I Found You Page 10

  ‘We’ve been to his house, Graham! We’ve met his aunty! That’s more than most parents get when their child starts a relationship.’

  Relationship?

  His mum checked her wristwatch and as she did so there was the sound of laughter outside the front door and the clatter of the letterbox being opened and shut and Gray’s dad came to the door and there were Kirsty and Mark and the ugly bear.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ said Tony.

  Mark looked curiously around the house. ‘Would you mind?’ he asked. ‘I’ve walked past these little houses so many times and I’ve never been inside one.’

  ‘Of course not!’ Tony held the door wider and gestured Mark inside. ‘Please.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Mark, ‘it’s like a dolls’ house! So tiny!’

  ‘Well,’ said Tony, ‘they built these houses for tiny people. You know, back in the sixteen hundreds, when this place was built, we’d all have been giants!’

  Mark bowed his head to go from room to room. Gray watched him curiously. Then he turned and glanced at Kirsty. Her face was pink and pinched with what looked like embarrassment.

  ‘And up here?’ Mark asked, peering up the staircase.

  ‘Bedrooms,’ said Tony. ‘Want to see?’

  Mark turned and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I get the idea.’

  ‘Can I get you a beer? Or something?’

  ‘No.’ Mark looked at his watch. ‘Thank you. I’d better get back. Promised Kitty I’d clean up the kitchen after dinner. Didn’t even tell her I was going out!’ He laughed, a hard bark that seemed somehow unrelated to him. ‘But maybe I’ll see you on the beach tomorrow? Forecast looks good.’

  ‘Maybe not tomorrow,’ said Tony. ‘We were thinking of a day trip.’

  Mark’s expression blackened for a second and clouds of displeasure passed across his eyes. But then he rallied and said, ‘Oh! Great! Where are you going?’

  ‘Not sure yet. Maybe Robin’s Hood Bay. Maybe a castle. See how we feel.’

  Mark shrugged, sighing. ‘Ah, well. Maybe another time then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tony, ‘more than likely. You all right getting back up there?’ He gestured towards the big house on the coastal path. ‘I can give you a lift?’

  ‘Tony,’ said Mum. ‘You probably shouldn’t. You’ve had a couple of beers.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so daft. I had two halves. Two hours ago.’

  ‘Honestly. I can walk. I’ve done it a million times. In all weathers. At all times. But thank you. You’re very nice people.’

  He left a moment later in a flurry of good manners and cheek kisses, leaving them once again windswept and unsettled in his wake.

  ‘So,’ Gray asked his sister over bowls of Frosties the following morning. ‘What did you talk about all night? You and Mark?’

  ‘Why do you say his name like it’s made up?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He just feels like he’s made up. Like he’s working from a script.’

  She frowned at him. ‘What on earth are you talking about, you weirdo?’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to explain it. ‘Anyway, what did you talk about?’

  ‘Not much,’ she said. ‘Just about school and family and stuff.’

  ‘Do you still like him?’

  She flushed with colour and stared into her cereal bowl. ‘Maybe. He’s all right.’

  ‘You don’t have to see him again, you know. You can say no, if he asks.’

  ‘Yeah, well, he probably won’t. So.’

  ‘Did anything happen?’ he asked, curious to see if she would lie to him. ‘You know, like kissing or anything?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ she snapped.

  ‘I’m your brother,’ he replied with more force than he’d intended.

  ‘I’m your brother,’ she echoed him mockingly, using a deep voice and rolling her shoulders. She laughed.

  ‘Yeah. Well. I just don’t want you to do anything stupid.’

  She rolled her eyes and got to her feet. ‘You’re just jealous,’ she said. ‘Because I’ve kissed someone and you haven’t.’

  It was a light-hearted dig. She hadn’t meant it to hurt. But it did. Gray had no idea why he hadn’t kissed a girl yet, given how much time he spent with girls. He’d had lots of those Hollywood moments when it had looked as though he was about to kiss a girl but then they’d turn away or someone would walk in or he’d lose his nerve and make a joke out of it. And there were girls who liked him, he knew that. People told him. But it was always girls he didn’t fancy. Sad, doughy-cheeked girls making desperate eye contact across the lunch hall.

