Skein Island

CHAPTER ONE

The library is empty for the first time today. I put away the rest of the returned books as I always do at closing time: the hardbacks on the shelves, the paperbacks in the rotating stand by the window that overlooks the car park. It’s blank out there, frozen under the shock of the outside light.

I think of the letter.

It arrived this morning, in a thick yellow envelope. My address was written by hand, in black pen. Above it was my maiden name. Miss Marianne Spence, like a call from the past. So I slipped a thumbnail under the flap of the envelope and ripped the past open.

The first thing I noticed was the letterhead, and then, at the very bottom, a single line written in the same hand as the address.

The night is so still. I decide nobody else is coming to the library tonight, so I go into the back office and take the letter from my bag, where it hangs on the peg behind the door. I unfold it and read it through again. Am I distrustful of my memory or the typescript? Both, I suppose.

But it’s the same.

I run my finger over the letterhead.

SKEIN ISLAND

I’ve told nobody. Not even David.

I’ve thought of it so often, wondered what it would be like to spend a week there: to take the classes, sleep in a bungalow, to write out the story of my life so far and leave it there for posterity. Would it change me? Would it do to me what it did to my mother?

No matter how I feel about the island, one fact is inescapable. I didn’t contact Lady Amelia Worthington. Nobody has contacted Lady Amelia Worthington. She has been dead for years.

The quote on the bottom of the letter bothers me – it’s a strange choice. I sit at the computer and Google it. I knew it was familiar. Homer’s Odyssey. I read it for the first time in my late teens; it gave me a taste for sweeping tales of fate, where a man overcomes such perils, risks everything to get back to where he started. And Penelope: waiting, weaving, unravelling, with a grace that I didn’t understand. Did she not feel such rage to be left behind? When it happened to me, I wasn’t serene. I wanted to understand her, but I couldn’t. I still don’t.

I switch off the computer and go back into the library. We have a copy of the Odyssey: the Rieu translation, a Penguin Classic that lives on the poetry shelf. It never gets checked out. I go to it and open it at random, flicking through the pages on fast-forward. Odysseus races through his journey, spurning the nymph, escaping the Cyclops, resisting the sirens. I had hoped for my eye to fall on a line that would answer the unexpected questions – should I accept this offer? What does the dead Amelia Worthington want with me?

A soft swish and a gust of frigid air tells me the automatic doors have opened. I look around the shelf and see a man. He has a pleasant face, and brown hair that’s cut very short. His cheeks are red from the cold.

‘Can I help you?’

He gives me an inclusive smile, as if he knows me and I am compliant in a game we have decided to play. He’s holding a knife in his right hand.

He says something that changes everything. ‘Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.’

CHAPTER TWO

Marianne asked to go in alone, so he waited in the car, listening to big band music on the radio.

He couldn’t remember the drive. This wasn’t unusual; it happened every morning, in the liquid flow of Swindon traffic. He had become attuned to the drip-feed of traffic lights leading to the factory until – standing in the cafeteria next to the tray of bacon, watching it glisten under the heat lamps – David would wake up properly for the first time each day. Everything that happened before that moment was merely a continuation of the previous night’s dream, and it always worried him, that lost time. Would he react in a crash, a crisis? Could he see danger and evade it with a flick of the steering wheel, a stamp of the brakes?

He hadn’t seen this coming. The look on Marianne’s face as she walked through the door at ten past eight that evening was not something he had ever prepared for. Her hands were empty. Usually she put down a canvas bag, heavy with books, on the hall floor next to the coat stand. David had walked out of the kitchen and caught her naked face and hands doing none of their normal things. Her coat was still on – unbuttoned, flapping – and her cheeks were white with cold. She came to him, cupped her hands around his elbows, and said, ‘We need to get to a police station, okay?’ He’d felt the shock of the moment, usual rules suspended.

He realised that he was only just coming out of it, sitting alone in the din of trumpets and drums, while Marianne faced this thing alone. She was probably making a statement to a sympathetic policewoman in a small clean room, her voice being recorded as she enunciated what had been done to her in precise detail. He couldn’t imagine what words she would use. She had a better vocabulary than him. He had a hard ball in the centre of his stomach that he could only describe as dread; he clenched his fists, tried to fight it off, wriggled in the seat.

