‘Rubbish. You heard her call him Arthur as clearly as I did. You know who Arthur is, don’t you?’
Moira sighed, in concession if not capitulation. ‘Yes, I know who he is. But the fact is anyone could have recognised her and phoned the tabloids. You, for instance, Tabby,
you
need the money, don’t you? You told me yourself you were penniless when you came here.’
Tabby glared at her. ‘So it was for money, then? They paid you for the address?’
‘Look, I took a big hit when the rue du Rempart clients ended their contract. I was lucky not to be sued.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Tabby cried. ‘The house was left in a bit of a mess, that’s all. It’s not as if there was a dead body in there.’
‘It’s all relative,’ Moira said sourly.
‘OK, then how does not finishing a cleaning job on time weigh up against not paying proper taxes?’
‘
What?
’
‘You paid Emmie and me in cash all summer, didn’t you? I’m guessing that’s more of a crime in the eyes of the French authorities than anything
we
did.’
Moira did not reply. Remembering the invoices she’d seen, the lucrative commission rate her former employer had charged, Tabby returned to the point: ‘Whatever payment the paper promised you couldn’t possibly have made up the difference in lost earnings.’
‘You’re right there.’
So it had been bitterness then; petty revenge.
‘How did you know who she was?’ Tabby asked.
‘Because I’m not an idiot, that’s how. I suspected from the moment I met her. An English woman appears out of the blue, nothing like the people who usually come here, behaving almost comically as if she’s on the run. She wouldn’t even tell me her
name
.’
‘But the scandal wasn’t in the French media.’
‘I’d followed it online. It was all over the English news sites. She’d changed her appearance, obviously, but I made an educated guess.’
‘Did you ever ask her about it?’
‘Of course not. I respected her privacy.’
‘You’ve got a strange way of showing it.’ Tabby felt suddenly extremely weary, not sure now what it was she’d hoped to achieve by this confrontation. Without the skills of a Nina Meeks, she had always been destined to leave empty-handed. ‘Anyway, it’s too late now. I have to get back. Her parents are waiting for me in Saint-Martin.’
‘Her parents?’ said Moira. ‘I thought they were dead?’ This incensed Tabby afresh, for if Moira remembered enough of the Marr case to know this, then she must also know Emily’s father had passed away recently – and yet still she had sought to sabotage her attempts to escape the spotlight. No matter that none of this actually applied to the woman under discussion; it was the principle of it that offended Tabby.
‘You know nothing,’ she told Moira rudely. ‘And since that’s the case, it would be better if you said nothing as well.’
‘Oh, go away,’ Moira said, turning from her in anger. ‘And don’t come here again, either of you. You’re as bad as each other.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Tabby said. ‘Neither of us is bad.’
Moira looked back at her with an expression of raw contempt. ‘I’m afraid I disagree. You’ve been nothing but trouble, both of you, and I’ll be damned if it’s my job to aid and abet a pair of low-life sluts.’
Startled, Tabby could not stop the gasp rising to her lips. It was a taste of what Emily had had to deal with, she thought as she left, recognising for the first time the role played in this affair by spite – plain and simple and, invariably, female: Moira’s, Nina Meeks’, Sarah Laing’s, perhaps Sylvie Woodhall’s too.
She was not sorry to close the door behind her in the knowledge that she would never lay eyes on the woman again.
At the house, she said nothing about her unedifying errand, letting the Barrons update her on their meetings with the
gendarmerie
and the police. Eve had been reported missing and the authorities would soon be conducting a search on the ground across the whole island, as well as alerting colleagues on the mainland. Airports and ferry ports were to be contacted and a photograph circulated. It was nothing, Ray and Kerry admitted, that they had not been through before in the UK.
‘They want to talk to you and the reporter,’ Ray said, ‘but I get the impression they think she’s gone back to England. This is a tourist destination: everyone goes home eventually.’ The police had taken his contact details and promised they would phone in the event of any positive identification.
What Ray did not say, but judging by his face was certainly now thinking, was that they were looking for Eve dead or alive. Accident, suicide: anything was possible, given her illness. Tabby felt a surge of fighting spirit at the thought of Emmie sitting in this same spot less than a week earlier, eating with her, talking with her,
living
. ‘She must be somewhere,’ she said with new resolution. ‘Let’s search the island ourselves as well. Let’s hire a car this morning and get out there, every village, every street. Then, if we don’t find her here, we’ll go back to the area in London where Emily and Arthur lived. We’ll follow the trail as Eve might have thought to follow it. There’s a hotel near Walnut Grove we should phone, in case she’s checked in there. And there’s Arthur himself. If I found him, she will.’
‘I think we should also get back in touch with the police in London,’ Kerry said. ‘Cover every possible eventuality.’
‘Fine,’ Ray agreed. ‘The police are contacting the owners of this place, but I imagine it will be acceptable for us to stay one more night. We’ll scour the island, then we’ll pack up Eve’s things and bring them home, continue the search there.’
The three of them left the house together and walked in single file down the cobbled alleyway, past the linen shop and other chic boutiques, on to the waterfront and through the café tables towards the
boulangerie
, then across the eastern quayside in the direction of the tourist information office. There they would be able to enquire about car rental and catch any necessary bus or a taxi.
‘We’ll find her,’ Tabby told Kerry, with a conviction she felt deep inside her. ‘She may not be right here under our noses, but we’ll find her, I promise.’
Kerry smiled gratefully at her. ‘Thank you for staying to help us, Tabby. It makes such a big difference. You know this place, you know
her
.’
‘You know her best,’ Tabby corrected her. ‘You and Ray.’
‘Not at the moment, we don’t. If we don’t know Emily, we don’t know Eve. But you know Emily, that’s the crucial thing.’
