The Disappearance of Emily Marr (21 page)

The hard bit, it would turn out, was not the muscular exhaustion that followed accelerated and intensive cleaning – adrenalin and lust counteracted that well enough and she had all evening to rest, in any case – but the discipline required to limit herself to a single hour before kicking him out.

‘I have no hurry,’ he told her, naked and relaxed on the bed as she began to dress.

‘No, but I do. I’m
working
here, Grégoire. You’re my lunch break.’

‘I’ll watch you finish your work,’ he proposed.

‘I think you should go home,’ she told him. ‘Aren’t you worried your wife will be wondering where you are?’

‘She has not any consequence where I am.’

‘That makes no sense.’

‘Then we must speak French if you want to have sense,’ he said playfully.

‘I don’t have
time
to speak French.’

A reluctance to leave on his part had not been scheduled for. She had expected (and would have preferred in the circumstances) an adulterer who had his clothes on and was out of the door within ten minutes of ejaculation. She did not ask what his alibi was – he would only deny he had need of one, peddle his nonsense about separating from his wife – but supposed it must have been easily enough concocted. This is surreal, she thought, hearing the washer-dryer enter its spin cycle downstairs and wondering how easy it was going to be to smuggle back home the used sheet Grégoire was sprawled upon and get it in and out of Emmie’s washing machine without detection (very easy, she decided; if not at her beloved laptop, then Emmie was more often than not absorbed in a book or her own thoughts). She would have thought he’d be more aware of the risk of this situation – unless, of course, it was the risk that aroused him in the first place.

‘You might be able to delude yourself, but you don’t delude me,’ she told him as he at last prepared to leave.

‘Yes, Tabitha,’ he said, sly, satisfied, happy now to joke. ‘You know me so very well.’

She wished she had thought to use a false name with him, allowed herself to escape Tabby Dewhurst and be someone else completely.

At home, she dealt with the bedsheet and switched the kettle on, still on her feet but already anticipating the sweetness of the forthcoming collapse. Four hours of cleaning condensed into three, one hour of sex, thirty minutes of walking, and dinner still to cook: just as she’d told Moira, she had a lot of energy.

Judging by the sound of running water from above, Emmie was taking a bath. She had her own regular Saturday changeovers, two fishermen’s cottages on the same street in La Flotte, which with a little ingenuity could just about be squeezed into the standard eleven-to-three slot. Tabby was not sure she would like to try such a feat.

There would be, of course, no drinks in the port tonight. It had come as no surprise that Emmie had not cared to discuss the incident of the previous Saturday. The following afternoon, Tabby had asked, ‘Did something upset you last night?’ and Emmie had replied, ‘No, I’m fine’ in a bright and determined tone. She’d been dressed in her usual casual clothes, all trace of the previous night’s make-up removed. Later, Tabby came across the cigarettes in one of the kitchen drawers, the pack missing just the one she had watched Emmie smoke.

It was a mystery – but she was getting used to that.

All at once the lights went out and the noise of the kettle faded. She had been alarmed when this had first happened, but was used to it now. The kettle used enough power to trip the electrics, their budget tariff giving only a limited supply. ‘Just wait till winter,’ Emmie had told her. ‘Apparently you can have hot water or the radiator, but not both at once.’

It had touched Tabby that she believed they’d still both be here, living together, months from now. She, for one, expected to be gone by autumn time. When high season ended and the work dried up, she’d be on her way. She couldn’t afford to live in an expensive part of France without a regular income. As for Emmie, she gave no impression of planning a departure, presumably aiming to stay in the house until such time as its owners chose to reclaim it. Renovations were planned for the following new year, they’d told her; until then, she needed give only a week’s notice.

Throwing the main switch by the front door, Tabby turned off the lights to finish boiling the kettle and then reinstated them once her tea was made. Standing idly with her mug in hand, she noticed in the centre of the kitchen table a plastic purple file that she’d never seen before and that presumably belonged to Emmie. It was the kind with loops of elastic to keep its covers closed, perhaps Emmie’s equivalent of her own zipped wallet in which she stored her passport and the old travel documents and tickets that amounted to souvenirs of her trip.

