Читать книгу Mainlander - Will Smith, Will Smith - Страница 8

Emma’s eyes were shut, as much from bliss as from the bright October morning light that flooded into the fifth-floor room of the Hotel Bretagne, turning the white sheets gold and topping up her subsiding glow. As well as her physical nirvana, the smile that uncharacteristically took over the whole of her face had its wellspring in the exchange she’d had with Rob before he had stepped into the shower.

‘What are you up to the weekend after this?’

‘Whatever you fancy. Sally’s off to look at bloody furniture on the King’s Road.’

She had taken this as a tacit invitation to spend longer than the usual snatched hours with him, and was already weighing up plausible excuses with which to absent herself from Colin. Shopping, lunch with an unnamed relative, plain old wanting some time to herself …

She rolled away from the window and opened her eyes to look at the bedside clock: 9:32. Rob had said he needed to start work at ten – but he was the boss: maybe he could cry off and they could spend the day together, or at least the morning. She craved another fuck. In fact, there was time for that and for him to shower again before ten. He was quick and urgent – she loved letting him do what he wanted. Colin’s attentiveness in bed, his sublimation of his needs to hers, all of which had seemed too good to be true in those first heady months, now struck her as weak and bloodless. Her former prince had a neediness, a lack of self in his centre, that he filled with duty.

Her musing was broken by a knock. Rob was still in the bathroom, so no need to tell him to hide as was his habit when room service turned up. She always teased him about that: there was no dignity in a king hiding from his servants. She opened the door and a middle-aged Portuguese man with a thick moustache wheeled in a trolley of pastries, cereal, fruit, juice, tea and coffee.

She picked up a croissant, switched on the radio and sat back on the bed. She turned up Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ till Rob barked, ‘No!’ from the bathroom. Laughing, she lowered the volume and fiddled with the channels till she found something more appealing, settling on what she thought was Bryan Adams, or possibly Bruce Springsteen, or that other guy with Jaguar or something as a middle name. It annoyed Colin when she got singers confused like that, the same as getting lyrics wrong. She often did it on purpose.

She fell back to thinking of locations for their mooted weekend assignation. It would be good to get out of this room. They met here as and when they could, maybe eight times since they’d first fallen on the bed back in July. Until then she’d genuinely thought she was over Rob. Their original split had thrown her off balance and she had struggled to regain it. Eventually she’d left the Island for a TEFL course, determined to travel the world and return solely for births, marriages and deaths, only to reappear with Colin at her side and triumph in her breast. He was different from Rob. He was just as handsome, but gentler and less raucous. He was idealistic and unworldly, self-deprecating and no hostage to cool, and above all he worshipped her. By going in the other direction, she had proved she wasn’t bothered by Rob moving on to Sally. She would have a purer love, based on intimacy and friendship, not showboating and overhosting. She had pronounced to the world through her marriage that she was finally happy, stable: she had boxed up the past and placed it in deep if not permanent storage. Rob and she had reached a palatable friendship, although she had never seen him without Sally, until that lunchtime when he’d passed her as she was looking in the window of Layzell’s, a local travel agency.

‘I recommend Barbados.’

‘Oh, hi, Rob. Yeah, I’ve been trying to persuade Colin we should go away for New Year. He doesn’t like the idea of winter sun, but I go a bit stir-crazy out of season here.’

‘Well, if you want sun and he wants cold you could come with us. We’re thinking of renting a ski lodge in Chamonix with Tony and Becs.’

‘Sounds great, but might be a little out of our range.’

‘Well, as a further compromise, you could do worse than stay at the Bretagne. I’d do it for mates’ rates, if not gratis.’

Emma laughed.

‘What?’

‘Rob, I want to get off the Island in my holidays. We’re already going to be here the rest of the summer, apart from a weekend at Colin’s mother’s and maybe a week in France.’

‘Trust me, you stay at the Bretagne and you won’t know you’re in the Island, apart from the view – which, by the way, is fantastic.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Grabbing a sandwich, then heading back to work.’

‘You’re not eating a sandwich. You’re eating at the Bretagne. Chef’s running in the new menu before next week’s reopening, for a few specially invited guests. Come on, free lunch.’

‘There’s not time to get there and back …’

‘You forget, I drive a Porsche.’

