she could think. A bit too much, some days. Some evenings the quiet would wrap itself around her like a soft blanket and lull her into gentle fantasies of the life she intended to make for herself and Em. At other times, however, it could goad her relentlessly. See! No one here but you! You're on your own, hiding out here, slave to your secrets, stupid idiot girl!
On such occasions, the silence was like a clock that had stopped, trapping Tess in the present – a situation caused by her past and which tarnished the future. Those evenings, she felt frightened and though she rarely reached for the phone or turned to the TV, nor did she face her fears. Instead, on that initial surge of adrenalin and at the first prick of tears, she'd lunge for a book and immerse herself in the lives of others instead. She had to start off by reading out loud, until she felt settled enough to have the silence surround her again.
For the first time in her life, she read voraciously. Anything that was on Joe's bookshelves she considered to have a worthy seal of approval. She tried authors she'd never heard of and authors she'd always meant to read. Every now and then she read passages twice, three times even, enjoying the wordcraft, the drama – but imagining that Joe had liked that book and wondering when he might be back and if there would be dinners they could share to discuss books they'd both read. His collection was vast and varied, from sumptuous coffee-table tomes to dense books about engineering, from the classics to modern masters and cutting-edge contemporary fiction. Tess was well aware it was escapism but what a way to pass another evening on her own. And anyway, wasn't that a function of fiction – a magical place that could transport you a world away? It wasn't as if she could solve anything just sitting there letting thoughts and memories and doom descend like a dark, damp veil. She'd done enough of that on evenings in London. Anyway, didn't Joe do just this when he was here, home alone – settle down with a good book until bedtime?
Sometimes, on a nondescript evening when her thoughts left her alone, Tess would tinker instead. This was different to the committed spring clean and reorganization she continued to devote much of her days to. Tinkering meant moving vases or clocks or the odd photo frame from here to there or from room to room; swapping the cushions in the TV room for those in the den, setting out the chessboard on the occasional table in the drawing room because, occasionally, it was good for such a table to have a purpose. Tinkering was finding a place for the phone books away from the lovely maps and atlases whose shelf they had shared. And it was when Tess was tinkering in the drawers of the hall console – let's put the pens here and the pads there, have the address book here, the takeaway leaflets in that folder there – that the phone rang. The suddenness of it was shrill and intrusive, having not been heard since that night in the bath that evening last week. Her hands were full of pens that she'd been systematically testing out on a scrap of paper rejecting any which were faint or which smudged. It had been a satisfying job that allowed for inventive doodling, which she was enjoying, but she ought to answer the phone. Putting the pens to one side, she picked up the receiver.
‘The Resolution – good evening?’
She makes the place sound like a hotel.
He waited a moment.
‘I'd like to book a room for tomorrow night, please,’ he said, ‘for a week.’
Tess thought, he sounds a bit like Joe. But then she thought, why would he phone to book a room?
‘I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number,’ she said. ‘This is a private residence.’
She sounded so affronted that Joe had to laugh. ‘Tess – it's me, Joe.’
She cringed but hid it behind a defensive tone. ‘I know that. I knew all along.’
‘You have a very – particular – telephone manner. Made the old place – the residence – sound like a posh guest house.’
‘Would you rather I didn't answer the phone then, Joe?’
The barb to her voice snagged against him and he thought, dear God, here we go again. But tonight it amused him more than it irritated him because it was – well, it was so Tess, really. And he could clearly envisage her in his hallway, her cheeks reddening with her silly indignation. It was tempting to wind her up a little more.
She listened hard to Joe's silence and wondered if she'd irked him and whether he might say, yes, Tess, don't answer my bloody phone.
‘I didn't mean it that way,’ she said.
‘I just thought I'd let you know I'll be back tomorrow.’
‘We were half expecting you last weekend.’
‘Things ran on.’
‘Good things?’
A flashback to Rachel's blow-job shot to mind. ‘Not bad.’
‘What time tomorrow?’ asked Tess. ‘Ish.’
‘Mid-afternoon, I would think,’ said Joe. ‘Ish.’
There was a pause.
Joe's coming back.
It was a concept privately welcomed by both. Tess thought of the beans on toast she'd had for supper – today, yesterday, probably the day before that too. Perhaps supper tomorrow would be different now. Proper. With wine. With conversation. And laughter. Joe just thought it would be nice to see her again.
‘Shall I – you know – have stuff in?’
‘Stuffing?’ But he knew what she meant.
She tried to sound casual. ‘Stuff – you know, fish, meat – for supper?’
She couldn't see him smiling; she could only hear the silence, which unnerved her. She wasn't to know that she hadn't over-stepped a mark, that over in Antwerp Joe was thinking to himself that he liked it that she'd asked. And that had she not, he liked to think he might have suggested the very same thing to her.
‘Sounds good,’ he said. He wasn't to know that suddenly she was in a knot as to whether there was enough in her purse – which she'd been keeping out of sight under her bed – to cover much stuff at all. ‘See you tomorrow, Tess.’
She wanted to keep him longer on the phone, to run away from her nagging thoughts to yak instead about the minutiae of her day. She could tell him how she'd enjoyed the Joseph Heller but not the Doris Lessing, that the downstairs loo was now a sunny yellow, that she'd worked out how to record from the television and had saved him a programme called Megastructures about a huge bridge somewhere, oh, where! oh, what was the bloody thing called! It's in Japan! She didn't want him to go just yet because then it would just be her in the house and another evening stretched ahead and made tomorrow seem a very long way off.
‘Bye then.’
‘Bye.’
She placed the handset back in the cradle thoughtfully and looked at the pens, all in a scatter, and couldn't remember which were for keeping. So she had to test them all out again. She saw that she'd doodled the word ‘Joe’ a number of times. She told herself it had been absent-minded scribbling, that if it had been Tamsin she'd just spoken to, she'd've written her name a number of times in a variety of colours and squiggles instead. But she certainly didn't want Joe seeing this. She'd be screwing it up and chucking it away.
Don't screw it up.
Don't chuck it away.
Well, the paper, yes. But not the thoughts released by his name.
She told herself to stop it at once. But then she reasoned that it was so quiet tonight – Wolf hadn't even piped up when the phone went and the pipes hadn't made a sound all evening. There was nothing on the box. Her eyes were too tired to start a new book. There was nothing to do but think about tomorrow. She was all on her own and that meant she didn't need to tell a soul what she was thinking. Deluded? So what! The little buzz was – nice.
Later, as she lay in bed still thinking about tomorrow, it crossed her mind whether to invite Mary to tea over the next few days. But she wouldn't – not just because Joe had never