I stand under the shower. Try to recall what to do. There are expensive toiletries in the shower caddy in black glass bottles boasting essential oils of lemon, mandarin, rosemary. But beside those, there is a bottle of supermarket shampoo. I flip open the cap. Apple. Like I used eighteen years ago.
I know what Daniel’s doing: he wants Lolly. The question is for me. Do I want her back? Do I want him and me?
I turn over the shampoo, let it spill out, mix with the water, fill the bathroom with its sweet, cheap condensation. I will do what he wants. I will let him bring her back.
I wear the clothes he buys for me – T-shirts, sweatpants, sweatshirts, plain knickers, no bras – they’re expensive editions of the clothes I used to wear when I was fourteen – but strangely, he’s bought them all in white. ‘A new start,’ he says, when he leads me to the full chest of drawers, ‘a new you.’
I shower every evening; I change into these fresh clothes but I hate the white. It shows everything, my whole body is on display,perhaps that’s what he wants, until it isn’t. I catch him staring at my nipples through the fabric, I wait to see that familiar jolt of desire. But I don’t. I’m struggling to identify exactly what I am seeing flit across his face, because it is so foreign to me, so unfamiliar, neither Daniel nor Kit have ever looked at me like that, until I realise what it is – disgust. I hug my arms over my chest. Try not to cry.
He handles it. One day, I come to the chest of drawers and find that every single item has been replaced in black, all the white gone. It reminds me of the door he punched through. How, one day, it just wasn’t there anymore.
Everything is better in black, I am more comfortable, he is more comfortable, his eyes linger on me a little more, don’t slide instantly away. But he doesn’t sleep with me in the loft though there’s an empty bed across from mine, he’s in the master downstairs. Sometimes, if I think too hard about that, it feels suffocating, dangerous, it echoes too closely how things were when we first came to the cottage – parent’s room, child’s room, parent, child. I press my hand over my racing heart. Tell myself things are different now. We’re adults. We have chosen each other.
Except, he never touches me. I tell myself he will soon, it’s only been a few days, it will be like how it once was, but perhaps because I am fixated on it, I think he’s touching me even less than before. He doesn’t stroke my hair like he did when we first arrived or try to hold my hand, he doesn’t repeat those things I’ve now let myself want,You’re rare, beautiful, astonishing, I’m still in love with you, it was always you.
I try harder. I brush my teeth, I shower, I feed myself. I eat downstairs now. I let him show me the wine cellar excavated into the floor of the kitchen, feigning enthusiasm at the motorised door, the spiral steps. I listen to him talk for hours about new papers he’s thinking of writing. Then, if the moment allows it, I reach for him, the stubble on his jaw, the softness of his lips, all that desire rushing back, he must feel it too, I was sure he felt it too.
But each time, he takes my palm, kisses it, hands it back to me. ‘When you’re better.’
Doesn’t he realise? He is my healing, only he can close over the black hole of Faye, Millie, Kit. But he won’t heal me.
57
Map
Now
Daniel tells me that he’s going to the field.
‘The field?’ He’s spent the last few days in the loft with me; he is on his laptop while I read the books he bought. He’s planning a comeback to lepidoptery, he’s thinking of ideas for a research paper, arranging meetings with old colleagues. But I didn’t realise there would be fieldwork. ‘Not for Cornish Blues. Didn’t they go extinct?’
‘You’ve been paying attention.’ He looks at me intently, just like he used to. My body shivers. ‘They went extinct eighteen years ago, sometime after us.’ He pauses, as if the end of our time together was as seismic as the extinction of a species. ‘Now, it’s just Holly Blues. Still, I think there’s something there,’ he says. For a split second, I feel like the last eighteen years haven’t happened, no prison, no Kit, no children - he’s snipped all that from the reel. A chill runs up my arm.
He isn’t there when the couple arrive at the next-door cottage, he doesn’t know that they have a baby, a baby who can’t stopcrying. Just hearing her makes my breasts swell – I can’t read, I can’t sketch. I press my forehead against the wall. When Millie was a few months old, she had colic. None of that reflux medicine worked, all that gave her an ounce of comfort was being strapped to my body, my back ached from it. I crave that pain now. I want to go down there, say, ‘Give her to me. I’ll hold her.’ Instead, I pull a pillow round my ears and stare at the walls.
That’s when I see the poster.
I’d dismissed it initially. The loft is intended for children, there are alphabet prints on the wall, a cupboard full of games; I assumed it was just another children’s poster. But it’s more than that. It’s a map of the Helford – the land, the estuary, the open sea, the locations labelled in cursive looping font. I stare at it for so long, I stop hearing the baby, the places settling in my mind like sediment. I know these places because of Alex. He showed me ancient oaks at Frenchman’s Creek, he told me the names of seaweed at Bosahan Cove. Trebah is the beach he said not to bother paying to enter, Port Navas is where he lived. I hadn’t realised how close it was to Durgan, no more than the tip of my index finger. And I think no matter how much money Daniel has spent renting the cottage, or how long we stay here on the estuary, we are in Alex’s country.
I’ve looked him up many times over the years. He became a skipper, took overForager, he posts about his fishing business – repairs he had to make, dwindling mackerel stock, how he’s started to export green velvet crab to Spain because there is no market here. But buried among these are morsels of his life – a date with his wife, a photo of his son, the coastal walk he does each year to mark the deaths of his father and his friend. He stilldives for oysters. There was a photo of him in his diving gear, the wetsuit on his body, a pelt.
But thinking of him in Cornwall is very different from scrolling through his social media in London; I have thoughts I’ve never had before. Has he thought about me in the last eighteen years? Would he recognise me? What would he make of me back here?
Once I start thinking about Alex, I can’t stop. He is in the estuary outside my window, in the nautical décor of the cottage – the fishing net wall hanging, the shelf of sea glass, a lobster pot on top of the kitchen counter – I’d think it all kitsch if I had a different history. Instead, I remember how he knew exactly where to drop lobster pots off the side ofForager, how he used to throw crab shells overboard for oysters to lay their spats in. He always thought of helping something on.
‘Lolly?’ says Daniel.
I turn to look at him. He is watching me from the kitchen island.
‘You seem distracted.’ He pads towards me with a bowl of salad, walks straight across the round door of the wine cellar. He’s assured me that it’s perfectly safe, the glass is reinforced, but I always skirt round it, convinced I’m going to crash through.
‘Have you looked at the books I bought you?’ he says, spooning tomatoes onto my plate.
‘Not yet.’ He putThe Origin of Species,Botanising in BritainandSaving Orchidson the end of my bed a few days ago. I haven’t told him I’ve read the first two before. That I’m not interested in orchids.
‘You’ve barely touched the sketchpad and pencils.’
I don’t reply.