‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she shouted. ‘He’ll be back soon. He always is.’ The crowd pressed against us as Jake began to sing. She held the cigarette upright between her fingers and blew smoke into my eyes. ‘Go back to the cottage with her. I’m staying with Jake. I showed your letters to my mother and I’ll show them to him. Then he’ll know what you’re really like… you lying cunt.’ She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, as if she was as shocked by the word as I was.
‘I’ve been searching for him – ’
‘Filthy prostitute… that’s what you are.’
Her words glanced off me. A terrible certainty had taken over and I was beyond being offended.
‘What if he doesn’t come back? Don’t you care? He’s missing. I went down to the beach searching for him but the tide’s in over the sand. What if he’s fallen from the cliff?’
For the first time she seemed to hear me. She shoved through the crowd, beating at them with her fists when they refused to move. It was still raining as we ran towards the harbour. Joan was talking to a man outside the phone kiosk. I recognised Charlie, the old fisherman who had danced with her all those week ago. She handed her car keys to him and he drove us back to the cottage.
‘He’ll be waiting for us,’ Karin said. ‘He’ll be mad at us for going without him.’ She shivered, drenched, as I was, from our run to the car.
‘Of course he’ll be there,’ said Charlie. ‘He’s a man who knows his way around there parts, right enough.’
The cottage was as we’d left it. The sodden towel lay on the path and the front door banged open and closed. A squad car arrived shortly afterwards. The night was long and loaded with dread. Guards came and went. Searchlights illuminated the cliff. The coast guard and a mountain rescue team joined in the search. We sat up all night and convinced ourselves he’d run away. Karin said he’d come back for her. She repeated this like a mantra. I longed to cover my ears but I listened and agreed.
His body was found the next day, washed in on the tide. We knew he was gone by then. We’d seen where he’d fallen. The scrub broken and uprooted had been unable to stop his fall as he pitched forward into the night. He would have died as soon as he hit the rocks, dead before he was washed out to sea. Karin and her mother were assured of this fact many times, as if, somehow, this was a balm to be applied over their grief.
We both knew our friendship could never be rekindled. How could it? We only had to glance across at each other to remember the waiting hours and the dread of what the morning would bring. I wrote to her after her father’s funeral and asked if we could meet and talk. The envelope came back to me by return of post. My note was inside, shredded.
PART THREE
Chapter 12
Jake
Jake took the Gibson from its stand and sat down on the straight-backed chair he always used when playing his guitar. He turned the tuning peg and checked the B string. Still too sharp. When the guitar was in tune he began to strum ‘The Long Goodbye’. He needed to calm down. Music usually provided the perfect antidote but not tonight. He had needed a slap back to reality and that was what he received when the Kingfisher Graphics business card fell from his wallet. The shock on Nadine’s face. Such unguarded hurt in her eyes. What had she been remembering when she picked it up? She had been silent of the journey home and had gone straight into her office. Had she believed him? He needed to delete those texts and photographs, stop behaving like a lovesick schoolboy and bid goodbye to a fantasy that was never going to become a reality.
She crossed the hall and entered his music room without knocking. They had an unwritten rule to respect each other’s privacy and his uneasiness grew when she sat down on the edge of the tatty, old sofa, the only piece of furniture they had brought with them from Oakdale Terrace. His fingers pressed nervously on the fret as he strummed lightly, nervously.
‘I want to talk about our marriage.’ Her back was ramrod straight, her cheeks flushed.
‘What about our marriage?’
‘We both know it isn’t working anymore.’ She twirled a hank of hair around her middle finger, a habit she had never outgrown when she was upset. ‘I’m sorry for blurting it out like this. I’ve been trying to think of a right way to say this… but the right way doesn’t exist.’
‘Not working? Since when has our marriage stopped working?’ He automatically tightened the D string then twanged it so violently it snapped and cut his finger.
She flinched at the discordant sound. ‘You’re bleeding. I’ll get a bandage.’
‘It’s okay… okay.’ He pulled tissues from a box and wrapped them around the cut. ‘I’m confused. Are you saying you want to leave me?’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘No, Jake. I want us to leave each other. I want us to be free to do the things we’ve always wanted to do.’ Her stance, the rigid set of her shoulders added to the tension in the room.
He stood up and rummaged in the media unit where he kept the spare sets of strings. ‘Let me get this straight. First of all you want to sell Tõnality. Then the house. Now you want to end our marriage. Am I leaving anything out? Would you like to disown our children, perhaps? Pretend they never existed?’
‘Are you going to pretend you still love me?’
‘Of course I love you.’ His hands shook as he tried to restring his guitar. He gave up and replaced it carefully on its stand.
‘Like a brother loves a sister,’ she said. ‘Like friends. That’s us, Jake. How often do we make love? We’re too tired, that’s what we say. We both know that’s not true. We never wanted this marriage but we knuckled down and made the best of it.’
‘We did more than that, Nadine. We worked at it.’
‘We’ve worked it to the bone. It’s made us old before our time. I won’t be forty for another six months but I feel as if we’ve lived the full circle of life when, really, there’s still so much more we can experience. I need more from my life and so do you.’
‘Stop telling me what I need,’ he shouted. ‘You’re willing to risk our marriage, our family, our home, our company on some harebrained notion that life should offer you more. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.’
‘You know I’m right. It’s time we stopped pretending.’
‘I’m not pretending.’ He sat beside her on the sofa, the space of a cushion between them. He grasped her shoulders, pulled her close to him. ‘What are you trying to do to us?’
‘I’m giving you back your freedom.’
The word throbbed into the open and a new energy, apprehension, tumultuous fear – Jake was unable to define it – vibrated between them.
‘I can’t talk about this anymore tonight,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to think… what to say….’
She swayed suddenly and moved closer to him, flushed, eager, her hands held outwards, pleading with him to embrace a vision only she could see. ‘We can make this work, Jake. You’ll thank me in the end. Once the children understand that nothing fundamental is going to change in their lives, they’ll accept our decision. It’s our time now.’
He felt her heat, the tremor of her breath when they kissed. Her lips opened under the pressure of his tongue. To his surprise, and, probably Nadine’s, they made love on the old sofa, as they used to do when the children were in bed and they lived in a small house where even a hiccup could be heard through the walls. No wonder the sofa sagged in the middle.
They did not bother removing their clothes. No foreplay to delay the inevitable clash of pleasure. No awkwardness as they unzipped, unhooked, unbuttoned, undid each other’s resolve to pretend that this was anything other than a familiar ritual. She was moist and ready, sweet and juicy as the apple she had so temptingly held before him. Her desire matched his own, their cries buried in each other’s shoulders as they shuddered into relief. When she moaned he was unsure if the muffled sound was carried on pleasure or pain.