The Girl You Left Behind (29 page)

And then they are at the top floor, kissing.
He wrenches
open the lift door and they stumble out, still pressed
against each other, need spiralling between them. She has one hand inside the back of
his shirt, absorbing the heat of his skin. She reaches behind her with the other,
fumbling until she opens the door.

They fall into the house. She does not turn
on the light. She staggers backwards, dazed now by his mouth on hers, his hands on her
waist. She wants him so badly her legs turn liquid. She crashes against the wall, hears
him swear under his breath.

‘Here,’ she whispers.
‘Now.’

His body, solid against hers. They are in
the kitchen. The moon hangs above the skylight, casting the room in a cold blue light.
Something dangerous has entered the room, something dark and alive and delicious. She
hesitates, just a moment, and pulls her jumper over her head. She is someone she knew a
long time ago, unafraid, greedy. She reaches up, her eyes locked on his, and unbuttons
her shirt. One, two, three, the buttons fall away. The shirt slides from her shoulders,
so that she is exposed to her waist. Her bare skin tightens in the cool air. His eyes
travel down her torso and her breath quickens. Everything stops.

The room is silent apart from their
breathing. She feels magnetized. She leans forward, something building, intense and
gorgeous in this brief hiatus, and they are kissing, a kiss she feels she has waited
years to complete, a kiss that does not already have a full stop in mind. She breathes
in his aftershave, her mind spins, goes blank. She forgets where they are. He pulls away
gently, and he is smiling.

‘What?’ She is glazed,
breathless.

‘You.’ He’s lost for
words. Her smile spreads across her face, then she kisses him through it until she is
lost, dizzy, until reason seeps out through her ears and she can hear only the growing,
insistent hum of her own need.
Here. Now.
His arms tighten around her, his lips
on her collarbone. She reaches for him, her breath coming in shallow bursts, her heart
racing, over-sensitized so that she shivers as his fingers trail her skin. She wants to
laugh with the joy of it. He tears his shirt over his head. Their kisses deepen, become
punishing. He lifts her clumsily on to the worktop and she wraps her legs around him. He
stoops, pushing her skirt up around her waist, and she arches back, lets her skin meet
the cold granite so that she is gazing up at the glass ceiling, her hands entwined in
his hair. Around her the shutters are open, the glass walls a window to the night sky.
She stares up into the punctured darkness and thinks, almost triumphantly, with some
still functioning part of her:
I am still alive
.

And then she closes her eyes and refuses to
think at all.

His voice rumbles through her.
‘Liv?’

He is holding her. She can hear her own
breath.

‘Liv?’

A residual shudder escapes her.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Sorry. Yes.
It’s … it’s been a long time.’

His arms tighten around her, a silent
answer. Another silence.

‘Are you cold?’

She steadies her breathing before she
answers. ‘Freezing.’

He lifts her down and reaches for his shirt
on the floor, wrapping it around her slowly. They gaze at each other in the
near-dark.

‘Well … that
was …’ She wants to say something witty, carefree. But she can’t speak.
She feels numbed. She is afraid to let go of him, as if only he is anchoring her to the
earth.

The real world is encroaching. She is aware
of the sound of the traffic downstairs, somehow too loud, the feel of the cold limestone
floor under her bare foot. She seems to have lost a shoe. ‘I think we left the
front door open,’ she says, glancing down the corridor.

‘Um … forget the shoe. Did
you know that your roof is missing?’

She glances up. She cannot remember opening
it. She must have hit the button accidentally as they fell into the kitchen. Autumnal
air sinks around them, raising goose-bumps across her bare skin, as if it, too, had only
just realized what had happened. Mo’s black sweater hangs over the back of a
chair, like the open wings of a settling vulture.

‘Hold on,’ she says. She pads
across the kitchen and presses the button, listening to the hum as the roof closes over.
Paul stares up at the oversized skylight, then back down at her, and then he turns
slowly, 360 degrees, as his eyes adjust to the dim light, taking in his surroundings.
‘Well, this – It’s not what I was expecting.’

‘Why? What were you
expecting?’

