I don’t think I have ever been as happy as I was then; perhaps it was the anticipation of waiting for her to arrive, listening to her conversations downstairs with Kathleen and Hannah, hearing the bathroom door, the various goodnights, knowing that in a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, she would be mine. I don’t know if Kathleen knew what was going on but she didn’t miss much. She was preoccupied with Mr Gaines, though, getting him out of hospital and helping restore his health. By then we all believed that happiness should be treasured if good fortune happened to blow it briefly your way.
And Liza was my good fortune. There wasn’t a piece of her that I didn’t marvel at. I loved her hair, the way it never quite lost the appearance of having been blown around at sea; I loved her skin, which seemed always to carry the faint tang of salt, the faint scars I now understood, the freckles that had come with her new life outside; I loved her eyes – opaque and reflective one minute, greedy and devouring in secret with me. When I made love to her I kept mine open, and locked on hers, and when I came I thought I’d drown in them. She was mine. I knew that, and I was profoundly grateful.
One night, when we lay talking quietly, she told me that having a child brought the most love and the most fear anyone could feel. I understood that now, because having found her, I couldn’t contemplate losing her. I lay awake at night, watching her, trying to picture her in prison in a cold, grey country a million miles from here, surrounded by unfriendly faces. And the image wouldn’t come. The two simply did not compute. She laughed at me when I used those words.
‘I’ll be okay,’ she said, burrowing into me, her arm across my chest.
I felt its weight like a blessing. ‘I can’t imagine you away from the sea.’
‘I’m not a whale. I can survive out of water.’ I heard the smile in her voice.
For some reason I wasn’t sure that was true. ‘I’ll help take care of Hannah,’ I said. ‘If you want.’
‘I’m not expecting you to stay.’
‘I care about her.’
‘But I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.’
‘All the more reason for me to be here.’
I could hear her breathing. When she next spoke there was a catch in her voice. ‘I don’t want . . . I don’t want Hannah to lose anyone else. I don’t want her to get attached to you and then, a few years down the line, for you to realise it’s too much for you. The waiting, I mean.’
‘You really think I would?’
‘Sometimes it’s hard to know what you might do.’ She paused. ‘I know more than most that you don’t always behave as you’d expect. And this isn’t a normal situation.’
I lay there beside her, thinking about what she’d told me.
‘I won’t blame you,’ she said quietly, ‘if you want to leave when I do. You’ve been . . . a good friend to us.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said. And with those words a new atmosphere settled around us in the dark, a kind of permanence. I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to say, but it was out there: a true reflection of myself, of what I felt. I took her hand, and my thumb traced her knuckles as her fingers tightened round mine.
Her voice broke: ‘Hannah will need as many friends as she can get.’
Along the corridor Milly whined in her sleep, perhaps unable to rest until Liza returned to her room. I held her until I felt the moment pass. I knew she was forcing her daughter from her mind, already separating herself, in an attempt to do what was right. In those moments I ached for her, wishing that, somehow, I could take that pain for her.
‘You don’t have to do it,’ I said, for the hundredth time.
She silenced me with a kiss. ‘I know you find it hard to understand, but I feel like I’m finally doing something. For the first time in my life I’m taking control.’ I heard her brave smile in the darkness. ‘I’m at the helm.’
‘My skipper,’ I said. Holding her.
‘Trying,’ she replied, and wrapped her legs round me with a sigh.
My sister rang at a quarter past three that morning. She’d never been any good with time differences. Liza stirred beside me, and I fumbled for my phone.
‘Okay, you want the good news or the bad?’
I pushed myself on to my elbow. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, half asleep. I rubbed my eyes. ‘Whatever.’
‘The good news is I’ve found him, and he’s still alive. It took a bit of time because he’s gone double-barrelled. I think he’s taken his wife’s surname too. The old woman is dead, which helps, as there are fewer people who can corroborate his side of things. It means your girlfriend’s not going to face a murder charge.’
She paused as I digested this, trying to force the relief I wanted to feel.
‘The bad news, Mike, is that he’s a councillor. A respected member of his community. Married, as I said, two children, stable, blameless existence. Round Table, charitable efforts, you name it. A councillor with parliamentary ambitions. Every single newspaper report he features in has him shaking hands with some police chief or handing over a cheque to a good cause. None of that is going to make your girlfriend’s case any easier at all.’
Twenty-two
Liza
Mike worked night and day to stop the development. Some nights he worked so late I thought he’d make himself ill. Kathleen would give me meals to take up to him, and I sat with him and did what I could, but I’m not good at dealing with people. Listening to him wheedle and charm, the authoritative way in which he laid things down as absolutes, made my head spin. He wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone. Whoever answered the phone, he would ask for the next person above them, and if they gave him no satisfaction he’d go for the one after that. He had a great memory for figures – he threw statistics into conversation like he had them written down in front of him, and everyone he spoke to he warned of noise and pollution levels, of extra costs and reduced business elsewhere. He explained how business would be drawn away from local bars, restaurants and small hotels. He showed where the profits from this hotel would go, and it was not into Silver Bay.
Yet even that wasn’t enough. He had persuaded Yoshi to get her academic mates to research the effects on whales of noise – but, as she said to me out of his earshot, these things took time. It wasn’t as if you could stick a whale in a Petri dish and prod it to see how it reacted. The southern migration was under way, the whales returning to the Antarctic, and after November they wouldn’t be in our waters for months, when it would be too late. He didn’t seem to hear when I mentioned these things, just stuck his head down and hit the phones again.