The Lamplighters

24

The cathedral was the place to meet, being large and anonymous. In pews, in cloisters, in the red velvet seats up by where the boys’ chapel sang, whispers had steeped the rank stone for centuries. Now theirs, hers and Michelle’s, could join them without remark.

‘Roger and the girls are in a cafe round the corner,’ said Michelle. ‘I can’t be long. I didn’t mean to bring them. They wanted to come. I mean, he did.’

‘Where does he think you are?’

‘Buying a birthday present. For him. I’ll have to go to Debenhams after, pick out a tie or something.’

Helen suspected this was how things were for people who had shared calamity: they got to the heart of it immediately, doing away with niceties and preludes about the traffic. She and Michelle hadn’t known each other before. They had met after the event, at the funeral Trident House put on – a ‘farewell service’, they’d called it, and it had been more for the newspapers than for any of them. In the years since, they made contact when they could, if one or other woman happened to be passing that part of the country. They would send letters whenever the sadness of that winter got the better of them, and the urge hit to express it to someone who understood: letters that were sometimes answered, sometimes not, but the comfort was in writing them.

‘Thank you for coming,’ said Michelle. ‘Thank you for calling.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘I wasn’t sure if you would.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Michelle. ‘Jenny never gets back to me.’

‘She doesn’t get back to me either.’

Michelle unzipped her handbag and took out a tube of Polos. Inside the foil, the sweets were cracked into pieces, all down the length of the tube. Helen could picture her dropping them at the village store while her daughters selected packets of fruit gums and cola bottles. How old would the girls be now? Eight and four, about that. Helen didn’t know how it would be to watch a child of hers thrive, healthy and sturdy, little limbs fattening, hair growing, suddenly as tall as you.

Michelle offered them, despite the bits.

‘Thanks,’ said Helen.

‘Please stop talking to Dan Sharp.’

She was taken aback. ‘That’s what you came here to say?’

An elderly couple came to sit on the pew in front of them. The man lowered his head. Michelle moved close enough that Helen could smell her shampoo.

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Do you even know who he is?’

‘Not really. He writes about boats and bombs.’

‘Under a fake name.’

Helen crunched the Polo. ‘I’m not surprised about that.’

The woman in front turned round and shot them a glare. Helen thought she had a bob like a motorcycle helmet.

Michelle whispered: ‘Why does a novelist want to write about us?’

‘I don’t know. Why does anyone write about anything?’

‘There must be a reason.’

‘He likes the sea, he said.’

‘Then he should go on holiday.’

Helen felt unsure why she was having to defend a man she hardly knew; why she wanted to. ‘He’s looking for the truth. He cares about it.’

Michelle put the sweets back in her bag and zipped it shut.

‘Shh!’ The woman threw them daggers.

Michelle signalled they move across the aisle. When they were sitting again, she looked up at the altar. Helen noticed she’d had her ears pierced once.

‘Do you believe in Him?’ Michelle asked.

Christ’s feet were crossed at their bridges: an eruption of coagulated blood. It was a particularly gruesome one, Helen thought. Whoever had modelled it had driven the thorns in with unnecessary force.

‘I’ve tried.’

‘Me too.’ Michelle rotated her wedding band. ‘I feel jealous when I see people coming in here and they just know, don’t they? They know it’s going to be all right.’

‘They believe. Which isn’t the same.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I know Vinny didn’t hurt the others,’ said Michelle.

‘I know Arthur didn’t.’

‘But we don’t know, do we?’

‘If it matters, I never thought of Vince as the villain.’

Michelle took her hand briefly, then let it go.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You were the only one.’

Helen saw she’d been picking her fingernails, which were painted red but bitten short. She was taken back twenty years, to the anxious teenager Michelle had been, trembling at the farewell service, during questioning or when pinioned by journalists in the street. People didn’t change that much. Jenny would assume the same of her.

‘Aren’t you afraid of what Trident will say when they find out?’

‘I don’t care what they say,’ said Helen.

‘They’ll stop your money.’

‘So?’

‘It’s different for me,’ said Michelle. ‘I’ve got people to look after. A family.’ She stopped herself. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘That’s OK.’

‘Just that they’re young still—’

‘I understand.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never felt scared of them? All that about not talking to anyone or giving away their private business. There was always a threat in there, never said outright but it was obvious what they meant.’

‘If that’s true,’ said Helen, ‘then I think talking to Sharp is our best chance at honesty. It’s always suited Trident to blame it on Vince, you know that. It’s never been fair. He went to prison; he was thought of as a bad lot, so it was easy. People could get their heads around it. All they had to do was admit they got it wrong in giving him a job; they never should have done it; let that be a lesson learned. But it matters, doesn’t it? To say what he was really like. I’d have thought it matters to you.’

Michelle closed her eyes.

‘Why are we really here?’ asked Helen.

After a moment, Michelle said, ‘Vinny wrote me a letter. Right before they disappeared. One of the tripper boats picked it up. He told me what he’d been in prison for. The final time. I never told anyone about it.’

‘All right.’

