Where Love Lies Page 6

  He kissed her, the only person in the world who would find woodworm beautiful. Then he rang Patrick to ask for recommendations for a woodworm treatment firm and a place to hire a sander.

  Occasionally, not often, he came home and she wasn’t there. A light might be on, or maybe none. The house would be full of traces of her: lipstick mark on a glass, discarded shoes, the radio left on. But he’d know as soon as he walked in that she was gone. The cottage’s heart was missing. At times, she left a note, or he’d get a text later. Other times, she didn’t. She’d return with a bunch of wildflowers, her boots muddy from walking. Once she left her phone on the kitchen table, and as the hours went by he’d imagined her lost, injured, running away. He didn’t want to be the sort of husband who checked up on his wife, but he’d been just about to ring her best friend Lauren when Felicity walked in with a box containing two perfect éclairs, one for each of them, which she’d taken the train into London to get.

  Today when he propped his bicycle against the shed wall and entered the house through the kitchen door, he could hear her upstairs in the back bedroom she used as her studio. Loosening his tie, he climbed the stairs. They’d agreed on signals months ago. If her door was closed, she was working and didn’t want to be disturbed. If it was open, he could go in, chat with her, look at her drawings. More often than not, her door was closed, and the drawings he saw were unconnected with her book.

  He knew she was stuck. He pictured her sitting in her studio, battering her head against an invisible window. Trying to think up a story that wouldn’t come. He was as helpless as she was. When he asked her about it, she waved it off as if it wasn’t important. When he offered to help, it seemed to make her cross. He could see when she was thinking about it, when she was trying to break through that barrier inside her. It made her quiet and distant, the way she’d been when they’d first met on that train, huddled inside herself, frowning at the page in front of her.

  The door was ajar. He hesitated outside it, catching an odour of white spirit and flowers. ‘Hello, love, I’m home,’ he called. When she opened the door, the scent assailed him. ‘Whoa,’ he said, lifting his hand to his face. ‘Did you drop a bottle of something?’

  ‘It’s an experiment.’ Felicity was standing by her desk. She’d moved the Mac and her scanner to the floor, and covered the surface of the desk with bottles and boxes and objects. He saw the plastic bottle of white spirit, and a bottle of perfume. A joss stick and an orange studded with cloves and a pale blue cardigan.

  ‘An experiment on what?’

  ‘Smell.’ She picked up the orange and held it out to him. ‘This, for instance. Smell it and tell me what you feel.’

  He sniffed. ‘Christmas.’

  ‘Christmas in general, or a very specific Christmas?’

  He closed his eyes and smelled. His grandmother’s kitchen, scrubbed flagstones and herbs drying from the beams. ‘Gran used to make mulled cider. Suz and I would always nick some. It was the first time I ever got drunk.’

  ‘Try this one.’ A pine-scented air freshener.

  ‘A million taxis.’

  ‘What about this?’ She passed him a small bottle filled with yellow liquid.

  ‘I don’t know what this is. Some sort of oil?’

  ‘It’s linseed. It’s used in oil painting.’ She closed her eyes and inhaled it. ‘It’s what my mother smelled like.’

  Felicity never spoke about her mother; not at length, anyway. He knew Felicity had been an only child, and that her mother had been a well-known artist. He knew they travelled around a lot, that there wasn’t a father in the picture, that they didn’t care much about money or timekeeping or material objects. He knew that her mother had passed away about six months before he’d met Felicity; he knew, though he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to, that Esther Bloom’s ashes were in a metal urn inside a plastic bag underneath the armchair in Felicity’s office.

  Quinn watched Felicity breathing in the scent of her mother. His own mother smelled of talcum and lily-of-the-valley and melted butter. He wondered if, when Molly was gone, he would try to recreate that scent.

  ‘She could be in the next room,’ Felicity said. ‘It’s extraordinary.’

