The Lie of You: I Will Have What Is Mine (18 page)

‘You’ll be tied up with the Durham project for ages.’

‘Yes, I will. I still think we should think about it. Children need fresh air and wide open spaces,’ he said. ‘And I sometimes feel trapped in London.’

And then we got trapped behind a tractor for the next few miles of the single-lane Cornish road. Markus is not brilliant in these situations and I could feel his impatience building as he wanted to get to the coast. My mobile phone rang.

‘Oh, no! I bet that’s work.’

‘Ignore it,’ he said. ‘You’re on holiday.’

I pulled my phone out of my bag and saw that Eddie was ringing me. I let it go to voice-mail. I wasn’t going to talk to him with Markus sitting next to me.

‘They can leave a message,’ I said.

We finally arrived at the hotel and were shown up to our family room. It was a large double-aspect room with slightly shabby furniture. It had a great view of the sea and we both thought it would do fine. I unpacked our stuff quickly and then went into the bathroom to listen to the voice-mail Eddie had left me. It was a long message. He said that he was off to Kent to work on the major garden redesign; that he was sorry about turning up at my work like that; I had been right to be angry. He just hoped we could stay in touch. I stood in the bathroom and thought about whether I should try to find a time to call him back later and wish him luck. Then I decided, no, enough of this. I was building a new life with Markus and we were going to have a good holiday together. I turned my mobile phone off.

It was too late for Markus to get in a dive as he still needed to fill his air bottles. We did get down to the beach before dinner and we both held Billy’s hands as we watched him have his first ever excited paddle in the sea. It was a lovely moment.

We had been in St Ives for three days and I’d asked my aunt Jennie over to our hotel for dinner.

‘Markus, if you like diving you must go to Botallack. There’s the most stunning natural swimming pool there, made from a ring of granite rocks. At high tide it fills with seawater. It’s a place only the locals know about.’

‘How do you get there?’

‘It’s a bit of a walk, about an hour from the village of Botallack, which is west of here. A pretty walk, though. And you’ll see the old mine head.’

‘If it’s an hour’s walk I can’t go diving. That’s too far to carry my gear. We could go snorkelling there.’

‘Let’s go tomorrow,’ I said enthusiastically.

‘I don’t think you’d want to take Billy. The climb down to the pool is very steep and slippery. I can’t look after him tomorrow. If you can wait till Thursday, I’d be happy to have him.’

‘I’d like to go tomorrow if we can,’ Markus said. ‘The forecast for Thursday isn’t great.’

‘Let’s go, then,’ I said. ‘You can swim in the pool and I’ll stay above with Billy. We can have a picnic.’

We were having a good time and had both started to relax. The weather had been good, Billy was sleeping well, Markus had got in two dives already and I had been enjoying lying on the beach, reading purely for pleasure. Markus and I had made love the second night and it all felt a long way from the office and the tensions I’d been feeling there. I was so glad we’d found the time to come away and were beginning to pull down the wall that had built up between us.

AUGUST

Tonight I slept in Markus’s bed. I lay on his side and could smell the faintest trace of his body.

I had not intended to sleep in her flat. I got there at nine o’clock and planned to work for a few hours. I put the hall light on and went into Billy’s bedroom. There is a small white chest of drawers by the wall and I got down on my knees and went through the clothes in the drawers. He is not yet one year old yet a lot of the clothes had labels for twelve to eighteen months old. He must be big for his age. His clothes were neatly folded, with jumpers and cardigans in the bottom drawer, T-shirts and dungarees in the next one up and vests, Babygros and socks in the top drawer. There is a row of little hooks on the back of his bedroom door and a padded jacket was hanging there. The seagull mobile had gone from above his cot. Perhaps they had taken it with them to Cornwall? Perhaps Billy can only sleep with the seagulls stirring above him.