  He’d hugged girls and had girls sitting on his lap. He’d held hands with girls and kissed girls’ cheeks and had fun with girls and gossiped with girls and had girls on the back of his bicycle. But for some reason he couldn’t cross the line into physical intimacy. He would wonder if he was gay if it weren’t for the fact that he knew resoundingly that he wasn’t.

  ‘Get stuffed,’ he said to his sister’s retreating back. ‘What do you know?’

  She ignored him and walked away.

  Mark was sitting outside Rabbit Cottage when they got back from visiting Sledmere House six hours later. He’d positioned himself sideways on the sea wall opposite, turned towards the late-afternoon sun, in a crisp white shirt and faded jeans. He was holding a bunch of pink roses.

  Gray noticed Kirsty stiffen slightly at the sight of him.

  ‘Good timing,’ said Mark, sauntering towards them, ‘I just got here.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tony, ‘that’s a bit of luck.’

  ‘Here.’ Mark passed the pink roses to Kirsty. ‘For your room. To brighten it up a bit.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said self-consciously. ‘Thank you.’

  There was an awkward silence, the sort of conversational void that needed to be filled with an invitation to come in. But nobody offered it.

  ‘Did you have a nice day?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Super,’ said Tony. ‘Been a hundred times before, but it’s always a good day out.’

  ‘I’ve never been,’ said Mark in a tone that suggested he wouldn’t dream of it.

  ‘So,’ said Pam, ‘what have you been up to? Been to the beach?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘Not today. No.’

  His usual effortless charm seemed to have deserted him. Kirsty’s body language was all wrong and he could tell.

  Gray turned and headed to the front door of Rabbit Cottage. He felt very strongly that for some unknown reason his sister wanted to be rescued from this situation and that he needed to be the one to do it. ‘Keys, Dad,’ he called to his father.

  Tony passed him the keys and smiled at Mark. ‘Well, maybe see you on the beach again?’

  Mark looked at Kirsty who was heading away from him with her pink roses. ‘I wondered …’ he said. ‘Kirsty, would you like to join me to see a film? Tonight?’

  Kirsty looked at her parents beseechingly. But his mum missed the nuance and said, ‘Well, I don’t see why not. We haven’t got anything planned for tonight.’

  ‘Great,’ said Mark, all the uncertainty disappearing and his usual carapace of self-assurance re-forming. ‘I’ll come at seven. If that’s OK?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kirsty, her gaze on the floor. ‘Sure. See you then.’

  Twenty

  Lily slides the two rings across the counter towards the jeweller. ‘Please,’ she begins, ‘can you tell me the value of these rings?’

  He looks at her curiously. He thinks she has stolen them. It is obvious. Probably from the bedside table of some married man she has been sleeping with. She manages a small smile and says, ‘Thank you.’

  He rolls the rings on to a black velvet tray and brings a small magnifier to his eye. ‘Well,’ he says a few moments later. ‘They’re both eighteen-carat gold, bought as a set; the stone is a diamond, about a carat. Value of around eight hundred pounds for the wedding band. Somewhere between two and
three thousand for the engagement ring. Do you want to sell them?’

  ‘No!’ she says sharply. ‘No. They belong to my husband’s mother. They are an heirloom!’

  The man stares at her for a moment. ‘I doubt it,’ he says. ‘These rings were hallmarked in 2006.’

  She nods, as though this fact is not at all surprising. ‘I know,’ she says, adjusting her handbag. ‘Thank you.’ She drops the rings into her purse and zips it shut. ‘Very helpful.’

  On the high street outside the jeweller’s, Lily clutches her handbag against her chest. She’d taken the rings to be valued because she’d suspected they did not belong to Carl’s mother. The style was too modern. But she’d hoped she might be wrong. Now she knows her instinct was right. And after her conversation this morning with Russ she is left with the knowledge that she has no idea where Carl was between his birth on 4 June 1975 and starting work at the financial services company in 2010. Thirty-five blank years. Might there have been a wife, a family even? Russ had said that Carl used women for sex. That Lily had been the first woman he’d wanted to settle with. But Russ had only known him for five years. Carl had come to him, as he’d come to Lily, as a book without words. Maybe before that he had been a different person, with different traits. Maybe he had been hurt by another woman, the woman who owned the rings.

