She stands on the garden path, framed by tangled creepers and trailing ivy.
‘If Janice hadn’t gone missing, if I hadn’t dug up all those clues – would you have told me?’
Emma looks at me for a long time.
‘No,’ she admits, eventually. ‘I don’t think I would.’
‘Right.’
She turns to go. ‘I love you, Leo.’
My eyes well. I don’t know if my grief is for Emma or for me. For Ruby, perhaps, or the chaotic, warm life the three of us have had together. I don’t know anything, other than that it’s only when something’s damaged beyond repair that we realise how beautiful it was.
Chapter Sixty-One
EMMA
Charlie and I park up on the beach at lunchtime. Nearby a family is unpacking bodyboards from a car. The children are arguing and the parents aren’t talking to each other, but somehow, everyone is OK. They’re a family. They share a car, a house; probably only the most inconsequential of secrets.
I’m not sure I will still have a family when I get back to London, but I’m focused only on Charlie now. Yesterday he was wearing shorts; today he’s wearing jeans. I want to know everything about him. Where he buys jeans – do his parents pay, or do they insist he earns his spending money? What is his summer job in Queens Park? How does he vote, where does he stand on Marmite? Did he shuffle round on his bum as a baby, like Ruby, or did he crawl?
When we stopped at service stations he bought exactly the snacks I’d expect an eighteen-year-old to buy. Large packets of sweets, greasy sausage rolls, crisps. He inhaled them, much in the manner John Keats inhales his bowl of dog food. I’m fascinated by this boy.
We took turns driving so the other could sleep, but all I could do was watch my grown-up son at the wheel of my car, an elbow resting on the door, taking measured swigs of an energy drink.
The idea of the shack seems like madness, now we’re here. I felt such certainty about it last night, recalling the connection between me and Janice when we’d sat watching the storm. Hours later, sleepless and wired, I feel insane. This whole thing feels insane.
‘Right,’ Charlie says. ‘Let’s do this.’ He gets out of my little car and stretches his long body, groaning with relief. I get out and look at the beach below us, the sheer scale of it. Pale gold sand and blue sea, like a child’s drawing. Dunes doming and cupping the periphery, marram grass bent almost flat in the wind.
We haven’t talked a great deal, even though we’ve been in a car together for several hours. Charlie’s veered between conviction that his mum is going to be up here in the stone shed, and certainty that she won’t. Apart from anything else, he said, his mum had never camped in his lifetime – not even for a night.
‘She doesn’t like roughing it?’ I’d asked, tentatively.
‘She just didn’t feel safe. She was paranoid someone would come into our tent and steal me while she slept.’
That had made for an uncomfortable silence.
Every time I think about Janice Rothschild, something wrenches in my abdomen. Charlie didn’t bring it up in the car, which was a relief, but it’s there: malignant, appalling. I gave up my son because of her lies.
Charlie’s zipping up a windbreaker, swapping his trainers for well-used walking boots.
I’ve always loved that brand of walking boot! I want to say, but I mustn’t bombard him with similarities. I’m scared of anything that might make him think I’m desperate. But, even more than that, I’m scared this will be a waste of time, that we will find nothing but a dusty shed full of sheep shit and picnickers’ litter.
I ask him how he’s feeling.