The Day We Disappeared (21 page)

‘I finished work before eight for
once,' Stephen beamed, ‘and here we are in the same restaurant! Mad!
Splendid! Petra's just moved to Clapton before starting art school,' he
continued. ‘And her dad, my big brother, has asked me to keep an eye on her.
So here I am, reporting for duty.'

Petra rolled her eyes but I was weak
with relief. ‘Of course,' I gasped. I sounded insane. ‘So are you
Barnaby's big sister, Petra? Stephen carries a picture of him in his wallet.
He's gorgeous!'

‘Yeah,' she muttered,
evidently disgusted at having to talk to me. ‘Yeah, he's my
brother.'

‘Well, it's nice to see
you,' I said, slipping my hand into Stephen's, out of sight of his
niece. He kissed my cheek again, a lingering kiss that smelt of clean skin and
verbena, and said he'd come over to say hi to Le Cloob when they'd
finished eating. ‘Hello!' he called in their direction.

‘Flannie …' Lizzy handed me
some water as I sat down. ‘Are you okay?'

I took a sip of water. ‘Um,
sorry?'

‘Darling, are you okay? Your hands
are shaking. You look like you're going to faint.'

A pretty
waitress refilled our glasses and the sudden smell of wine made me feel sick.

‘That's Stephen!' I
said. ‘And that's his niece. For a moment I thought …' My voice
wobbled off into nothing. ‘I'm such a freak!'

Claudine was scowling at Stephen and
Petra. ‘How do you know he is her niece?'

‘Oi,' Tim said sternly. He
poured me some water out of a carafe. ‘Claudie, he introduced the girl as his
niece. We all heard him. I think, if she was his secret lover, she might possibly
have objected.'

Claudine began to argue but he and Lizzy
told her to shut up. I tried to breathe myself back down to some sort of
equilibrium.

‘Sorry about that,' I said,
when they'd finished arguing. ‘I wish someone had warned me that love
turns you into a paranoid lunatic, ha-ha!'

Tim and Lizzy exchanged glances, which
annoyed me. ‘Pumpkin,' Tim began. There was a delicate expression on his
face. ‘Pumpkin, you looked … er, very anxious back there.'

‘As if your life were
'anging in the balance,' Claudine added unhelpfully.

‘Well, if he'd been cheating
my life would have been hanging in the balance. Oh, come
on
, guys.
We've just been there! I'm okay! I'm just in love!'

Tim did the face I knew he must use on
his patients. Polite, respectful but ever-so-slightly concerned. ‘I accept
that,' he said gently. ‘But just take it easy, okay? Relax into it,
Annie. If you're right for each other there needn't be anything to worry
about.'

‘I agree,
darling,' Lizzy said. ‘Maybe you should do some of those meditations you
like, keep yourself nice and balanced. I mean, it's normal to worry a little
bit, of course, but you did seem, er, like you were about to die.'

I pushed my salad round my plate, hoping
nobody would notice that I'd hardly eaten. I was fed up with having to defend
myself and my relationship, and even more fed up that they were probably right. I
mean, Stephen had spent the past seventeen days telling me how madly he was falling
in love with me and yet I'd gone into freefall when I'd spotted him
having dinner with a teenager. That was not sane behaviour.

Tim had been hassling me about the fact
that I'd stopped seeing my therapist when I'd run out of money. His view
was that now I was earning again I could afford it. My view was that I
couldn't stop smiling: why would I want to go back to the gloom of my
therapist's armchair?

Now I wondered if maybe I should. Tim
was seldom wrong about these things: not only did he know me inside out but he had
the added benefit of having sorted out his own shit quite spectacularly.

Tim and I had met at that support group
as sixteen-year-olds when we had begun to implode. He had lost his big sister to a
brain tumour around six months before and had been harming himself. I had decided on
my sixteenth birthday that I was done with being alive. All of my birthdays had been
bad since Neil Derrick had been urged by voices in his head to ‘punish'
my mother while we played hide and seek on Woodford Farm, but that one, nine months
after I'd started having panic attacks, had been
impossible. I'd woken up unable to remember
Mum's face and had had an attack. By lunchtime I'd had four more, and as
my fifth had moved in on me, like a rotating saw, I'd agreed with myself that
that would be that.