  She stares down at her left hand, at the rings on her wedding finger. A thin white-gold band, paired with a baguette-cut diamond eternity ring. Carl had chosen the engagement ring himself. She remembers how she’d felt a tiny pinch of disappointment when she’d opened the suedette box. She’d been expecting a solitaire diamond, the type of diamond that snags on clothes and glitters under halogens, the type of diamond that looks like it contains all the constellations of the universe. But she had hidden her disappointment, smiled and said, ‘It is beautiful,’ whilst silently wondering how much it had cost.

  She would have liked a ring like this, like the one zipped away inside her handbag. The one that her husband may have bought for another woman.

  She breathes in hard and heads down the high street, away from the shops, back to the silence and stillness of her empty flat.

  There is a small fan of letters on the doormat. She collects them together and adds them to the other letters that have arrived since Carl went missing four days ago. She is tired. Beyond tired. She heads straight to the bedroom. The keys are still there, by her bed. She picks them up, rolls the brass fob around her palm, examines the grooves and nibs of the keys. One of them has a plastic head and a strange double-sided stem with a complicated pattern of indents. There is a key-cutter by the station. She will take it there, maybe; tomorrow, if it’s open, or Monday. The man in there might know. It might tell her something. It might help. Because, Lily is now almost entirely certain, these keys are the keys that open the door to the house where Carl lived with the wife who wore the rings in her handbag.

  She sits on the side of the bed and she takes off the high-heeled shoes she wore today to look nice for Carl’s only friend. She pulls her hair away from her face and fixes it into a ponytail and she stares through the window, into treetops silhouetted by the bleached-out sky behind.

  It’s Saturday. She tries to remember what she was doing this time last week. They had lunch, she remembers suddenly, at a pub in the countryside. It was a smart pub. Painted shades of grey, menus on blackboards, newspapers hanging from poles and cutlery in wooden pots on the tables. Carl had had a burger; she’d had an Asian prawn salad with noodles. Carl had had a pint of cider; she’d had a glass of Prosecco. What had they talked about? She can’t remember. Work, she supposed: Carl talked about work a lot. Her family. He always liked to hear the latest news about her family. The flat. They’d been planning to redecorate, put some new colours on the off-white walls and soften the lighting, get some new blinds. ‘Put our mark on it,’ Carl had said. Lily had not really seen the point in spending more money on the flat when it was already so perfect but she liked to see Carl’s face soften as he discussed it, she liked the way he became so animated. They’d talked about the food, of course. Carl was obsessed with food. So many people in this country seemed to be obsessed with food. On the television, day and night, there were shows about food, and the shops bursting at the seams with food that had travelled thousands of miles to get there. And even there, in the countryside, surrounded by fields, by cows and sheep, in a pub, a place to drink, there was tuna sashimi.

  So, they had talked – comfortably. They had laughed. Their feet had curled together beneath the table; between courses they had held hands across the table. A normal newly married couple. Then Carl had driven them home, stopping on the way to pick up some shirts from the dry cleaner’s. There’d followed a movie, some wine, sex. She’d woken the following morning, as she did most mornings, to find Carl smiling at her. And, as she did most mornings, she’d said, ‘What are you smiling at?’ And he’d traced the contours of her face with his fingertips and said, ‘You.’ And then they’d kissed and had sex again. And that was how life had been. A tight, almost suffocating cocoon of love. Sometimes Lily had wondered if it might be nice to go to a nightclub or to meet friends for dinner. But as Carl himself had often said, they were ‘still on honeymoon’. There was plenty of time to share themselves with other people, to dilute the intensity of their coupling. Lily had been happy to wait.

  But now she is feeling the full force of their isolation. She pulls the duvet over herself, over her head, so that it is dark and airless and she curls herself into a small ball.