‘It only made him sound worse than he was – and there was already so much against him that it didn’t seem kind to rub salt in the wound. That’s all it would have been, for it to come out straight away afterwards. Do you see?’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes met Helen’s, and the look communicated in them was urgent and pained. ‘But there was another thing in that letter that I should have shared, Helen. It did matter. It could have helped. Only I was too scared to say anything.’

Helen waited.

‘Vinny told me there was a man out to get him. He thought he’d be able to get away from his past with this job on the lighthouses, but actually it was the opposite. Now this person knew just where to find him. Vinny was a sitting target, out on the sea.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘The one he’d done it to. The last thing.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Michelle checked behind her, as if her husband might be standing there, or an official from Trident House. Out in the vestibule, a baby started crying.

‘This man worked for Trident,’ she said. ‘Vinny found out right after he got offered the job. His mate back home told him; said he’d never believe it, but guess who else had found a way in? Not as a keeper – he was office administration, but under the same roof, if you can call it that. He had this funny name for himself. Called himself the White Rook. That’s what the gangs back in town called him. It was cos of him having all this white hair, since he was a kid. What’s that again?’

‘Albino.’

‘His real name was Eddie.’

‘Eddie took the job as a way to get at Vince?’

‘He must’ve discovered Vinny got work at Trident, then decided that’d be as good a way to do it as any, so he wormed his way in.’

Helen felt light-headed. This was how it worked with the vanishing. Whenever a new idea surfaced, or the event tilted to a fresh angle in her mind, or a possibility occurred to her at three in the morning so fully formed that she had to sit up, clammy and disorientated, and turn the bedside lamp on to get her bearings, the lighthouse shook in its snow globe. The pieces fell in a new pattern each time.

‘Are you talking about revenge?’

‘I think so.’

‘What happened to Eddie?’

‘He left the Institution,’ said Michelle. ‘No one saw him again. But I don’t think it was Eddie that did it anyway. I think he paid someone. He had people all over. Dangerous people who could get things done and do it under the radar.’

‘Did Trident know the connection? They must have.’

‘If they did, they never said anything to me about it. But it’s like Vinny knew it was going to happen. He said he was seeing things out there. Imagining stuff that wasn’t true, and he said that happened sometimes, with the loneliness of it, but this was new. Then when they disappeared, the more I think about it, the more it seems clear as glass to me that that’s what happened. It wasn’t the sea or spies or any of that. It was this man, this White Rook. Eddie. He’s still out there, and if he gets wind that I’ve been talking about Vinny, whatever I say, he’ll come after me and my family.’

Helen thought about the birds Arthur’s father had kept. Her husband had used to recall going up the hill in the early mornings, before school.

They get better, then they fly away.

In a sliver of an instant she saw the dimple in Arthur’s smile as he looked up at her from the book he was reading.

How did the mind hold on to such things? She could never remember which number bus to take to the city centre from home, but she could remember that.

‘It’s easy to feel responsible,’ she said carefully. ‘I feel it too. I expect Jenny does. Our own stories are always going to feel the most significant. But listen – for your White Rook there are a dozen more. Things that make us worry we had more to do with the disappearance than we realize; that we’re all to blame in some way—’

‘This writer following me,’ said Michelle; ‘it brings it all back. How it was in ’73. I can’t live through it again, Helen. I was nineteen, bloody hell, I was a baby. Didn’t know what hit me. I’d lost the man I was mad for.’ Her throat closed; her voice broke. ‘I miss Vinny. Every single day. And you miss Arthur too, and Jenny misses Bill. With Roger, with marrying him, it isn’t the same. If I’d been your age, I’d never have got with anyone else, like you haven’t, cos there wouldn’t be any point. But I had to get on; I couldn’t give up on life. I wouldn’t change the girls for the world but maybe it’s true that you never love again like you love the first time.’

‘It is true,’ said Helen.

‘I’m safer if I keep my mouth shut.’

‘That’s what Trident wants you to think.’

‘What difference is a stupid book going to make?’

‘None, maybe. Except to me.’

A couple of schoolboys in the next aisle were looking at them. Michelle said: ‘Tell it to Jenny instead, then. She is who you’re doing it for, isn’t she?’

‘Of course,’ said Helen. ‘And believe me, I’ve tried.’

‘Where’s she living?’

Helen told her. ‘Trident gave me the address.’

‘Mrs PK still gets the perks.’ But she said it with a smile. ‘Twenty years is long enough, isn’t it? We’ve all moved on. She can’t hold it against you. It wasn’t as though—’

‘Yes, she can.’

Michelle took her hand. ‘I’ll help you, if you want.’

‘I don’t know how you’re going to do that.’

‘If you help me. Be careful, Helen. That’s all. Be careful what you tell him. Will you?’

‘I will.’

Michelle looked at her watch. ‘Oh God, it’s half past. I’ve got to get to Debenhams and back before Roger sends out a search party.’

She collected her bag and jacket; then they stood and hugged each other. Helen wasn’t used to hugging; it had never come that naturally to her, and besides, there was no one these days who needed it.

‘It was good seeing you,’ said Michelle.

‘It was good seeing you, too.’

Helen put on her coat and watched the other woman leave, down the aisle and out into the bright afternoon light.

