest win on the local lottery that would see her right for a while, and drunk the day away. Her friend Danny had joined her for last orders once he’d finished his kitchen shift and they’d sat on the walkway that led out to the Victorian tidal bathing pool at Havre des Pas. It was opposite the café outside which she now sat, insulated from the fresh October air by her body-warmer, and a stagger away from the bedsit where she’d been woken by sunlight streaming through the dip in the sheet that hung as a makeshift curtain. It hadn’t helped her mood to find Danny on the floor; that meant they’d started off sharing the bed platonically, then he’d either mentioned the L-word or had started grinding against her with an erection while they were spooning. Either way, she’d literally kicked him out of bed. He had a characteristic that marked him out from other men she had known, which drew her to him as a friend but repelled her as a lover: dependability. She’d enjoyed sleeping with him initially, but she was not conditioned to be attracted to men who posed no challenge, so had made it clear some months ago that they were to proceed as friends. He’d protested but they had stuck to it without any tension, except on those odd occasions when Louise had been drunk on the wrong side of the Island at midnight without a taxi fare and they’d ended up sharing a bed. Her girlfriends had taken to referring to him as ‘Danny Doormat’, which she resented. If he chose to put her on a pedestal and make an unasked-for pledge of romantic servitude, that was his look-out. She’d made clear to him where they stood.
The café was starting to fill for lunch. A family of four stood on the pavement, the parents eyeing the menu with distaste.
‘It’s a rip-off place for visitors. I mean, look at the people,’ muttered the father, in peach-coloured linen trousers and boat shoes. Louise looked around at the out-of-season tourists. They were her kind of people: Mancs, Scousers, Scots, working-class families in search of a bit of sun in a place where you could order a decent cup of tea in your own language.
‘Oh, please, I’m starving,’ moaned the elder son, lanky for his age.
‘You said it was our choice, Dad, and this looks fine,’ put in the daughter.
‘There’s no room anyway,’ said the mum, whose taut features were mostly hidden behind a pair of outsize sunglasses.
‘I’m going if you’re looking for a table,’ piped up Louise, broadening her accent to intensify the awkwardness.
‘Oh, no, we’re fine, actually,’ replied the dad. ‘We’re running late for a thing anyway …’
‘They serve really quick,’ said Louise, getting up. ‘Hey, Mick, I’m leaving two quid for the coffees. This lovely family needs to eat and go!’ A waiter in his fifties with smeared tattoos on his forearms and a beer belly like a balloon came straight over with menus and ushered the family, who were divided between relief and annoyance, to their seats.
‘I recommend the chip butty,’ Louise added perkily, as she passed the mum, who looked the type to wonder why ten minutes a week in front of the calisthenics video didn’t shift the pounds accrued at aimless social teas.
She crossed the road and stood at the railing, looking down at the beach. The dark blue water was smooth and gelatinous. She inhaled deeply. She loved the saline scent that permeated the perimeter of the Island. Very different from the stench of the diesel-skimmed brown water that lay in the port of her home city. The sound of the wash was calm and hypnotic. It wasn’t the kind of tide that felt like it was trying to take the Island, unlike the late-autumn swells that beat over the edge of the sea walls. It was nuzzling the sand about twenty feet down from where the high tide had left a rim of seaweed. She looked at her watch. Midday. Twelve hours earlier she and Danny had bought a bottle of whisky from behind the bar and sat on the walkway staring down at the reflections of the coloured bulbs strung above that glinted in the roll of the black water. She had found herself admitting to him that she had been sacked. She regretted telling him the specifics: mention of her sleeping with another man reinforced the boundaries of their relationship, but he spiralled into a monosyllabic gloom of hurt. She remembered ignoring this and declaring that Rob de la Haye would regret the fucking day he’d crossed her.
A toddler punctured her reverie by bursting into tears as a seagull attempted to mug him for his doughnut. She remembered crying last night. Fuck. Danny was so loyal to her, carrying a torch that might have been mistaken for a lighthouse, that she tended to steel herself against the revelation of any vulnerability, but last night she had broken down, and he had put his arm round her. A pass dressed up as gallantry. He had made her a promise. She had talked about packing up and going home. The best a Mainlander like her could hope for was to serve at top table: she was never going to get a seat at it.
‘Get your own place then, like you wanted,’ Danny had slurred. When they first met, at the St Aubin hotel where she’d started as a cleaner, she’d talked of her grand plan to buy a little hotel or B-and-B and build up a business. Her fellow expats were happy to use the Island as a source of casual labour and casual sex, but not her. She didn’t like the way its people looked down their noses at her. Forty-three years ago and seventy-one miles away her granddad had run up Normandy’s Gold Beach into the jaws of death while these petty Islanders were waiting out the war with nothing more to complain about than a shortage of sugar.
‘I’m not allowed to fucking buy here, Danny,’ she’d spat back. Her grand plan had been shattered: without local housing qualifications she wasn’t eligible to buy any property, commercial or private, until she had rented for twenty years. ‘I can’t wait till I’m forty-two.’
‘Use my quallies then.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’ll do it together. You find the money, I’ll buy it for you.’
‘Buy what, though?’
‘The Crow’s Nest is for sale.’
‘How much?’
‘Sixty.’
‘So I’d need a six-grand deposit. Plus another four or so for the refurb. That place hasn’t been touched since the seventies. Anyway, that would make you my boss. I don’t think either of us could handle that.’
‘We’d be partners. Mine on paper only. I run the restaurant, you do the rest. And we split any sale fifty-fifty.’
‘Oh, Christ, Danny. This is some weird future fantasy you’ve worked out. How many times? I don’t need you to save me.’