She had laughed, but allowed him to pull her along by the hand. After an above-par lunch of fruits de mer, with a couple of glasses of champagne, in a pristine deserted dining room, Rob had insisted on wowing her with the new decor of the rooms before he ran her back into town.

As she had looked out at the rocks of St Clement’s Bay from the room she was in now, he had stood behind her and put his hands on her hips. She’d turned to ask him what he was doing, but the fact she didn’t remove his hands meant they had kissed, then fallen on to the bed in a near-frenzy. Rob confessed that the memory of their time together loomed larger than its limited duration should have allowed, and that he felt neither regret for what they had just done nor the desire for it to be unrepeated. He had joked about keeping the room free at all times in case they needed it. She wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not, and found herself hoping that he wasn’t.

Rob came back in, his biceps flexing as he towel-dried the back of his hair, which was longer than the front. A larger towel was wrapped low round his hips, showing off the almost-six-pack for which he’d never had to work. Colin always wore a towel higher up, nearly under his armpits, like a woman.

‘Did you tip?’ he said, gesturing at the trolley from which he picked up the Financial Times.

Emma gestured to the spray of her clothes on the floor. ‘I don’t know where my bag is.’

‘Tip well and they’ll keep schtum.’

‘None of the staff would say anything anyway. They’d lose their jobs.’

‘True. Maybe I just like the intrigue.’

‘You like having a fuck-pad in your own hotel.’

‘“Fuck-pad” … I like it. Did you come up with that?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘We should have it as a plaque on the door. And another up at Grosnez Castle.’

‘Why Grosnez Castle?’

‘You’ve forgotten!’ yelped Rob, whipping the smaller towel from round his neck and twirling it triumphantly, like a banner. ‘It’s where we first went all the way. Usually I’m the insensitive lunk who forgets significant moments in a relationship.’

‘We didn’t do it in the actual ruins. It was further down, on a ledge.’

‘Does it matter? I got the general area right.’

‘It matters! It was my first time,’ she murmured, stunned that she was feeling the same elation now that she had felt then.

‘Mine too … outdoors.’

‘You said it was your first time!’

‘It was, it was! I’m kidding! Not sure it’s been bettered …’ He leant down and kissed her. She pulled off his towel and reached for his crotch.

‘Sorry, no time for seconds.’ He straightened and moved to the wardrobe.

‘Hey, next weekend, if the weather’s good we could maybe take the boat out, pop over to Carteret.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, as he pulled on the two-tone burgundy Pierre Cardin shirt that earlier he had deftly hung on a hanger with one hand while removing her bra with the other.

‘Sally’s not around.’

‘That would break rule numero uno – not outside this room.’

‘Why did you say, “Whatever you fancy”, when I asked you what you were up to the weekend after this?’

‘I didn’t. I said, “Whatever I fancy.”’

‘You said, “Whatever you fancy.”’

‘You must have misheard. Wishful thinking. I’m flattered. And mildly freaked.’

Emma sat up in bed and turned away from him.

‘Em, come on, we can’t risk being found out. You’re scaring me.’

‘We could go on the boat, go to France. Who’s going to see us there?’

‘Getting out of the harbour unseen is like trying to get out of a prisoner-of-war camp. And Carteret and Saint-Malo are full of Islanders doing the weekend baguette run. That’s why we have the rules.’

‘I don’t like rules. It makes me feel you do this all the time.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. This hotel is full of my mistresses. That’s the only reason I run it.’

‘Don’t make fun of me.’

‘But you’re being …’ He trailed off.

‘What? Ridiculous? Crazy? Say it.’

‘Paranoid. And demanding. We should just enjoy what we have.’

‘I’m a little confused as to what that is right now. It feels like no-strings sex.’

‘Well, I don’t know what you’re complaining about. It was me adding strings that split us up the first time.’

Emma stood and headed wordlessly to the bathroom. She felt a slam rising through her arm as she reached for the side of the door, but knew instinctively that the same cold pseudo-normality she had used against Colin last night and earlier that morning would be more cutting, and so closed the door gently.

She began her second shower of the day, annoyed again with the man in the other room. This shower was powerful, enveloping: she could lose herself in it, unlike the electrically heated unit at home that whirred and buzzed to produce a trickle akin to that of an emptying watering-can. She always took long showers after sex with Rob. She supposed he might read guilt into this, that she was undertaking the kind of instinctive baptism people do when struggling with shame, but she felt none of that. She just liked the shower.

