She gets onto her knees and tries to push up the mattress so she can hide the gun underneath it, but the design of the bed means that the frame has tall sides. It’s impossible to get the gun beneath it. She wouldn’t be able to extract it quickly, or at all.
I need it, she thinks. But it’s important to be safe with it. And it’s important that I’m safe.
The room spins around her. She thinks again of the possibility that Jayne is dangerous and her face crumples. She squeezes her eyes shut. A tremor runs through her and she feels it in every limb and every organ. Even in her lips. It’s as if she’s falling apart.
She’s terrified of what will happen next. She knows she’s drunk, knows she’s confused, knows she could be wrong, so wrong, but she’s very afraid of Jayne.
It’s the worst terror she’s ever felt.
Curled up around the gun, all she can think is that she must protect herself at all costs, for Alfie’s sake.
She blacks out.
Maggie has bundled Emily into a rocking chair in a snug just off the kitchen, where a fire burns bright and hopeful. A dusty swag of dried hops is draped over the mantel. Dull brass ornaments, horse-themed, are fixed to the low-hanging beams.
Emily is wearing Maggie’s clothes, strange elasticated trousers,worn and stretched in places that don’t relate to Emily’s body, a fleece top that smells alien, and scratchy woolen socks.
Her own clothing has been taken from her, to be laundered, or dried off, she wasn’t really listening when she first got here. She just knows that it’s gone and that she feels as if she’s in another woman’s skin and finds it uncomfortably intimate.
She’s ashamed of how John found her. It’s horrible to think how quickly she came undone and helpless out there.
John disappeared as soon as they arrived here. She doesn’t know where he’s gone and doesn’t ask. It’s easier without him. He witnessed her humiliation.
His dog has stayed to lie at Emily’s feet with mournful eyes, her head resting on her paws, watching as Maggie fusses around Emily, her nose twitching at the plate of biscuits Maggie delivers with a hot tea, loaded with sugar Emily hasn’t asked for. Emily drinks every drop of it and gobbles down the biscuits.
Her injured leg rests on the seat of a chair Maggie pulled up for her. The sock is rolled down to expose the ankle, which is swollen, an angry pomegranate red that the firelight intensifies. Emily leans forward and adjusts the bag of frozen peas Maggie gave her, to take down the swelling. The peas are almost at room temperature, the bag soggy and soft.
“A phone,” Emily says. “I need to borrow your phone.” She remembers her manners: “Please.”
Maggie gives her a handset. “Best if you use the landline. The mobile signal isn’t reliable.”
“Thank you,” Emily says. “I’m so sorry to keep you up this late.”
“It’s no bother. I’ll leave you to make your call.”
Emily presses a button on the phone and the dial tone is one of the most delicious sounds she’s ever heard. She wonders if Paul will pick up this late.
But as she makes to dial his number, her thumb hovers over the keypad. She’s dyscalculic, can hardly remember her PIN number,let alone phone numbers. Sometimes it’s possible if she drills them, repeats them like a mantra, but even then, they slip away from her. Paul told her to make sure she learned his mobile number by heart, but she’s never been able to.
Some of the digits from his number suggest themselves to her but not enough of them, and not in the right order.
She puts the phone in her lap, feeling utterly impotent. It seems cruel that she managed to reach the farmhouse yet lost her phone on the way.
“Are you all right?” Maggie is watching from the kitchen.
“I can’t remember my husband’s mobile number,” she says and is ashamed to feel tears pricking.
“Is he home?”
A twinge of terror means she doesn’t know how to answer that at first. Edie’s letter has polluted all rational thought, upended all reasonable assumptions. Of course, he should be home. But is he?
Pull yourself together, she thinks.Of course, he’s home.
“Yes,” she says. “He might be asleep.”
“Do you know your landline number?”
Emily shuts her eyes. She does. She thinks she does. That one she practiced more than the mobile.
