The Silent Tide (19 page)

Throughout the next morning Emily kept glancing at her phone, wondering why she hadn’t heard from Matthew. All that came through was a long text from her sister about Christmas arrangements: despite having two small children Claire had invited everyone to hers on Christmas Day Matthew, though, was going home to Wales, where she would join him at New Year.

Something else that arrived was an email from Matthew’s tutor, Tobias Berryman.
I’ve taken you at your word,
it said,
and hope you won’t mind reading my draft and telling me what you think.
She sighed, remembering his reference to ‘echoes of Marlowe’, but clicked quickly on the attachment all the same and scanned the first few paragraphs. To her surprise, what she read was good: dark, thrillerish and sharply written. She wrote himqg like movement a quick word of acknowledgement then, seeing the file of
Coming Home
on her desk, she rang Joel’s mobile number. He answered right away.

‘I’m typing Chapter Five as we speak,’ he told her. ‘Hope you’re impressed.’

‘I am. Look, I’ve found another Morton file. Well, it sort of found itself.’

‘What do you mean?’ Emily explained how it been left on her desk.

‘And it’s for
Coming Home?
Yes, I ought to look at it.’

‘It’s all about Isabel. How she and Hugh met. Did you know she was his editor at McKinnon and Holt?’

‘Yes, I did.’ He paused, then said, ‘Of course I’ll come in and look at it, but it might not be till the New Year now. What are you up to for Christmas, by the way?’ They chatted for a while. He, she gathered, had rather a distant relationship with his parents, and Christmas with them was a bit of a duty. They sounded much older than hers were and he had no brothers or sisters.

She replaced the receiver feeling sorry for him but also a little disappointed by his reaction to her find. Isabel didn’t seem to intrigue him nearly as much as she did Emily.

At lunch Emily joined the hordes swarming through Oxford Street, trying to tick some Christmas shopping off her list. She managed to track down a building set for her nephew and chose bath toys for her three-year-old niece, but the men proved impossible as usual, and she couldn’t decide what to get for Matthew. She was in the lift going up to her office, wondering whether he’d ever wear the silver cufflinks in the shape of pen nibs that she’d earmarked, when her phone chimed gently and she looked to find a text from him. If she was free, he wanted to meet her after work. Would six-ish suit? Something about the formality of it made her uneasy.

She’d planned to go out with Megan later, but of course she agreed to meet him and he suggested a wine bar just off Bond Street. She knew the place. It was likely to be quiet, even near Christmas. She hoped he wouldn’t be late.

When she arrived, however, he was already sitting at one of the round tables, half-hidden behind a screen. She knew by the anxious look on his face that something was on his mind. He kissed her on the mouth, lingeringly as though the kiss meant something significant. They sat down, their faces close across the little table, and he poured her red wine from the bottle he’d already started. They both drank in silence. The wine was dark and heavy, with an acid taste.

‘What’s wrong?’ She looked straight into his eyes and his gaze faltered. He replaced his glass on the table and brushed his upper lip with the back of his hand.

‘I didn’t sleep much last night.’ He folded his arms on the table, his expression serious. ‘I felt bad about the weekend, that I’d upset you. I wanted you to know that.’

‘I know some of it was my fault’ – she felt a rush of anguish – ‘but—’

‘It wasn’t one of the greats. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We’re both very stressed at the moment. I think . . . I think we need time apart.’

His words fell like a pebble in a deep pool.

‘Oh,’ she said. She hadn’t dreamed that this was what he’d say, but now he’d said it, something settled into place. Her throat swelled.

‘We’re getting on each other’s nerves all the time,’ he rushed on. ‘You keep wanting me to be different—’

‘Matthew, I don’t!’

‘You do. And I feel I let you down, oh, in all sorts of ways. It’s as if . . . you want me to be someone else. Someone I’m not. And it’s making me unhappy.’

She picked at a loose thread on the tablecloth and couldn’t think what to say. She felt like crying. And now she was crying. She reached in her pocket for a tissue. For a moment she couldn’t speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, when she’d recovered a little. He slid his hand across the tablecloth and touched her fingertips.

How calm and definite he sounded, but when she looked she could see strain in the creases round his eyes, in the warm sympathy of his gaze.

