H olding her in my arms, I wondered how any man could inflict the kind of pain and terror that would fracture this woman apart. That was how she felt in my arms, like broken pieces that no longer fit together. I wondered if there was more going on than she had said, but her poker face was the best I’d seen. Until now. Just then my phone began to ring and she pulled away. I searched in my pocket, trying to turn it off.
‘Bloody thing,’ I muttered, until I finally got hold of it, only to let it slip
through my fingers and on to the ground. We both bent to get it, bumped foreheads and finally she picked it up.
‘Isabelle,’ she said, reading the name and handing it to me.
I just stared at the screen until it stopped ringing. Isabelle. I’d somehow managed to put her completely out of my thoughts. Like I’d compartmentalised my life in London into a separate filing system in my head. Having spent the most incredible day with Martha, opening up about our pasts in a way that neither of us ever had before, and being in a different country, I felt like a different person. I felt as though I were no longer running, at least for now. My whole life up to this point had been running away from something, losing myself in books and hoping to God that no one would notice the great big hole inside of me where something vital should have been. I looked back at Martha, the vulnerability in her eyes
challenging me and my propensity to simply tell people what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth. She’s just a friend, I could have said. But there was something about her gaze, like she could see right through me.
‘Isabelle is my girlfriend.’ ‘Oh.’
There was a vacuum, which I stupidly chose to fill with more words. ‘Actually, I should probably call her my fiancée. I proposed just before I
left.’
‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘Well, congratulations!’ She smiled with a forced jollity that made me feel even worse.
Why hadn’t I told her earlier? I should have told her at the start. Surely that’s what a normal person would have done. I could sense her embarrassment, which was misplaced because I was the one who should’ve been embarrassed. I tried to seek refuge in the thought that lying and not telling the truth were two different things, but even I didn’t believe that. She then made a big production out of checking the time on her phone and saying she should get back home. Alone. That point was underlined and in bold. I’d fucked up.
 |
I arrived back at my B&B to find Nora watching a quiz show on the telly in the front room. She sat on an armchair with wooden armrests, her ashtray balancing precariously on one while a Jack Russell snored peacefully on her lap. I looked around for the other two, then realised they were sniffing my shoes. He could probably smell where I’d been and how much of an idiot I was.
‘Oh, you’re back,’ she said, despite the fact that I had not made her aware of my departure. She simply maintained an air of familiarity with everyone coming through her house. Like a mother to all of us.
‘Do you want a cup of tea or a sandwich?’ she asked, slotting her bunioned feet into her slippers.
‘I’ll make it,’ I said. ‘You stay where you are.’
She looked at me as one might look upon the face of a saint, which made me realise how little it took to make someone happy and yet how rarely it happened. I rinsed out a brown teapot and set the cups on a tray, with a packet of pink wafer biscuits.
Once she had the tea in her hand and another cigarette lit, she turned her attention to me.
‘Come on then, who is she?’ ‘Sorry?’
She even took the unnerving step of turning down the volume on the
TV.
‘You’ve that look.’
‘What look?’ I asked, immediately trying to change my look, which is a
very difficult thing to do when you weren’t aware you had a look in the first place.
‘I didn’t come down in the last shower,’ she said, tipping her ash into the ashtray and wriggling into a more comfortable position for interrogation. ‘You’re a brooder – a bit like himself outside.’ She nodded at the shed, wherein I assumed her husband was still hiding. ‘He used to be a window cleaner, before he got the pension. Now that might not seem very grand to the likes of you, but there’ll always be windows that need cleaning.’
I nodded, because you couldn’t argue with logic like that. And there was no point in telling her that ‘the likes of me’ had to rely on scholarships and student loans, thanks to Father’s drinking.
‘Anyway, years ago, he had the chance to go into partnership with this fella; said they could tout for more business and get bigger jobs. So, himself starts brooding on it. And brooding and brooding until, well, it was too late.
The other fella found someone else who jumped at the chance and they got the contract for half the hotels in the city!’
Just then her husband stomped down the stairs in his vest and trousers and smacked the newspaper down on the hall table.
‘For the last time, woman, I’m afraid of heights!’ he announced, before shoving his arms into a shirt and storming out the front door. It closed with such a thud that the pictures of the various popes hanging in the hall shook in the most unholy way. We stared open-mouthed at the hallway where he no longer stood.
‘He never got over it,’ she said, a slightly judgemental tone in her voice, and I wondered what was the glue that held people together. Mutual disdain? Lack of any better idea? ‘Anyway,’ she continued undeterred, ‘it doesn’t do any good to brood.’
Perhaps she was right, I thought, as I sipped my tea and the volume on the TV crept up again. What the hell was I brooding over anyway? I came here to find the manuscript, not to develop a crush on another woman. If anything, spending time with Martha was getting in the way of my research. I began warming to this idea because it meant that the blame was being lifted off my shoulders. I took my leave of Nora and went upstairs to my room and laptop. There were two emails. The first from Isabelle:
Answer your phone!
Classic Isabelle style. Direct and to the point. She was a woman who had high standards for herself and everyone around her. She was a life coach and often spoke in rousing statements like Go big or go home, or If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you! Was I slightly intimidated by her relentless energy? Maybe, but it’s also what drew me to her. She was everything I felt I needed to be.
We had met two years before at my sister’s wedding. She was the wedding planner then. Her previous incarnation, as she called it. She seemed to have a new career every few years and was totally brilliant at all
of them. I had it on good authority that she was an amazing yoga teacher before that, according to the groom, who could still throw his legs over his head, which was a bit too much information really. I was immediately struck by her confidence, and by the time we waved the happy couple off on their honeymoon, she made it clear that whatever I had in mind, it would be on a trial basis only for her. Much like her careers. She looked at me like someone deciding whether to pick a bruised apple and give it a go. And so I found myself constantly trying to win her over (as much as myself) to the idea that I could, given the right conditions, become a success. Like a houseplant. I knew that if I had someone like Isabelle in my life, everything would be infinitely better, bigger, brighter! I never had anything or anyone in my life that I could feel proud of – that I could say, ‘Look what I’ve got’. Flashbacks of my father’s face haunted me, those tear-drenched nights when he tried to convince my mother to take him back. But at times, I just felt so tired. Tired of proving myself. Tired of trying to make someone see something in me that I wasn’t even sure was there.
I decided to send an equally punchy reply:
Lost in research! Tomorrow ok?
I opened the second email. It was from a colleague in London who had been scanning Carlisle family archives for any mention of Opaline. There was nothing of note beyond her twenty-first birthday. It was as though she had dropped off the face of the earth. Her brother, however, was very well documented and had been quite high up in the army during the First World War. He’d earned himself a rather grim nickname, ‘The Reaper’. It wasn’t very much to go on and brought me no closer to the lost bookshop on Ha’penny Lane. Or the elusive young woman who lived next door. The woman who had helped to find out Opaline’s real name. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I had this weird sense that she was somehow the key to it all. Or perhaps that was the story I had to tell myself in order to stay close to her, no matter the cost.