25

It would have been normal to meet one’s new neighbours on the doorstep, or when slamming the door to one’s car. Instead she had met Bill and Jenny Walker at a charity dance in Mortehaven village hall one summer when Arthur was off on the light. She had spent much of the week crying in the bathroom, Monday to Thursday anyway, because she felt that was a safe place to cry. Normally she did not mind when Arthur was away, the empty cottage, but she felt it then. It depended on the time of year.

Frank’s wife Betty dropped in with a shepherd’s pie and asked if she would be kind enough to help in the cloakroom. One of their number had fallen away; they’d be so grateful. As usual when put on the spot, she felt she couldn’t say no; the instinct was to be helpful, even if, after Betty left, she wondered why on earth she had agreed. But the village hall cloakroom was a dim-lit place and putting tickets on hangers on coats made a plodding, harmless sense. ‘Have you met them next door yet?’ Betty asked. She hadn’t. The Walkers’ car had arrived yesterday, the new Assistant Keeper and his family, chaotic with luggage and children. Helen should have been round already. It looked unfriendly that she hadn’t. She was Mrs PK, it was her obligation; she ought to have been leading the charge, offering her services as she had when Betty moved in.

Arthur couldn’t help when his spells of duty fell, but yesterday was a mighty and dreaded obelisk. For three hundred and sixty-four days of the year it rolled towards her from a foul horizon. She had an instant to meet its living eye before closing her own.

The dance was successful. Helen stayed with the coats, soft and perfumed. She smelled the men’s cologne, which was warm and spicy, and the women’s musk like flowers and sex. In quiet moments she smoked to stop herself crying and fingered the velvet sleeves that hung in their rows, closely packed and frilled like gills on a mushroom. He came to her near the end, to collect the jackets his wife had put in.

‘You’re Helen,’ he said, and introduced himself.

She was thankful for the dark. Bill Walker wasn’t what she had expected, although she hadn’t expected anything in particular; he was neater and younger, with a long nose and even features that reminded her of one of Raphael’s cardinals. He gazed at her as she hadn’t been gazed at in a very long time, and she could almost believe she was another woman, and none of the things that had happened to her had happened.

‘Those two,’ he said. ‘The buttons, yes; no, next one along.’

In the end he came and pointed them out himself. The closeness of him, his skin fair and unlined, felt inexplicably comforting. She had to have twenty years on him, at least.

Like spectators, the coats gathered round. It was a few seconds; it couldn’t have been more. For all the times she would relive it, it must have been more.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Bill, for he could tell.

‘Yes,’ she said, because she would never. She didn’t know where to start, nor should she start, with someone she had only just met.

His wife was still at the bar; she wouldn’t come back of her own accord, he’d have to go out there and fetch her. They danced to ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, there in the cloakroom, the only two people in the world. In the sooty darkness he drew her to him, or she went without persuasion, it was hard to say, and they held each other, her cheek on his, and the room was humming harder as the ceiling flew away.

26

I don’t know what drew me to him. If it hadn’t been Bill, it might have been someone else. At that time in my life, it could have been anyone.

That sounds selfish but I hope you’ll stick with me. If you’re putting this in your book, you need to get it down right. I don’t want any mistakes.

Will Jenny believe me? I shouldn’t think so. But this is one story I can give you and know it’s true. I’d rather leave it written down than not at all.

That was how Bill and I met. The temptation was more about how it made me feel than any such thing towards him. It felt good to be wanted. That isn’t an excuse; I did what I did; it was my decision. But when we had that initial connection… I wonder if that isn’t too grand a word – ‘connection’; what is that anyway, a fussy way of saying ‘attraction’? I wouldn’t say I was even attracted to him; it was just that he had seen me crying; he had seen a secret part of me, and once that happened it seemed logical that he might as well see the rest. I was lonely and sad. It had been a long time since a man had held me – since he’d touched any part of me – and then there was Bill. He made me feel all the things affairs are supposed to: young, desired, cleansed of past misdemeanours, even if the misdemeanour in the present is the worst of the lot.

Did I feel for him in return? No. Not for Bill. I felt for someone who wanted to be kind to me. Who’d listen, after my husband had stopped.

Living in the cottages, we couldn’t avoid getting close. We lived all over each other; even when the men were away the women were stitched together constantly. You couldn’t decide one day that you didn’t feel sociable because there’d always be someone doing their weeding in the front or calling out the window asking if you wanted to come over for a cup of coffee, so if you didn’t crop up at least once you’d have them banging down the door asking if you were all right. Some people might like that, but it wasn’t for me. I like my front door and it’s closed for a reason.

When Arthur was off it sometimes meant Bill was home, and the other way around. That was how it worked with the roster. For each man it was eight weeks on the tower then four at home, rotated among four of them, if you count in Frank. So, in a way, it would have been the ideal ground for it. When I didn’t have my husband, there was a chance I’d have Bill. It could have worked beautifully… if that was what happened.