What was bugging her, though, was that Rob had been right. Their affair could only ever remain behind closed doors, and closed doors upon which no one was likely to come knocking other than room service. Everyone knew everyone else’s business in the Island. Wipe a tear from your eye on leaving a supermarket in a cold wind, and expect your partner to ask why you were seen sobbing in public when you made it home.

He was also right that she had ended their earlier coupling through fear of constriction. While they had seen themselves as being together for ever, in the endless love peculiar to teenagers, they envisaged it happening in different parts of the globe. Emma was a big and beautiful fish in a small pond: she had designs on larger waters. London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, they would all fall to her charms, in what industry she wasn’t yet sure. She should be able to rise to the top of whichever pile she chose to climb: acting, music and fashion were all easy options for someone with her looks and instinctive knack for trailing broken hearts behind her, as evidenced by the legions of solitary doe-eyed boys pounding the beaches, pining for her, with ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ on their Walkmans. Rob saw their future differently. It was to be Island-based. He would provide a large income and they would be the Island’s ‘It Couple’. They would live in a converted granite farmhouse with a pool, and a garage for as many cars as they wanted. Labradors, horses and, after a time, two children, one of each, named Hugo and Holly, who would go to the same schools as their parents had attended and follow the same paths laid out before them, leading to lives of stress-free luxury.

These opposing visions of the future were as distinct as high and low pressure, and the result was as inescapable as the storm that had broken a week before the end of the summer holidays. They were about to start the last year of their respective sixth forms, where they were each deemed the coolest and most attractive of their peers. Rob had shown Emma the broken-down St Lawrence farmhouse he wished to buy one day and restore for her. She suddenly felt restricted, as though her life was being mapped out for her without her consultation, so her response was less than exuberant. Rob was hurt, declaring her ungrateful.

‘Ungrateful? For you telling me how my life’s going to be? There’s a whole world out there, Rob! It’s nice to have options.’

‘Options on houses, or options on guys?’

‘Both. This is all too much.’

She convinced herself that the split was for the best, which was easier than admitting she might have overreacted. She knew it would sting to be dropped off by her mother on the first day of term, rather than by Rob in his open-top white VW Beetle. She would no longer feel like the unofficial Princess of the Island, and would need to control the agenda when news of their break-up rippled through the common rooms. The sting had the added barb that on the first day of term it was her best friend Sally getting out of his car at the school gates. Sally, whose gawkiness threw her own elegance into even greater relief, Sally, who only got her cast-offs, Sally, to whom boys talked so that they got to talk to herself. Sally had explained that she’d started dating Rob only after Emma had dumped him, in fact just days before term started. When Emma’s anger had increased, she had become defensive, citing Emma’s proclamation that she was unfazed at the demise of what had been a golden coupling, and her declaration that she could ‘do better than Rob’. After weeks of antipathy, Sally had admitted at a tearful café summit that she should have told Emma that Rob had asked her out, but she hadn’t known how to go about it: she’d felt awkward and guilty, paranoid that it wouldn’t last, and was scared of jinxing it. Emma and she had made up, unsure as to how the new power shift would affect their worlds but still best friends because, at their age, these things seemed cast in stone.

Over their final year at school Sally’s status and confidence grew until she had become the cool beauty everyone wished to associate with, while Emma seemed to lose her bloom and momentum. Her bitterness and confusion seeped out, and her face hardened. Her eyes seemed permanently narrowed, which gave her the intimidating look of someone predisposed to disapproval.

She became aware that the short-term boyfriends she acquired thereafter were facsimiles of Rob. She wasn’t sure whether she went for yachting alphas because she wanted Rob or simply to outdo Sally. They treated her badly, perhaps encouraged by her own lack of self-esteem. The only exception had been Dave Le Gresley, who had begged her to maintain a cross-Channel relationship when she had set off for the TEFL training college, even promising to follow her round the world if she went through with her travel plans. Dave had been too doting and would do anything for her. By then she had known only how to come second.

And here she was, still coming second.

Rob was on the phone when she came out of the bathroom.

‘Christophe, Louise on the front desk, she’s got to go … No, not because she’s Scouse, I don’t have a problem with that, but my wife will … Yeah, you know. Cheers.’

