Still in my original frame, sepia-tinted and yellowed with age. Still flanked by my father, Mr Brent Newhaven and their invisible wires. There I was, smiling into that camera, my seventeen-year-old bathing-suited self, preparing to pursue me through the rest of my days.
I took a deep breath. ‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ I said. ‘I never caught that ruddy shark.’
That got him. He faced me.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘My dad’s partner caught it. Told me it would look better on the hotel, give us more publicity, if it came from me.’ I took another draught of my beer. ‘I hated lying. Hate it still. But I understand something now. If it hadn’t happened, this hotel would never have survived the first five years.’
‘Or it could have been a six-storey development for the last twenty,’ Mike said wryly.
I turned the picture to the wall. ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘a lie is the way of least pain for everyone.’
I placed my hand on Mike Dormer’s arm, and waited until he felt able to look at me again. He nodded towards the door, as if we should go, and we glanced up at the house, where Liza’s bedroom light still glowed in the dark.
‘You know something? I’ve never seen a tiger shark in this bay. Never,’ I said, stepping out into the dark.
‘Greg has,’ he said, as he made to close the doors behind us.
‘You’re not listening,’ said the Shark Lady.
Twenty-seven
Mike
I had one and a half suitcases, and the empty space within them was so great that I could almost have fitted one inside the other. That space seemed to echo my state of mind. I would be the only passenger, I thought, who was likely to be penalised for under-utilising their weight allowance. Somehow, during my time here, I had shed half of my wardrobe so that all I wore now, day after day, was one of my two pairs of jeans, perhaps a T-shirt and shorts if it was a really warm day. Not a lot to show for such a seismic period in my life, I thought, as I placed them on my bed. I guessed I could buy my parents a hell of a lot of duty-free.
I was not taking my oilskin: somehow it was too bound up with being here, and I didn’t want to look at it hanging up in the wrong surroundings. I was not taking my suits, which I had given to the Silver Bay charity shop. I didn’t pack the T-shirt I’d been wearing when Liza first came into my bed, or the jumper I had lent her the night we had sat out by ourselves until two a.m., and which I secretly hoped she might want to keep. I was not taking my laptop: I had left it in the living room for Hannah, knowing it would be of more use to her. Besides, it might only be a matter of hours now until Letty returned to them, but I couldn’t bear to separate Hannah and Liza from that pixellated image. It might sound odd, but it would have felt like tearing them apart all over again. They both sat in front of it for hours, talking, comparing Letty and Hannah’s faces, considering the myriad different ways in which they had changed and not changed.
Liza was out on Ishmael – her last trip before they, too, left for the airport. I had hardly seen her since the previous day and wondered whether a quiet exit with no goodbyes might be the best thing for both of us. I told myself that at least they would be occupied: this afternoon they would finish doing up Letty’s room. Hannah had been allowed the day off school, and they had spent the previous evening painting and putting up new curtains, filling it with the kinds of things a ten-year-old girl might like, and arranging Letty’s dolphins. Hannah was up there now, music blaring, pinning up posters that she would tear down in a fit of indecision. ‘Do you think they like this group in England? What do English girls like?’ she would ask me anxiously, as if I were likely to have a clue. As if it were likely to make a difference.
I watched all this from a distance, half removed from their happiness, too consumed with the prospective loss of my own. They might miss me a little, but they had a far greater prize to contemplate, and a whole new life ahead. Only I was likely to shed tears tonight. I looked out at the little bay, at the distant mountains and at Silver Bay’s scattered rooftops. I listened to the birdsong, to distant engines, to Hannah’s music thumping above me, and felt as if I was being wrenched from my home. What was I going back to? To a woman I was not sure I could love in a city that now stifled me.
I thought of having to pick up the pieces of my old life, revisiting once-familiar bars and restaurants with braying City acquaintances, forcing my way through crowded streets, shoehorning myself into a new job in an anonymous office block. I thought of Dennis, who would doubtless convince me to return – and what was the alternative? Then I pictured myself stuck on a train in a new suit, closing my eyes to imagine Hannah tearing down the beach with Milly at her heels. I thought of Vanessa’s smile, her perfume and high-heeled shoes, our smart apartment, my sports car, the trappings of our former life, and knew, with a sick feeling, that it meant nothing. I wanted to be here. Every last atom of me wanted to be here.
The worst of it was that I still liked Vanessa. I still cared about her happiness. And I cared about my own integrity. For those reasons alone it was important that if she held true to her promise I should hold true to mine.
Those were the words I would repeat to myself silently several hundred times a day. Then I would visualise the months ahead, of lying awake at night, with Liza’s face, her intermittent smile, her knowing, sideways glance, haunting me. I would imagine burying my face in the one T-shirt that might still carry her scent. I would make love to someone whose body did not instinctively fit my own.
Come on, I told myself sternly, as I walked briskly to the hire car to bring it to the front of the hotel. Liza had her girls, and I was about to secure their future. Two out of three was a pretty good strike rate for anyone. I reversed into the front space, then sat staring at the dashboard. I had finally mastered the weird gearstick and, as I turned off the ignition, that small fact bugged me more than anything.
My flight was not due until the following morning, but standing there, increasingly swamped by my thoughts, I decided I had to leave now. I would drive to the city and book a room in a hotel for the night. If I stayed an hour longer, my resolve might melt. It meant that I would not see my sister, that I would not witness the reunion, but I knew Monica would understand. If I stayed till tomorrow, if I fooled myself for five minutes that I was any part of that new family, I might not be able to do the thing I had promised.
I got out of the car, and turned to the road as I heard a familiar whine. Greg’s pick-up skidded into the driveway then shuddered to a halt, his bumper a few inches from mine, buoys and fishing nets colliding noisily with the back of the cab.