The car park was half-full, and the glass sliding doors that led into the station were brightly lit. David could see a tiled floor and a standing pot plant, probably artificial. Nobody came or went.

The big band rhythm had segued into soft jazz before he saw her step out of the station and look around for their car.

He started the engine, drove to her; she got in and clipped in her seat belt, then gave him a smile and a shrug, easy and bright.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

‘Is it okay? What did they say?’

‘They’ll be on the lookout for him.’

‘Is that it?’ David said. He had a vision of getting out of the car, storming into the station and demanding justice, action, police cars out hunting all night. Or maybe he should take the law into his own hands and crouch in the bushes by the library, dressed in black, kitchen knife in hand – he had an idea it would make him feel better. But where was Marianne in his vision? He turned to her, took her cold little hand in his.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he said.

‘What do you want to know?’ She pulled her hand free.

‘Anything you want to tell me.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s get going.’

He manoeuvred to the exit, and pulled out. The streets were quiet, the nine o’clock lull between tired workers on overtime and energised bunnies making for the pubs. Swindon was one roundabout after another, and he hardly had to stop at all; he turned the steering wheel in measured amounts, first to the left, then the right.

‘Maybe we should get a takeaway,’ said Marianne. Her voice was perfectly normal, as was the sentiment. He knew she was talking about the Chinese on Wootton Bassett high street. He wished he could look at her face.

‘Can do.’

She clicked off the radio. ‘I already told you it all. It was closing time, he came in, he told me to get in the back and take off my clothes.’

David heard her draw breath, and swallow.

‘And I told him no,’ she said. She opened the glove compartment, then shut it again, and turned up the heat control on the dashboard. He wanted to pull over and look at her face, but all he could see were her fingers: short, unvarnished nails, the ragged thumbnail on her left hand that she bit. When she was trying to concentrate on a novel she would frown and put her index finger on each line and follow the words like a child. Her fluttering hands moved around the car, touching dials and the sides of her seat.

‘And he went?’ David said.

‘He turned around and walked out.’

‘Just because you said no?’ He should have stuck to silence; there was something accusatory rising inside him, and he had no idea why.

‘I can remember thinking – if I go in the back, I won’t come out again. That’s just what I knew, and I thought about screaming, or trying to push past him to get to the door. Time was moving slowly, I mean, really slowly, and in the end I said no, in my best library voice, the one I use on the teenagers when they try to access dirty websites on the public computers. And he stared at me, and then he left.’

It occurred to David that this was his first big test as a husband. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ said Marianne, ‘I’m really fine, I’m better than… I can’t explain it. All my life I’ve been afraid of something like this. I think, deep down, all women are afraid of some faceless man. And this guy, he came along, and I knew what he wanted, he wanted to hurt me, but he had a face. It’s not at all like I pictured it. Can you understand? Do men picture it too?’

‘Not in the same way,’ he said, ‘I don’t think.’

‘Maybe a man would just have fought, but for me, for women, there’s this question hanging over it. Whether I’d freeze or submit to anything he wanted, and I didn’t do those things. He was defeated by that. He was… surmountable, I suppose.’

‘Surmountable,’ David repeated. The word reassured him more than anything else Marianne had said. This was her, using a long word to describe a simple thing, a thing that a four-letter word could have covered.

‘It was freeing,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it happened, in a way. Yes.’

‘I hope they catch him before he tries it again,’ David said.

She fell silent.

‘You okay?’

‘I keep saying I’m fine. Forget the takeaway, okay? Let’s go home.’

It was just beginning to hit her, David thought: what could have happened. He wanted her to face it, to tremble, to fall towards him so that he could catch her and hold her together. They would get home, and not sleep tonight, but stay up all night talking it through, her crying, and it would be awful, but at the end of it they would be closer than before, he hoped, he wanted, closer in the way that survivors are.

