On the front step, he kisses both her cheeks like her father would have done, and Emma thinks her heart has finally broken.
Chapter 36
Violet
Grassland Flowers
She is dreaming of her father. He is walking through a grassland scattered with flowers, surrounded by a flock that is the size of an ocean. Or is it a sky? The sheep populate the endless landscape like miniature cream clouds. She can feel the woolly fleeces scratchy against her legs. She is trying to get to him but cannot reach him. Her legs are slow and heavy, each step almost more effort than she can make.
Then, just when she thinks she will never find him again, he turns and smiles at her, waving his old brown hat in great circles in the sky.
Waking, there is a glimmer of her father nestling in her mind, and this momentarily eases the chill of remembered death as she breaks the surface of the dawn.
And then come thoughts of the daughter he never really knew. She thinks of the plump snug softness of her sister’s hand in hers, and she turns her head away from her cabinmate’s inquisitive gaze. She will not show her tears to another.
As she shivers into her dress, she wonders if it is more painful to mourn the dead or the living.
PART 2
Chapter 37
Emma
Grey Tulips
From where she lies on her hotel bed, she can tell that the light has changed. The previous night she pulled one curtain, but it had been too great an effort to reach for the second.
Her performance downstairs had taken every last bit of her strength. She had mounted the steps to the hotel, talked to the receptionist, booked her room for a few more nights, explained she would be working and would not wish to be disturbed. She had even smiled.
Closing the curtains on her one-woman show was just beyond her.
She knows it is early– 6 a.m., perhaps. She has no idea where her phone is and no interest in finding it. She cannot see the glass of the window from where she lies curled under the covers, just the muted light of an overcast day falling on the linen curtains. Their pattern of grey and white tulips seems smudged and lifeless.
She closes her eyes and goes back to sleep.
When the evening streetlights turn the tulips to pale orange, she gets up and runs a bath, moving slowly, carefully, each step an effort. She lies in the bath and looks at her legs and wonders what they will be like when she is an old woman. Her skin still looks young, flushed from the previous day’s sun and the warm water surrounding her, but her bones feel like they belong to another, prehistoric age. She would like to curl up and sleep in the bath, but the cooling water and hard edges drive her back to bed.
She wakes looking at the same curtains in the same grey light and wonders if the previous day was a dream. Her head is aching, but then so is everything, and she doesn’t think paracetamol or any doctor is going to help her.
She orders breakfast she doesn’t want, to stop the staff from speculating and possibly calling her room or the police. She feeds her croissant to the pigeons on the windowsill but drinks her coffee with a vague feeling that half reminds her of pleasure. Her phone has run out of battery and she makes no attempt to find her charger. She does not want to know what time it is or to move beyond the limbo she now finds herself in. She has thought in circles for days and weeks and months and she has been through every emotion from disbelief to rage, from despair to misery, and it has always led her back, totally exhausted, to where she started:
Why did Will have an affair?
There was a time when she would have bet the happiness of her marriage on the certainty that she would have known. Or that, at the very least, looking back, she would appreciate there had been signs. Now she cannot believe her naivety.
But theyhadbeen happy, hadn’t they?
Emma stops the thought before it can nudge others like it to the cliff edge. The only way from there is down. Did she bring it on herself? Had she neglected Will? Was there something wrong with her– something intrinsically unlovable? Was her mother right?
Instead of letting loose these thoughts, Emma sits by the open window and pushes her fingers deep into her hair, thumbs pressing into her aching neck.
She returns to the bed, curled up like a question mark. When a sudden downpour drums against the window, the sound brings some comfort, but then comes the drifting metallic scent of the rain, and she is taken back to a late December garden, the day she found out about Will’s affair. Kneeling in the mud in the freezing rain, clutching at snowdrops she had ripped from theearth.
On the third day, the ringing of the hotel phone breaks in upon her like a pneumatic drill. She sits up in bed, hugging her knees, and stares at it. A few minutes later there is a gentle knock. When a piece of paper is pushed under the door, she realises she has been holding her breath. The note is from Roberto, asking if she’s all right. He has included his mobile number.
Emma turns the television on just to raise the volume of sound in the room. If the phone rings again, she has no intention of answering it, but she wants some background noise to cushion its impact.
It is Agatha Christie season on ITV3 and Emma settles down with crisps and a small bottle of red wine. She has only just discovered the minibar in the wardrobe and she thinks she might work her way through it. It seems preferable to talking to someone about room service. She banks the pillows around her and pulls all the cushions off the bedroom chair so she is cocooned in a little pod in her bed. She wonders what Agatha Christie thought about when she ran away from the world and hid in a hotel in Harrogate.
