The Secret Wife(35)
In her head she heard her mother’s voice berating her: ‘Why are you such a quitter? You take piano lessons then get bored; you start tennis coaching then don’t want to go back. You never stick at anything.’ Was it true that she was a quitter? She had stopped piano and tennis and drama and all those other extra-curricular activities because her mum had such high expectations; she had to be a prodigy at everything. When she rang home with the news she’d got a 2:1 in her journalism degree, her mum had commented, ‘What a shame. If only you’d done a bit more work …’ She could just imagine the deep sighs if her mum could see her now, hunched over a steering wheel, her heart overbeating with anxiety.
She forced herself to breathe regularly, counting to five between breaths and trying to make her mind go blank of everything but the in breath and the out breath, as they taught at her yoga class. A truck sped past with a whoosh, covering her windscreen with a wave of surface water.
She knew she needed to keep herself occupied, and reading Dmitri’s next novel was not going to hack it. Then she remembered the overgrown patch of weeds behind the cabin that she’d been waiting for the right moment to deal with. It should be easier to uproot them now the earth was softened by rain. She’d get soaked to the skin but it would give her a real sense of achievement to clear that patch. It was flat and treeless so maybe she could do some planting there. Keeping busy was the best way to cope with a broken heart.
Chapter Twenty
The rain continued all week but at least it was still hot. Kitty spent her time clearing the earth around the cabin and it was like working under a power shower as the torrents beat down on her back and steam rose from the freshly dug earth. It was tough work that left her streaked in mud, with muscles that ached in new places every day. She used her camping stove to heat noodles and make tea indoors, and spent the evenings sitting in her swing seat on the covered porch, drinking wine and reading Dmitri Yakovlevich’s remaining novels.
They were rich and in some ways surprisingly modern stories, with an overriding theme of love and loss. His male characters were more in touch with their emotions than any man she knew, endlessly analysing their reactions to events, but his women were all slightly idealised, a little too perfect, maybe. Could any male writer create convincing female characters? she wondered. The last two novels, the ones written in America, could easily have been published in the present day. The writing was clean and spare, but evoked glorious images that filled her head until she felt she knew the people in his stories as well as if they were her companions in the cabin. They were complex and flawed but never dull. Was that what Dmitri was like?
Kitty remembered that she held the copyright to these novels, as part of the inheritance. She should try to get them reissued. Perhaps she would contact his last publisher, Random House, and ask if they might be interested. She could imagine them selling well with modern covers and intelligent broadsheet reviews. She could write a feature about her great-grandfather and explain how she came upon his story … but she would have to find out more about him first. He was still a shadowy figure with a biography that consisted of a few dates and places and huge gaps in between.
One afternoon, when the rain was coming down in sheets, she heard a car pulling down the track towards her cabin and she dropped her spade to watch. It was a police car with two officers inside. One of them opened his window and called out: ‘You Kitty Fisher?’
She was astonished, and before she answered ‘yes’, her mind had invented a dozen different reasons why they might be there. Had she breached her car-rental agreement? Was there a problem with the ownership of the cabin? Did she owe local taxes for something?
‘Your husband reported you as a missing person back in England,’ the closest officer explained. ‘They tracked you down from your credit card use and the vacation park told us you were here. Is everything OK, ma’am?’
It had never occurred to her that Tom would call the police. What an idiot! ‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to come out all this way,’ she gasped. ‘Please – come in for coffee and I’ll explain.’
They followed her to the cabin door, carefully wiping their feet before entering. Kitty lit the gas stove.
‘I’m sorry I only have one chair,’ she told them. ‘You’re my first guests. I’ve been here a month doing up the cabin. I recently inherited it.’
‘You didn’t tell your husband you were coming?’ One of the policemen did the talking while the other wandered round examining the work she’d done patching the walls.
She turned away to spoon instant coffee into cups. ‘I decided I needed a break. He’d been cheating on me.’
‘So you’re teaching him a lesson?’
‘No.’ Kitty shook her head. ‘I couldn’t decide what to do, and I wanted to see if I could rescue this cabin, so it fell into place.’
‘Looks like you’ve done a good job here – but you should let your husband know you’re safe. He thought you might have done something stupid …’
Kitty frowned. ‘You mean suicide? Tom knows me better than that …’ Her voice trailed off. Did he? Could he really have believed she might have killed herself over Karren with the double ‘r’? That implied a level of arrogance she hadn’t thought him capable of.