‘I don’t know why it’s got like it has,’ she whispered, shaking her head. ‘It doesn’t feel right, I agree, but surely . . .’

‘You’re working so hard, and I’ve got to get this damned course finished. It’s the wrong time for us, hey?’

She dabbed her eyes with her tissue and nodded. He’d made his decision, that was obvious, and she wasn’t going to beg. She studied him now, trying to fix him in her memory, her Matthew, very dear and gorgeous. But already his demeanour was changing; she sensed his withdrawal.

‘Hey,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘Cheer up, we’ll still see each other.’

‘Yes,’ she said, trying to smile back, then more strongly, ‘Yes, of course we will.’

‘Will you be all right?’ he asked when they reach the Tube station, where he would go off in one direction, she in another.

She nodded, determined not to cry in front of him. They stood together, watching the strings of twinkling snowflakes criss-crossing the shopping street, high above their heads.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it being Christmas.’

‘We couldn’t have gone through Christmas,’ she said quickly. ‘Or New Year.’ It would have been unbearable to have stayed with his family and then for him to have ended things.

‘No, we couldn’t,’ he agreed. ‘I got you a present, though.’ He lifted the flap of his bag and withdrew a package wrapped in silvery paper. ‘It’s a book,’ he said, with his lopsided grin, ‘in case you hadn’t guessed.’

She managed a laugh. ‘I’ve almost got you something,’ she said. ‘I’ll put it in the post. Happy Christmas.’ And somewhat hesitantly, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. ‘Send my love to your family.’

‘You, too,’ he said. They hugged each other for a long moment. Then he let her go.

The last time,
she thought as she watched him walk into the Tube station. She didn’t know if he looked back. She couldn’t see for tears.

She was devastated, completely devastated, but it helped to have Christmas somewhere different this year. Her sister Claire lived two miles from their parents and on the day found herself overwhelmed by the preparations for Christmas lunch, so Emily went over early in her mother’s car to assist. Claire’s husband Mike took the children out to the playground whilst the women cooked, and Emily was able to talk properly to her sister about Matthew. Given Matthew’s poor record with Emily’s family she’d half-expected Claire to berate him, but instead her sister was surprisingly sympathetic to both of them.

‘It’s a shame, I liked him,’ Claire said as she picked cloves out of the bread sauce. ‘Mum and Dad did, too.’

‘Yes, so they tell me,’ Emily said gloomily peeling sprouts.

‘But you’re both so busy with your careers. Perhaps he’s right, it’s the wrong time.’

Emily remembered with pain the expression on Matthew’s face when they parted – friendly, concerned, yes, but no longer loving. ‘But he was so special,’ she whispered, spilling sprouts over the worktop. The tears started again and she wiped them furiously away. Claire dropped the spoon in the sauce, and came and put her arms round her.

‘You know what they say, Em: if it’s meant to be, it will be . . . Now let’s get that bird out of the oven whilst the kids aren’t underfoot. Once they get back and Mum and Dad and Granny come, it’ll be chaos.’

Granny, when she arrived, pulled Emily to her soft bosom and stroked her hair as though she were a little girl and not a young woman taller than herself. ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ she said fondly, as she had done every time Emily or Claire had broken up with someone, but this time there was a tinge of weariness in her voice. ‘Don’t leave it too long to go fishing again, eh,’ she added, releasing her. ‘I know what you modern young women are like. You’ll wake up one morning and want a baby and find it’s too late.’

‘I’m only twenty-eight and I don’t want a baby at the moment, thanks, Granny,’ she said, smiling bravely. ‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’

And she would be fine. But that didn’t stop her missing Matthew.

Her blood raced when a text arrived from him during Christmas afternoon, but it was merely to say thank you for the cufflinks and to ask if she was OK. She texted him back, ignoring the question, but thanking him for his present.

It had been the first she’d unwrapped that morning when she had awoken in the safety of her childhood room. It was indeed a book:
Poetry for Life. You know I don’t believe in the poetry-as-therapy racket,
he had scrawled in the accompanying card,
but I hope you find something you like in here.
He signed it
With love.
It offered poems for life’s occasions. She turned the pages, skipping the ones about true love found and gloomily reading one about what happened when love died. It didn’t help one bit.