‘I don’t know … The
whole thing about your council tax …’ He glances back up at the open ceiling.
‘Some chaotic little place. Somewhere like mine. This is …’

‘David’s house. He built
it.’

His expression flickers.

‘Oh. Too much?’

‘No.’ Paul peers around into the
living room and blows out his cheeks. ‘You’re allowed.
He … uh … sounds like quite a guy.’

She pours them both a glass of water, tries
not to feel self-conscious as they dress. He holds out her shirt for her to slide into.
They look at each other and half laugh, suddenly perversely shy in clothes.

‘So … what happens now? You
need some space?’ He adds, ‘I have to warn you – if you want me to leave I
may need to wait until my legs stop shaking.’

She looks at Paul McCafferty, at the shape
of him, already familiar to her very bones. She does not want him to leave. She wants to
lie down beside him, his arms around her, her head nestled into his chest. She wants to
wake without the instant, terrible urge to run away from her own thoughts. She is
conscious of an echoing doubt –
David –
but she pushes it away.
It is time
to live in the present. She is more than the girl David left behind.

She does not turn on the light. She reaches
for Paul’s hand and leads him through the dark house, up the stairs and to her
bed.

They do not sleep. The hours become a
glorious, hazy miasma of tangled limbs and murmured voices. She has forgotten the utter
joy of being wrapped around a body you can’t leave alone. She feels as if she has
been recharged, as if she occupies a new space in the atmosphere.

It is six a.m. when the cold electric spark
of dawn finally begins to leach into the room.

‘This place is amazing,’ he
murmurs, gazing out through the window. Their legs are entwined, his kisses imprinted
all over her skin. She feels drugged with happiness.

‘It is. I can’t really afford to
stay here, though.’ She peers at him through the half-dark. ‘I’m in a
bit of a mess, financially. I’ve been told I should sell.’

‘But you don’t want
to.’

‘It feels … like a
betrayal.’

‘Well, I can see why you
wouldn’t want to leave,’ he says. ‘It’s beautiful. So
quiet.’ He looks up again. ‘Wow. Just to be able to peel your roof off
whenever you feel like it …’ She wriggles out of his arms a little, so that
she can turn towards the long window, her head in the crook of his arm. ‘Some
mornings I like to watch the barges head up towards Tower Bridge. Look. If the light is
right it turns the river into a trickle of gold.’

‘A trickle of gold, huh?’

They fall silent, and as they watch, the
room begins to glow obligingly. She gazes down at the river, watching it illuminate by
degrees, like a thread to her future.
Is this okay?
she asks.
Am I allowed
to be this happy again?

Paul is so quiet she wonders if he has
finally drifted off to sleep. But when she turns he is looking at the wall opposite the
bed. He is staring at
The Girl You Left Behind
, now just visible in the dawn.
She shifts on to her side and watches him. He is transfixed, his eyes not leaving the
image as the light grows stronger.
He gets her
, she thinks. She feels a stab of
something that might actually be pure joy.

‘You like her?’

He doesn’t seem to hear.

She nestles back into him, rests her face on
his shoulder. ‘You’ll see her colours more clearly in a few minutes.
She’s called
The Girl You Left Behind
. Or at least we – I – think she is.
It’s inked on the back of the frame. She’s … my favourite thing in
this house. Actually, she’s my favourite thing in the whole world.’ She
pauses. ‘David gave her to me on our honeymoon.’

Paul is silent. She trails a finger up his
arm. ‘I know it sounds daft, but after he died, I just didn’t want to be
part of anything. I sat up here for weeks. I – I didn’t want to see other human
beings. And even when it was really bad, there was something about her
expression … Hers was the only face I could cope with. She was like this
reminder that I would survive.’ She lets out a deep sigh. ‘And then when you
came along I realized she was reminding me of something else. Of the girl I used to be.
Who didn’t worry all the time. And knew how to have fun, who
just … 
did
stuff. The girl I want to be again.’

He is still silent.

She has said too much. What she wants is for
Paul to lower his face to hers, to feel his weight upon her.

