The Love of My Life(90)

The clock ticks. I set the ham down. Emma gets a glass of water.

I put the ham back in the fridge and try to persuade John to get into his bed, just as Emma’s phone rings. ‘It’s Charlie,’ she whispers.

‘Charlie?’ she says, answering. ‘I’m sorry, did my message wake you . . . ?’

She listens for a minute. Can’t sleep, she mouths at me.

I get up and fill the kettle.

‘Well, I know it sounds mad,’ she begins. ‘But . . .’

Fifteen minutes later, we stand at the doorway to our house.

Emma is wearing a waterproof and a beanie hat. She has tea, which I’ve made, and crisps; a couple of apples. It’s quarter past four in the morning and she is about to drive to Highbury Fields, to pick up Charlie, and then she’s going to drive six hours north to Alnmouth beach. Jeremy’s already gone to work. He’s on air at 6 a.m.

‘What will you tell Ruby?’ Emma asks. She tried to wake Ruby a few minutes ago, because she hadn’t seen her last night. ‘Hey,’ she whispered, as Ruby half-woke. ‘I just came to give you a quick kiss, because I’m off to—’

‘Go away,’ said Ruby’s voice, in the darkness. ‘You’re squashing me.’ So that was that.

‘I’ll work something out. But she’ll be fine. She was having a brilliant time with Oskar and Mikkel yesterday evening. She’d no idea we thought you were missing.’

‘I don’t want her to feel like I’ve just abandoned—’

‘She won’t.’ My voice is firm, because Emma needs it to be. ‘Ruby knows you’re her servant. She’s very comfortable with it.’

Outside a bird is making tentative song. His call goes unanswered, but he tries again, and again.

‘I can’t ask you to forgive me,’ Emma says, after pausing to listen to the bird. We’re standing so close I can smell the warm tiredness of her skin. I close my eyes, imagining how it would feel to just lean my face into her hair, to slide my arms around her and pretend she is the Emma I know and trust.

‘I can’t ask you to forgive anything I’ve done,’ she says, quietly. ‘But I need to do this for him. I hope you can understand.’

And I can. I’d do anything for Ruby. We would all do anything for our children.

‘I just need to ask you one thing,’ I say.

‘Of course.’

‘And I beg you, Emma, please answer honestly.’

She stands on the garden path, framed by tangled creepers and trailing ivy.

‘If Janice hadn’t gone missing, if I hadn’t dug up all those clues – would you have told me?’

Emma looks at me for a long time.

‘No,’ she admits, eventually. ‘I don’t think I would.’

‘Right.’

She turns to go. ‘I love you, Leo.’

My eyes well. I don’t know if my grief is for Emma or for me. For Ruby, perhaps, or the chaotic, warm life the three of us have had together. I don’t know anything, other than that it’s only when something’s damaged beyond repair that we realise how beautiful it was.





Chapter Sixty-One


EMMA


Charlie and I park up on the beach at lunchtime. Nearby a family is unpacking bodyboards from a car. The children are arguing and the parents aren’t talking to each other, but somehow, everyone is OK. They’re a family. They share a car, a house; probably only the most inconsequential of secrets.

I’m not sure I will still have a family when I get back to London, but I’m focused only on Charlie now. Yesterday he was wearing shorts; today he’s wearing jeans. I want to know everything about him. Where he buys jeans – do his parents pay, or do they insist he earns his spending money? What is his summer job in Queens Park? How does he vote, where does he stand on Marmite? Did he shuffle round on his bum as a baby, like Ruby, or did he crawl?

When we stopped at service stations he bought exactly the snacks I’d expect an eighteen-year-old to buy. Large packets of sweets, greasy sausage rolls, crisps. He inhaled them, much in the manner John Keats inhales his bowl of dog food. I’m fascinated by this boy.

We took turns driving so the other could sleep, but all I could do was watch my grown-up son at the wheel of my car, an elbow resting on the door, taking measured swigs of an energy drink.

The idea of the shack seems like madness, now we’re here. I felt such certainty about it last night, recalling the connection between me and Janice when we’d sat watching the storm. Hours later, sleepless and wired, I feel insane. This whole thing feels insane.

‘Right,’ Charlie says. ‘Let’s do this.’ He gets out of my little car and stretches his long body, groaning with relief. I get out and look at the beach below us, the sheer scale of it. Pale gold sand and blue sea, like a child’s drawing. Dunes doming and cupping the periphery, marram grass bent almost flat in the wind.

We haven’t talked a great deal, even though we’ve been in a car together for several hours. Charlie’s veered between conviction that his mum is going to be up here in the stone shed, and certainty that she won’t. Apart from anything else, he said, his mum had never camped in his lifetime – not even for a night.

‘She doesn’t like roughing it?’ I’d asked, tentatively.