After You Left(14)

‘Maybe we’ll buy a place here,’ Justin had said. There was a quality to his voice that I couldn’t quite pinpoint: wistfulness? Or was it sadness? Why would he be sad? ‘Once I pay off some of my debts, we can get a weekend place. Somewhere our children will enjoy – when we have them.’ He smiled at that. ‘Maybe we’ll get a boat, even.’ The photographer asked him to try not to talk. I chuckled. Justin always had to be planning, thinking ahead, putting every moment to good use.

Out of the blue, it started to rain. I remember us running back inside. The clutch of his hand round mine. ‘I’m happy,’ I remember telling him. ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘More than you might ever know.’ He stopped briefly, and looked at me solemnly for a moment. I thought he was just intensely moved. I remember Sally running up behind us, off the beach. ‘My God, this is quicksand!’ She laughed. Previously, she’d been a little peeved with me. I hadn’t used her to plan our wedding. I had wanted to keep it casual and without fuss. But all was well between us now.

She’d thought we’d been wrong to marry in spring. ‘You don’t want rain on your wedding day!’ she’d said. ‘You know what that means!’ I hadn’t. ‘Post-wedding tears that will be cried,’ she went on to tell me. Sally had a superstition for everything. I didn’t believe it, but, nonetheless, I’d experienced a sudden vision of myself crying in my wedding dress, and I’d had to push it away and vow not to listen to any more negative stuff, because clearly I wasn’t immune to it.

But look – it had rained – and Sally had been wrong. And all I remember is that the air was spiked with the scent of the sea, and the rain clung to my face and hair, and I was the happiest I had ever known I could be.

Inside, the staff brought around champagne and Lindisfarne mead, and tiny crab sandwiches, an island speciality. I mingled with the forty or so guests, as a man strummed ‘Greensleeves’ on a Spanish guitar. ‘Where’s Justin?’ I whispered to Sally.

Her pretty green eyes glistened with tipsiness. ‘I think he took a phone call. I saw him walking toward the library.’

I slipped away, and followed the small corridor that led to the room with the tall windows, with its comfy seats and bookshelves, but when I went in there, the only sign of life was a fly that kept hitting the window in its frenzied attempt to get out. When I returned to the main room, Sally was holding two champagne flutes. ‘Here. Best you get your fair share, as you’re paying for it.’ We had joked earlier about how some of Justin’s friends were knocking it back. She passed me a glass. ‘Did you find him?’

‘No.’ We chatted, but I was on a mission. Where could he have gone for all this time?

Well, this is where he’d gone.

In this one last photograph, Justin is standing outside with Rick, his friend from his Oxford days, who had come up from Gloucester with his wife, Dawn. They’re on the small stone balcony that overlooks the sea. It’s raining heavily, but clearly they are not minding that. Rick’s eyes are fixed on Justin, and his face is serious. I can only see the back of Justin’s head, but I can’t take my eyes from it. What were they talking about? I can almost feel secrets in the air, as though I am right there, back in the moment, watching them from the very vantage point where Aimee must have been standing.

I remember them coming back in, drenched, and Rick saying something about them having gone for a walk.

But, clearly, they hadn’t gone for any walk. They had been immersed in conversation on a balcony. And whatever they had been talking about was private enough for Rick to feel he couldn’t quite be honest about it.





SEVEN


My assistant, Victoria, pops her head around my door. ‘You’ve got visitors from Sunrise Care Home.’

It takes me a moment, then, ‘Oh! Right!’ The old folk. The phone call with the woman, right before our wedding. Some neurologists believe that looking at visual art can awaken the memories of those suffering from dementia. The woman’s polite, well-pitched voice. The pent-up, tremoring quality in it, like an interviewee who was trying not to show how desperate they were to land the job.

We thought we might be able to help our elderly friends who wander lost in their minds. We hoped Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper might be able to help them find a way back.

It had sounded almost rehearsed. Yet it touched me. Her intensity had.

I step into the foyer and come face to face with the elderly lady who was in the gallery the other day. She is with a man probably around my age. He’s stocky and not particularly tall, with a pelt of unruly hair and kind brown eyes.

The woman is already extending a hand. ‘I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself on Monday. I’m Evelyn Westland, and this is Michael Morretti—’

‘Evelyn’s chauffeur,’ he says. He rumples his hair, languidly, like he’s just woken up from a long nap, then offers me his hand.

Evelyn tut-tuts. ‘He’s not my chauffeur! Michael is a nurse at Sunrise Villas. But he did drive us all here today, so I suppose he has a point.’ She sends him a teasing, almost flirtatious little smile.

A nurse? I wouldn’t have thought. He looks more like a tough guy not given to complex self-expression: a B-list actor in a mob movie, perhaps.

‘We’ve got them in a van outside.’ He flicks his head toward the door. He’s standing, somewhat rigidly, with his hands crossed in front of his crotch. ‘We wanted to check with you before we brought them in. To make sure you’re ready for us. If you can ever be ready for us.’