‘And anyway,’ Bill adds, ‘we want to sit in the audience and show off that we’re related to you.’
‘Just don’t ask any embarrassing questions, okay?’
Bill links his arm through Fiona’s, wiggling his brows as he says, ‘Us?’
I step from the warmth of their house and cross the street towards my car. Fiona and Bill watch from the doorway, checking I make it safely to the vehicle.
I start the engine, flick on the heater, turn up the radio. As I move off, I lift my hand to wave – but they are already turning away.
Bill pulls the door firmly behind them, locking his family inside.
Elle’s skin held the deep tan of a summer holiday spent largely unoccupied. She was running late, still learning to navigate the sprawling campus, and she slipped into the back of the lecture theatre, breathless.
She scanned the sea of heads looking for an unoccupied seat, dismayed to spot only one at the front. As she tiptoed down the central stairway, trying to make herself invisible, the lecturer paused mid-sentence.
He was sitting on the edge of a desk, the screen behind him illuminated with the words Shakespeare’s Tragedies. He had foppish brown hair and wore a well-cut cord jacket, over a pair of dark jeans.
‘I should mention,’ the young lecturer said, ‘that if anyone is late, they have the regrettable task of being my assistant at the end of the lecture and handing out the day’s notes. So,’ he said, his gaze finding hers, ‘that role is awarded to you, today.’ He smiled. A boyish smile that lit up his face and created sunbursts of lines around his eyes.
The attention in the auditorium swung to her, as a hundred pairs of eyes followed his. Perhaps because she was nineteen, perhaps because she was still buzzing from the shots she’d only stopped drinking at four a.m., she had – right there in front of a packed auditorium of English Literature students – grinned as she curtsied to him.
‘At your service.’
Luke Linden, he was called, ‘but just call me Luke’. He was one of those lecturers, she would learn, who abandoned the lectern and preferred to roam, striding expansively from one end of the hall to the other. He had a flair for using a pause to great effect, causing even those students with a tendency to drift, to suddenly look up as if silence had summoned them. Luke Linden was a man who could talk passionately about semantics and notions of romantic love in Jacobean England – yet still looked like one of them.
Except he wasn’t one of them.
And that’s where Elle had made her first mistake.
‘The best story to tell – the only story to tell – is the one living within you, inhabiting you, insisting that it be heard.’
Author Elle Fielding
I push open the car door into darkness, feel the hurried beat of my footsteps across my frost-hardened driveway.
On the doorstep, I fumble in my handbag looking for my key.
Maybe I should have had an extra glass of wine, crashed on Fiona and Bill’s sofa, not come back to an empty house.
I slot the key into the lock and slip inside, bolting the door behind me.
There it is, the silence. It pins me, fills my ears with its voiceless boom.
I hate coming home to an empty house – particularly after dark. Jesus, maybe Fiona is right: I do need a dog.
I keep finding myself missing the congestion of my old life in Bristol; the steady thrum of traffic, the stores open all hours of the night, the sounds from other people’s lives that filtered through the walls of our flat – voices, televisions, cisterns refilling, plates being stacked, laughter.
I force myself to move briskly through the house, flicking on lights, the radio and television.
It will be my first winter here and I wonder how warm it will be. Underfloor heating doesn’t give the same heat as a fire. I must start using the log burner – but each time I think about laying it, I’m overwhelmed by Flynn’s absence. It has always been his thing.
In the last place we rented, there was an open fire, and I remember the way he’d carefully select the wood each evening, telling me whether it was apple or silver birch, or a piece of plum chopped down from a job he’d done the previous year. He’d describe how long each piece would burn for, what the notes of the smell might be, how long it had been seasoned.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I slip my mobile from my pocket and dial his number. I want to hear his voice. I want to say, I’m thinking of lighting the log burner you chose. I want to tell him, I miss you. To hear him say, I forgive you.
When he picks up, I catch the low riff of music. Muddy Waters. One of Flynn’s favourite blues artists. He plays his music on a record player that used to belong to his father. He loves the ceremony of setting the needle, hearing the fuzzed scratch as the record begins to spin.
‘Elle?’
‘I just … I thought I’d … say hello.’ I glance at my watch. It is midnight on a Friday. Shit.
‘Right. Hello,’ Flynn says, lightly amused.
Tucking the phone under my ear, I move into the kitchen to make certain the back door is locked. I press on the handle, check the bolt. Then I follow the perimeter of the kitchen ensuring each of the windows is secure, and the wine cellar is locked.
I tell Flynn about my evening at Fiona and Bill’s as I move into the lounge, looking behind the sofa, running my hand along the curtains until I can feel the wall. Every room needs to be checked. Every window. It gives me peace of mind.
When I’m satisfied that the house is secure, I move into my bedroom, sinking down onto the bed, letting myself fall backwards, my head hitting the pillow with a soft thump.
Pressing the phone close to my ear, I can hear the slow draw of Flynn’s breath, can picture him sitting on the sofa, fire lit, an empty bottle of ale on the side table, the lights low.
The Muddy Waters record comes to its end and our conversation ticks comfortably into silence. I let my eyes close. In our previous life – the version of us that runs parallel to this one – I would be stretched out on the sofa, my feet on his lap, the warmth of the fire playing over my shins. We would be making plans for the weekend ahead: a walk in the forest with a pub lunch perhaps, or a drive to the coast to visit friends.
Across the phone waves I hear a door opening, then footsteps. Quick and light. There is the murmur of a female voice, low, keening.
‘Oh,’ I say, sitting up, a hand moving to my chest. ‘You’ve got company.’
His mouth sounds closer to the phone, as he says, ‘Listen, Elle, I didn’t know you were—’
I try to form words that will make this okay, but I can’t think what to say, what to do with this sudden, crushing realisation.
So I do the only thing that comes to me: I hang up.
I pace my bedroom, replaying the phone call, over and over.
Flynn.
Flynn and another woman.
It’s a fist in my stomach.
I launch my mobile at the bed. It bounces off, hits my cream bedside table and lands on the carpet.