The Disappearance of Emily Marr (9 page)

What had Emmie said about forgetting traumas? Well, this would be the perfect place to forget her own – or to try to, at any rate.

She’d insisted on having them laid bare, her faults – or rather the single consuming fault of her being Tabby Dewhurst. ‘Too much in what way?’ she asked him, and she had to squint into the brightness, close her ears to the street. Varanasi: it was an epic, intense backdrop, though she was not sure anywhere would have suited humiliation of this sort.

‘Too needy,’ Paul said. ‘Too clingy. Too serious. You want me to be everyone.’

She was indignant, already desperate. ‘No, I don’t. Who? Who do I want you to be?’

‘Friend, counsellor, family.’ He took a breath then, deciding whether or not to continue. But you had nothing to lose when you’d already decided to rid yourself of everything and so he
did
go on: ‘I’m sorry your father died, but I can’t be him as well as everything else. I’m sorry you don’t speak to your mother, but I can’t be her, either. The friends who’ve let you down or you say don’t listen to you, I can’t be all of them. Especially not here. I’m not some kind of travelling therapist. I’m not any kind of therapist!’

She listened, aghast. It was true that he had been far more than a partner to her in the four years of their relationship; he’d been a saviour, a crutch. She couldn’t have survived her father’s death without him; she couldn’t have come to terms with estrangement from her mother; she couldn’t have filled all the holes.

‘But that’s what boyfriends are supposed to be,’ she said, ‘and girlfriends. They give each other whatever is needed.’

‘Not all the time,’ he said, ‘and not to the point where they want to stand in the street and scream.’

He wanted to scream.

Tabby began to tremble. ‘I’m no different from how I’ve always been, Paul.’ But straight away she saw she’d hanged herself with that, she’d made his argument for him. The unbearable neediness of her was cumulative.

And there was worse to come, before he walked away, before he left her swinging.

‘I’ve tried to tell you before,’ he said, ‘but you never get the message.’

That choked her badly, made the single syllable hard to mouth: ‘When?’

‘Like before we left England, for one.’ His hands gestured with frustration. ‘That would have been…’

He did not finish the sentence, but she heard it anyhow: it would have been better, cleaner; he’d wanted to travel alone. Or he had wanted to go
in order
to bring an end to them, it had been the only way he could see to loosen her suffocating hold. The man she loved had been prepared to leave the country to shake her from him and not only had she not recognised this but she had insisted on going with him! She’d had no idea she was sharing a mission to escape herself.

‘You
never
said you wanted to break up,’ she protested. ‘Why didn’t you spell it out? I can’t read your mind.’

This time his expression answered for him: pity and fear. Pity that she had no one else, fear that when she fell apart he’d be too far away to do anything about it. The pity remained, but the fear had been overcome.

‘This trip was what I needed,’ she said, with a conviction she could not feel. ‘I’m over all of that now. I’m over the past.’

‘So am I,’ he said.

Later she would understand that he had been the only one speaking the truth in that conversation. But this was not the sort of realisation you made on the spot, in the moment, when despairing eyes and helpless hands distracted you, when inflating lungs and deflating hearts competed with words and won.

As it went, Moira found work for her just two days later. Another of her cleaners, a local girl called Sophy who lived in the southern village of Sainte-Marie, had fallen sick and there were four remaining weekly clients to be covered: could Tabby step in? The thrilling – and unfamiliar – sense that she had found herself in the right place at the right time deepened.

As promised, Moira instructed her at the first appointment. It was straightforward enough work, pretty much what she had done unpaid while living with Paul, what most women did but faster, and she worked ceaselessly to impress her new employer, the muscles in her arms hot and aching by the end of the three-hour shift.

‘Very good,’ Moira said on inspection, and paid her cash. Folding the notes in her hand caused a surge of tears to her eyes: she felt relief and gratitude and something close to a renewal of faith.