He took the final roundabout into Wootton Bassett and turned into their estate. The Spar on the corner was still open, but he drove past, turned left, and parked up in their space. She got out of the car first and by the time he’d followed she was already at the front door, thrusting her key into the lock. The stiff lines of her shoulders suggested panic; he jogged to her, put his hands on her back as she threw open the door, and they stumbled into the dark house together.

‘Listen, it’ll be okay,’ he said, but Marianne was on him, kissing his face, putting her tongue in his mouth, her hands already at the waistband of his trousers. He tried to think rationally about it for one moment, and then felt his body respond to her. She pulled off her own trousers and took the stairs two at a time to their bedroom, the coldest room in the house due to a broken radiator; but she didn’t dive under the duvet as he expected. When he got into the room she was taking off her shirt, standing on the bed in her plain white knickers, the curtains open, the glow from the streetlight falling across her knees and feet.

‘Right now?’ he said.

‘Leave the curtains.’ She turned and knelt down, then took off her knickers. ‘This way.’

David came up behind her and pulled her towards him, his hands on her hips. She put her head down, on the duvet, giving him a view only of her body and her brown hair, tied up. He pulled it free and splayed it out over her back.

‘Now,’ she said, and he did as he was told.

He woke up, much later, when he heard the front door close.

For a moment he didn’t move. It took him a while to become aware of the room once more: the grey depth of very early morning, the still-open curtains that told him the streetlight was off, the suitcase missing from on top of the wardrobe, and the thin creases in the duvet beside him. He spread his arm into that empty expanse, then realised what it all meant.

Stuck to the cold blue face of the alarm clock was a Post-it note. On it, she had written, in small neat capitals:

He heard the car start; by the time he reached the street, in his boxer shorts, it was out of sight.

CHAPTER THREE

I fold the brochure and slip it back into my handbag. Lady Worthington decided back in 1945 what a woman is and who is worthy of her island, and if we want to come here we have to play by the rules that outlive her.

The room is far from full. There are seven other women; they’ve formed a self-conscious queue from the unoccupied reception desk to the dirty glass double doors. They have been my only company on the boat during the hour-long crossing. The pier at Allcombe had been deserted, too. A grey, slabbed stretch of closed kiosks and iron railings, icy to the touch, delineated land from sea.

I can’t believe I took that boat. I stepped on board the Sea Princess, helped over the threshold of the pier by a lanky young man in a bobble hat and fingerless gloves who had a businesslike set to his mouth. It was that sense of the journey as the last stage in a transaction that had, in the end, persuaded me to take that final step. And already there is dislocation from what went before. This is the breaking point of my life; from now on, everything will be different.

The women have nothing in common, not obviously, anyway. I expected the island to appeal to a certain type, although I’m not sure what type that would be. But the queue gives no information except that we are a patient lot. Nobody has arrived to take down our details. Outside the glass doors, the retreat of the Sea Princess is visible on the choppy grey waves. It will not return until next Saturday, so there really is no rush. At least, not for those of us in the queue.

But that gives me only seven days to find out why I’ve received an invitation from a dead woman.

A tall woman with loose brown hair, very straight, emerges from the doorway on the other side of the reception desk. She ignores the queue until she has switched on her computer screen and arranged herself in her seat; then she looks up, and a smile appears, as if she is surprised to find somebody waiting for her attention. I watch the others being dealt with: given multicoloured paperwork, talked to, dismissed in turn. Eventually there is nobody left to be processed except myself.

I approach the desk.

‘You must be Marianne Spence? You’re lucky to get a place at the last minute. Usually our ladies don’t just turn up at the dock.’

‘It’s Marianne Percival, actually. Spence is my maiden name.’

She makes a note on the computer screen. ‘Well, we’re having a slow week, so you’ve got good timing. Here’s your itinerary. The compulsory activities are highlighted. There aren’t many, so don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of time for you to do your own thing. The yellow pieces of paper are for your declaration. There’s a compulsory meeting on Monday morning about how to complete it, only half an hour and there’s tea and biscuits. The pink sheet is a map of the island. You can see I’ve put a cross in red on your shared accommodation. You’re in bungalow three. There are no locks or keys on the island. It’s necessary for you to place your mobile phone, laptop and communication devices in the safe keeping area, which is marked with a green cross. I’m afraid there are absolutely no exceptions to that.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘That’s fine. I have a question, actually.’

