Significance (57 page)

‘We will be the judges of what is important.'

‘Well, this wasn't really. It was just a poem. I've been working on it forever. It's just it was the last thing I remember, but that's meaningless because I've been worrying away at the damn thing every day since we got here. But it's ironic, which is why I laughed, because it's about nearly dying…' She paused, then added, ‘I'm sorry.'

Sabine wanted to say we know who he is, we have a suspect, we will find him, he will be punished. Sabine's own yearning for justice was acute, honed on years of policework, sharpened on those cases where the culprit was never found. ‘The man who did this…' she began, then casting her gaze about she happened to look up and saw Marilyn's husband's face behind the glass panel in the door. When she met his eyes she saw the vivid hatred still burning in them.

‘Well,' said Sabine, standing up and gathering her belongings. ‘Perhaps if you remember anything else you could write it down.' Her gaze dropped meaningfully to the black notebook.

But the woman had now also seen Scott in the doorway and she put the notebook to one side and shifted her position in the bed to raise herself up as much as she could.

He opened the door and swept into the room before Sabine had taken more than one step towards it. He did not look at her again, focusing all his attention on the woman in the bed whose green eyes, Sabine saw as she glanced back, were brimming with tears of happiness.

House of Cards

Florian can hardly bear to say what it is he has come to say. Suzette looks at him, waiting for his words. He doesn't look at her face.

‘What's wrong? What's wrong? Tell me what's wrong.'

He shakes his head, looking as if he might cry. Then in that way that men are more capable of than women he lets out an angry growl.

‘Florian.' She reaches for his shoulder, but resists touching him. She cannot read him, does not know what is wrong, what he wants, what she can do, or should do. She knows what she wants to do, what her impulse is, what her body wants. And that is to throw both her arms around him and hold him. Hold him, smell him, taste him, hear him, breathe in his breath, touch the back of his neck, his cheek with its rough pinpricks of hair – he needs to shave. All this is perhaps written on her face, concern, alarm and fear.

Which is why he cannot quite bring himself to look at her. The longer he takes to say what it is he has to say the more likely he is to weaken. So he blurts the words out.

‘I'm leaving.'

‘Florian?'

‘OK? I can't stay. I'm sorry. I love you. Can't stay.'

Staccato phrases. He's giving her a list of facts. It's a matter of simple mathematics. He might have told her this over the phone. Or avoided it entirely, said nothing, just disappeared, but he needed to see her. Not because that was the right thing to do when you dumped someone, but because he had to see her.

Perhaps he imagined that this last meeting with her could somehow be stored away and kept. Kept forever or kept until he no longer needed it? Or kept until it was worn thin and ragged. Ghost
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like and vague.

‘I'm sorry. I have to because…'

There he was with that list again

‘I'm coming with you.'

‘What?'

‘I'm coming with you.'

‘You can't.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because, your job, your apartment …'

‘My lousy waitressing job! My two and a bit rooms?'

‘You told me you loved it here, close to the sea, the estuary, the salt marsh…'

‘So? There're other places near the sea. It doesn't have to be this town, this few square metres on the coast. I want to be with you.'

His mathematical projections haven't figured in that equation. He's dumbstruck by its simplicity, its unfathomable beauty. Zero plus zero plus zero is a pointless exercise. While he absorbs this he is worryingly quiet.

Suzette reformulates her own calculations, not that she had much time to prepare. His zero plus zero plus zero was a sum she could only add herself to and perhaps she isn't wanted after all.

‘Unless,' she says.

‘Unless what?' he repeats.

She gives, then takes away. All his life this has happened to him. What impossible clause will she now add?

‘Unless what?' he repeats.

‘Unless you don't want me.'

Now they are packing their bags. Now he is buying a car. A battered old car that leaks oil and leaks water and has in the depths of its engine a knocking sound like the arrhythmic heart of a dying man. For three hundred Euros what did he expect?

Suzette puts the last week's rent in an envelope along with her keys and posts it through her landlord's door. Florian kisses his mother and tells her not to worry. He promises to ring.

They drive south. They have a small tent. Some money. Suzette's duvet in a bin bag. Clothes in suitcases. A plastic carrier bag with soap, shampoo, razors, deodorant, toothpaste, brushes, nail cutters, tweezers. A radio that eats batteries, a couple of torches, hers and a large one that's spattered with paint and oil, his. Along the way they will add to their belongings; a camping stove, a saucepan, knives, a tin opener and a cheap corkscrew that breaks the first time they use it. They hug the coast, here, dotted helpfully about, are the municipal campsites France is so famed for. Subsidised by the government, simple in their arrangements, but egalitarian in principle. One family may park up in their motor home, plug themselves into the electricity supply and spend their evenings watching T.V. while others put up their tent, spread a blanket on the ground, make a simple meal and in the dimming light watch only one another's faces. Or the stars.

They move through the country, the days pass. Soon it will be September and the campsites will all close and the weather will change.

Suzette and Florian have no regrets, but the money is running out.

They drive into a small town, following the signs which direct travellers to the campsite. Here on the edge of town is a church and before the church a larger
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than
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life crucifix. The figure of Christ has been cast from metal and painted white, but there is a crack in the figure's left shin that is barely visible until it reaches the top of his foot where the metal has rusted copiously, pouring out a dark red stain that has all the violence and vivid horror of blood. Stigmata. Or an accident of physics.

