But he knew it wasn't. Of all the places he'd been since the night of Mark Derbyshire's Christmas party, this house was the one place that Elise Fox was not. Her absence from it was absolute.
Nathan turned off the bedside lamp. His eyes were startled by the unfamiliarity of the darkness. It took time for them to adjust to the moon-tinted edges of the room. But he must have slept, alone in that darkness, because he woke to the first hints of the dawn chorus.
He got up and got dressed. He removed the duvet from the bed and left it folded there, with his towels alongside it. He slipped out the front door.
Outside, it was cold and wet. He was tired and the engine, in the country stillness, made a loud and lonely sound.
He went home first, to shower and shave, and was not late for work.
20
Sometimes, in those early days, they weren't sure where to go. Trips to the theatre or the cinema seemed contrived -- but there was tacit agreement that Nathan should not invite Holly back to his flat, not even for a video and a Chinese takeaway. The moment she crossed his threshold would be charged with too much significance.
So they met at lunchtimes and ate at a nearby brasserie, or they met after work and spent an hour or two talking in the corner of some quiet pub or wine bar. Gradually, Nathan's neurotic desire to provide her with novelty began to diminish, and one place became their regular venue -- a stone-flagged bar in the basement of an Italian restaurant. Often, it was empty but for the skinny Russian waitresses, playing eighties pop on a cheap stereo. If it was empty, they sat in a corner anyway, and ordered something to eat and a bottle of wine.
Holly would tell him about her day. He learned a great deal about the day-to-day operation of being an estate agent. And he learned that Holly wasn't happy at work.
She'd taken a Business Studies degree at Southampton. Graham and June would've preferred her to do something else, something useless like English -- but Holly hadn't seen the point then and she didn't see the point now. She'd wanted to run her own business since she was fourteen years old.
Elise had changed all that. The job at the estate agency was supposed to be a temporary solution, something to bring in the money while their lives were off-kilter. But their lives were still off-kilter, and Holly was still an estate agent.
She didn't like her boss, a dick called Neil who had an eighties flick and a supercharged BMW. He was about twenty-two and still spotty round the chin -- but he had four children and an ugly house about which he never stopped boasting.
Holly still intended to be her own boss. It wasn't even a question of capitaclass="underline" her parents would remortgage their house, if necessary, and she had some savings - after all, she hadn't been paying rent for quite some time. Plus, her social life had been non-existent.
Then she dipped her head, exactly as she always did during these moments, and drew her finger around the rim of her wine glass. 'But the timing, you know.'
She told him about her parents.
'Dad was in the navy. It always gave him, what would you call it, this self-confidence. Like a dignity thing. But Elise, that sucked all the confidence from him. He's housebound. He potters all day in the garden or in his study. He won't go further than the garden gate for weeks on end, not even to go to the pub.'
This was the pub across the green where, two or three times a week since Holly was young, Graham had met his cronies to play dominoes, and poker at Christmas. One of those cronies had been Mark Derbyshire, whose name was no longer mentioned in the village.
'The press conferences were terrible for him,' she said. 'He used to throw up before leaving the house. I had to help him out to the car, like he was an old man.'
'Does he talk about her?'
'He can't. He just acts as if you're not talking. It used to drive me up the wall.'
'But not any more?'
'Well sometimes, yeah. But there was this one Sunday morning, I heard him crying. He was sitting on the floor behind the door of his little office. Just saying "My God, my God" over and over again, muffled, like he was biting his fist and trying not to cry. Like it hurt, y'know, like he was in physical pain. This is, like, a week before Elise's twenty-first.'
Nathan rested his jaw on his hands, saying, 'Oof.' And then, not wanting to hear the answer, he said, 'Your mum?'
'Mum used to be a secretary - she's organized. After she got married, she did work for charities, action groups, whatever. PETA, the WWF, the Women's Institute, homeless charities. She'd do this thing for the WI - she'd go to dodgy estates and teach single mothers and families on benefit how to budget - how to do cheap, home-cooked meals.
'So she knew what to do, to help her cope. She set up the foundation . . .'
This was the Elise Fox Foundation.
In time, other families of lost children had pledged effort and capital; the Foundation expanded, growing to offer a counselling service to the violently bereaved and to those, like June, whose grief lacked an object.
June had never sought therapy - the Foundation was her therapy.
But it grew so large that she became oppressed by it. Now she was its chair. Fund-raising and day-to-day operations were handled by a woman called Ruby, who lost her daughter on a French campsite in 1991.
With Ruby, June was at liberty to discuss Elise as something other than a girl whose primary characteristic was absence. She became a daughter again: a new baby, a stumbling toddler, a gawky, bespectacled eleven-year-old. While Ruby was around, Elise and her disappearance were not the same thing.
Nathan said, 'And what about you?'
'What's to say? Families pull together, or they break apart. I didn't have much choice.'
'But it's like . . .'
He waved his hand around, fighting for the word.
'I'll tell you what it's like,' she said. 'It's like being in open prison.
From the outside, it looks like I've got all the privileges: job, car, friends. Y'know. But all the freedom is gone. I'd always sort of assumed that Mum and Dad would become my responsibility, one day. But not so soon, you know? I had plans. Not big ones, necessarily.
Just normal plans: good job, nice husband, house, kids. Blah blah.
And suddenly, all that. . .'
Again, she fluttered her hand, following its progress like a departing bird.
Nathan leaned forward over the table.
'You're not even thirty yet.'
'Not yet. Ha. Okay, the thing is, I know I'll probably have all that.
But not in a way that'll seem natural. I'll always have this thing that happened to me, and nobody will be able to understand it. How do I have children? How do I even send them to school in the morning, after what happened to Elise? How do I tell them there's no such thing as monsters? How do I tell them not to be scared of the dark?'
She was becoming frustrated. She could explain, but not make him feel, the scale of this loss -- that, like an explosion, it expanded from a central point equally in all directions: that it stretched back in time, infecting the day of Elise's birth; and the night she was conceived - it was a ghost in the shadows of the evening June and Graham first met, first danced, first kissed. And it warped into the future, it coloured every breath Holly would ever take.
'And whatever I have,' she said. 'Whatever I get in the end, whatever kind of happiness I'm able to build, all of it will be stuff Elise was never able to have. How do I live with that? How am I supposed to have the husband and the kids and the house and the job and, I don't know, the three holidays a year in sodding Barbados when my sister went out one night - and just stopped?'
'I'm sure Elise wouldn't want you to be unhappy.'
'Of course she wouldn't. But just because the way you're feeling doesn't make sense, it doesn't stop you feeling it.'