Of course, when Jenny discovered it, she thought the worst. I don’t know what gave it away. She never said and I never asked. She’d had her suspicions for a while, I suppose. Bill made no attempt to conceal his feelings about me, and to be honest, I’m not even sure it was about me. Not deep down. I believe Bill wanted a way out of a life he didn’t get on with. Our ‘affair’ was a choice he could make on his own.

She told me she knew on the day of the memorial. She said the oddest thing to me then; she said: ‘He got what was coming to him.’ I did too, in a way.

Trident House held the service once they’d decided my husband was dead. They didn’t consult me or ask for my blessing or understanding or anything like that.

Have you made any progress with them, by the way? No, that makes sense. I’d imagine you could ring them six more times and you still wouldn’t hear back. Trident will want to distance themselves from what you’re doing, so I doubt they’ll comment on it much. I don’t mean to be offensive, but they’ll be dismissive about the stories you’ve had published. They’ll say, what’s a man like him going to know about a matter like this? They’d be right. But in twenty years, you’re the first person who’s asked me for my part in it. All the journalists who’ve thrown their hat in, not one of them ever knocked on my door and asked for my own words.

Trident would sooner blot the event from their history. They’ve never engaged with any aspect of the aftermath, as far as I know: no interviews, no release of records, no transparency whatsoever. These days, it wouldn’t be like that – there’s more demand for that sort of thing now. But back then it was all about covering it up. Unluckily for the Institution, people don’t work that way. Feelings and memories don’t either. It isn’t something you can hide away in a filing cabinet. You can’t keep people quiet however hard you go at it.

The day of the memorial stays with me for all the wrong reasons. It was cold, on the fringes of spring, and windless; Mortehaven Beach was smooth and brown, pitted with pebbles, and I can still see very clearly the lip of the sea as it dragged into shore; it had that rotten-froth quality, fermented like beer. There were men in uniform standing by boards covered in flowers. They had photographs of Arthur and the others, staring back to us, to land. A simulation of a burial when there was nothing to bury.

It rained and rained. I wore heels because it seemed disrespectful – stupidly – not to, and my shoes kept disappearing into the sand. Arthur’s face on the placard didn’t belong to him. You know when you see a picture in the paper of a murdered girl and you search her eyes for a clue as to what happened to her, some inkling that she’d known? Well, that day I looked at Arthur and I understood this was his secret and it always would be. Families and friends urged us to ‘fight’ – for answers and resolution – but the definition of fighting is that you’re up against something, aren’t you, and it was just too exhausting for me. It wasn’t Trident House I was fighting. It was him; it was Arthur. He didn’t want me in on it. There’s the assumption you have to seek answers for your loved ones when they die. Suppose they’d prefer silence?

Afterwards, Jenny went for me. I couldn’t blame her. I was trying to help her with the baby because her daughters were off running riot on the beach, and I could see she’d been crying and not sleeping, just like me, and then out of nowhere she smacked me across the cheek. The worst was seeing Arthur’s and Bill’s faces on the billboards, and the look in Arthur’s eye was one of, Thank God I’m out of that.

Right then I’d have swapped with him in a heartbeat, just about wherever he was. Chained up on a ship or pecked to death in a cove, anything was preferable. I envied him his privacy. It isn’t easy to disappear. For the life of me I don’t know how he managed it. The problem is that Jenny never listened to my side of the story. You might say the problem is with me and your readers will, I’m sure. There’s nothing so hateful as a woman who gets involved with another woman’s husband. Never mind the husband’s part: he was tricked or seduced, most likely, and it’s funny how men insist on power in all aspects of their lives except when it does not suit them, and then they’re content to be feeble and let the women take responsibility. Jenny carried on loving Bill and that’s her business, that’s her prerogative. Bill was a husband and a father, and the meaning in those roles is greater than I have privilege to know.

The truth is, I did dance with Bill at the charity ball when Arthur was away on the light, and I did get close to him in the weeks after that. On one occasion, after I became upset at their house, he kissed me.

The kiss was quick and meaningless. It felt completely wrong. That was the turning point. I asked myself what I had been doing – this wasn’t me; it wasn’t at all – and what exactly I’d been hoping to get out of it. Flattery was part of it, I admit. I couldn’t think what a young man saw in me. I’d been a fool and I regretted my mistake. I wished that Bill would regret it too.

I told him it couldn’t go any further. I thought he’d agree, but his reaction was astonishing. He became hostile at the same time as swearing his devotion. He said he was in love with me. He very nearly spat those words, as though he hated his position but could do nothing to change it.

After that, I did all I could to avoid him. I made excuses to Jenny and felt thankful when Bill went back to the Maiden, so I didn’t have to see him. When he was ashore without Arthur, he behaved frighteningly. That’s the only word I can use. I’d find him in my cottage, saying he’d come to fix a light that Jenny told him about, and afterwards I’d notice possessions of mine were missing. Underwear and soaps, shoes and jewellery: to this day I’m convinced he stole a dear necklace of mine, a chain Arthur gave me when he proposed. I can’t think where else it went and naturally I couldn’t tell Arthur, so he must have thought I’d lost it or didn’t want to wear it.

It seemed Bill wanted us to be a couple so much that in his mind, at least, it came true. He talked about holidays we might take. Local beauty spots he’d show me when he was next ashore. Suppers he’d treat me to at his favourite restaurants.