Under the window there was a padded fabric toy box with a Noah’s Ark design. I lifted the lid. It was full of toys – a squeezy rubber giraffe that squeaked when you pressed it, a painted wooden clown with jointed arms and legs, lots of coloured wooden bricks and a red plastic tipper truck with large wheels. The rubber giraffe was rather horrible. It had hooded eyes and long black rubber eyelashes.

I walked into their bedroom next. I saw that she had left their bed made up. I would have thought she would have stripped the sheets before she went away. I wanted to lie down where he lies every night. I took off all my clothes, pulled back the dark quilt and climbed into his side of the bed. I slept well in that large strange bed. And I had the most vivid dream. I was standing in my kitchen. Markus was sitting at the breakfast bar. I took a knife and made a deep incision in the flesh above my right ovary. Markus was watching me intently. I pressed the sides of the wound carefully until a raw egg emerged through the slit. I caught the egg in a white china bowl. I was glad that the yolk had not broken. I heated butter in a frying pan and fried the egg for Markus.

When I woke up next morning it was nearly eight so I dressed quickly and got to work. Her study is small; there is hardly room to move. There were some new photographs of Billy on the back of the door. I sat on her chair and looked at the shelves in front of me. What a mess they were. I pulled the first batch of papers from the shelf and looked through them. They were a mixture of paid bills, postcards from friends and a few charity Christmas cards. Then there were some reference books and a second batch of papers in one of those plastic wallets. I skimmed through these. They were mainly letters from her parents in Portugal. I had not known that her parents lived abroad. She must have some place where she kept important documents.

I stood up and looked at the shelves. There was a purple box file wedged into the space above the books on the top shelf. I stood on her chair carefully and took the box file down. This was it. On the spine of the file she had written:
Birth Certificates, Pension, Will
. It was one of those box files with a spring that holds the documents down. I pulled the spring up and took the papers out. Her birth certificate was on the top. She is two years younger than me. Her father is English and her mother Portuguese. She was born in London. Billy’s birth certificate was under hers. He was born on 3 October at University College Hospital. He has no middle name. He is just plain Billy Hartman. I find it moving that Markus has named his son after his grandfather, the news photographer and communist. He was the member of his family that Markus loved most and the one who had the greatest influence on him.

He told me that when he was eleven years old his granddad took him to the fishing village where he had grown up. His granddad had not been back there in forty years. His wife had died in the spring and that had prompted the journey. This visit meant a great deal to Markus and he often talked about it. His older brothers had sneered at the idea of going away with their grandfather, so it was just the two of them. Markus told me his grandfather always had time for him, always listened to him. And he had his own special name for him too, which was Poppa.

On their first morning in the village they walked to the site of his grandfather’s house. It was on the outskirts of the village and the house had been pulled down and a new single-storey building stood in its place. His poppa was troubled by the disappearance of his old home. Then he noticed that the trees from his childhood were still there. He told Markus that the trees had been his world when he was growing up; that sometimes they became a pirate ship, sometimes a chariot. So Markus climbed his favourite tree for him.

Then they walked back into the village and stopped in front of an old-fashioned store that sold clothes. It was in the best position in the village, Markus said, and Poppa told him that when he was a boy the family that owned this store were very big fish. He knew the son of the family, Jari Varpe; they had been schoolmates. They went into the shop and his grandfather noticed a man standing behind the counter. He had grey hair and a lined and disappointed face.

He had looked startled and said, ‘Is that you Billy Hartman?’

‘It is, Jari. It is indeed. And this is my grandson, Markus.’

The two men shook hands, looking into each other’s faces with amazement, and established that they hadn’t seen each other for forty years. And afterwards – and this was the bit that Markus often talked about – his grandfather walked with him down to the harbour and said, ‘Just imagine Jari’s life here all these years. Imagine him getting up every morning to unlock his shop and to stand behind that counter and see the same old faces coming in. When I was your age we all thought Jari Varpe had the world at his feet. The family business trapped him here.’