Now trusted to work alone, she set about her tasks with exactly the same vigour as the trial session, mopping tiles and vacuuming rugs and scrubbing toilets as if her life depended on it – because it did. In those first houses in La Flotte and Saint-Martin, empty of occupants during her working hours, she hardly took a break at all, much less thought to indulge her natural preference to lie on the most comfortable bed in the house and fantasise that she was the owner.

She had been in very few private homes in the last seven months and there was much to satisfy her curiosity. The houses were French-owned, either weekend homes or occupied full-time, and she enjoyed seeing the unfamiliar furniture styles and bathroom fittings, even the French cleaning products. Hers was an imagination easily sparked, and the smallest personal clue – a family photograph, a sports trophy, an old Larousse with an inscription on the flyleaf – was enough to set her off, picturing these people in their daily lives, devising lifestyles for them, inventing little histories that couldn’t possibly be true but that made the hours sprint by.

By the third house she was already slipping open the bedside drawers and bathroom cabinets, casually auditing the items her clients kept private, the books and trinkets and contraceptives, in one case a padlocked teenager’s journal. She was scanning the tops of wardrobes and poking into the backs of deep shelves with the thoroughness of a participant in a treasure hunt, but there was nothing to find of course, at least nothing exotic, only an out-of-date soup mix or a pair of scratched swimming goggles. The faint suspicion that her interest might be in some way perverse was easily eclipsed by the conviction that she was dedicating herself to the service of cleanliness and order.

The fourth place was a holiday unit that was let all year round and bereft of all personal clues – a sniffer dog would be in and out in two minutes – and this, she knew, was typical of what she could expect of all her jobs when the summer season began. A locked cabinet held what must be the only private items, otherwise it was a case of removable sofa covers, stacks of IKEA basics in the kitchen dresser, cupboards absent of any surprises. She’d been advised by Moira to throw away opened kitchen products in the holiday lets, and Emmie had said it was permitted for the cleaners to take them instead for themselves if they wanted, but the shelves in this one were empty, waiting to be filled by the next set of arrivals. Only in the last ten minutes did she find an abandoned item, a three-pack of apple juices – the branding was Sainsbury’s, she supposed a British family must have stayed here last – but since the pack was intact she followed the rules and replaced it on the scrubbed cupboard shelf.

Five minutes later, preparing to leave, she found herself in a peculiarly nervous state of mind: it seemed that the unremarkable discovery had disturbed an emotion, a memory of her father she had kept tightly folded these last years, as she had so many concerning him from the period following his divorce from her mother. A triple pack of apple juices, little green boxes with straws, the kind you gave to kids in their packed lunch: something
this
innocuous was reviving a vignette that encapsulated much of her feelings during her teenage years, feelings of isolation and failure, intense ones. Locking up and beginning the walk back to Saint-Martin, she pictured herself as a sixteen-year-old, the day she’d arrived at her father’s house having argued with her mother about her stepfather Steve.

‘Tabitha. We weren’t expecting to see you today.’ Her father’s wife Susie had answered the door, her welcome just a grade warmer than if it had been the gas man come to read the meter in the middle of dinner. She wavered visibly between asking Tabby to come back at a more convenient time and just letting her in and telling her to make it snappy. Her eyes dipped to the bulging canvas bag her stepdaughter carried, but she made no comment.

‘Come on in. Mike’s in the garden with the girls.’ She never said ‘your father’, always ‘Mike’. It wasn’t a conscious strategy, Tabby noticed – and in fact it had an inclusive quality, a suggestion that she was one of the adults now – but it was consistent, she never slipped.

In fact her father was just coming indoors himself. He must have been playing some particularly energetic game because he was breathing heavily and looked hot in the face. He was overweight these days, well fed by his new wife. Close behind him, Susie’s two girls appeared from the kitchen, tearing the plastic off a pack of juices and needing their stepfather’s help to extract the cartons. They called him Dad now, no Mike for them. He took the third one for himself and was just putting the straw to his lips when he noticed her.

‘Hello, love! When did you get here?’

‘Just this second.’ She wanted to hug her father, but did not. Shows of affection felt awkward now and were easier avoided. ‘Hi, girls, have you had a nice game? What were you playing?’