She put the book out of sight in her case. Maybe she’d look at it again when she felt stronger.

On Boxing Day, she met up with her friend Megan, who was spending Christmas with her family, and they walked her mum’s dog down by the river. It had been Megan who’d comforted her a week ago, after she’d parted from Matthew. They’d skipped their planned meal out and gone straight back to Megan’s, where Emily had spent the night because she hadn’t wanted to cry alone.

Megan, a tall and striking-looking girl with long silver-blonde hair, was deputy manager of an online business selling designer furniture. She had lived on her own for the past year, since a painful break-up with the boyfriend she’d moved in with after the flatshare, and Emily knew she was exactly the person to go to, warm, understanding, a listener who didn’t apportion blame.

Today they walked together along the muddy towpath where the dark surface of the water shivered in a needle-sharp wind. The little dog darted about in front, occasionally stopping to bark at the river birds wandering about on the opposite bank, their feathers fluffed against the cold.

That daft animal,’ Megan said. ‘Hey, it’s no good doing that, they know you can’t get them.’

Emily’s laugh was half-hearted.

Megan asked, ‘How are you doing? Have you heard from Matthew?’

‘Yes,’ Emily said, explaining about the text. ‘Do you think it meant anything?’

Megan sighed. ‘He might just be concerned. Try not to read too much into it.’ She looked keenly at her friend.

‘It’s the wind,’ Emily said, blowing her nose. ‘It makes my eyes water.’

Instead of going to Wales for New Year she went to Luke and Yvette’s New Year’s Eve party in London. It was strange, not being part of a couple.

‘At least it was only a few months out of your life,’ a schoolfriend of Yvette’s said bitterly. She told Emily a long story about her recent separation from someone she had lived with for five years. The implication was that her pain was worse than Emily’s. Feeling her own pain belittled, Emily extricated herself as soon as she could.

‘That’s such a shame, you were so good together,’ Luke remarked when he refilled her glass for the fourth time. That made her feel bad in a different way, as though she and Matthew had somehow failed. She stopped counting the glasses after that, and ended up paying an expensive minicab fare back to Hackney rather than risk passing out on public transport. She wondered whether she’d see much of Luke and Yvette in future. All of the people at the party except for herself and Yvette’s schoolfriend had been in couples.

January settled in, and although the pain lost its edge she still missed Matthew, kept thinking of things she wanted to tell him, remembered his smile, his enthusiasm about life, the arguments they’d had about, oh, everything from fashion to politics. Matthew had liked to question the truth all the time, which could be exhausting but now she valued it.

Back at work, she’d told Liz about the break-up. And that, of course, was like putting it on the social media networks, and soon all the department knew and gave her sympathetic glances for a couple of days. Even Gillian, who was famously reserved, asked if she was all right. ‘Yes,’ she insisted hastily, blushing. No one appeared to know anything of Gillian’s private life. As far as anyone guessed, she only had her work.

There were other downsides to being single. George, the editor whose voice and manner she disliked, left the office by chance at the same time one evening and suggested a ‘friendly drink’. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said firmly, ‘I have to be somewhere,’ which was partly true – she was going to try out a samba class, but not until later. Office gossip said that George’s sense of boundaries around friendship were vague, to say the least, and the thought of his bearish advances was not appealing.

George, blond and teddy-bear-like, shuffled his big feet. ‘What about lunch sometime, then?’

‘I’m booked up for the next couple of weeks,’ she told him. ‘Maybe after that.’ She kissed him lightly on the cheek, so as not to give offence.

On the bus home that night an elderly couple were sitting on a seat opposite, holding hands. The old man was smiling at the old lady and it struck Emily that perhaps he saw her still as he’d always seen her, the essence of her beyond the sunken face and the shorn grey hair. This touched Emily so much she had to look away.

Back home, the video about Hugh Morton was still sitting on her table, waiting for the next time she saw Nell to return it. She must remind Joel about the
Coming Home
file. Christmas, and all this business with Matthew, had put Hugh and Isabel right out of her mind, but now she remembered how important it was.