‘I’m looking at it as a business proposition. You’re bright, Lou, brighter than me. And tougher. I don’t want to spend my life chopping carrots and reheating shepherd’s pies so some hotelier can own three cars and a pool, but that’s all I’ve got ahead of me. You can pull me out too.’
‘Pull you out of what? You’re Jersey born and bred. You’re fine.’
‘We’re not all fucking millionaires and tax exiles. Some of us work bloody hard, same as your lot.’
‘Do not compare yourself to my lot. My lot have been shat on. How many of your school-friends have been stabbed or banged up?’
She started to feel hungry so opened her purse to check how much cash she had left. She found two pounds and a scrap of paper scrawled with Le Petit Palais, La Rue de Grassière, Trinity. Rob’s home address. She had surreptitiously obtained it from the office before she left the Bretagne. She hadn’t known why. A vicious letter to his duped wife? An anonymous threat? A dog turd in a box? She looked back at the café where the parents of the local family were wolfing their food, the wife clutching her handbag on her lap rather than risk putting it on the floor against her chair. What did she expect would happen? That it would be hooked and tossed into the throng of the great unwashed who would close ranks like a League of Thieves from a nineteenth-century romance? This Island had branded her since she had first touched down, a two-star accent in a five-star town: Scousers were thieves, untrustworthy. Very well, if that’s what the Island wanted, maybe that’s what the Island should get.
She strode back to her bedsit and used the communal phone in the hall to dial a cab, then went back to her room and took a tenner from Danny’s wallet, leaving him an IOU and a promise to be in touch in the week.
On the way into the belly of the Island, sunbeams darted through the spindly branches of the wind-stripped trees, adding to her headache. She shifted to the other side of the car and wound down the window to let the cool breeze enliven and narrow her sense of purpose. This had the bonus of drowning out the insinuations of the prying local driver.
‘Friend’s house?’
‘Yeah, going for lunch.’
‘Nice houses round there.’
She wanted to say, ‘Keep the car running while I rob them,’ but settled for ‘Hm.’
The houses on the hawthorn-edged lane began to thin out and swell. As, she imagined, did the hair and girth of the male owners, fattened by the confluence of middle age and wealth. The waists of their wives would slim with the need to retain the attention and resources of the tailored sloths.
‘Just pull up here,’ she said. She paid and got out in the road.
The white house looked big but, then, anywhere looked big compared to the council flat in which she’d grown up. It had had two windows: the front and the back. This house had twelve on the front, all with wooden shutters painted gold to match the fake Victorian gas lamps that lined the snaking drive at intervals too close for the desired effect to work.
A metallic green Renault 5 approached, its indicator flashing to turn in, so she continued walking towards the next house to muster her courage. After it had pulled into Rob’s drive, she snuck back to see who it was. She knew who it wasn’t: there was no way that the man she had fucked would drive a car like that.
She peeked round the trunk of a beech tree that stood at the edge of the front garden and saw a rowing couple get out of the now parked car. The woman was attractive, in spite of her frown, which looked to Louise as though it had become the default setting for her face. Their raised voices drifted over.
‘I can’t believe you only mention this now. Where’s the letter?’
‘Back at the flat.’
‘And he said he was a pupil? I’ve got to go back now.’
‘You can read it later. This is embarrassing.’
‘No – I’ve got to go now. I’m sorry … I’ll come straight back – we’re just down the road.’
‘Fucking hell, Colin, why does everyone have to come before me? Fine, piss off. And don’t bother coming back. I’ll get a taxi.’
‘I’ll be back …’
As he jumped back into the car and began to reverse clumsily at speed, Louise ran forward to hide behind one of the large bushes that pocked the garden. He headed out of the drive and back the way he had come, while she spied on the woman she supposed was Colin’s girlfriend or wife. She watched her collect herself, then ring the bell. The door was opened by a blonde woman in a Breton top and white jeans with a gold chain-link belt. She was pretty, but the kind of pretty you could buy. Rob hovered in the background. Louise bristled at the sound of indiscriminate shrieking. She knew their sort: they were finicky orderers and bad tippers. As the door with its large fish knocker shut behind them, she thought of how people like that didn’t know they were fucking born. She’d love to choke the forced shriek in that stupid bitch’s throat and give her a real howl of pain.
She collected herself. The wife wasn’t the enemy. Rob was. She pitied the poor cow. She looked at the cars parked in front of the house and in the open garage. A Porsche, a small jeep, some kind of classic car, an old soft-top VW Beetle and a sporty yellow cabriolet. More cars than her dad had owned in his life.
The phone was ringing as she eventually approached the house. She heard Rob yell that he’d get it and caught a glimpse of him through the glass panels at either side of the door that looked on to the front hall, which was bigger than her living quarters. It sported an oak sideboard the size of her bed, on which sat a large pink conch shell, a piece of white coral and a golden bowl overflowing with sunhats and sunglasses. He had picked up the phone and had his back to her.
‘Hi … Oh, hi, you going to be joining us eventually? … Sure, I’ll get her.’ He held the receiver away. ‘Emma, Colin for you!’
As Emma approached, her view of Louise blocked by Rob, he pointed at the phone with his spare hand, motioned ‘ssh’, then opened his arm for an embrace. Emma allowed him to kiss her, while Colin waited at the other end of the line. Louise stood still and smiled: this prick couldn’t be asking for it more if he tried. As Rob moved aside and Emma took the call, she spotted Louise and pointed, then turned her back, terror in her eyes.
‘Hi … I put it on the coffee table … Well, you must have moved it without knowing what it was …’
Rob caught sight of Louise and his jaw dropped, as if he’d just been told he had thirty seconds to live. She moved in front of the door, which he opened, then stepped through, shutting it behind him.
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