‘Okay, but the meeting on Monday should cover everything.’

‘No, about why I – how I came to get a place here.’

‘We really can’t go into selection criteria.’

‘No, but… I received a letter. From Amelia Worthington. It said it was a personal invitation.’

She purses her lips. ‘We only send out standard letters of acceptance.’

‘This is different. It’s signed by her. Lady Worthington.’

‘Do you have it with you?’

‘No, I… I’m sorry.’ It’s still in my bag, on the back of the door to the library office. A place I couldn’t bear to go. ‘Is there any way to check what you sent out to me? From here?’

She taps away on the keyboard, and I wait, patiently, like a good and quiet customer. ‘It says here you applied in the summer.’

‘No.’ It makes no sense.

‘You sure?’

I attempt to suppress my irritation, but I know it’s on my face, in the lines around my mouth.

‘Of course. I’ve never applied. My mother applied, seventeen years ago. That would have been under Spence. Maybe there’s been a mix-up. Do daughters get invited back?’

‘No, that’s not… That shouldn’t make any difference. Leave it with me. I’ll look into it.’

Did I think it was going to be resolved so easily? What exactly am I doing here? I dare to voice the idea that’s been lurking in my head since this morning. ‘Can I ask, would it be possible to see my mother’s declaration? Since I’m here?’

The receptionist makes her sympathetic face. ‘I’m really sorry, but we don’t do that. All declarations are strictly confidential.’

‘As a family member, I must have some sort of right to view it?’

She’s getting frustrated with me; her eyes slide away to the door. ‘No, I’m sorry, but not at all.’

I pick up my bag and papers, wearied by the polite argument, and turn away. I was expecting to find out nothing, and therefore it is no discouragement. I already have plans in place. I’m glad the mystery remains unsolved.

Over the double doors to the reception, carved into a wooden plaque in tiny letters, is a familiar quote. I approach it, and squint up at it. My eyes haven’t lied to me. Homer lurks here too.

At the bottom of the plaque, four squares have been painted in a row, equidistant: red, blue, yellow and green.

Once I step off the main path I soon find myself in fields of harsh, hillocked grasses that catch at my boots. The winter sun is surprisingly strong and there are no trees, not an inch of cover in sight. Even so, the skin on my face tingles with cold.

Skein Island is half a mile across at its largest point, shaped like a lozenge, long and thin, with ragged cliffs that erode a little more every year. The buildings stand thirty metres above sea level and there is only one accessible beach, at which the boat docks for thirty minutes every Saturday. It is the definition of isolation. I know all about it. There was a book released in the seventies, black and white pictures of women with stark faces in front of small, shabby buildings; I kept it under my bed for years, then deliberately destroyed it with a pair of kitchen scissors before marrying David. To symbolise something, I suppose.

If I had a telescope, I reckon I could see Allcombe pier jutting out from the green mass of land that lies over the water. Maybe, by now, a few out-of-season holidaymakers are out, eating fish and chips, wrapped up warm against the chill of the wind over the Bristol Channel. But there is no way to tell what is happening on that far shore, except that the Sea Princess is about to return to it; that is the one recognisable, straight-lined shape I can spot, moving away, swaying on the waves.

I keep walking, leaving the white walls of the reception building behind. The Sea Princess soon falls out of sight. Now there are sheep, not white clouds of sheep, but watchful eyes in tangled stringy masses of burred wool, their shiny, crusted droppings lying all around, and the cloying, earthy smell of them filling up my nostrils. They are simply loose, free to go where they like without fences or hedges to hold them back. Something about that thought triggers the memory of the man walking into the library and saying to me, Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.

I push it away.

Seventeen years ago my mother came here, to the island. Then, when her week was up, she had decided not to come home. I received birthday cards with a Bedfordshire postmark, but in all other ways she had gone. My father and I were consigned to her past.

And now, to suit some unknown purpose, I am here.