He told Markus that he must live his life to the full, fight for his beliefs and not be afraid of taking on new challenges.

Years later Markus often visited his grandfather in that miserable nursing home in the middle of nowhere and I told him once that I loved the way he always wanted to take responsibility for the weak and the vulnerable. He got quite cross with me then and said he did not see his grandfather as weak or vulnerable. He was still a big man to him. He ended his relationship with me the year his grandfather died. I have often wondered if the two events were connected.

I will take the birth certificate and get a copy made. Her will and testament made interesting reading. She had left everything to Billy. She did not have that much. She does not own the flat. She rents it and it has a long lease, which she has assigned to Billy in the event of her death. What about Markus? She had also made provision for Billy to see a named child psychotherapist...
should I die suddenly
. What had driven her to put that in her will? She was not ill. She had a number of pension plans with smallish sums of money in them.

Just then I heard a key in the front door and the handle being turned. I leapt up and stood behind the study door. It was a bad moment. Could they have come back? I did not have time to move the documents or close the box. I heard footsteps coming down the hall and someone saying to herself, ‘She left the hall light on.’

It was a woman’s voice, not Kathy’s. I heard her go into the kitchen. Then there was the noise of someone rummaging in a cupboard and of water being run into a bowl. It must be the cleaner come to do the flat. She would have her own set of keys. After a few minutes I heard the radio come on and then she was fiddling with the tuning switch to change stations. The kitchen filled with a country and western song. Kathy’s study was right next door to the kitchen and I would have to walk past the open kitchen door to get to the front door. So I had to stay in the study until the cleaner moved into another room. Would she come into the study? It did not look as if it was ever cleaned. She had probably been told to leave it alone. One option would be to stay in the study until she had finished her work. That could be two or three hours. I did not have the strength to stand behind the door for that length of time.

I would have a better chance of getting down the corridor unnoticed when she was in the bathroom or one of the bedrooms. Of course, she would strip the sheets from their bed. That might be my chance. She worked in the kitchen for about twenty minutes. I heard her sweeping the floor and putting china away. I was getting very bad pins and needles in my legs. Then she put the kettle on and made herself a drink.

She came out of the kitchen and went into the bathroom. I could hear her put on the bath taps as she scoured the bath. This was my best chance. I picked up Billy’s birth certificate and walked noiselessly down the corridor, opened the front door and pulled it to. I did not actually close it as it might have made a click. She would think she had left it open when she came in. I will have to go back later this week to replace the documents and put the purple box file back in its place. I walked down the three flights of stairs with shaking legs, crossed the entrance hall and escaped into the street.

I was walking up the stairs to the office when Philip Parr came up behind me, taking the stairs two at a time, and said, ‘Heja, how are you? Have you got a minute?’

I followed him into his office. He motioned me to take a seat. ‘It’s been a while since we talked.’

I do not like his face. There is something angry and compressed about it. It is as if all the features are pushed into the centre. He thinks he is attractive because of his power. He is not attractive. He moves with quick, jerky movements. He is not at peace with himself or with his body.

‘How’s the heritage sites project going?’

‘OK, I think.’

‘Which sites are you doing?’

‘Scotland and the north of England – Durham Cathedral, Hadrian’s Wall...’

‘Was that your choice?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘I expected you to choose somewhere more exotic...’

‘Maybe I find them exotic.’ I smiled at him. ‘I’ve never been to the north of England or to Scotland.’

‘And you think the project’s going well?’

I hesitated, so that he noticed my hesitation.

‘I think so.’

‘You don’t sound very convinced.’

‘I just wonder if our readers will want to stay with the topic for a whole year, that’s all. Perhaps interest will wane after a while.’

‘That would be unfortunate.’

‘There are some wonderful places on the list. Some of the more obscure sites are perhaps less interesting. The Verla Groundwood Mill did not interest me when I was twelve, and it still does not. Perhaps it would be better to select the sites of greatest interest and focus on them.’