  ‘Smell does that,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be the sense that’s most connected to our memory. It’s closer in our brains or something. Once, I remember, I picked up a book at my parents’ house and opened it, and something about the smell of it reminded me of a cat we used to have. I hadn’t thought about the cat for years. And the odd thing was, the memory was of the cat dying. I remembered hugging him after he was dead, and his fur felt the same, but his body was limp. I must have been four or five years old. I remember my dad putting him in a box to be buried in the garden, and I put his catnip mouse in the box with him because that was his favourite toy.’

  Felicity was looking at him intently. ‘All that, from a smell?’

  ‘I must’ve opened that book at the same time, or maybe the catnip mouse got into it. I don’t know. But yes, all that from a smell. I can still feel it now when I think about it.’

  He waited for her to reciprocate. To tell him something about her mother, or one of her memories. But she was gazing at him and he couldn’t read what she was thinking.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ he asked, finally.

  It seemed to bring her out of a sort of trance. She nodded and put the cap back on the bottle of linseed oil. ‘I’m not sure I like it,’ she said, and picked up another bottle, this one rectangular and decorated with flowers in relief. She took off the cut-glass stopper and handed it to him. ‘What do you think about this?’

  It was perfume, cloying and tropical, too sweet, like a room full of lilies. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Where’d you get this?’

  ‘I bought it. Have you smelled it before?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’ He turned the bottle over in his hands. Frangipane. ‘Not the sort of scent you would be likely to wear, is it?’

  ‘Not me, no.’ She took it back from him and sprayed it in the air. ‘It’s different in a perfume. No, it’s not quite right.’

  ‘Not quite right for what?’

  ‘Just – not quite right. It’s got vanilla or something in it. Something mixed in.’ She put down the bottle, firmly, as if she’d made some sort of a decision. ‘Anyway, it’s not important. It doesn’t matter.’ She went to the window and opened it wide, to let the fresh air in.

  Chapter Eight

  THE LETTER COMES from the hospital a few days later, when Quinn’s at work. I open it up and skim it; it gives me a map of the neurology unit, and an appointment eight weeks away, in August.

  I’ve never been to a neurology unit, but I’ve spent plenty of time inside a hospital. I picture sterile white walls and crêpe-soled shoes on polished floors, a big machine for looking into brains like the ones I’ve seen on television. I picture a doctor trying to work out why my brain is giving me these memories, treating them like a symptom or a sort of headache, which is ridiculous because I’m not ill at all.

  I may be haunted; I may have a brain that is trying to tell me something, to remind me of something I’ve forgotten. But I’m not ill.

  When it comes down to it, these memories are happy ones. A scent of flowers, and a sensation of overwhelming love. Who goes to the doctor to diagnose the cause of happiness?

  Away down at the bottom of my thoughts, the place where the worries live, I think, But what if there’s something really wrong with me?

  I fold up the letter and put it in the bottom of my in-tray where I file bills. I feel fine. In fact, I feel better than fine. If the memories get weird, or if I start having any headaches, I’ll call Dr Johnson and ask if he can move the appointment forward. If they go away, I’ll cancel it.

  Until then, I’d prefer to understand what this smell and this feeling mean, and a big machine or a doctor won’t be able to tell me that. Any more than they were able to save my mother.

  The loft in our cottage is low-beamed
and full of cobwebs and the scent of damp thatch. The first time I go up there, on the rickety aluminium ladder, I forget the torch, so I have to go back down and search for it. The beam picks out the outline of boxes, suitcases, the decorations we bought for our first Christmas together. My plastic box of photographs is shoved right under the eaves near the back. I pull it over to the open loft hatch, where there’s more light, and sit with my feet dangling over the edge.

  There’s a certain amount of hazard in looking at old photographs. On the one hand, they’re just pieces of paper, frozen memories. They can’t act; they can’t hurt you in new ways. Everything in that box is finished. On the other hand, once you’ve opened the box, it’s difficult not to look at everything in it. It’s hard not to remember things you’d like to forget, not to regret choices you wish you hadn’t made. Even the happy photographs are dangerous, if the happiness captured in them is gone.

