‘Jon! How could you say that? How could you embarrass me like that?’
‘Us Chettles do not suffer fools lightly, Claire. I’m not about to start now.’
She wanted to leave him, to just go home, but it was his car and she did not know where the nearest railway station was. Sheringham, probably, a good twenty miles away. She had not seen a bus or taxi since they were in Ely the day before yesterday.
‘I don’t feel as though I’m on holiday, Jon. I haven’t been able to relax. All we’ve done is drive and argue. And I really needed this break.’
‘Hey, it was your choice.’
‘Oh, like it would have been different if we were in Paris?’
He was nodding. ‘Paris is the city of romance. It’s impossible to have an argument there.’
She snorted. ‘There’s a word for people like you. Dumbfuck, I think it is.’
He let that one go, but she could see his jaw clenching, his knuckles whitening on the wheel.
She saw the windmill first. It rose up from a coppice beyond a low range of roofs, its naked, motionless blades seeming to pin the sky into position. She pointed it out and Jonathan nodded, turning the car on to a gravel track. They crested a small humpback bridge over a stream choked by rushes. The windmill was white, tall and solid. Some of its windows were open; lace curtains wagged in the breeze.
Jonathan parked the car and got out without looking at Claire. He walked through the heavy wooden door at the windmill’s base. Claire collected the bags and stood for a while, looking out towards the dunes. On the path, a cluster of birdspotters in brightly coloured windcheaters alternated their focus between her and a clump of gorse. They surprised her because there was not a man in their midst. Occasionally, one of them would raise their binoculars and favour her with a brilliant stare. A woman in a fluorescent green beanie trotted further down the path and the others followed. Claire laughed. They looked intense and foolish.
At the door, she paused. She could not see anybody inside.
‘Jon?’
There was a visitors’ book open on a bureau next to a coffee cup. A small jar of lollipops on the windowsill had been discoloured by the sunlight. ‘Hello?’
She left the bags by the door and headed towards the room to her left. The door was ajar; an old woman was turning back the covers on the bed.
‘Oh, hello?’ said Claire, raising her hand. The woman looked up and smiled.
‘Hang on dear,’ she said, fiddling with her ear. Claire saw she was wearing a hearing aid. ‘I keep it turned off when I work. Nice to have silence every now and again.’
‘My name’s Claire? Claire Osman? I booked a double room for tonight.’
She moved past Claire and checked her name in the ledger. ‘Yes. Room for two. Where’s your partner?’
‘He went in ahead of me.’
The old woman gave her an askance look before shuffling towards the other end of the room. She twisted the handle on the door at the end but it was securely locked.
‘Nobody came in here, my love. Are you sure?’
‘I’m certain!’ Claire blurted. ‘I saw him come in before me. He must have gone through that door.’
‘Aye, if he was a spirit. That’s the door to the windmill. It’s always locked unless we have a party of schoolkids come around, or enthusiasts, you know.’
‘The other guest room then. He must be joking with us.’
‘There’s someone already in that, my love.’
‘He must be in there.’ Claire felt sick. She would have been happy to see the back of Jonathan in any other circumstances but this was just too weird. Suddenly too final.
She pressed up close against the old woman’s back when she disturbed the other guests, who were sorry they could not help, but no, they had not seen a soul in the past half hour. Claire felt her head filling with grey. She smelled Trebor mints and Earl Grey on the woman’s cardigan. The next thing she was aware of, she was sitting on a high-backed wooden chair in the dining-room, her eyes fixed on a cut-glass bowl filled with boxes of Kellogg’s Variety packs. The old woman was holding Claire’s hand. The other guests — a woman in a pair of khaki shorts and a fleece; a willowy woman in a track suit sucking vampirically at a cigarette — watched, concerned, from the corner of the room.
The latter introduced herself as Karen and looked as though she had smoked herself thin. The type of woman who hurried a meal, picked at it really, just so that she could have the cigarette afterwards. Claire wondered if that was the way she had sex too. She drew the smoke so deeply into her lungs that it was almost without colour when it returned.
Her partner, Brenda, offered to call the police and look around the dunes outside. ‘The tide here is pretty innocuous but, you know, water is water.’
Claire sat in the room, looking at Jonathan’s travel bag. It had not been zipped up properly; a corner of his Bolton Wanderers flannel was sticking out of it. Two WPCs arrived. She told them what she knew, which was nothing. They made notes anyway. Checked the car. Told her to relax and there would be someone to talk to her in the morning. Best not to go anywhere tonight. In case Jonathan should return.
‘He’s got the car keys anyway,’ she said. The policewomen laughed, although she had not meant it as a joke.
She watched them go back to their car. They talked to the old woman for a while, one of the policewomen turning to look at her through the window for a few seconds.
She ate with the other couple at the ridiculously large dining table, Brenda quick to let her know what a sacrifice this was as they had aimed to go to the Red Lion in Upper Sheringham for food. Karen puffed before and after courses and during mouthfuls. Her cheeks seemed permanently hollowed.
‘Has he ever done this before?’ she asked.
Claire started to cry through her food, something she had not done since her childhood. She had forgotten how hard it was to eat and cry at the same time.
‘I can’t talk. I’m sorry.’ She left them and went to her room. She drew a hot bath and soaked for twenty minutes, tensed for his knock at the door and his impatient, stabbing voice. She never realized she would miss him so much.
Later, she watched the dark creep into the sky. Mars clung, a diamond barnacle, to the underside of a raft of cloud. The birdspotters were still out there, a mass of coloured Kangol clothing and Zeiss lenses. There was even a tripod. Cows stood in a far-off field like plastic toys.
Pale light went on outside. A soft-looking girl carrying a hose slowly drifted around the perimeter of the windmill’s grounds wetting the plants and the lawn. An overweight dog ambled alongside her. Claire listened to the fizz of electricity until it calmed to a dull murmur and then went to bed.
Sleep claimed her quickly, despite her loneliness and the alien posture of the low-slung room. Her dreams were edgy, filled with vertiginous angles and lurid colours, as though she were a film director trying too hard. She was in a car too big for the road, ploughing through a village where there were no men. She was heading towards a windmill in the distance that did not seem to get any closer. Occasionally she would drive over some indistinct shape in her path. Before long, the roadkill became larger. Some of it wore clothes. It did not impede her progress; she drove straight over it.
whump. whump. whump
Shanks of flesh squirted up on to the windscreen. The engine whined as it bounded through the bodies.
whump. whump. whump
Awake. Grainy blackness separated into the lumpen shapes of furniture and pictures on the wall. Imperfect light kissed at the curtains, turning them into powdery tablets.
‘Jonathan,’ she whispered, softly, hopefully.