I replay Ana’s directions (‘This isn’t some meet cute,’ she said.‘Don’t forget the plane waiting for Robbie outside. The terror of where he’s about to go …’), and remember the weight I felt, staring into Nick’s eyes.
I recall our every move and turn of expression, and realise, with a jolt, that neither of us smiled.
For everything we tried, we never tried that.
It comes to me that we were so focused on portraying Iris and Robbie’s foreboding, we forgot what must, in that moment, have trumped everything else for them.
It’s the emotion that Imogen captures so perfectly in her writing, and which I experienced over and again in my dreams last night, but haven’t consciously registered until this second, because it just felt so instinctive, and now that I finally see it, really, blindingly obvious.
Because although I have no doubt that dread was a near-constant feature of Robbie’s and Iris’s too-short love affair, I’m not actually convinced it would have got a look in at their reunion.
Not in that moment of them first locking eyes on one another.
It’s like Imogen said, it really must have felt miraculous to them.
So, they’d have been full of wonder, surely?
Happy, too.
More than anything, happy.
I’m pretty confident they’d have smiled.
I’m in no rush to share my epiphany. I’ve messed up so much lately, I want to be really certain I’m on to something before I involve anyone else.
Gathering my things, I return to my room, grabbing the key card Ana gave me, then leave again, heading into the old section of the house, up the echoing servant stairs to Iris’s room.
You’ll work things out here, Ana said.I know it.
I must know it too, because why else would I have come?
It unsettles me that I have. I wasn’t lying to Nick when I told him I had no plan to return. If anything, the memory of my hallucination (because what else could those flares and roaring planes have been?) frightens me all the more, now that I’m here, pushing Iris’s door wide.
Yet, as I step into her room, and soak in its ghostly stillness – that sense that she and Clare have only just this moment walked out – I realise that I was always going to find my way back here this morning.
I think I’ve probably been wanting to do it ever since I woke.
Iris’s bed is still rumpled from my body. On the bureau, herhairgrip remains lying where I left it, next to the nail polish stain. Instinctively, I go to it, raising it to my own loose hair. It slides in easily, its touch triggering a tingling that radiates outwards, closing around my scalp. I flex my neck, feeling the tingling spread, and keep my stare fixed on my pale reflection in the mirror. It still doesn’t fit, not in this glass. I look harder, and, as I blink, the tingling in my skin surges, my face seems to evaporate, and I see another reflection entirely.
I yank the grip from my hair.
‘Stop.’ I breathe. ‘Enough.’ My shaken voice fills my ears. ‘You’re doing this to yourself.’
I’m tempted to leave. Run back to the secure, soulless luxury of my room.
It’s what I tried to tell myself to do after I heard those planes.
But, just as then, I don’t go anywhere.
I move to the window, compelled to know whether everything outside will look as it should.
And, to my shuddering relief, it does. I see the catering truck, pulled up outside the hangar where everyone’s filming, and a smattering of crew, darting around in the mist. Huge security and studio lights are positioned across the base which, in the cold light of day, once again appears reassuringly synthetic.Disneyfied. High above it all, a helicopter circles, doubtless carrying some pap photographer, waiting to snap a sellable shot. I wish them luck in this weather. Except I don’t. Not at all. I hate them, and their obsessive diarising of my body and my life. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.
A sound comes, cutting through the helicopter’s throbbing. It’s that bird again: the one with the haunting call that gave me shivers the day I arrived, and who now makes me turn, searching for it in the heavy sky over the woods.
I can’t see it. It must be too far away.
But, as its call goes on, I shift my focus downwards, to thetrees, thinking of Iris and Robbie meeting within them, in theirold cottage of some sort.