  I know I have photographs of Ewan inside this box somewhere. There’s at least one strip we took in a photo booth in Boots, pulling funny faces, kissing each other. I seem to remember another one taken by one of the members of his band, Matt maybe or was it Dougie, in a nightclub so dark that you can only see Ewan’s face in a blur. But mostly they are photographs I took myself. I took photographs of Ewan laughing, running, sleeping. I took photographs sitting in the bath with him, in the park with his shirt off in the sunshine. There were several rolls’ worth of film, which I had developed and kept in a shiny plastic envelope. I captured so many moments because they felt precious to me, because he was so beautiful I could hardly believe it. I took photographs and printed them out to keep, even before Ewan went away.

  Is that because I knew they were all I was going to have left of him?

  I don’t have as many photographs of Quinn – not physical ones, anyway. There’s one, framed, in our living room: a black and white one of us on our wedding day, with Quinn holding an umbrella up over our heads. I’m wearing my ivory wedding dress and he’s in his morning suit. He’s kissing my cheek and I’m looking up at the sky. It’s a beautiful photograph, very well composed, and I remember that moment too, the warmth of his arm around my waist, the raindrops pattering on the umbrella and us safe beneath it, the way he laughed afterwards and told me I had muddy feet.

  Over the past ten years, technology has changed. We take photographs on our mobile phones and text them to each other for immediate consumption. My Nikon is digital. I download my photos onto my Mac, but I don’t print them out. It’s too much bother. My photographs of Quinn are electronic information, instantly accessible. I don’t have to look at them because Quinn is here living with me.

  I regard the box. If I could put my hand inside it and immediately find the envelope of pictures of Ewan, I would probably do it. But there are lots of other pictures in there. Pictures of my mother when she was well. Pictures of myself, as a child, holding her hand.

  I push the box back under the rafters, and climb back down the aluminium ladder.

  I meet Lauren at her office in the City. Lauren is my oldest friend. My childhood was too itinerant to form any lasting friendships, though I still remember Jodie, with whom I used to eat lunch in Year Four, and Aisha, who taught me how to put on make-up at age twelve, and lots of other girls who were my best friends for a while. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve passed these people on the street since, not recognizing how they’ve grown into adults.

  Lauren and I met in a youth hostel in Mumbai when we were both eighteen, both backpacking around the world, both drunk on the different languages, all the different people, strange sights and smells and tastes. She had dreadlocks then, and small round glasses, and practically bathed in patchouli oil. These days she has had her vision corrected by laser surgery and wears smart suits and handmade shoes, works as a financial consultant and spends half her time in London or Brussels and the rest of the time flitting around Asia helping the super-rich save money.

  As always, when she walks through the glass doors into Reception it takes me a moment before I recognize this sleek, well-groomed woman. In my mind, despite all the evidence that time has moved on, she’s still teenage Lauren, a little bit overweight, bouncy on her feet, with all those woven bracelets made out of string.

  Then she smiles and it’s my friend. ‘Fliss,’ she says, kissing both cheeks. Her skin is cool, her hair straightened. Everything about her is expensive except for the warm way she squeezes my hand. ‘Do you mind if we have our lunch on the go? I need to do my steps for today.’

  ‘Steps?’ I say, walking with her out of her building. She’s wearing trainers with her suit.

  ‘Fitness programme. I’m dating a personal trainer in Brussels – Hans. Did I tell you? He is really cute. But sort of a body fascist. Come on, five hundred more steps and then I’m allowed to have a high-protein wrap. I brought one for you, too. You’ll hate it.’ She starts some sort of app on her phone, and we set out at a pace down the street, swerving around fellow pedestrians.

  ‘I thought you were seeing that trader, Frank Whatsisname.’

  ‘He was married.’ She pulls a face. ‘That’s the third American I’ve dated who’s turned out to be married. Remind me never to touch another American again. I’d rather run a marathon, which by the way Hans wants me to do next spring. How’s Lovely Quinn?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How’s Annoying Mother-In-Law?’

  ‘Also good.’

  ‘Stepford Village?’

  ‘It’s not that bad. It is a bit Stepfordy. But it’s very sweet.’

  ‘And the book?’

  ‘Slow. It’ll get there.’

  ‘Any news?’