The lip of the island becomes visible. I stomp onwards. I walk up to the edge and stand as close to the drop as I dare. I examine the chalky angles of the cliff, the jagged points of the rocks upon which the sea flicks itself into foamy exclamations. My hatred of heights presses strongly around me, insisting that I take a step away. On holiday, skiing in La Grave, high in the toothbrush-clean mountains of the Alps, I lost my nerve at the ski lift and shuffled back to the hotel while David laughed from the slopes. But there was no embarrassment, just a mutual understanding of who we both were, why I was the weaker one. David is good at skiing and Marianne is good at reading E. M. Forster novels in front of open fires. I know my limitations. Except that I thought this trip was beyond me; I always stipulated that I didn’t want to come here, to follow in my mother’s footsteps.

I walk along the cliff edge, keeping to its undulations, watching the sun dip lower. A small blue bench comes into view up ahead. Upon it sits a woman, still and stretched out, palms down on the wood, legs long, crossed at the ankles.

I consider turning back, but then the woman moves her head in my direction, and there is something welcoming in the way she cocks it to one side. She has a square face with smallish eyes, lost in a nest of energetic crow’s feet.

‘Lovely sunset,’ she says, when I get close enough to hear.

‘Yes.’

‘What number are you in? I’m in three.’

It takes me a moment to realise she’s talking about the bungalows. ‘Me too.’

‘Takes some getting used to,’ says the woman. I nod, and stand beside the bench, keeping my eyes on the sea. ‘Can’t take too long to settle in, though. We’ve only got a week. I’m Kay, by the way.’

‘I’m Marianne.’

‘I’ve already got half my declaration done in my head. As soon as I found out I had a place, I was thinking it over. You?’

I haven’t considered this – the writing of my own declaration. ‘I don’t know. I think it might come easily to me, though. I love reading.’ How smug that must sound. The breeze picks up. The sun is completing its inexorable trajectory into the sea.

‘I wonder what the food will be like,’ says Kay. She pats the square of bench beside her, and I perch on the end.

‘I think we have to cook it ourselves.’

‘Really? Crap. I live on microwave meals back home.’

‘I’ll cook, if you like. For us. Or anyone.’

‘Can I tell you something?’ says Kay. ‘It’s not the kind of thing I’d usually tell a stranger. I know we’re meant to be getting used to the seclusion, saving up all the private stuff for the declaration.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I couldn’t have been a nun. This place is already too quiet for me. Have you handed in your phone yet? I did that first. I thought – if I don’t do it now, I never will.’

‘No, I haven’t done mine yet.’

‘Really? Can I check my email?’ She holds up one hand; she has bitten fingernails, painted purple. ‘Actually, no. Scrap that. I bet you don’t get reception out here anyway.’

We sit in silence. Oddly, I’m relieved that I don’t have to give her my phone. Eventually, I say, ‘You wanted to tell me something?’

‘Yeah. It’s only that when I get back home I’m going to buy a motorbike.’

‘Okay.’

‘I suppose that doesn’t sound like a lot to you. Let’s just say there are reasons why everyone is going to have a meltdown about it.’ She wriggles, and stands up. She’s very thin; her combat trousers hang low on her hips. ‘I’m going to go check out the bungalow. You coming?’

So I stand up too, and fall into a fast walk beside her, keeping pace, negotiating the dishevelled, uninterested sheep and their turds.

‘I bet you’re good at everything,’ says Kay. ‘You look the type.’

There is no reply that can be made to that. I think of how difficult I once found sex. David is the only man I’ve ever really relaxed with. It was difficult to switch off my brain, to stop worrying that I was taking too long, trying my partner’s patience. But he had endless persistence. He ordered some erotic books on the internet, and a door opened for me. I could become the heroine of the book, and do and say the things that I wanted for the first time. Technically, it was pretending to be somebody else, but that had never seemed to bother David.

‘I wasn’t very good at school,’ says Kay. ‘Not great as a mother, either, if I’m honest. My three kids will tell you that, right out. I tried really hard when they were little, but as they get older they stop wanting you to know stuff about their lives, and I never had the patience to whittle away at them. And then, before you know it, it’s all your fault because you didn’t spend three hours a day interrogating them. Besides, when you have three, they form their own gang. You got any kids?’

‘No.’