It was as if I had told him that day not that I wished to end it with him – whatever ‘it’ was; a single intimacy, our getting to know one another, the confusion of our meeting, things that, all right, might amount to infidelity in the mildest sense of the word but not, in my view, the obliterating sort – but instead that I had resolved to end my union with Arthur and begin again with him. Bill would be flagrant about it, taking my hand with Jenny in the room, or slipping his arm round my waist while I was in the kitchen slicing the fruit cake she’d brought round. No matter how many times I told him no, he refused to leave me alone. And the shells! Those bloody seashells he brought back for me, the ones he chiselled on the tower; they filled up my house, my drawers, anywhere I could think of to hide the damn things because I was terrified someone would see them. I couldn’t throw them away in case Jenny found them in the bins. She often added her glass to the collection at the last minute. I couldn’t risk it.

I was trapped. There was no escape. Not unless I confessed to the short-lived attachment we’d had – which would anyway be Bill’s word against mine.

You can argue that one kiss was enough. But I wish Jenny knew it was nothing more. Bill and I were not in love. Love is pure and clean and kind; it comes from a noble, gentle place. It doesn’t come from frustration or blackmail or hatred or dissatisfaction. Bill didn’t love me. I want to tell Jenny that, and I’ve tried, over the years; I’ve written her letters, I’ve gone to see her, I’ve called her up, but it’s no use.

Now you’re here. And you think I want to find out what happened to Arthur, that I’m hoping you’ll hit on what’s never occurred to us before. Well, I don’t. Twenty years is more than long enough to dwell on what you can’t change. I’d rather focus on what I can.

My husband is dead, but I’m not. Nor is Jenny. And this thing I share with her, it isn’t a dead thing, it’s living, and if that’s the case then it can change, it can grow, it can find a way out. I’m tired of death and loss; I’ve had enough of those.

I told you before about the garden. The way life has of coming back again and again, out of the cold. That’s what I’m hoping for. That’s what I want.

27

Ron must have left the Metro in gear because when she turned the ignition it jumped backwards like a startled rabbit. She hadn’t driven in a while and felt shaky behind the wheel, her brain confused by messages. Indicate, mirrors, check her blind spot. She used to do it without thinking. At points the whole thing felt too overwhelming.

She wasn’t looking forward to today, her grandson’s sixth birthday party. Jenny had never enjoyed social occasions, but with Bill by her side it had been bearable.

Now she was on her own, fending for herself at family events, mixing with people she didn’t know, whose silent judgements followed her round the room. Did they remember her from years ago? Their parents would. She had been the hysterical one, scrapping at the cameras and swearing in the news. But Hannah said she needed to get out of the house; she’d been cooped up too long; she was starting to ‘go strange’.

She turned the fans on and thought the air emanating from them smelled of fish. She should use the car more. But where would she go? Apart from her children’s houses, or the supermarket. Join the WI, suggested Hannah. But the thought of crocheting blankets with a gaggle of old dears left her cold. She could imagine how it would be, once they realized who she was. Gossiping over their knitting needles.

She was steeling herself to pull out of the space when she spotted a woman in her wing mirror, walking up the street.

Jenny ducked down in the driver’s seat. She was prone to this. Whenever she saw a person she knew in the park or the shops, she wouldn’t approach them with glad surprise and a word of greeting, as other people might; she’d hide behind a lamp post or the nearest display of toilet roll and wait until they’d gone by.

Only, this wasn’t a person she knew. She didn’t think so, anyway. Blue jeans, big jacket, yellow hair scraped back in a bun. Jenny couldn’t get a clear view of her face.

Maybe she recognized the height and build of this woman; yes, maybe she did. The fish air grew stronger. She turned the fans off.

The woman passed the car and stopped outside Jenny’s gate. She took a piece of paper out of her pocket and checked an address. Then she knocked on the front door and waited some time, a good two minutes, before stepping to one side and nosing into the living-room window. Jenny felt pleased she had closed the curtains.

Another knock, another wait: whatever it was she’d come for was important.

Still sagged in the seat, Jenny shoved the car into first and drove away, leaving her blind spot unchecked.

When she was a girl there’d been Marmite wheels and a game of musical chairs; now it was bouncy castles and balloon artists at the village hall, the whole class of thirty invited, then back to Hannah’s semi-detached for a cake the size of a wall tapestry.

Jenny drifted on the periphery of the gathering. While Hannah rushed about after the children, filling paper plates with slices of soggy Margherita pizza and some depressed-looking carrot sticks that had been sitting out for too long, she avoided conversation. The parents looked tired and annoyed, positioning themselves close to the bowls of cheese puffs and ogling the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cake when it was finally unsheathed and lit ablaze with enough candles to fire a rocket into space.

‘Mum, can you help clear away?’

She was relieved to be given a task: in the kitchen emptying ketchup-stained discs into a black bin liner. Back in the next room, a child’s argument flared. She heard crying, soothing, then a gently closed door. She put the kettle on.

First, the car outside with its engine running. Now Michelle Davies.

