Girl Unknown(95)
David is waiting for them in the arrivals lounge. He sees them come towards him pulling their luggage behind them. They look tired, as if the journey has taken longer than the two hours of the flight. He goes to greet them and they embrace, all three of them together, a momentary triumvirate before they break apart. To anyone watching, their reunion must seem strange. Clearly, they are family, but despite the emotion of the reunion, there are no smiles. He reaches to take the bags; Caroline turns away and wipes at the corner of her eye; Holly stands with her hands in her pockets, looking about her.
A whole season has passed since he has seen them in the flesh. Their corporeal presence seems at once startling to him as well as comforting. Holly has grown taller. He is alive to all the changes in her – the new curves, the thinness of her face, grace in the way she carries herself. She catches him looking and he nods towards the exit. ‘The car is this way,’ he tells them.
Some time towards the end of the summer, they had made the decision to part. It was not named as a separation, more a side-effect of the need to protect Holly. Both agreed that it was in her best interests to return home and continue her education, as they had planned before all this happened. They wanted her, in as much as it was possible now, to have a normal life. One of them had to remain behind for Robbie. There was no argument, although that didn’t mean there was no guilt. Weighing up the needs of one child over the other. Caroline would return to Dublin with Holly, while David stayed on.
As the car passes over the long, meandering bridge back to the island, Caroline feels the tension in her limbs returning. That sick feeling is with her again, panic in her chest. She keeps her eyes trained on the sights outside the window, her hands tightly gripped in her lap. Strange to see those same fields and roads, grey now in the dim light of a cold December day. When they had first come to ?le de Ré, she had heard it described as a Mediterranean island that had somehow got lost in the Atlantic. During the summer months, with the glittering turquoise waters surrounding it, the yellow dust of the roads, the geraniums and hollyhocks pouring colour over every concrete surface, it was easy to believe that description. Now, with a chill wind whipping over the island from the ocean, trees bending to it, a spray of rain on the windscreen, Caroline feels as if she has come to a different island – hostile, unwelcoming, cold.
As he drives, David tells them about a heron he has seen on his walks near the house. It is large, he says, estimating its wingspan to be two metres, maybe more. In his conversations at the market, he has discussed the bird. Others have seen it, too, and believe it to be a great blue heron, very rare in these parts. David wonders aloud if it might have made a nest nearby. Briefly, he scans the horizon, as if looking for the bird in flight.
The villages they pass seem deserted – many of the houses look shut up for the winter, shutters bolted closed, windowboxes empty. The little car gathers pace as it bypasses Saint-Martin, heading west towards the village of Loix. Caroline doesn’t ask David where the car came from – a small white Citro?n, several years old by the look of it. It is just part of the changed picture. Everything feels different and strange. This car David is driving, his altered appearance – older, roughened, hardy – serve as a reminder of the life he has carved out for himself during the months he has spent on the island without her. When he drives, it’s not with the interest or relaxation of a tourist. He sits hunched forward, intent on getting to his destination. His eyes are fixed on the road, barely glancing past it to the landscapes that surround him.
Caroline takes all this in wordlessly. Four months have passed, punctuated with phone calls, emails, Skype. We are strangers to each other, she thinks, as the little car shuttles through an intersection, on to a long, straight road over the salt flats.
‘So, how is he?’ Caroline asks.
They are alone in the house. Holly has gone to the village to buy bread, leaving the two of them sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. It is too cold to sit on the terrace. Stray leaves swish and scatter over the flagstones.
‘He’s the same.’
‘Has he said anything?’
‘No.’
‘Anything at all?’
‘Nothing, Caroline,’ he says, adding: ‘I’m sorry.’ As if it is his fault. In a way, it is.
He watches her taking that in, her lips pursed, sees her bite down on her inner cheek, then look away. There is something controlled about her now, not like when it first happened and she was overcome with emotion. Fear, anger, bewilderment – he had sat at this very table and watched her sobbing uncontrollably, heard the scraping sound of air wrenched into her lungs, her face ruddy with tears. But that was then. Now she is composed, which makes her seem even more distant from him – the sternness of her control over feelings that had once ravaged her. He thinks about reaching across the table for her hand, decides not to.
They sit in silence for a moment, and he thinks of the bedrooms upstairs, his lonely occupancy of the house all these months. It is a relief when the iron gate clangs and they hear Holly stepping into the hall.
Over a lunch of chorizo stew that David has prepared, Holly updates her father as to her progress in school, the subjects she likes, the friends she has made. David asks, tentatively, if there has been any trouble over what happened during the summer. He is referring to the brief flurry of media interest in the aftermath of Zo?’s death. A couple of tabloids and one of the Sundays had shown particular interest in the more prurient details. It didn’t help that one of the players in the incident was a journalist, another a lecturer who had made minor waves in the weeks beforehand over some colourful language employed during a radio interview. There was no door-stepping or even minor harassment, but both David and Caroline had been fearful of the impact it might have on Holly when she returned to school. There had been a little teasing, and a lot of staring and pointed fingers, but the teachers were vigilant and Holly herself seemed capable of shrugging it off. There is still the fear that it might start up again once the trial begins in a few months’ time, but for now, they are all grateful for the respite.