‘Thought not.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘I’m good at motorbikes,’ says Kay. It’s as if she’s been starved of the freedom to talk; she unburdens herself, at speed, with relief scored through every word. ‘I’ve got good reflexes, and stuff. I feel free on a bike, free to be good at it. But on a bike it’s not always enough to be good. All it takes is some idiot in a car, not looking at a junction, and you’re dead. Or out of action for a while. I got hit by a car. Old lady who just didn’t see me, and I went right over the top of her sky blue Nissan Micra and ended up in hospital for eight weeks. I promised my mum and the kids – no more.’ She is walking faster; I have to break into a trot to keep up with her. ‘The thing is, I don’t want to be alive just to make them happy. Nothing else does it for me.’

‘Was it a very bad accident?’

She slows down again as she describes, lovingly, the broken bones, the removed spleen, the physical cracks that lead to emotional ones, her kids, her mother, and the men who never stuck around. It is easy to admire her stubborn belief that only a motorcycle makes her free.

The main building comes into view once more, a white bulge on the landscape. The lights are off; the island is beginning to look done for the day. I follow Kay back on to the gravel path, through the rose garden, past the glass doors of reception and down the side path that leads to the bungalows. We don’t speak again, but it’s a pleasant silence; the kind that falls when the curtains go up and the show is about to start.

The bungalow is one of many placed in crocodile formation, on either side of the path. The interior space is divided by stand-alone partitions, on one side, the basic kitchen with a long wooden table at its centre and two benches; on the other side, eight single beds with duvets with faded green cases. Strings of electric lights hang from the exposed rafters. It isn’t homely, but the simplicity is appealing. It’s impossible to think of the place as anything other than a temporary stopping point.

The kitchen is already occupied, the aroma of tomatoes, garlic and onion, keeping each other company.

‘You’ve got in there quick,’ says Kay to the woman standing in front of the oven, stirring a pan. ‘Marianne was going to cook for all of us.’

‘I thought I’d make puttanesca,’ says the woman, with a beautiful roll of the tongue to her Italian. She has darker skin, and long, hennaed hair, falling in corkscrews. ‘There’s enough for everyone. Are you hungry? I’ll put some pasta on.’

‘Great!’ Kay sits down on the bench as if she has the right to be served. ‘Is there any wine?’

‘Some cheap red. I used a little for the sauce.’ She gestures towards the bottle. I come forward and take it, then open the coarse pine doors of the kitchen cabinets, hung at head height on the outer wall, until I find three glasses, then bowls and mismatched cutlery. I bring them all to the table, and pour the wine. Kay takes the first glass.

‘I’ve put my case on one of the beds already. I hope you don’t mind. I’m Rebecca,’ says the woman. She is wearing a loose green dress that falls back from her arms as she reaches up to turn on the extractor fan. The sound of it echoes around the kitchen. I realise she’s older than I first took her to be.

‘I’m Kay. She’s Marianne. I’m usually not that keen on Italian food,’ says Kay, ‘but I’m starving tonight. It smells great. You’re cooking for us too, right?’

‘You don’t like Italian? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ says Rebecca. ‘I thought everyone liked it.’

‘And Marianne will cook us something amazing tomorrow.’

‘I don’t have to,’ I say, even though my input does not seem to be needed. ‘If you like cooking.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ says Rebecca. She kneels down and retrieves a large saucepan, then takes it to the sink and fills it with water. I watch her complete these homely actions, and wonder who Rebecca would usually be doing them for, and why she feels it necessary to do it for strangers.

Kay carries on talking away, making conversation without needing input. She pours herself a second glass of wine, and I continue to sip on my first until the pasta arrives. It’s tasty; the chopped anchovies and olives warm my throat and then soothe my empty stomach. The act of eating is both painful and satisfying.

Kay talks of a holiday she once took to Siena. I try to listen, but my thoughts are on the holiday David and I once took to Lake Garda. I can’t remember much of it except the very cold water, transparent to a frightening depth, and the time I had refused to get on a pedalo with David because the idea of being together in the centre of that body of water had been unbearable.

‘I’ll make coffee,’ says Rebecca.