Suzette crosses herself. Florian does not see the statue, his eyes are on the road, he's tired and hungry and wants to get there, now, soon; not get lost which they have done more than once. Suzette crosses herself as she too does not want to get lost. As in lost in purgatory, for her sins are multiplying. Soon she will need to go to confession.

It's late when they arrive at the gates of the campsite. Once they are booked in, the caretaker of the site changes the sign to full. Suzette and Florian take this as a good omen. Someone is looking after them.

A group of men are playing boule on the green in the last of the light. Children's voices can be heard calling and echoing one another in some sing
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song game. People cross and recross the campsite carrying rolls of toilet paper or towels and washbags, some are in dressing gowns, some in shorts and t
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shirts. Others carry plastic bowls full of pots and pans to wash. One man has a large silver fish and an enamel plate and long thin
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bladed knife; he holds them all in his folded arms, almost defensively.

Suzette and Florian put up their tent, eat bread and cheese and apricots, then climb into the tent pulling the duvet in after them as if it were a recalcitrant and overgrown child. Or a cloud.

There is a slight chill in the air the following morning. The towels they had hung on a hedge the night before are damper now than they were yesterday.

‘Let's go for a walk,' Florian says.

Holding hands they leave the campsite and follow the signs to the beach. On a bulletin board near another church, Suzette sees a card that reads ‘Housekeeper/gardener wanted. Non
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residential. Couple preferred.'

‘We could do that,' she says.

‘Non
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residential,' Florian says. ‘No room at the Inn.'

‘We could get somewhere.'

They walk on, deep in shared thoughts. Neither needs to voice what is worrying them. They have reached the edge of the known land; beyond there are dragons.

The paved road ends and there is a path that winds down to the pebble beach. The tide is out and only a few souls are about so early. Walkers with dogs, one man up to his waist in the water with a triangular net, catching crevettes.

They walk under the cliffs, the rocks stirring and clacking beneath their feet. Florian stops and begins to search the stones as if he has lost something. Suzette does the same though she does not know what she is looking for.

‘Ha!' he says and stoops to pick up one roundish bit of rock about the size of an egg.

‘What is it?'

‘A fossil. A sea anemone.'

‘Really?'

She takes it from him, turns it over in her hand. It's the colour of slate, similar in shape to a doughnut peach, plump and round with an indentation at its centre, marked with white dots that run in clear lines that fan out like the petals of a flower.

While she studies it, Florian begins searching again. She cannot believe that he can possibly find another, as one is miracle enough, but soon he's found one more.

But two is enough. He straightens his back and looks up and around. They retrace their steps, walking slowly and thoughtfully, happy in the moment.

‘Look at that house,' he says and points up.

She sees the house high on the hill above the beach, its face turned to meet the sun. It's a beautiful house, the ground floor is white stone with a redbrick trim at its corners and around the downstairs windows and the front door. The upper half is a steeply pitched roof with three dormer windows at the front and two more at each side and at both ends tall red chimneys. All of the windows are shuttered.

‘It looks empty,' Suzette says.

‘Yeah. What a waste.'

‘But it's so beautiful.'

Later, having called about the housekeeping job and left a message, they dismantle the tent, pack everything in the car and drive back to the now deserted beach. They park a short distance away and, taking only a torch and a couple of useful tools, they make their way to the empty house. The only obstacles are a padlocked gate and a wire fence that is easily scaled. The gravel drive is overgrown with weeds.

‘Why would anyone abandon such a house?'

‘Someone grew old and died there. Maybe they had no one to leave it to. Or there's a dispute over the will.'

As the front door is sealed shut and visible from the road, they sneak around the back of the house which nestles against the hill and is shadowed by overgrown trees. Florian finds a window whose metal shutter has already been half
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prised open. With a crowbar from the car he manages to bend it back so that he creates enough space to crawl through.

‘Might have to smash the glass,' he says, but then with the merest tug he manages to open the window. ‘Not even locked.'

While Suzette holds the torch he climbs through. She hears the soles of his shoes slap the tiled floor as he jumps down.

‘Kitchen,' he says, then whistles in appraisal.

She follows, passing him the torch, then wriggling through and into his waiting arms.

‘Wow!'

The room is still furnished; there is a table and chairs, a dresser with some crockery, pots on the stove. In the next room there is not so much, brighter squares of wallpaper where pictures once were, a few worn
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looking cushions and a large and expensive looking Turkish rug that has been half rolled up as if someone suddenly changed their minds about the merits of taking it.

‘Let's get our stuff,' Florian says and for the next hour they go to and from the car, Suzette passing stuff up to Florian as he sits on top of the fence either dropping things onto the weeds below or climbing down to deposit them more safely.

They unfurl the carpet, throw a blanket, then a sheet, then a duvet on it and their bed for the night is made. They put their camping stove on top of the big stove in the kitchen.

They make love and talk about the onset of winter, of their good luck. The next day they wake to changed weather, a cold wind from the north and gathering clouds that threaten rain.

They explore the rest of the house, the creaking wooden stairs, the pink bathroom, the three bedrooms, one of them equipped with a narrow single bed, another with a double bed frame but no mattress. Upstairs the smell is dry and dusty like chalk and wood dust and talcum powder mixed together.