Girl Unknown(69)
His smile broadened, and just then Robbie came running past and launched himself into the air, his hands clutching his knees to his chest. We watched as he plunged into the water, Holly shrieking and turning aside to avoid being splashed. I remember thinking I must freeze this memory and hold on to it: the beauty of the garden, the coolness of twilight after a long journey, the weight and warmth of my husband’s arm around me, and the rocking waters of the pool as my son surfaced, gasping for air, laughing, triumphant.
The first night, we wandered out into the quiet village square and ate outside a bistro while men played boules on the red clay beside the church. By the time we got back to the house it was late and we were all exhausted after the journey. We said our goodnights and it was not until the next morning that I had a chance to explore the house properly. David and the kids had gone out to the market to buy provisions, while I was left alone to wander through the quiet rooms, accustoming myself to the particular sounds and odours they held.
There was a masculine feel to the place – the furniture dark, although comfortable enough. The walls were hung with framed maps of the island and various sepia-tinted photographs – studio portraits of Victorian women with strong jaws and crinolines; moustached men with books lying open on their knees. Indeed, there were books everywhere in the house – stacked in piles behind doors, towers of them leaning against walls. I imagined Alan sitting alone in the long stretch of the evening, sipping a glass of wine and getting lost in his reading, not noticing the hours ticking by. I was surprised at his gesture of kindness, offering us the use of his holiday home in the wake of David’s disappointment.
We hadn’t talked much about David’s failure to gain the professorship – he was reluctant, too, to discuss the difficulties in our marriage or the death of his mother – but I knew it had affected him deeply. It was more than just a professional disappointment. To him it was an indictment of his whole career. ‘You’ll get another chance,’ I had told him. ‘There’ll be other opportunities.’
‘That’s just it,’ he had said, looking at me in a despairing way. ‘There won’t be. This was my one chance and I blew it.’
He had always tended towards seriousness, but when we were first married, he would sometimes catch himself becoming morose or pessimistic, and pull the corners of his mouth into a cartoon face of misery that made me laugh. Just like that his mood would lift. Somewhere along the way he had lost the knack of it.
As for me, I was still smarting at Peter’s parting words: ‘I need someone who’s at the top of her game, not distracted by her domestic situation.’
Standing in the darkened living room, running my finger over the gilded titles of those old books, I considered our professional humiliations and the injured pride that went hand in hand with them. I thought about the chasm that had sprung up between David and me over the past six months. I could blame a lot of it on Zo?, but the first fissure had appeared long before that – the first time I’d kissed Aidan, or when I’d stood in a darkened hallway and listened as my husband named another woman the love of his life. Perhaps it went further back to the ghost of a baby. That fissure had been there a long time, but how easily Zo? had caused it to widen and deepen, ripping through our family, pushing us apart. I looked around the room and felt the strain of my hope that in this house we might find solace, a renewal of love, a way back to each other.
The iron gate jangling on its hinges pulled me back into the present. At once the cloistered atmosphere in the house changed as the others came in, bringing with them the energy of the marketplace, the triumph of their purchases. There was a flurry of activity as bags were emptied, contents spread over the table.
‘Hungry?’ David asked, holding up a bag of pastries, the brown paper translucent with grease.
‘Famished.’
Those first few days, I remember in a haze of lightness, like shrugging off your winter clothes and stepping into the sun. We hired bikes and cycled across the salt flats, along the coastal paths. We went to Saint-Martin-de-Ré and marvelled at the wealth of pleasure-boats and yachts clustered in the harbour. On our way back to Loix, we discovered an oyster bar with an ocean view and spent a couple of hours there under the shade of parasols, feasting on seafood, David and I getting nicely sozzled on a chilled bottle of Chinon. The village itself hadn’t much to offer by way of entertainment – a café by the market, the bistro and a bar on the village square – but it didn’t bother us. We were content to spend our days on the beach, our evenings dining on the terrace, reading our books as the sun set.
The kinks and bruises of the past few months faded a little more with each passing day. The tension that had stiffened David’s shoulders dissipated, and he relaxed, whistling to himself in the mornings as he made coffee, his face animated, no longer closed or drawn. Robbie was talking to me again, his exams completed without incident, the trouble at school behind us, as too was the fear I had felt for Holly’s security and well-being. The village, and the island, felt small, intimate, safe. The kids were able to wander off on their own, exploring the area on their bikes, while David and I relaxed by the pool or took a stroll down to the seafront.
Towards the end of our first week, David and I were sitting on the terrace eating lunch when his phone buzzed. Shading the screen from the sun with his cupped hand, he said: ‘A missed call.’
‘Who from?’