I get up and find cups. At the back of one of the cupboards is an old board game with a ripped lid. I bring it down and put it in the centre of the table, along with milk and sugar.

‘Game of Life!’ says Kay. She opens the box and takes out the board, then examines the pieces. ‘There aren’t many pegs left but I reckon we could play a game. It’s better than listening to me all night, right?’ She rolls her eyes, and starts setting out the little plastic cars. ‘So what made you apply, then? For the island?’ She doesn’t aim the question at anyone in particular; Rebecca is busy spooning coffee into a filter jug, so I reply.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Let me guess – your husband did it for you so he could have a week alone with his mates and his widescreen telly.’

‘No, nothing like that. I received the offer of a place without applying. My mother came here years ago. I think maybe it’s to do with that.’

Kay nods. ‘Did you ask her? Maybe she applied for you. To follow in her footsteps?’

‘No, I…’ I swallow, hating the nervous feeling in my throat. ‘I haven’t seen her since she came here, actually, seventeen years ago.’

‘She disappeared while she was here?’ Rebecca says, bringing the filter jug to the table, along with a packet of digestives.

‘No. No, she’s in Bedfordshire now.’ The ridiculousness of it makes them both laugh. Hearing that sound, I feel comfortable for the first time since that man walked into the library. Time makes the worst things laughable, I suppose. ‘She sends cards every now and again and the postmark says Bedfordshire, but she’s never given me an address, so I always assumed she didn’t want to meet up. She just didn’t want to be with my father any more. Or me, I suppose. Something here – something she realised – persuaded her to leave us.’

‘So what are you doing here?’ says Rebecca. She presses down the plunger on the jug, taking her time, leaning into it. ‘Shouldn’t you be in Bedfordshire somewhere, asking her why? Or do you want to be persuaded to leave everyone behind too?’

‘I want to know why I received a letter inviting me here,’ I say. ‘I’ve got no interest in my mother.’ It sounds ridiculously untrue. ‘The letter was signed by Lady Amelia Worthington.’

‘Who?’ says Kay.

Rebecca rolls her eyes. ‘The founder of the island. The dead founder of this island.’

‘That’s quite a trick.’ Kay takes the green plastic car between her thumb and forefinger and speeds it around the board. ‘So how are you going to get your answers? Hunt around in between swimming and yoga? Check the graveyard for signs of recent disturbance?’

‘Strikes me as an administrative error,’ says Rebecca, pouring the coffee. ‘And there is no graveyard here.’

The conversation is running away. I say, ‘While I’m here I thought I’d try to find out a little bit about my mother as well. I thought maybe I was invited because she did something interesting when she was here, or wrote a great declaration, or… I don’t know. If I could get her declaration, maybe that would tell me something.’

‘They don’t do that.’ Kay puts the car back down on the start square, and fits a blue peg behind the wheel.

‘I know, but I thought—’

‘Good luck with thinking. It never works for me.’ She spins the wheel in the centre of the board; it stops, abruptly, on number three. ‘Right. We’re off.’

I wake up.

The enormity of what I’ve done is upon me, pressing on my chest. I can’t remember why I left him; all I can feel is the certainty of guilt. I have become my mother. We have finally been united in the act of desertion.

I should have explained it to him. I should have said, I need to understand why I received this letter. I can’t understand why I didn’t. There is no light. The sea is audible, a murmuring voice outside the windows. I picture myself, how I must look from the sky: a tiny, smothered mass, surrounded by the blue, awaiting my answers, travelling towards a goal that David can’t appreciate.

On our fifth date, I told him what it was to be abandoned. We went to a restaurant, like a couple from a romantic novel: an arranged meeting, reservation made, then the slow walk home afterwards, holding hands, a kiss. Containing the relationship within those strictures gave me the much-needed illusion of control. David wore a suit, a tie, aftershave; I found his desire to impress me with his appearance charming and also a little funny. So I responded in kind by wearing a dress to dinner, a different one every time. I liked the idea that with each dress he was getting a different woman. That evening, I had been in a low-cut wraparound dress, offering him more than I had dared to before. But instead of taking it as an invitation to flirt, it had brought out a serious side in him. He asked questions about my life, my past, all the things I hate to talk about.

