Reminding herself of her epiphany that her life’s purpose should not be so easily interchanged with the seeking of male approval, she sat for a minute or two furiously denying further thought of any of the men who routinely troubled her thoughts. Then she tapped instead the words ‘Emmie Mason’.
It was a common name, it turned out, more common than she’d thought, judging by the thousands of results. The first few pages referred to an artist, a songwriter and a cross-country runner of the same name; there was also a headmistress, a florist, a dentist, an environmentalist interested in homesteading (whatever that was), not to mention the dozens more who populated the business networking sites, often known simply as ‘Em’ or ‘Emi’. Not surprisingly, a scan of image results yielded no photograph of her Emmie, either in the current low-key incarnation or in the earlier more head-turning blond guise she’d glimpsed in the mystery photograph. She even tried ‘Emmie Mason London’ and ‘Emmie Mason France’, only to be faced with millions of possibilities where the words were combined. Her Emmie was the needle in the haystack, perhaps not even stuck in the haystack at all.
Well, it was hardly surprising, given the innate elusiveness of Emmie. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it was like one of those film plots when you woke up and found your friend gone, only to discover you were the only person who thought she’d existed in the first place, everyone else insisting they’d never laid eyes on her. You then had to find a maverick detective to help you figure out if she were ever real or just a figment of your imagination, a ghost you’d created for company.
But no, that could not happen here. No matter what her mother might say, she didn’t think the authorities need be alerted just yet.
She had ten minutes of her hour left. To torture herself, she reopened her email and read some of the messages Paul had sent her when they were still together and counting down to their trip. They were the memos of a mate, a fellow adventurer:
Twenty-eight days to Full Moon Party!
;
Check out this awesome surfing ashram!
(She never did find out what
that
was.) How easy it was with hindsight to read them as pleas for release. I can’t be your father, he’d said, or your mother or your therapist or your friend. I just want to be freed from you.
Then she began to read the messages she’d sent in return. One stood out:
Honestly, Paul, without this trip to look forward to, I think I might go mad
. He’d had no choice but to take her with him. She had made herself his responsibility.
She re-read the last mail she’d sent him, from Paris, before her money ran out:
I still love you and am here if you want to get in touch
. It was the work of a doormat, and yet wasn’t it the awful truth that she still meant every feeble-minded syllable of it?
Whatever it was she was doing with Grégoire could make no difference to that.
‘Who is this man who has made you so sad?’ he asked her the next day, in the master bedroom of the rue du Rempart house. The shutters were, of course, closed.
‘You,’ Tabby said, teasing.
‘No, who?’
‘No one. He doesn’t matter,’ she said, circumstance alone giving her words a temporary and quite credible conviction (how could he matter if she were happy to lie in bed with someone else?). ‘He doesn’t want me, so…’
‘If he doesn’t want you, why do you want him?’
‘Oh, come on,’ Tabby said. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted someone who didn’t want you? Or wanted her
because
she doesn’t want you?’ She was aware of sounding rather young, mouthing psychologies she’d read in magazines as opposed to having gained from experience. Luckily, such lack of authenticity was either willingly indulged by Grégoire or lost in translation.
‘Never. I think this is cultural differences,’ he said, and he shrugged and Tabby laughed, which made him laugh, and this was as serious as things would get between them.
It was an affair now, albeit a seasonal one. They had their routine, their honed subterfuge: early on Friday evening she would text him confirmation of their rendezvous the following day. Since she had finally bought credit for her own phone and no longer needed to borrow Emmie’s, she and Grégoire even spoke sometimes, for there was no risk to it. Noémie and the boys being based for the whole summer at the house in Les Portes, he was alone in Paris during the week, joining his family on Friday evenings or – via Tabby – on Saturday afternoons. She did not ask him his cover story, assuming it was simply a matter of his telling his family a false arrival time. If he arrived instead on the Friday, he only had to fabricate some errand to run for a couple of hours the next day. Somehow, his blithe arrogance counteracted any guilt she was experiencing; nonetheless, she liked to think Noémie had her own weekly vanishing act, her own lover in a secret cottage somewhere on the island (though she rather doubted that
her
lover had been hired to clean the cottage first).