Two decades on, older and knackered looking, but still undoubtedly her.

‘Why did you do it?’

A question for herself or for Bill – it didn’t matter really. Better watch out for that, though: Hannah had caught her talking to herself last weekend and told her off. ‘Don’t get batty on me, Mum; I haven’t got the space, so it’d be Cedars Retirement and there’s only one way out of there.’ But if Jenny didn’t say these things out loud then Bill would never hear them, and she believed, somehow, wherever he was, that he did.

If she concentrated, she could see her husband clearly, standing there at the kitchen cupboards, getting the coffee cups out, a thin pleat of cigarette smoke trailing from his hidden face like a chimney smouldering in a wood.

She always saw Bill as he’d been when she had lost him. She could not update him, or imagine him aged. The human face changed in mysterious, spontaneous ways, not just by genetics but by the living of life. Unless it was known what had happened to a person, it couldn’t be done. So, Jenny preserved him as the man she had married, before the disappearance, before they met Helen Black, before they had ever set eyes on the terrible Maiden Rock.

She filled the mug, although Hannah was low on Nescafé, so it was a weak brew and had to be improved by three teaspoons of sugar.

Hannah poked her head in. ‘We’re cutting the cake in a sec.’

‘I’m not feeling well, love.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Just a headache. I’ll be fine.’

Hannah looked concerned. ‘I’ve got paracetamol in the bathroom.’

‘It’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll have a sit-down.’

Jenny leaned on the counter and willed the tears away. There were the quietest triggers to despair: the shortage of coffee, for one. In these moments of trivial difficulty, it felt as if the world was against her, unwilling to compensate.

Bill’s affair had been worse than his disappearance. At least in the second he’d been the victim. Although, as Jenny told herself time and again, he’d been the victim with Helen too.

It had started with those cups of tea. As Jenny stirred her mug, repeated refrains of ‘Happy Birthday’ seeping through the walls and the bin bag slumped against her legs like a homeless person in a shop door, she recalled returning to Masters one afternoon when Bill was ashore. Helen sitting there, glossy and groomed, in their good room; Bill had his arm round her on the settee and their cups of tea had gone cold in front of them. Jenny thought a lot about the tea, afterwards: that they must have been talking for a long time and forgotten about the tea. The fact those teas were cold bothered her.

Later, when she asked Bill why Helen had come to the cottage, he’d poured scorn on it. When she’d asked again, he’d shouted at her that if she spent less time at the bottom of a bottle, she might be able to work it out. His insult pierced her as sharply as if he’d said it moments ago. For days Jenny hadn’t been able to look at him, hadn’t been able to speak to him, and the separation after that was a hard one: when he went back off to the tower, she didn’t know what to think. Each time she saw Helen she turned away, afraid of confrontation but at the same time desperate to confront.

Instead she drank and tried not to worry, but the more she drank the more she fretted and the same the other way. Jenny had promised herself she would never turn into her mum. But it had started quietly, as these things do. To start with only drinking when Bill was off because it helped to keep her company, or if the girls were fraying her nerves, or after Mark was born and then she never got any sleep. Soon, a glass turned into a bottle.

Jenny went into the hall. The party had moved to the garden. Through the patio glazing, she saw a group of children gathered round a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, which they were stabbing with strips of material. After a while, some sweets were handed out.

Bill had accused her of being unsympathetic. After what Helen had gone through, shouldn’t she be able to rely on her friends?

Jenny didn’t understand why she couldn’t be the friend. Why did it have to be him? They did everything together. He didn’t have friendships she didn’t know about.

It was never easy, from then, when Bill came ashore. Every time Jenny left the house, she assumed he was sneaking over to Helen’s, or Helen was sneaking over to theirs. When she got home, she’d check the water glasses to see if they were dry, and the tap in the bathroom that she always left askew, and smell the air in case she could detect perfume. Helen always wore the same, Eau Passionnée, only bit of French Jenny knew, and that was only because she’d been to Admiral one time and seen it on the dressing table and given herself a spritz; she never wore perfume so she’d felt like a new lady in it. The most shameful thing was how she had driven up to Exeter one day a few weeks later and bought a bottle of her own. She had wanted to feel like Helen. To see what that was like. But when Bill came ashore and she met him off the boat, the first thing he said to her was, ‘What’s that smell? It doesn’t suit you,’ so she never wore it again.

A car pulled up outside Hannah’s house. Jenny heard a door slam. A marble of panic rolled up her throat. She gripped the banister and fled upstairs.

Moments later, peering down from Hannah’s bedroom window, she saw it was only a parent come early to collect their child, the one who’d been crying.

Hannah’s right, she thought miserably. I have gone strange.

Her daughter’s room was a tip, the bed unmade, her son-in-law’s toiletries splashed across the bedside. Bill had never been messy. Lightkeeping had taught him standards, such as how to ball his socks and put them in a drawer, instead of discarding their wilted bodies on the carpet like a pair of rats squashed on the motorway.

If only she could describe the pain that had made her do that wicked thing.

She had wanted to shake him. She had given him beautiful children and a loving home and still he was looking over that fence thinking a couple like that, who’d gone through that, were better than them?