  Twenty-one

  Alice, Frank and Romaine return three hours later with a bag full of perfectly decent clothes from the Red Cross shop and a three-pack of boxers and a clutch of new socks from M&Co on the high street. It’s past lunchtime and everyone is starving so Alice has picked up a ton of fish and chips from round the corner, which they unfold at the kitchen table and tip on to china plates.

  ‘I do normally cook,’ says Alice as Kai squirts half a bottle of ketchup over his chips and puts three in his mouth. ‘It’s just everything feels a bit … out of sequence right now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘No! You don’t need to be sorry! It’s just – I’m not the most together person in the world and it doesn’t take much to make all the wheels fall off. I’m only one unexpected house guest away from existential chaos.’

  ‘I’ll go shopping for you,’ he says futilely.

  ‘They make you pay for stuff round here.’

  ‘I know. I just thought …’

  She squeezes his hand and smiles. ‘I know what you meant and it’s very sweet of you. But I can send one of this lot out.’ She gestures at Kai and Jasmine, who both roll their eyes at her. ‘And tell you what, to prove that I’m not as Benefits Britain as you probably think I am, I’ll cook us a lovely dinner tonight. Pasta. Something like that.’

  He nods. Her offer is genuine and warm but he still feels guilty. ‘Once I’ve worked out who I am, I’m going to take you all to the …’ He searches for the name. It begins with R. It evokes thoughts of 1920s glamour. It’s gone. He sighs.

  Alice looks at him and chuckles. ‘Sounds great. But, seriously, you don’t have to do anything. Just accept the hospitality. That’s how we do things oop north.’ She puts on a northern accent and her children, who all have northern accents, tut at her.

  ‘Well, I’ll be paying you back for the clothes and the rent.’

  ‘That you can do,’ she says. She smiles at him over the top of Romaine’s head. It’s a worn-out smile, tired and faded around the edges. But there’s still a kind of thrilling glamour about it. Something golden and intoxicating. Like an old hotel, he thinks. Like … the Ritz.

  He smiles to himself at the satisfyingly recalled name and he adds it to his collection: a priceless coin dug up on a beach.

  Derry is at the front door. She has Daniel by the hand and looks very stern. ‘What’, she says, ‘is going on? Jules says she saw you in town this morning, shopping
, with that guy.’

  Alice clutches her heart and throws Derry a look of mock horror. ‘Scandalous!’ she says.

  Derry grimaces. ‘But, Al, it’s one thing giving him shelter, it’s another spending your bloody money on him.’

  ‘Christ, Derry, I spent twenty quid in the Red Cross shop.’ This isn’t strictly true. It was closer to forty once you factored in the pants and socks.

  ‘Is he here?’

  Alice sighs. ‘So far as I know. He’s in the shed. Having a nap.’

  Derry is wriggling with frustration. This is the downside of allowing a friend to manage your life for you.

  Alice holds the door open and says, ‘Come on then. Let’s get this over with. And just for the record,’ she adds in a low voice, following her friend into the kitchen, ‘Griff loves him. And so does Romaine. And kids and dogs know people.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘He’s nice,’ she says circumspectly. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  Daniel finds Romaine in the back yard and Derry immediately starts tidying Alice’s kitchen. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. ‘“Nice”,’ she mutters. ‘Well. I look forward to being able to draw my own conclusions.’ She drops a ball of chip paper into Alice’s bin, washes her hands and dries them. Peering through the window of the back door into the back yard she says, ‘He’s up.’

  ‘Up?’

  ‘Yeah. Your man. Playing with the littlies.’

  Alice joins her at the back door. Romaine and Daniel have embroiled Frank in a game involving two dolls, a threadbare dog and a Transformer. He is on his haunches, following instructions very gravely.

  ‘See,’ says Alice. ‘He’s a fine man.’

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ says Derry, hanging up Alice’s tea towel and switching on the kettle. ‘But he’s an unknown quantity. And given your history, I really think you should call the police.’

  Alice rubs the tips of her elbows. As much as she doesn’t want to fuel Derry’s paranoia, she does want to share. ‘I suggested it,’ she says. ‘When he first arrived. He blanched. Looked petrified.’ She shrugs.