Check-in/-out procedures at the cottage also worked in their favour. Though check-out was eleven o’clock – when her own shift would officially start – the owners were Belgian and invariably their tenants were of the same nationality, leaving by nine for the eleven o’clock Brussels flight from La Rochelle. This meant Tabby could arrive early and then extend her ‘break’ in the middle of the day. The incoming holidaymakers were expected to occupy themselves before checking in at 3 p.m. and the entry system would be disabled until then, so they could not surprise her unannounced. Meanwhile, the owner never visited, bookings and payment taken entirely online, so there was no one for the neighbours to go to with gossip – if there
were
any neighbours who had not let their own property and entrusted its upkeep to a Tabby of their own. As for Moira, she made the occasional spot-check on her cleaners, but according to Emmie she closed shop at midday on Saturday, returning to her home on the mainland for the rest of the weekend. Since Grégoire did not arrive until after twelve, there was minimal chance of discovery.
As a matter of ritual as much as pride Tabby would check every room in turn before pulling the front door shut behind her. The interior shone, the surfaces gleamed, the light danced: the perfect Ile de Ré holiday awaited the approaching Belgians. Call it atonement, recompense, a guilty conscience – she was, if anything, doing a
better
cleaning job than she would have done otherwise.
No one would guess.
Though Moira had praised her as an outstanding worker, Emmie was a less than fastidious cleaner at home and had made no objection when Tabby offered to clean their house once a week as part of her rent.
To avoid disturbing Emmie, she tried to find a time when she was alone in the house, which she approached with the same thoroughness she did her paid jobs. The rooms were comparatively small, but the facilities more dilapidated. The bathroom in particular was in need of renovation, but she liked its worn-and-torn charm, still remembered with pleasure her first bath in it, how magical it had felt to be bathing unhurried, the polished blue sky high above the ancient glass of the skylight.
One thing she was absolutely clear about: she had not volunteered her services in order to snoop. Any search she might make for the purple folder was casual, its failure of no particular disappointment to her.
In Emmie’s room she always exercised the utmost restraint as she vacuumed the rug and straightened the items in the drawers and wardrobe. Of course it was impossible not to note, alongside the utilitarian sweatpants and cotton tops, the pretty vintage dress Emmie had worn in the photograph, or the single other smart item in her wardrobe, a black boiled-wool jacket with big covered buttons and a white fur collar. It was in the same retro style as the dress, though far too heavy to be worn in summer weather here.
To do her job properly, it was important to dust the few items on the dressing table, to spray the mirror and polish the glass to a shine. To do this it was necessary to remove the postcard of the painting she had often wondered about, but she would make a point of not turning it over to read the message. On one occasion, however, entirely by accident, the card fell from her grasp to the floor, landing with the words facing up. It was only a single line of blue ink and – well, she was only human:
For E, my
coup de foudre
, with love, A
x
The painting was called
Coup de Foudre
,
too, she noticed. She’d heard the term, but could not place it. There was no French–English dictionary in the house, unless you counted Emmie, whose French was fluent, but Tabby could hardly ask her for a translation: she would make the connection straight away, know Tabby had been reading private correspondence. She might not appreciate the coincidental nature of such things; she might think, First the photograph, now this.
She repositioned the postcard, telling herself that she would not give it another thought.
It was Sunday lunchtime and therefore a bit of a risk, but still she texted Grégoire:
What does ‘coup de foudre’ mean?
The message came back a little later:
A lightning bolt
.
Then, a minute later, an afterthought:
The English say, love at first sight
.
