‘Cat?’
‘Sorry. Yes, this is fine. Great.’
‘You must find it weird being back here, I guess.’
I can’t quite meet his gaze. I still remember the day he told me they’d bought the house. I was sitting outside a loud and overcrowded bar on Lincoln Boulevard, feeling hungover and ridiculously hot. I’d been in Southern California for a few years by then, but still hadn’t acclimatised to relentlessly sunny. The first thing I felt was shock. Everything else came after the call was over and I was left alone to imagine them curled up in the drawing room in front of the fire and its bottle-green tiles, drinking champagne and talking about the future. Although it wasn’t the last time he called me, it was the last time I answered.
‘I just can’t understand how everything can still be here, after all this time. I mean, other people must have lived here since—’
‘An older couple were here for years. The MacDonalds,’ Ross says. ‘They must have got most of the original furniture in the sale and didn’t change much. When we bought it, we replaced most of what was missing.’
I look at him. ‘Replaced?’
‘Yeah. I mean, they left the big stuff: the kitchen cabinets and table, the range, the chesterfield. The dining room furniture. But most everything else is new. Well, not new – you know what I mean.’ His smile is strained and unhappy, but there’s anger in it too. ‘Felt like every weekend, El wanted to drag me to antique shops or fairs.’
I flinch at her name – I can’t help it – and Ross looks at me carefully, holds my gaze too long.
‘You never asked me why,’ he says. ‘Back then. Why we bought this place.’
I turn away from him. Look towards the window and that painted-over cupboard door.
‘It came up for auction. El saw the notice in the paper.’ He sits heavily down on the bed. ‘I thought it was unhealthy to dwell on the past. I mean … you know what I mean …’
And I do. I was happy here. Mostly. And I’ve been so unhappy since. But I still know it’s true: you can never go back.
‘I got the deposit together, helped her buy it.’ He shrugs. ‘You know what El was like when she wanted something.’
My face heats, my skin prickles. He’s talking about her in the past tense, I realise. I wonder if it’s because he thinks she’s dead, or because she and I don’t have any kind of a present any more.
He clears his throat. Reaches into his pocket. ‘I figured while you were here you’d need these. So that you can come and go when you want.’ He holds out two Yale keys. ‘This is for the hallway door, but I usually leave it unlocked, and this is the night latch for the front door. There’s a deadlock too, but there’s only one key, so I’ll stop locking it.’
I take the keys, squash flat the memory of black dark. Run. ‘Thanks.’
He rocks forwards onto his feet as if yanked by strings. He starts to pace, running his hands through his hair, seizing big fistfuls. ‘God, Cat, I need to be doing something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know what!’
He wheels on one foot and lunges towards me, eyes wide enough that I can see the red threads around each iris. ‘They think she’s dead. They keep skirting around it, saying it without saying it, but it’s obvious that’s what they think. Tomorrow, she’ll have been missing for four days. And how long do you reckon they’ll keep looking before all their muttering about weather and time and resources becomes “I’m very sorry, Doctor MacAuley, but there’s nothing more we can do”?’ He throws up his hands. His T-shirt is stained dark at the armpits. ‘I mean, it’s not just her that’s disappeared, it’s a twenty-foot boat with a twenty-two-foot mast! How can that just vanish? And she was a good sailor,’ he says, still pacing. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time he’s said all this to someone. ‘She knew I hated it when she went out alone on that bloody boat.’ He drops back down onto the bed, strings cut. ‘I always told her something like this could happen.’
‘I didn’t even know she could sail,’ I say. ‘Never mind owned a boat.’
Moored at Granton Harbour. I suffer an image of us standing at the bowsprit of the Satisfaction instead – laughing, shouting, the hot tropical wind tangling in our hair – and I feel a stab of something between longing and fury.
‘She bought it online a couple of years ago.’ Another flash of anger. ‘Binding contract, non-refundable deposit. She was making good money from commissions, the occasional art show, but not enough. So I had to pay the balance. And she got what she wanted. Before she even knew how to bloody sail the thing. God, I wish I’d never—’ He draws his hands down his face, dragging at his skin. ‘It’s my fault. All of it.’
I sit down next to him, even though I don’t want to. I want to tell him that she’s not dead, but I can’t. He isn’t ready to hear it yet. ‘How can it be your fault?’
He was away: some last-minute psychopharmacology conference in London. An annual requirement for all practicing clinical psychologists. ‘The efficacy of psychoactive therapies versus safe ratios,’ he says. As if that’s important. As if I have a clue what that is. He blames himself for not being here, for not stopping her going out, even though we both know it wouldn’t have made a difference. But that isn’t all of it. There’s something else, I can tell. Something he isn’t saying.
‘By the time I got back, she’d already been missing for at least five hours, probably more, and that storm had come in from nowhere.’
I think of that Day One photo of him caught in the shadows between two round, flat spotlights.
‘Yesterday, they widened the search to the North Sea. All the fishing boats and tankers out there are looking for her too, but …’ He shakes his head, stands up again. ‘I know they’re going to stop looking for her soon. I know they are. The police are coming round tomorrow morning. No one wants me down at the harbour any more, doing fucking nothing but getting in the way.’ He snorts. ‘The wailing widower.’
He seems so angry, so bitterly resigned.
‘You must be knackered. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?’
He immediately starts to protest.
‘I can’t sleep until tonight anyway,’ I say. ‘If anything happens, I’ll wake you up, okay? I promise.’
His shoulders sag. His smile is so wretched, I have to look away from it. I look out instead at the green windy sway of the orchard beyond the window.
‘Okay,’ he says, reaching out to squeeze my hand once. ‘Thank you.’ At the door, he turns briefly back, his smile more like his own. ‘I meant what I said, you know. I’m really glad you’re back.’
I root about in my suitcase until I find one of the vodka miniatures I bought on the flight. Sit down on the bed in the warm space where Ross was, and drink it. On the bedside table, there’s a framed photo of a very young El and Ross grinning next to the floral clock in Princes Street Gardens. His fingers are inside the waistband of her denim shorts; hers are splayed across his stomach. Had I gone by then? Had I already been forgotten? I look at El’s big happy grin, and know the answer.
I turn away, look around at the room again instead. The Clown Café was solely El’s invention: a richly imagined roadside American diner, with walls of red and white and glass tubes of pink neon. An old record player was a jukebox playing fifties Elvis. The pine sideboard was our table; two high stools, our chairs. The bed was a long serving counter, and the cupboard, the john.