‘Football,’ her father replied on behalf of the two small girls, who were sucking their drinks in that dramatic way small kids did, as if on the brink of acute dehydration.

‘Would you like one of these?’ he asked her.

‘I think we’ve run out,’ Susie said.

‘That’s OK,’ Tabby said. ‘I’m not thirsty. Maybe later.’ She could see Susie did not relish that ‘later’. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Tabby or begrudged her basic refreshment, no one thought that; it was just that she planned her family’s weekend with some precision and did not welcome spontaneity.

‘Everything all right?’ her father asked her.

‘Yes – I mean, no, not really.’ Tabby faltered, flooded by a sudden sensation of disorientation. The sight of her father as a resident in a house where she was merely a guest, even the way the light bounced off him here: it was like meeting his doppelganger or travelling to the future and seeing how he would become after she no longer needed him. And yet she did need him still, that was why she was here. Perhaps the problem was that she had spent so little time in this house there was nothing familiar about it or its contents; when picturing this scene
en route
, she’d misremembered the colour of the sofa, the size of the garden, even the height of his second wife, whose house this had been during her first marriage. Would it be different if Tabby’s mother had moved out of the family home and Susie and the girls in? Or would that only have made it heartbreaking in a different way?

‘I wondered if I could stay with you for a little while,’ she said, careful to include Susie in her appeal.

‘Stay?’ Susie repeated. ‘You mean sleep here?’

Knowing that the lack of a spare room had been cited frequently as a reason for her not to stay the night, Tabby added pre-emptively, ‘I don’t mind sleeping on the sofa. Or in a tent in the garden if you like.’

‘A
tent
? Don’t be soft, of course you can stay,’ her father said, just as she’d hoped. (His agreeability had been part of what had allowed Susie to install him as her own with such ease.)

‘Can I have a word, Mike?’ Susie said, inevitably. She dispatched the two girls to the TV at the far end of the room, presumably to keep them out of range should the discussion get heated. But Susie did not allow heat, Tabby should have remembered that. She was what Tabby’s mother called passive-aggressive. The conference took place in pained murmurs in the kitchen and before too long Susie could be heard stalking up the stairs, then moving items about in one of the bedrooms. Layla, the elder daughter, followed her up, asking what was happening, as her father returned to deliver the verdict.

‘It’s no problem,’ he told Tabby, though his flush suggested otherwise. ‘The girls can bunk up together. You can have Layla’s room.’

On cue, Layla could be heard protesting at the top of the stairs. ‘It’s only for a night or two,’ Susie was saying. ‘Like when your gran comes to stay.’

‘Why can’t she have Jessica’s room? Why does it have to be
mine
?’

‘Are you sure?’ Tabby said to her father. Desperate though she was, she half regretted this invasion.

‘Of course. It’s not for long, is it? So what’s happened this time then?’

She’d planned to tell her father the real reason for her decampment, had rehearsed the words, the true ones, imagining herself saying them in one breathless go, perhaps not quite meeting her father’s eye as she did: ‘Steve’s been pestering me. He says he’s got a picture of me in my underwear and he’s put it on some internet site for other men to rate. He said he’s had messages saying how they understand his torment with jailbait like me in the house. I can’t tell Mum, he said he’d deny it and say
I
was coming on to
him
, and he’s right, I know she’d take his side…’

It was this last fear that distressed her most, more than the claim itself, which may or may not have been true. How could he have taken a picture of her in her underwear? She could not see any opportunity, though the suggestion itself was horrible enough. No, the suspicion that her mother
would
accept his word over hers: that was the frightening part. She had ended her marriage for Steve; mightn’t she be willing to risk her relationship with her daughter, too?

All of this Tabby had planned to tell her father, to ask him what he thought she should do next and hear him say that whatever it was he’d do it with her or for her, that she would never have to suffer this kind of harassment again, but being here, in a house with two small children within earshot, she felt that she would contaminate the air they breathed, make herself even more undesirable to Susie than she already was.

‘We fell out,’ she said at last.