The on-duty psychiatrist at A&E had
prescribed anti-depressants and referred me for psychodynamic therapy. At some point
a psychologist had taken charge of me and suggested several other things I should
try. The guilt at what I'd done to Dad and Lizzy was so crushing that
I'd tried everything on her list, which meant – among other things I
didn't want to do – attending a weekly support group.

I'd found the group to be
pointless and had kept on going only because of my family, and because I liked Tim
so much. Perhaps it was because he was so fragile himself, or simply because he was
such a beautiful, kind person, even back then, but in Tim Furniss I'd found a
man with whom I'd felt safe.

As the months had passed, however,
I'd watched him grow and change; watched him discard the ragged mantle of his
past and step into a vital and focused existence of which I could only dream.

He'd done it. He'd
recovered. And I … Well, I'd limped on as best I could.

Fine, I thought wearily. I'll go
back to therapy if I need to. I'll read books. I'll do anything I have
to do to keep this relationship going.

‘Just give me a chance,
guys,' I said, picking up my fork again. ‘I totally hear what
you're saying, and I accept that I need to calm down. So let me just get on
with that in my own time, okay?'

Tim smiled.
‘Good on you, Pumpkin. And remember, we love you.'

Stephen and Petra got up to go while we
were all arguing over desserts. He shepherded her to our table before leaving,
telling Le Cloob he'd come back for a glass of wine once he'd walked
Petra home. ‘If that's okay,' he added. ‘I don't want
to be That Boyfriend who just gatecrashes everything.'

Lizzy giggled. ‘I had one of
those. But I can tell you're not the same. We categorically demand that you
return, Stephen. It's not optional.'

‘Nice to meet you, Petra!' I
said. It was a relief to be calm again. ‘We'll have to go for coffee
some time – we must be neighbours!'

‘We are,' she said.

‘Oh! He told you where I live,
then? Just there on Blurton Road?'

‘Uncle Stephen has told me
all
about you.' She gave me a sickly sort of a grimace. What a
charmer!

Well, I'd work on her, just like
I'd work on myself. Maybe if I played my cards right she'd even come to
see me as a sort of cool (or most probably not cool) aunt.

Uncle Stephen, so impossibly handsome in
his rolled-up shirtsleeves, caught my eye and winked.

Two hours later, we were engaging in
some casual nudity on the big Inca rug in my front room. It was his first time at my
house and, after a brief tour, most of which he'd spent removing my clothes,
we'd had a bit of a marathon in front of the fireplace, which I'd filled
with candles. We
were both sleepy and a
bit drunk but every now and then one of us roused ourselves out of our stupor long
enough to kiss part of the other. An elbow here, a rib there. The candlelight made
long shadows across Stephen's lovely tanned skin and I thought once again that
he looked like a mythological god.

‘This is like a film,' I
said timidly. ‘Midsummer sex in candlelight. Feeling this good.'

Stephen rolled sideways so that he could
see my face. ‘But, Annie, you have three large locks on your front door, and
you keep your keys in a secret cubbyhole, which makes me feel like we're in a
thriller. And let's not forget that you did run off to vomit while I was
bestowing tender kisses on your neck.'

The morning-after pill had caught up
with me; the second in a fortnight. I hated taking it; hated what it meant; hated
what it did to me. But that was the problem with love. It stripped you of sense.

‘We have to stop having
unprotected sex,' I said. It worried me that I wasn't looking after
myself properly.

‘I agree.' Stephen yawned.
‘How do I know you aren't infecting me with rotten diseases?'

I smiled thinly. ‘Hmm.'

‘Hey … Annie? What's
wrong?'

‘Nothing. Well, just the
morning-after-pill thing. I shouldn't let it happen.'

Stephen kissed my forehead. ‘And I
shouldn't either. Stop worrying. We made a bad mistake and then we made it
again. But that's that.'

I relaxed. ‘Thank you. And sorry
for ruining this little film scene we're having here. Look!'