Carol had stoked the flames. She reminded Jenny how she had raised that family all by herself, being on her own with the girls since Bill started on the tower and then when Mark came along she was on her own with him too, washing nappies, warming bottles, bent over the baby’s cot at three a.m., with the Maiden Rock blinking at her through the night.

During those nights Jenny would weep with anger: she hadn’t known which was worse, that Bill was tending the flame and as wide awake as she was – awake but not helping, having no idea how ready she was to hurl the baby out the window, send him soaring across the sky like a comet in his blanket – or that he was sleeping. She could have murdered him if she thought about him sleeping. And she could have murdered him if she thought about Helen, and the less she slept the more she thought and the worse her thoughts became. She didn’t sleep for months with Mark. Not sleeping drove her potty.

Helen hadn’t raised his family, had she? She hadn’t given him children and ironed his clothes. She hadn’t cooked him Arctic roll from scratch and stroked his brow as he complained about the Channels and how they made his stomach fill with coal.

But still Helen felt it appropriate to write her damn letters that were only about making herself feel better, not Jenny. As soon as Jenny started reading them – as soon as she saw Bill’s name written down – she crumpled them up and threw them away.

I bet lots of men have loved you, Jenny had thought of Helen at the time. It’s not fair for you to decide you want him now, when he’s mine and he’s all I’ve got.

Her daughter’s nightdress lay in a heap at the foot of the bed. Jenny sat and ran a hand over it. She remembered folding Hannah’s nightie when she was little, under the pillow, kissing her clammy forehead goodnight. ‘Will you check on me? Check on me in two bits.’ ‘Yes, I’ll check on you.’ ‘In two bits, Mummy, check on me. Promise?’

Promise. How could Bill have turned his light out on them?

Soon, Hannah would see her innocent mother for the fraud she was – pretending all these years to be the victim when she was anything but. She would cut Jenny off, as coldly and permanently as Jenny had cut off her own mother.

‘Mum?’ Hannah appeared at the door.

Jenny jumped. ‘You frightened me.’

‘I didn’t know where you were. How’s the head?’

‘What?’

‘Your headache.’

‘Oh. Better.’

‘People are leaving,’ said Hannah, ‘thank God.’ She had a tea towel over her shoulder with a smear across it. ‘Greg’s doing the party bags. Are you coming down?’

Jenny looked away. She tried to stop the tears coming, but it was useless.

She had only intended to give her husband a scare. She hadn’t meant for him to go forever.

‘What’s wrong?’ Hannah came in. ‘Mum – what’s happened?’

Jenny pulled the nightdress into her lap.

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ she said.

28

29

She had noticed the bird for the first time a week ago, after she’d travelled to see Jenny. That had been a wasted trip. She’d spent the whole drive back deciding what further lies she would have to tell Roger, who’d been annoyed at needing to take the day off work to look after the girls. Already she’d made up the sick friend who hadn’t long left.

It was sitting on the lawn one afternoon while she was folding away the garden chairs, and since then it kept appearing all over the place, on the windowsill while she was cooking breakfast, under the oak tree or perched on the guinea pig hutch, its beady eye staring in at her. It was always on its own.

‘Who are you?’ she said to it one day. ‘Go away.’

She grew afraid of seeing it, even if some time could pass between sightings – but this made it worse because she would think it had gone, only for it to reappear suddenly, when she least expected it, like a poke in the ribs while falling asleep.

On Sunday afternoon, Roger took the girls out. Michelle was sitting on the sofa reading Woman’s Weekender and was growing interested in a story about a couple done over by the mortgage lenders, when a flash of white flickered in the corner of her eye. The bird was on the grass again, its feathers settling. It orbited on the spot, getting its bearings, but when it caught sight of her it stopped and looked at her probingly.

‘Shoo,’ she said, parting the conservatory glass, but the bird didn’t move until she stepped outside and went right at it, as close as a metre away. Then it flew off and settled on a branch above her head. ‘Leave me alone,’ she told it. Back inside she drew the curtains and tried to return to Woman’s Weekender, but she knew the bird was there, she knew it even if she couldn’t see it, sitting there in the tree, watching.

When Roger came home, she had the curtains closed. He said, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ She said it was nothing, she’d just had a migraine.

The next morning the bird was outside her bedroom. Roger had left for the office. She was glad he was not here to see her open the window and hurl a cup of water at it with a strangled noise, which prompted a flurry of wings and her elder daughter to rush in, mouth full of toothpaste, and demand, ‘Mummy, what’re you doing? You look like a clown.’ Michelle met her reflection in the mirror and was surprised by what she saw: her hair unbrushed, yesterday’s make-up black grit.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time to get ready.’

On the drive to Monday Club the radio played James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’. Michelle thought about the night she had met Vinny, of his lips when he smoked.

With both girls dropped off, she drove to Sainsbury’s even though she didn’t need anything. She put her head on the steering wheel.

The song made her ache.