He raised his newspaper and immediately made another call. ‘Rick, it’s Rob. How’s tricks? … Great, I want five thousand worth of Acorn … Because they’re going to replace the BBC micros in schools … Yeah, not just in the Island, across the UK … And a company called Exotech … Mainly copper … I want fifteen thousand of that … I don’t care how much it is, it’s going to go up … Because it’s in electrical wiring. Trust me, the amount I’ve spunked away having that farmhouse rewired, not to mention the bloody kitchens here, means I know what I’m talking about … Good, speak soon.’

He hung up and began making notes in his Filofax, while she sat on the bed and combed her wet hair. Provoked by his silence and knowing time was short, she opened her mouth to resume their argument, then closed it. A lump in her throat had choked her off. There was only one sensible way their affair could end: lifelong silence between them. If she pushed him now that would be it. She hated herself for accepting the little he could give, but she needed it.

She hid behind her hair. ‘You should get some monogrammed towelling robes.’

‘That’s all phase-three stuff, icing on the cake. We’ll scare the working classes off first, then go upmarket. Robes cost more than towels and one in five gets nicked. More, if it’s Scousers staying.’

‘How’s the restaurant doing?’

‘Not great. Refurb overran so playing catch-up from opening mid-season. Bar’s doing well, and at least Sammy Dee hasn’t come back. Had a major fight with Dad over that, but times change. Who wants to see some fat dick with a perm and a velvet jacket singing out-of-tune Sinatra in front of some tinsel?’

‘The guests presumably. Some of them come back year after year to see him.’

‘They’ll be dead soon, and until then they can stay at the Victor Hugo or Golden Dunes or one of the other morgues. I’m looking at the next generation, and they want something different. The Royal Barge have that guy who does Eagles covers – at least that’s only ten years behind. Right, done.’

Rob put down his Filofax as Emma switched on the hairdryer.

‘You need better hairdryers too. This always takes ages.’

‘They’re all new.’

‘They’re no good.’

‘No more upgrades till I’ve paid off a chunk of the refit bill. Need people to tuck into those surf-and-turfs. Such a good mark-up on lobsters. I’d start pulling ahead a damn sight quicker if that’s all they ate.’

‘You were just buying and selling in tens of thousands! You can afford some decent bloody hairdryers.’

‘I need those tens of thousands to keep afloat.’

‘Women need a decent hairdryer.’

‘Are you complaining about the facilities in the free fuck-pad?’

‘I’d be complaining if I was paying.’

‘The old dears we get are happy to spend half the morning drying their blue rinses, and it gives their husbands time to lie on the bed and stare at the walls.’

‘You’ve got to invest in your business.’

‘I am investing in my business – too fucking much, as it happens. Can we not talk about this? It’s stressing me out.’

Emma switched off the hairdryer. ‘I give up. I’ll let it dry on the way.’

Rob reached for her hand. ‘Em, what we’re doing, it’s okay, you know. We’re just working through a bit of unfinished business.’

‘You’re tagging this on to when we were together before.’

‘Yes. It’s part of what happened then.’

‘As opposed to now.’

‘Now is different. We’re in different places.’

‘Do you think I’m a slut?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve slept with more people in this Island than you have. I mean, you’ve been with me and Sally. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Are you trying to make me feel inadequate? What’s your point?’

‘I’m a girl you sleep with but don’t marry.’

‘I can’t marry you because I’m already married. So are you.’

She crawled across the bed and draped her arms round his neck. ‘I’m sorry … I don’t know what I’m saying today.’

‘If it’s too much, we can cool it …’

‘It’s not too much. It’s just enough. A little bit of fun in these four walls that no one knows about. Just as we agreed.’

‘Yup. Only Christophe.’

She withdrew her arms. ‘What?’

‘Christophe knows. About the room. And why I need it.’

‘Jesus, Rob.’

‘I can’t keep it from him – he’s my eyes and ears in this place. Trust me, he’s a locked safe. He’s French so he knows how these things work.’

‘I thought he was Corsican.’

‘Same thing.’

‘Oh, really? So a Jerseyman’s the same as an Englishman.’

‘Fine. He’s Corsican. You win. Point is, I trust the guy.’

Emma started picking her clothes off the floor. ‘Colin knows too.’

‘What?’

‘About us.’

‘Fucking hell! Why are you telling me this now?’

‘He only knows about the first time.’

Rob threw his head back. ‘Oh, Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack.’