Her eye was caught by the dark, shiny corner of a photograph sticking out of the top and she reached out a hand to tuck it back in. At the moment of contact, however, she changed her mind, pinched the corner and began to ease it outwards.

She disappointed herself even as she brought index finger and thumb together. This was the problem with her job, she thought: it made access to other people’s possessions an everyday occurrence, it blurred the line between respect and disrespect until the two were no more than a casual step apart – one that, crucially, only you knew you had taken. What was that famous philosophical question Paul had told her about once? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make any sound? Something like that. And in any case, if people
would
keep taping up signs saying ‘
Privé
’ and yet not use a lock and key – well, it only made the temptation to pry greater and that was not philosophy but human nature. (She was aware only very dimly that she had a tendency to blame her transgressions on human frailty in general rather than any character flaw of her own.)

Having worked the photograph free, she held it under the light. It was a picture of a couple, a man of about thirty, eyes narrowed at the camera, cigarette between his lips, and a young blond woman whose face was averted from both him and the camera. Judging by their smart dress and the flower arrangements in the background, Tabby judged it to be a reportage-style wedding shot. She would not immediately have known the woman was Emmie had it not been for the dress being the very one she’d worn last weekend, and the similar heavy style of eye make-up. The girl in the photo was rather younger and slenderer, captured in sudden motion as she turned, tresses of hair obscuring the lower part of her face. Her hair was shoulder-length and pale blond, almost platinum-blond, and curled in the 1950s way of Grace Kelly or Lauren Bacall or one of those old movie stars. Tabby peered more closely, admiring the elegance of the dress on Emmie’s leaner frame. It fitted her better here,
suited
her better.

‘Hard to believe it’s me, eh?’

She started at the sound of Emmie’s voice at the foot of the stairs, giving a little gasp and flushing deeply. She had not heard her footsteps on the stairs, supposed the failure of power must have interrupted her bath. ‘Sorry about the lights,’ Tabby said helplessly. ‘I hope you don’t mind…’ She held out the photo for Emmie to take. ‘I didn’t mean to be nosy. It was sticking out of the folder and I couldn’t help recognising the dress from last week…’

It was an obvious lie, but Emmie did not challenge her, taking the picture from her but staying close to Tabby so they could both study it. She marvelled at her own image.

‘You look very different,’ Tabby said, unnecessarily. ‘Your hair’s so blond.’

‘Yes. I needed a total change of style.’

Tabby wasn’t sure if she meant before or after the photo was taken; certainly there’d been a drastic rethink since, for there was no doubt that the current Emmie was far drabber than this glamorous creature and had gained a fair amount of weight. Then Tabby noticed another detail: in the picture, Emmie held a cigarette at hip height – the camera had caught a curl of smoke from its end – and she recalled how Emmie had hardly been out two minutes before she’d wanted to run off and buy cigarettes. They said reformed smokers were more likely to relapse in the company of old smoking buddies; perhaps clothes could have a similar effect? Had she and Emmie not fallen into that silly argument about the men at the next table, what other old habits might she have revived? What confidences might she have been persuaded to share?

There was a pause and then Emmie said, ‘I know, I know…’ and the pleasure in her voice made Tabby turn in surprise to her. Sometimes Emmie seemed to have the ability to read her mind: she’d give an answer to a comment Tabby had only thought, and then they’d continue without needing to mention the fact. But this time Emmie had pre-empted wrongly: she wore exactly the expression of someone who’d just been paid a delightful compliment and was modestly deflecting it.

‘You look fantastic when you dress up,’ Tabby said belatedly. ‘Really glamorous. Like I say, I’m not sure I would have recognised you if it weren’t for the dress. Who took the picture? Are you at a wedding or something? Is that an old boyfriend you’re with?’ As an attempt to get Emmie to tell her more about her failed love affair, the ‘badness’ that had ended it, it was a typically unsuccessful one and Emmie merely sighed, slipping the photograph back into the folder and taking it with her towards the stairs.

