“Why did he stand for it?” Vera asked. “That’s the question. More relevant than why he asked her to leave in the end. Jeanie was there for three months. Why didn’t he boot her out sooner?”
“He loved her,” Emma said. “Didn’t he?”
“Oh, no,” Vera replied, quite certain. “Love didn’t come into it. Not on his part.”
“Abigail was certainly surprised that she didn’t get her own way immediately.” Emma smiled, remembering her friend’s frustration, the strategies which all seemed to fail. There had seemed some justice in the fact that Abigail had been forced to suffer an upset in her life. Emma had looked on at the rows with the same mixture of sympathy and pleasure as if Abigail had sprouted an enormous pimple on the end of her nose.
“Why did Keith suddenly give in?” Vera demanded. After three months?”
“Perhaps she just wore him down with her persistence.”
“Aye. Maybe.”
“Why don’t you ask the inspector who worked on the case at the time? She must have spoken to people, come to a conclusion.”
“Caroline Fletcher doesn’t work for the service any more,” Vera said briskly. “Like Danny here.” She paused. “Strange, isn’t it, that the two officers most actively involved in the investigation retired from the police soon after Jeanie Long went to court?”
She turned her wide smile on Dan, inviting him not to take offence.
Chapter Thirteen
Outside the sun was still shining. A gusty westerly promised more rain. Cloud-shaped shadows were blown across the fields where the green shoots of winter wheat were already showing. In the little house Vera was still holding forth and Dan was still listening. Emma made her excuses and left them to it. She drove to the end of the Crescent, then, instead of turning towards the village, she took the opposite direction towards the coast. Wendy, the coxswain of the pilot launch, was the nearest thing she had to a friend here, and liked it when she dropped in with Matthew. Emma felt she needed an excuse to be out of the house, away from the television and the local news. She couldn’t face seeing Dan again on the screen. He’d been thinner then, his hair shorter. But the way he’d been glowering at the camera, you could still imagine him letting his temper get the better of him. She couldn’t imagine him taking orders easily and wondered if that was why he’d left the police.
Every year in the autumn there were predictions that the Point would be washed away by the tides of the equinox. One big gale, people said. That was all it would take. And certainly it was skinnier than it had been, a spit of land, shaped like a drooping, wasted phallus, hanging into the mouth of the river from the north bank. In places the old road disappeared into the sea and a new track had been made through the sand, the sea holly and the buckthorn. The Point bulged slightly at the tip, where the jetty was and the houses belonging to the lifeboat station had been built. These houses were incongruously modern, all the same, as if they’d been made from a kit. Easy to leave behind, Emma supposed, if that one big gale did come. Only the cottages where the coxswains lived had any substance.
She parked opposite the houses, next to the mobile cafe which sold coffee and fry-ups to the birdwatchers and fishermen. Matthew was awake and began grumbling as soon as the car stopped. She fed him there, sitting in the front passenger seat, looking out over the water, with her coat draped around them both. There was no one to see but she didn’t even like going without a bra. Wendy, who claimed never to have been bjjpody in her life, loved to watch the baby feeding, but Emma didn’t want an audience. Not today. James said the baby was as regular as the tide in his habits and it was true. Her life was punctuated by six hourly interruptions. She was getting used to it.
Mathew settled and she allowed her mind to wander. These quiet times of waiting were when she would usually conjure up dreams of Dan Greenwood. There would be nothing exotic about her fantasies. At night she would wander into the pottery and he would kiss her and touch her. She seldom imagined herself making love. Hers were the fantasies of an immature teenager, comforting and harmless. The fantasies she might have had when she was fifteen, before Abigail had died. She told herself she should leave them behind. She was grown up and they had no meaning now. But it was harder than she had imagined to let them go.
As she pulled down her jumper two teenage lads raced from one of the houses and began to kick a ball against the sea wall. Still carrying Matthew she got out of the car and looked down the river. The smell of mud and seaweed mixed with the frying bacon and chip fat from the cafe.
The cafe was a relatively new arrival on the Point. Before it, there had been an ice-cream van, but only on fine days and at the weekends. And, thinking of the ice-cream van, Emma suddenly remembered that this was where she had first met Abigail Mantel. She hadn’t thought of the encounter for more than ten years. Even relating the history of their friendship to Caroline Fletcher, it had slid somehow out of the story. Perhaps it had been too trivial. Now it came back in jagged flashes, like the sunlight on the pavements. She thought, This is what it is like to be old. This is how old people remember their childhood.
It was June, the end of their first week in Springhead House. Robert was still elated by the new purpose in his life, optimistic about the house, his work, the whole deal of living in the country. “A new start,” he’d say, over and over again. “Really, we are so blessed.” Though Emma didn’t feel blessed. She felt uprooted. Literally. As if someone had yanked her out of hard-packed soil and dumped her to rot. She’d tried to talk about it to Christopher, but he’d only shrugged. “It’s done,” he’d said. “They won’t move back. Not now. Best make the most of it.” She’d thought then it was the sort of thing an adult might say and had considered him almost a traitor.
In contrast, Robert had bounced around the place, wearing them out. And now it was Saturday and although their belongings were still in boxes and Mary looked exhausted, he insisted that they take a trip out to explore their new surroundings. Perhaps they were carried along by his enthusiasm or perhaps they didn’t have the energy to put up a fight, but it was agreed very quickly without argument. A bike ride, he said. Obvious. Ideal because the country’s so flat. And he climbed over the packing cases in the garage to pull out their bikes.
They rode in line with Robert at the front. He was dressed in big khaki shorts which flapped at the leg and a T-shirt with the Christian symbol of the fish on the front. Emma enjoyed the sensation of riding, the pull on her legs, the smell of salt and seaweed and mud. But all the time she was thinking, Please don’t let anyone from my new school see me. Not with my parents and my nerdy brother, all of us looking like something out of Enid Blyton.
Then they were at the Point, and that must have been where Robert was aiming for all the time though he never said. And suddenly it was like riding over the sea, with water on both sides and gulls flying alongside them. At the ice-cream van they stopped. They flopped onto the grass, with the bikes on their sides next to them, while Robert went to buy the ice creams. Christopher rolled onto his stomach and trapped a ladybird under his cupped hands. He’d always captured insects that way. He was looking at it through a hole he’d formed between his thumbs and first fingers, then there was the roar of an engine. He sat up to look and the ladybird flew away.
Arriving back with the ice creams, Robert glowered at the noise. His perfect family afternoon had been disturbed. He muttered about hooligans. The car was black and shiny, a convertible with the roof down, and it pulled up beside them. Loud music, which Emma failed to recognize, continued even after the engine had been turned off. In the passenger seat was Abigail Mantel, her red hair in effective disarray. At first, Emma thought the car must belong to a boyfriend. Abigail seemed much older than she was. Even at that first glimpse you could tell she was the sort of girl who would attract a boyfriend with a powerful car.