‘Unlike Christophe, he’s very much an unlocked safe. Should make tomorrow interesting.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘We’re coming for lunch.’

‘Are you? Sally never tells me anything.’

‘Sorry – you annoyed me about Christophe.’

‘It’s fine. Look at us, sniping like an old married couple.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘I take it back. Are we okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’d better get to work.’

‘Me too.’

Thinking that they might have spent the day together, Emma had called in sick immediately after confirming her rendezvous with Rob. An empty day now yawned before her. The weather was fair but she couldn’t face a walk. There was the risk of bumping into someone who knew someone from work and, in any case, she was dressed in her Midland Bank navy skirt and jacket, and court shoes. She set off driving round the Island, on the same roads, past the same houses, with the same faces at the same windows and the same shrubs in the same gardens. Every corner, every street lamp, every tree-shrouded lane was primed to trigger a memory. She felt as if she was driving through her own theme park.

She passed her parents’ St Clement’s beachfront house where she’d spent an awkward New Year following the announcement that her first term at Birmingham University was to be her last, and where Colin had written ‘Marry me’ in seashells outside her bedroom window on the first Christmas Day of their relationship.

Further along the coast road was the flat at La Rocque that she’d rented during the years of idle temping and dating, years of confusion and anger. There were natural laws in the universe that she had never imagined could be defied, and one of them was that she would marry sooner and better than Sally.

Gorey Castle was where Sally, sprawled against the outer battlements after a pub crawl on the last day of school, had told her she didn’t care about her exam results and had decided to turn down her university place: she wanted to be Mrs Rob de la Haye. It was also where Emma had first kissed Rob after they had rolled down the castle green, a sweeping slope edging the castle’s northern wall.

St Catherine’s Breakwater was a compound memory: multiple family walks in the rain, disappointing her father with her lack of enthusiasm for sailing, her younger brother Rory nearly falling off the edge during a tantrum, Colin boring her with his superior knowledge of the history of the breakwater.

As she drove up the east coast she remembered sitting alone at White Rock, bereft and broken after fulfilling her duties as Sally’s chief bridesmaid. She had been convinced that Sally was trying maliciously to emphasise her recent weight gain with the cut of the dress. At the end of the evening a drunken Sally had told Emma that she knew how hard it must have been to watch her and Rob walk down the aisle, but that she, too, would soon find her prince. Emma had played it cool, denying it was even an issue, while struggling to understand why it still was and why she was maintaining a friendship that served only to undermine her confidence and self-esteem. As she had watched the sun come up that morning, disappointed that its sickly rays still left her shivering under her car blanket, she had known she had to leave again.

On skirting the top of Bouley Bay she was reminded of Colin, and how on his first visit he had eulogised about how the purple pebbles matched the heather on the cliffs then wondered why she could ever want to leave such a place. She had come back to work for the summer to earn some cash before she set off on her TEFL travels. As their love grew and his stay extended from July to August, his enthusiasm made Emma see the Island in a new light and her travel plans receded. When the job at the school had come up in September, she had allowed herself to be swept up in his sense of Providence. Now she resented Colin for having cheated her out of other, possibly better, options. She could have been off this rock and married to an architect in New Zealand, sending round-robin Christmas letters detailing their idyllic life spent flitting between their beachfront mansion and thousand-acre farm.

Nearing the brown-brackened outcrops that loomed over Bonne Nuit, she realised that she was halfway round the Island. She was literally going round in a circle. She turned into the centre, determined to find an unfamiliar road. She veered left down a lane, remembered it led to her cousin Yvonne’s house, so took the next right, then another left and a right, all along lanes that she knew by sight if not by name. She took three straight lefts in a row, then discovered she had doubled back on herself and went into a frenzy of random turns, speeding as fast as she dared, pushing herself to near panic as she imagined the hedgerows folding over and swallowing her. She came to a crossroads. Straight ahead lay the Carrefour Selous, another crossroads at the middle of the central parish of St Lawrence. The right cut across to the top of St Peter’s Valley and the airport, dense copses lining the slow curve up to a plateau leading to the broad beaches of the west coast. A pleasant drive but one she’d made many times before. The left led back towards St Catherine’s and Rozel. She rested her chin on the steering wheel and a fugue descended, until an estate car stopped behind her and beeped. She pulled out quickly to the left, then noticed a smaller road just off it that led up a steep incline. To make it she had to swing on to the other side of the road, which caused an oncoming van to brake hard and blare its horn, but she had found her Holy Grail: she did not know where this road led. Her mood lifted, along with the land’s elevation, as the lane banked left and right.