Tabby did not reply. It was a glorious morning and she allowed herself to be distracted by the way the sun bounced off the freshly hosed cobbles, light exploding in the air around them, and by the way the water in the harbour had become a wobbling looking-glass at their feet. Already holidaymakers filled the terrace tables, ordering their coffees and fishing sunglasses from pockets. In every direction people were exulting in their morning, breathing the salty Atlantic air, planning their day’s pleasures, guilty or innocent. She did not think Ray or Kerry had been able to pay any attention to their surroundings, much less take any joy in them.
‘You could have just walked away,’ Kerry added at her side. ‘No one would have blamed you if you had.’
Tabby linked her arm through Eve’s mother’s, surprising both of them with the sudden intimacy of the gesture.
‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said.
1. | How significant are the two settings in the book: Walnut Grove, a leafy Georgian road in south London, and the Ile de Ré, an island off the Atlantic coast of France? |
2. | The connection between Arthur Woodhall and Emily Marr is instant – |
3. | What were your early impressions of the character of Emmie? What does she mean when she refers to her circumstances as ‘exile’? |
4. | What is your reaction to the media witch-hunt of Emily Marr and the orchestration of it by tabloid columnist Nina Meeks? |
5. | Are there any similarities between the two adulterous relationships in the book? |
6. | Arthur and Emily are said to have been ‘punished’ by the tragedy that befalls the Woodhall family. Does the punishment fit the crime? |
7. | How did you react to Tabby’s discovery of Eve’s history? |
8. | One of the themes of the book is isolation. Can you relate to any of the feelings of alienation felt by Emily Marr or other characters? |
9. | How surprising is the psychiatric condition suffered by one of the characters? |
10. | In what way does Emily Marr ‘disappear’? Do any other characters lose a sense of their own identity during the course of the book? |
The author on
The Disappearance of Emily Marr
What inspired the story?
The story is told in two strands and one of those strands contains my original idea: the sudden and entirely unwanted propelling to notoriety of an ordinary person. This was inspired directly by the book
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
(
Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
), a superb and disturbing novel by Heinrich Böll published in 1974, which I first read in German class in school and have re-read several times over the years. Katharina Blum is a young woman discovered to be romantically involved with a man wanted by the police and she is hounded to the point of breakdown by the tabloid press.
Her ordeal occurs in more innocent times, in the respect that it is well before the digital age and she has ‘only’ the more sensationalist print newspapers to contend with. The character assassination of Emily Marr takes place in the present day, in which virtually all media is sensationalist and, thanks to the internet, ceaseless. Her notoriety happens overnight: one day she has the normal privacy of an ordinary citizen, the next everyone knows her name, her address, her mobile phone number, email address, and the rest.
I’m very ambivalent about social networking and the news sites that spawn vitriolic member comments; I don’t think they draw from us the finest of human impulses, and so this plotline was partly an exploration of that.
The other strand, which follows the journey of Tabby on the Ile de Ré, came out of an interest in certain psychiatric disorders. I took some time in thinking how the two plotlines might be blended and when I hit on it, it seemed so natural and obvious.
Emily’s story is told in the first person and Tabby’s in the third person. Was it hard to alternate and was one voice easier or more enjoyable to write than the other?
Having more than one voice is often more interesting for the author and creates natural changes in pace for the reader. In this case there is also the difference in context: Emily writes her account with the benefit of hindsight, which automatically makes hers a very knowing voice, and poignant too, all her broken dreams and regrets right there in the telling, while Tabby’s story is told as it happens, which makes her naïve, direct, in the moment. She is young as well, naturally optimistic. I preferred writing Emily’s strand because her character is more like mine and so I found she came more fluently. I felt great love and sympathy for her and spent a lot of time working out if I could possibly give her a happy ending because I felt she really deserved one.
As heroes go, Arthur Woodhall, who is not good-looking and is pushing fifty, is not typical, is he?
My books aren’t romances and Arthur is certainly not a classic romantic lead. He is a proper flawed grown-up and an extremely jaded individual – he’s been unhappily married for twenty years, has two teenage children and has been a workaholic for three decades. My aim was to convince readers of the chemistry between Emily and him in light of her family history and sense of isolation, rather than to share her attraction for him. Having said that, I must admit he is the kind of person
I
would find attractive, because what he has is intensity and I like that – and I think most women do. The character of Grégoire was intended partly as a counterpoint: he is much more the heedless and arrogant adulterer we can all disapprove of. In disliking him, readers will, I hope, let Arthur off the hook a bit.
Tabby’s story takes place on the Ile de Ré in France, a setting you have used before. Why?
I know the Ile de Ré very well and personally think it is heaven-sent as a backdrop for suspenseful plotlines. I’m amazed there hasn’t been a detective series filmed in Saint-Martin-de-Re, a seventeenth-century village inside immense Vauban fortifications. It’s hugely atmospheric, the old houses connecting haphazardly, the grey Atlantic pressing against the walls.
Yes, it features to a lesser extent in
The Second Husband
(2008) as well, and in both cases is a remote hideaway for characters experiencing a form of exile. In fact, in summer the village is very, very busy, but Emmie and Tabby live in a house hidden from the throng, and they keep their shutters closed at all times.
I love the contrast between a carefree holiday atmosphere, with people wandering around in the sunshine, their only concern which beach to picnic at, and a hidden, much darker situation just a street away. Ten metres from the beautiful people there’s a house you can’t see into, and inside it a mysterious and potentially tragic situation is unfolding.
Given the book’s ending, do you plan a sequel?
No, though I have decided for myself what becomes of each of the characters, as I usually do. But I always wanted the story to end with a vanishing. Readers are very welcome to contact me individually and I’ll share my thoughts on the poor soul we’ve now lost track of.