February ’72. She had only gone to the party because Erica made her. There’d been nothing to wear so she’d gone through the laundry basket and found a pair of flares which she’d doused in her mum’s Rive Gauche. She’d been dumped a week ago and wasn’t in the mood. ‘Come on; it’ll be fun,’ said Erica. When they arrived, she thought, I’ve seen too many scenes like this. A girl was being sick into a flowerpot outside and the end of her plait kept getting caught in her mouth.

‘This is Vinny.’

Michelle had heard about Erica’s jailbird cousin. She wondered then why she hadn’t listened harder. Vinny had a head on everyone else, with dark hair and slightly uneven teeth. She could look at him only when he wasn’t looking at her. Meeting his eye gave her a humiliated sort of shock.

With Erica gone, he said: ‘Michelle… Makes me think of that Beatles song.’

‘Do you dig The Beatles?’

‘More of a Stones man.’

‘I never liked my name,’ admitted Michelle. ‘It reminds me of the sea. It’s the shell part. The sea scares me a little. Too deep, maybe.’ She was talking too much.

Vinny had a nice smile, warm and sincere, and it travelled up to fill his eyes.

‘Do you want to celebrate with me?’ he asked.

‘What are you celebrating?’

He picked up a bottle of Babycham. ‘Come on.’

It was fresher outside on the steps, once the girl and her plaits had gone in.

‘I got a job today,’ he said. ‘As a lighthouse keeper.’

She could see his eyelashes in the dark. ‘I’ve never met a lighthouse keeper.’

‘Now you have.’

‘And there was I talking about the sea.’

‘That’s how I knew you’d be the one to celebrate with.’

She smiled. The drink tasted sweet. ‘Do you have a smoke?’ she asked.

Vinny fished around in his jacket. ‘It’s grass.’ When he struck the match, she glimpsed the insides of his hands, which seemed an intimate part of him to see.

‘It doesn’t sound like a real job,’ she said, wanting to stay out here with him.

‘What’s a real job?’

‘I don’t know.’ She passed him the joint. ‘One where you don’t get lonely.’

‘I won’t be any lonelier than I am now.’

‘Do you feel lonely now?’

He smiled back at her. ‘Not exactly.’

Michelle thought, there’ll always be a bit of me that gets drawn to the wrong one. Maybe there’s a bit of that in every woman.

In the car park at Sainsbury’s, a VW’s horn beeped behind her. The driver wound her window down. ‘Are you going?’ she said impatiently. ‘I’ve got two kids in the back.’

Michelle remembered she was parked in a mother and baby space.

‘Sorry. Yes. I am.’ She reversed and drove out of the car park the wrong way down a one-way route, prompting a cyclist to shout that she was a blind bloody cow. Indicating left at the roundabout, she saw the bird again, sitting on the island in the middle, on its own, staring at her.

She was woken in the night. Her toes were cold. Two thirty-three a.m.

Roger’s bulk was soothing next to her, his fleshy back rising and falling on a snore. She got up and put on her dressing gown, which felt stiff because she’d dried it on the washing line and the sun had cooked it.

Downstairs, in his study, she reached for the file hidden under the desk. Roger had encouraged her to throw it away: ‘What do you want to keep that crap for?’ He’d called it junk that was taking up much-needed space, an objection he did not throw at the arrangement of chrome ‘stress-relievers’ scattered across the veneer.

Michelle sat in his chair and opened the folder. Letters from Trident, all variations on a theme: Our deepest condolences… shocked and bewildered… if there’s anything we can do. Then the Bereavement Allowance that was better read as hush money: cash for keeping quiet and they’d keep her in exchange.

Finally, their verdict: We’ve investigated all we reasonably can… Prison changes people… the isolation… not the best place for Vincent to have been, in his state of mind.

State of mind? To this day Vinny had the finest mind she had come across.

Interviews: 1973.

Michelle leaned over in the queasy glow of the overhead and ran her nail around the lip of the file. When the inquiries were happening, Helen Black had insisted on getting copies of everything. Trident hadn’t a leg to stand on: the last thing they needed was a stricken relative going to the press.

She reread the transcripts now, words spoken twenty years ago but still alive on the page. Though she knew the text well, her head hurt and her heart hurt more.

She wished that she had been the one to talk about Vinny. Instead it had been Pearl, his aunt, the woman who had raised him. Michelle could have told them what Vinny had really been like, not these lies. Painting him as a thug and a down-and-out. To have it documented, all the lovely things about him, would have meant something.

Most of Pearl’s account she could dismiss, but one part was difficult. She reached it now and lingered there, going over the words until their meaning broke apart. Mike Senner’s claim troubled her. It always had. The fisherman swore he’d been out to the tower the week before it was discovered empty; he said he’d gone to fill up the water storage tanks and had spoken to Bill and Vince. They had told him about an unexpected visitor.

Why hadn’t the investigators pursued that claim? It fitted. And it proved what happened, surely it did.

The clock on Roger’s desk said five to four. Her eyes were closing; it would be morning soon.

Upstairs, she climbed into bed, careful not to disturb her husband. A shadow moved across the wall, the fingertips of trees reaching through the curtains. She could feel the weight of the man she’d loved, loved him still, the ghost of him, sitting next to her, reassuring as a dog, and how that lightened then left as she tripped over into sleep.