But he doesn’t speak. She waits for a
moment and then says, just to break the silence, ‘I suppose it sounds
silly … to be so attached to a painting …’

When he turns to her his face looks odd:
taut and drawn. Even in the half-light she can see it. He swallows.
‘Liv … what’s your name?’

She pulls a face.

‘Liv. You know th–’

‘No. Your surname.’

She blinks. ‘Halston. My surname is
Halston. Oh. I suppose we never …’ She can’t work out where this is
going. She wants him to stop looking at the painting. She grasps suddenly that the
relaxed mood has evaporated and something strange has taken its place. They lie there in
an increasingly uncomfortable silence.

He lifts a hand to his head.
‘Um … Liv? Do you mind if I head off? I’m … I’ve
got some work stuff to see to.’

It’s as if she has been winded. It
takes her a moment to speak, and when she does her voice is too high, not her own.
‘At six a.m.?’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

‘Oh.’ She blinks. ‘Oh.
Right.’

He is out of bed and dressing. Dazed, she
watches him hauling on and fastening his trousers, the fierce swiftness with which he
pulls on his shirt. Dressed, he turns, hesitates, then leans forward and drops a kiss on
her cheek. Unconsciously she pulls the duvet up to her chin.

‘Are you sure you don’t want any
breakfast?’

‘No. I … I’m
sorry.’ He doesn’t smile.

‘It’s fine.’

He cannot leave fast enough. Mortification
begins to steal through her, like poison in her blood.

By the time he reaches the bedroom door he
can barely meet her eye. He shakes his head, like someone trying to dislodge a fly.
‘Um … Look. I’ll – I’ll call you.’

‘Okay.’ She tries to sound
light. ‘Whatever.’

As the door shuts behind him, she leans
forward, ‘Hope the work thing goes …’

Liv stares in disbelief at the space where
he has been, her fake cheery words echoing around the silent house. Emptiness creeps
into the space that Paul McCafferty has somehow opened inside her.

The office is empty, as he had known it
would be. He launches himself through the door, the old fluorescent bulbs stuttering
into life overhead, and makes straight for his office. Once inside, he rummages through
the piles of files and folders on his desk, not caring as the papers spew out across the
floor, until he finds what he is looking for. Then he flicks on his desk lamp, and lays
the photocopied article in front of him, smoothing it with his palms.

‘Let me be wrong,’ he mutters.
‘Just let me have got this wrong.’

The wall of the Glass House is only partly
visible, as the image of the painting has been enlarged to fill the A4 space. But the
painting is unmistakably
The Girl You Left Behind
. And to the right of her, the
floor-to-ceiling window that Liv had shown him, the view that extended out towards
Tilbury.

He scans the extract of text.

Halston designed this room so that its occupants would be woken by the morning
sun. ‘I originally set out to put some kind of screening system up for
summer daylight hours,’ he says. ‘But actually you find that if
you’re woken naturally, you’re less tired. So I never bothered
putting them in.’

Just off the master bedroom is a Japanese style

It ends, cut short by the photocopy. Paul
stares at it for a moment, then turns on his computer and types DAVID HALSTON into a
search engine. His fingers thrum on the desk as he waits for it to load.

Tributes were paid yesterday to the modernist architect David Halston, who has
died suddenly in Lisbon at the age of 38. Initial reports suggest his death was
as a result of undiagnosed heart failure. Local police are not said to be
treating his death as suspicious.

His wife of four years, Olivia Halston, 26, who was with him at the time, is
being comforted by family members. A member of the British consulate in Lisbon
appealed for the family to be allowed to grieve in private.

Halston’s death cuts short a stellar career, notable for its innovative
use of glass, and fellow architects yesterday lined up to pay tribute to
the

Paul lowers himself slowly into his chair.
He flicks through the rest of the paperwork, then re-reads the letter from the lawyers
of the Lefèvre family.

a clear-cut case, which is unlikely to be time-barred given the
circumstances … stolen from an hotel in St Péronne circa 1917,
shortly after the artist’s wife was taken prisoner by the occupying German
forces …

We hope that TARP can bring this case to a swift and satisfactory conclusion.
There is some leeway in the budget for compensation to the current owners, but
it is unlikely to be anything near the estimated auction value.