I scampered over
to my little house-key cubbyhole. ‘Look, I'm going to be all casual with
my house keys, see?' I tossed them into the air and they landed on the sofa.
‘Look! There they are, just sitting on the sofa. In full view of the street.
That's how relaxed I am …'

Stephen started laughing.
‘They'd be in full view of the street if you didn't have your
curtains closed.'

I looked forlornly at my big pile of
keys. How shiny they were, I thought, my jailer's hoard. Of course I
couldn't just leave them in view of the street. Far too shiny. Far too
obvious. ‘I may need a bit more time on the keys front,' I admitted,
putting them back in their cubbyhole. ‘So if you could cope with feeling like
you're in a thriller a little longer, that would be great.'

Stephen just chuckled. ‘Come back
here.'

I came. ‘Stephen, thank you for
being amazing tonight. You charmed the hell out of everyone.'

‘I did not! Claudine was looking
at me like I was some sub-species of crustacean!'

He wasn't wrong. When he'd
returned to the table Claudine had grilled him for a good five minutes before Tim
had stepped in and told her basically to be quiet. Stephen, being the good-humoured
man that he was, had taken it in his stride, but I'd felt like I might die of
embarrassment.

Luckily, Lizzy and Tim didn't seem
to have any problem appreciating Stephen. Lizzy had been reduced to tears of
laughter when Stephen told us about his elder brother, Petra's dad, who
apparently used to throw bananas and oranges at Stephen's head while he slept
and spent his summers sitting in a pear tree reciting the lyrics from
The King
and I
.

By the end of
the night Lizzy was declaring quite openly that she thought Stephen was the best man
she'd met in years. ‘And to top it off you're appallingly
good-looking!' She giggled. ‘Well done! I think you've even won
Claudie over.'

Claudine declared he had done nothing of
the sort, but did at least manage to kiss Stephen's cheek when we left the
restaurant. Tim and Stephen had even had a manly hug, much to my delight.

‘He's so handsome,'
Tim whispered, as Stephen ordered Lizzy and Claudine cabs on the FlintSpark account.
‘And just great. He's basically the perfect man.'

‘Isn't he?' I'd
blushed.

Tim looked at me. ‘Yeah,' he
said sadly. ‘I wish I had some of his charm.' He had gone home looking
depressed.

Poor old Tim. The Mel thing must have
hit him hard.

‘Claudine will take time, but they
basically all think you're amazing,' I told Stephen. One of the candles
sputtered and his face swayed in and out of the shadows. ‘And they're
right,' I told him. ‘You are amazing.'

Stephen pulled me close and kissed me.
‘I'm glad they liked me. I liked them. I have hopes of one day becoming
a member of Le Cloob. Or at least a sort of recognized guest.'

‘And that's another thing!
You remembered that we're called Le Cloob! I was so proud!'

‘Of course I remembered,
silly.' Stephen ran his fingers along my arm. ‘You talk about those guys
all the time.'

‘I'm sure I do … I can
barely remember anything of the last two weeks. It's just been like a perfect
blurry blur.'

Stephen kissed me again. ‘Your
memory is really quite
extraordinary,' he told me. ‘In a very bad
way. I honestly don't know how you ran your own business before we
met.'

‘Neither do I. Trust me, I made
many, many mistakes.'

Stephen sat up suddenly. ‘Which
reminds me! I have something for you.'

He got up, walked over to the hallway
where his work satchel was hanging and returned with a little maroon booklet.
‘Look what arrived on Tash's desk this afternoon. You massive
goon.'

‘WHAT?' I sat up. ‘No!
Where? How?'

Stephen grinned, handing me my passport.
‘You are hopeless,' he said, snuggling back around me. ‘Sylvie at
the château found it and the courier dropped it off today.'

‘God,' I said, mortified.
‘How could I have been so stupid? I looked everywhere! I spent a fortune
getting that emergency travel thing!'

Stephen kissed my ear. ‘It's
all part of your mad charm,' he said, nuzzling my neck. We lay there for a
long time, the candlelight flickering over our bodies and the dark room behind us.
The heat of the day had finally passed and the warmth of my man wrapped around me
was blissful.

Being here now, so completely calm and
happy, I couldn't quite believe I'd felt so hysterical when I'd
spotted Stephen and Petra earlier. It seemed like something from a different
world.