Bring Me Back (B.A. Paris)(31)

It’s hard to get down to work but despite having one eye out for an email coming in, I manage to cast an eye over some new Requests For Proposal. Ellen comes to get me for lunch and we listen to some jazz while we eat the paté I bought earlier, Peggy at our feet. Is that why I fell in love with Ellen, I wonder, because she loves the things that I love – dogs, jazz, cooking? Because she’s a better match for me than Layla was?

‘I can’t believe how high our water bill is,’ Ellen is saying.

‘It’s the price we have to pay for a beautiful garden,’ I say, aware that my phone has just beeped, a sign that an email has come in. But I’m not going to look at it here, in front of Ellen, in case it’s from Layla.

‘Dessert?’ Ellen asks. ‘I’ve poached some apricots from the garden.’

‘Lovely.’

I rush through the apricots and with a quick kiss to Ellen, head out to my office.

The email is from Layla. I open it quickly.





AND NOW I HAVE





TWENTY-SEVEN

Layla

The trouble was, I couldn’t see inside Finn’s head. Despite the two Russian dolls that I’d left for him to find – one on the wall outside the house, another on his car – despite letting Ellen catch a glimpse of me in Cheltenham, which personally, I thought was a stroke of genius – maybe he was still refusing to believe I was back. Perhaps he didn’t want to believe it. He was going to marry Ellen and no amount of Russian dolls was going to change that. Anyway, didn’t she deserve him after all the sacrifices she’d made?

So I tried to let go. And I might have managed to if I hadn’t returned to the cottage, this time to go inside to take a keepsake of our time together there. The keys to the cottage were the only thing I’d had with me the night I’d disappeared, because they were in the pocket of my jeans, the jeans I’d been wearing the day we left St Mary’s.

I chose to arrive at lunchtime when there was less chance of being seen by Thomas. Like the previous time, I passed unnoticed out of the station. My steps quickened as I walked towards the cottage and as I approached, the past dug its claws in deeper, dragging me back to before, so that when I arrived at the gate, I fully expected Finn to fling open the blue front door, worried that I’d taken so long to come back from my walk to the village. When he didn’t, I thought he must be in the garden, so I let myself in. Lost in the past, I was surprised to find the key hard to turn in the lock, the door difficult to open, as if something was holding it shut. Maybe Finn had put a bag of rubbish there, to take out to the bin later.

I pushed the door harder, shoving whatever was behind it out of the way, and stepped into the hall. And the past, having had its fun with me, tossed me right back into the present. Disorientated, I stared at the mail piled up behind the door, yellow with age, trying to understand, because it seemed so at odds with the flowers in the garden. Even if Finn only came by once a month to keep the cottage up to scratch, surely there shouldn’t be this much mail?

Unwilling to accept what my eyes and nose were telling me – the stench of neglect was everywhere – I reached out and pushed open the kitchen door. A shower of dust fell from it and as I stood on the threshold looking in, it was hard to make sense of what I was seeing. Inch-thick dust covered every available surface and cobwebs hung from the beamed ceiling in shrouds. It eventually sunk in. Finn hadn’t been looking after the cottage, waiting for my return. How could I have ever thought that he would? He hadn’t been hoping that I would come back. I could stop leaving little Russian dolls for him to find. I wasn’t going to get the past back, I wasn’t going to be able to come out of the darkness and into the light. I was going to have to spend the rest of my life in subterfuge, hiding my true self away from the world.

Devastated, my eyes swept around the kitchen. Something caught my eye; a slightly raised rectangular shape on the table, something there under the dust. As if in a trance, I walked over and picked it up, exposing the brown wood surface of the table beneath. It was a letter, the envelope covered in the dust of a thousand years. I studied it for a moment, wondering why it wasn’t lying in the hall with the rest of the mail. I ran my finger across the front of it, dislodging the powdery film, and saw that the envelope had been handwritten, not typed, the ink so faded I could barely make out what it said. I held it up to the light streaming in through the window. There was just one word – Layla.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the letter Finn had left for me, because I recognised his handwriting. Eventually, the terrible shaking that had taken hold of me when I first saw my name on the envelope drove me to put it into my bag, terrified that the letter, fragile with age, would disintegrate in my hands before I’d had a chance to read it. What did it say, this letter that Finn had left me all those years ago? Was it a letter of warning, never to go near him again, to not seek him out, in the event that I did turn up? Or was it a letter of a different kind?

Aware of time passing, I left the cottage quickly, pulling the door closed behind me, then locking it, glad there was no sign of Thomas. As I hurried towards the station, I slipped my hand into my pocket and closed my fingers around the little Russian doll, one of the new ones, trying to calm my racing heart. When I arrived, I walked to the end of the platform, where there was less chance of somebody trying to strike up a conversation with me. Not only was I incapable of talking, I didn’t want a friendly local asking me why I’d come to St Mary’s, or a tourist telling me where I should go to next. But the family of four I walked past were too wrapped up in themselves to take any notice of me, as were the young couple sitting on the only bench, his arm around her shoulders, reminding me painfully of how Finn and I used to be.