  Lauren likes certainties. She’s not the type to be visited by memories of her past or buffeted by unexpected emotions. When I met her in that youth hostel in Mumbai, she already had her mental checklist of What Lauren Will Do With Her Life. She’d deferred her entry to the Sorbonne to study economics for a year, so she could travel the world and experience everything. I, on the other hand, was travelling because I had no idea what else I should have been doing.

  If I told her about the sudden feelings I was having about Ewan, the phantom smells and the mad being in love, she’d want to investigate them. She’d want to find a rational explanation, and I’m not quite ready for that yet. Besides, Lauren absolutely adores Quinn. ‘Love him,’ she told me in private, after the first time I’d introduced them. ‘Keep this one. He’s good for you. I’ll marry him if you don’t.’ But I knew she wouldn’t; she’d told me that at the age of thirteen she’d determined that she would only marry a man who had as much personal wealth as she did.

  ‘Not much news,’ I say.

  She passes me something wrapped in cling film, and I unwrap it and take a bite. I immediately spit it back into the wrapper. ‘That is really, really gross.’

  ‘I know.’ She chews hers. It requires a lot of chewing. ‘Hans loves them. Zero carbs.’

  ‘Is he your financial equal?’

  ‘He’s independently wealthy. Old money. Here, have a protein bar.’

  The protein bar is slightly more palatable. My ballet flats aren’t quite up to the pace that Lauren is setting, and I’m obviously not as fit as she is, either. It’s safe to say that Quinn is not a body fascist. Besides, I’ve spent most of the past few weeks sitting in my room, staring at a blank sketch pad. Or wandering in the rain after having feelings I can’t explain. We power-walk up Bishopsgate into the gardens.

  ‘Do you remember Ewan?’ I ask her.

  ‘Ewan who?’

  ‘Ewan McKillan.’

  She stops. ‘The one who broke your heart?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if he broke my heart as such …’

  ‘He broke your heart. I recognized the symptoms. You washed up in Paris a complete wreck. Spent an entire month wandering around the Père Lachaise cemetery. The bastard.’

  ‘Ewan didn’t break my heart on purpose,’ I say. Lauren never even met him, after all. None of my friends met him
; Ewan and I were a unit unto ourselves, until we weren’t. ‘Our timing was wrong. We couldn’t be together.’

  ‘As I recall, he got some other woman pregnant.’

  ‘That was before he’d met me. He didn’t know she was pregnant when we were together.’

  She snorts. ‘According to him. It’s hardly star-crossed-lover stuff, Fliss. He was a creep. You were better off without him.’

  ‘Did I really seem heartbroken? Properly heartbroken?’ It seems so distant now. The heartbreak, that is. I try to remember how I felt that autumn, wandering around the tombs, watching the cats frolic on the tombstones. I can think it in words, but I can’t feel it any more.

  ‘You were a skeleton. You hardly ate anything.’

  ‘To be fair, I spent a lot of time living on love before that. I can’t remember ever eating with Ewan in the same room.’

  ‘Too busy shagging. And shagging isn’t real life. A man who you can’t eat with is a man you can’t stay with.’ I point at her high-protein wrap, and she grimaces. ‘Point taken. Anyway, we do eat, Hans and I. It’s just never anything nice.’

  ‘Ewan was my first real love,’ I say. ‘He was beautiful and exciting. I’d never met a man like him before. When I was with him, I felt … that we were meant to be together. That I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and everything was right with the world.’

  ‘Which obviously wasn’t true at all, since you’re not still with him. Good riddance, I say. Anyone who can make you so unhappy doesn’t deserve a single moment of your time.’ We’ve reached a bench with a bin beside it. Lauren chucks the wrap in the bin and sits on the bench, and I join her. ‘Fuck it. You’re right. I’ll ring Hans and tell him it’s over.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I say, alarmed. But Lauren is already reaching for her phone.

  ‘Oh. He’ll be busy now anyway, doing his Pilates class. Okay, as soon as I get back this evening, I’ll ring him. He’s got a half-hour slot between half eight and nine.’ She turns to me. ‘Anyway, look at you now, Felicity. Everything’s really right with your world these days.’