And she imagined him laughing to himself at the thought of her believing this to be what
they
had, chortling as he stood in the vast kitchen scrubbing mussels with Noémie or dressing the salad, strolling with their kirs on to the sunlit terrace by the pool. No, it made little difference whether he planned to leave his wife or not after the summer (of course he didn’t): the point was that if he were legitimately free he would not consider her, Tabby, for a public relationship.
She was no one’s lightning bolt.
Emily
Sylvie and the boys were dead. They’d come off an A-road near Horsham and crashed into a bank of trees. All three suffered fatal head and chest injuries and were pronounced dead at the scene, their bodies taken to the hospital mortuary. Such was the car’s speed before the frontal impact crash that it had been described by witnesses in stationary oncoming traffic as terrifyingly over the limit. To have survived it would have been a miracle, and there had been no miracle.
The liaison officer spoke to Arthur with maternal tenderness. ‘Were they on their way back to London, do you think? Was that the route she usually took?’ I don’t think she was pursuing any official inquiry, but was just trying to get him to speak, to say something and engage with the information. He was in shock, anyone could see that, his gaze stark and empty, his skin greyish and dehydrated-looking and his breath faint. I wanted to grip him in my arms, cover his face with my body, speak for him, breathe for him, but I knew instinctively I should not. Since I had joined them in the kitchen, he had scarcely glanced in my direction. Instead I had to rely, as the others were, on the strong, sweet tea he’d been given.
‘Do you feel light-headed?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said in a voice that was no longer his. Like his face, it was devoid of conscious expression. ‘They weren’t coming back to London.’ I realised he was answering the officer’s question, not mine. ‘They were down there for the summer. I was joining them this afternoon. There was no reason for them to come back, they must have been going out for the morning somewhere.’
The woman said the deaths had been reported to the local coroner, which was normal in the circumstances. He would probably wish to investigate, she said, which meant that registering the deaths and proceeding with the funeral would have to wait until authorisation was received.
‘Investigate?’ I said, when Arthur failed to query this information. ‘What do you mean, the “circumstances”? You just said no other vehicles were involved?’
‘Yes, but they don’t know how the car came to go off the road the way it did. It might have been any number of factors. It’s nothing to worry about, the coroner enquires into all unexplained violent or unnatural deaths, that’s his job. An inquiry will establish the facts, the exact cause of death.’
Unexplained… unnatural… exact cause
… I knew what she meant, then, and it chilled the blood in my veins: whether the crash had been accidental or deliberate. Arthur, of course, had no cause yet to question the distinction.
‘There must have been something wrong with the car,’ I said. ‘The brakes, maybe? To be driving at ninety or more when the limit was – what did you say?’
‘The limit is seventy on that stretch, I believe, but we won’t know the exact speed the car was travelling at until after the investigation.’
Officer Matthews added, ‘I’m afraid they’ve had a lot of problems with speeding on that road. A motorcyclist appeared in the magistrate’s court recently having been caught at a hundred and thirty miles an hour.’
‘God,’ I said, shocked. ‘Maybe it —’
‘Sylvie wouldn’t have been speeding,’ Arthur said at the same time; it was as if he hadn’t heard me begin to speak. ‘Not with the boys in the car. You can’t compare this with some lunatic Hell’s Angel.’
The officers were quick to agree with him, and I realised I should not have drawn the discussion in this direction.
‘I need to go to them,’ Arthur said. ‘I need to talk to the paramedics, the police, someone from the response team at the scene.’
I’d momentarily forgotten that he was a medical professional himself and would know something of the process that awaited him. He put his tea aside as if he meant to leave that very minute. I looked to the police officers for a lead – he couldn’t be allowed to travel, not in this shocked condition – but they only nodded their agreement.
‘We can arrange for someone to take you,’ they said.
‘No, I’ll drive myself.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ I told him. I’d never learned to drive.
But he looked at me as if I were a stranger, an intruder. ‘What? No. No, thank you.’ I wondered if he knew my name.