‘Sorry,’ Tabby said to her receding figure. ‘I know I said I wouldn’t ask.’

When Emmie came back down later and the two ate supper together, there was something subtly different about her, a difference that became more defined as the evening wore on: self-importance, perhaps even vanity. Tabby could be wrong, of course – Lord knew she was not the best judge of character – but she thought she detected in Emmie’s eyes the faint, counterintuitive sense that she was, for the first time, enjoying Tabby’s curiosity.

Such was the power of this instinct that Tabby began to convince herself that Emmie had left the photograph lying around deliberately and that the reason for this was in some way connected with Tabby’s liaison with Grégoire that afternoon. It was as if she needed to let Tabby know that she had once been the attractive one, the one propositioned in shops and bedded in secret assignations.

But that made no sense at all. It had to be guilt giving her strange ideas. For fear of provoking disapproval, she had not told Emmie about meeting Grégoire again and she could think of no other way of her knowing. Yes, Tabby had borrowed her phone to text him, but she had deleted the message just as soon as she’d sent it, and in any case it had contained only the address of the house on rue du Rempart and the time that he should come. Emmie was not a witch or a clairvoyant. Additionally, she had not left the photograph lying face-up; Tabby had pulled it from the folder and in doing so had invaded Emmie’s closely guarded privacy, just as she had the night they’d met.

Something
had
shifted in Emmie this evening, though. However quick she had been to shut down interrogation, however able she was to compartmentalise those experiences that had led her to leave England (if nothing else, the photograph showed that at some point since she had radically altered her appearance, and everyone knew that people did that when they’d suffered some kind of trauma), that sigh of hers had been the sigh of a person accustomed to inspiring intrigue.

A person who did not wish to go on resisting other people’s questions for ever.

Chapter 12

Emily

I was intensely curious about Arthur’s house. It was on the uphill part of the Grove, the ‘right’ end (though there was hardly a wrong one), one of a row built for a better class of Georgian than the rest and now inhabited by a better class of Elizabethan. Having adjusted my route to work to pass it every day, I would steal long looks through the ground-floor windows, though there was disappointingly little to be glimpsed and nothing that ever altered. You could see a portion of book-lined wall, a standard feature on the street, a corner of a high-backed chestnut leather chair, and the pale stiff shade of a standard lamp. The curtains were of some dark, heavy fabric and possibly silk-lined – in any case, they were rarely pulled shut; the tops of a pair of blinds were also just visible. Arthur told me this room was his study, the kitchen and family room being, like the Laings’, below, and the whole of the first floor – with a trio of tall polished windows and vivid flowerboxes at the front – used as a formal sitting room. The bedrooms and bathrooms were on the two floors above, while in the garden was Sylvie’s studio (she made hand-decorated greetings cards, I had learned, and sold them at craft fairs and school fundraisers).

I should say here that I never once aspired to taking possession of this house, of kicking Sylvie out of her side of the marital bed and installing myself in her place – that would have been unthinkable on every level. I may have signed that rental lease for 199 with naïve dreams of sharing the grand and romantic identity of the street, but I was an outsider here, even in my own flat. In any case, the deeper my love for Arthur grew, the less I cared about either my neighbourhood or my status within it. When I imagined us in our new life, it was in a small cottage outside the city, with stone walls, square windows, a spray of wisteria, the classic childhood home I had always dreamed of.

Of course, my enemies would argue that I thought in these terms because Arthur was a father figure to me, as if there is something evil or perverse in that. But why should there be? Why should a lover not also be caring and protective? Do young women really want what I had with Matt, the initial thrill of the chase replaced all too soon by a casual neutrality whereby he called me ‘mate’ and prided himself on evading any ‘traps’ I might set for him? Was it really such a surprise that I responded to being treasured and adored by someone older?

‘
Please
can I see your house,’ I’d say to Arthur. ‘When she’s out for the day or down in Sussex. Just a five-minute tour. It’s hard to know someone properly without seeing where he lives.’