She turned on the radio for a further boost but the nimble-fingered riff of Dire Straits’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ conjured a heart-tugging combination of jauntiness and despair. She turned the dial blindly, desperate for another song, one she hadn’t listened to endlessly as part of the compilation tape Bounce Back that she’d made around the time of Rob and Sally’s wedding. As she flicked between stations, she laughed at her misplaced fury with the station programmers. They hadn’t chosen to mock her with their selections. There was no conspiracy: this was the Island getting on top of her.

As the road rose she found a French station, which was accessible from various points on the Island. The song that was playing was the one she had chosen as the climax of that tape, a song as high in the air as ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was down on the floor.

Baby look at me,

And tell me what you see,

You ain’t seen the best of me yet,

Give me time I’ll make you forget the rest.

For some reason it unlocked within her a deep-hidden joy. She slapped up the volume and jigged in her seat, beeping her horn in time with the music, partly out of the need to warn any oncoming drivers of her presence as she rounded fern-laden corners, and partly out of an unexpected frenzy of optimism that could not be held back. As she sang along, ‘Fame! I’m going to live for ever’, she started to believe it, only a kernel of her feeling ridiculous, but that was part of her revelry: the ridiculous was far more fun than moroseness. Rob was just something she was working out of her system. She’d needed to go back to him to grasp that she didn’t really want him. Their affair was benign, a boon to her marriage as it would help her see the good in the husband with whom she lived on a beautiful island. She would not be drowned by the past. She would spring on top of it, laughing as it drained away. She stopped the car, her elation snatched away, as if a magician had pulled off a tablecloth leaving everything on it in its place.

She had driven this lane before. She must have. There in front of her was the farmhouse that Rob and Sally were having renovated. The same farmhouse that Rob had promised her when she was seventeen. Sally had taken her round the empty shell at a celebration barbecue following the successful purchase, pleading with Rob to replace an oak on the front lawn with a circular drive and a fountain, and expounding on the dilemma of deciding between a swimming-pool or a tennis court or both, but then having a limited garden space. Emma had been inclined to make sure she was not around for the work’s completion.

Builders were plodding around the house now: it was coming together. Emma leant her head against the car window, crushed by the epiphany that it wasn’t just the ghosts of the past that she had to wrestle and evade but the ghosts of the future. She could fool herself no longer. She had to leave, this time for good.

As she trudged up the stairs to the flat, with nothing to look forward to except sitting in the tainted glare of framed wedding photos, wondering if she’d ever smile like that again, Mrs Le Boutillier’s door opened. Emma’s mood deflated further.

‘Hello, Mrs Bygate, not at work today?’

‘No.’

‘Have you got that bug that’s going round?’

‘I think I probably have, so best keep back. I don’t want to give it to you.’

‘Very thoughtful of you – got to be careful at my age.’

Emma turned to put her key in the lock.

‘Oh, silly me, I’ve got this for you – you must have just missed him,’ Mrs Le Boutillier went on.

‘Colin?’ replied Emma, confused.

‘No, the boy. He had a letter for your husband. I said I’d make sure he got it. Things get awfully messed up in the pigeon-holes. Not everyone in this block takes as much care as I do, making sure the right letters go in the right places.’ She held up an envelope with ‘Mr Bygate’ handwritten in the centre.

‘Right, thanks.’ Emma tried not to sigh, but was weighed down by yet further proof that any interaction with her neighbour took at least five times longer than she might have predicted.

‘He was ever so helpful. I’d just got back from the market and he helped me in with my trolley. I offered him a cup of tea to say thank you but he said he was in a rush. Maybe I put him off, talking too much. That’s the thing when you live alone. If you get the chance to talk you probably do it too much …’

‘Right. I’ll make sure Colin gets it. Did he say who he was?’

‘He said he was a pupil.’

‘He should be at school then.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. I get so confused by what holidays they have, these days. Not like in my day …’

‘Wonder how he knew our address.’

‘Well, it’s an odd name. Only one in the phone book.’

‘I suppose. Thanks again.’

‘Let me know if you’re feeling up to a cup of tea later. I bought some currant buns at the market that need eating up …’

Emma had shut the door.