David likes to search for the bottom of things. What do you really feel? he asked me, that night. How very seriously he took my replies, over lamb shanks and strawberry mousse cake, sitting in a deserted bistro on the Swindon road where the waiter strutted by the table, attempting to rise to the occasion.

‘What happened on the day she left?’ he asked, after three glasses of red wine, just before the arrival of coffee with a burnt aftertaste. I felt so romantic, in a literary sense, with the candlelight between us and Norah Jones on the CD player.

I told him it hadn’t been an unusual day. My father had been working as a gardener back then; well, doing any job, really. So I had let myself in after school with my own key.

‘How old were you?’

Sixteen. And he had shaken his head at that.

I confided in him, rewarded his desire to know me. I had talked about always feeling that my mother had wanted to leave, to get away from Arnie, with his drinking. Sixteen would seem to be the age when a girl can start to fend for herself; perhaps that was how my mother saw it.

‘But sixteen is… at sixteen you’re a baby,’ David had said. ‘You were just a baby.’

I remember reaching across the table and touching his arm. He had said something important, and I had begun to understand, at that moment, that my books were not enough.

Standing at my front door, after the walk home, I asked him to come in, wanting him, and he had said no. A week passed. By the time he phoned I had changed my mind again, decided that I didn’t want him, attack being the best form of defence. I would not have returned the message he left on the answer phone if it had not begun with the words, I’ve gone and fallen in love with you.

I didn’t believe him, of course. Nobody could fall in love after five dates.

And now I understand, as I lie here in the dark, why I hadn’t told him in person where I was going. He has always been the better talker. He would have persuaded me out of it in less than a minute, maybe told me it was my mother I was looking for, and we would be in Bedfordshire right now, searching places together.

I find I’m crying, noisily, competing with the sea, keeping it company.

‘Can I get you anything?’ says Rebecca, from my left.

I hear the squeak of bedsprings, and then a new weight settles on one side of the bed, next to my knees.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ whispers Rebecca. ‘Bad dreams? To do with home?’

‘I should have told him,’ I manage to say.

‘Told your husband? That you were coming here?’

‘I left him.’

I wait for condemnation, but instead Kay’s voice, too loud for the middle of the night, says, ‘Yeah, well, we all do something terrible every now and again. That’s life for you. Did you bottle it all up for so long that it had to come whooshing out, all of a sudden, like a bottle of Coke that someone shook? You have that repressed look about you.’

‘Shut up, please, Kay,’ says Rebecca, in what sounds like an amused tone of voice, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so.’

Kay claps her hands together, says, ‘Brilliant!’ and then there is the sound of movement, and the overhead light bursts into shocked life. ‘Since we’re up, I’m getting tea.’

‘There’s only horrible, cheap teabags,’ says Rebecca.

‘What would your majesty prefer? Earl Grey?’

‘I like Earl Grey,’ I say, and the two of them laugh at me. Kay pads away in her zebra-striped pyjamas, and the kettle is soon audible through the partition wall. It works itself up to boiling point and Kay hums along with it, occasionally talking to herself, saying things such as not even then and it’s meant to be green, stupid.

‘She’s a live wire,’ says Rebecca. ‘Do you really want to be here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You say you want to know why you were given a place here by a dead woman. It strikes me you didn’t have to come. You could have simply asked over the phone, couldn’t you? And they would have told you that it was an error by some new member of staff. A mix-up of letters. Are you really trying to solve that mystery, or are you after the experience? The experience of being your mother. What it’s like to leave.’

I can’t move. I absorb the words, until tea arrives. Kay passes around the mugs and sits down on my bed too; it creaks beneath her.

‘It’s so quiet here, I actually can’t sleep,’ she says.

‘Me neither,’ says Rebecca. ‘I should say, by the way, I’m a therapist. I’m sorry if I overstepped the mark, Marianne.’

‘Why, what did you tell her to do?’

I shake my head at Kay. ‘She didn’t tell me to do anything. She just pointed something out.’

‘I hate it when people do that.’ Kay smoothes the duvet with one hand. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about how we could get hold of your mum’s declaration, if they won’t give it to you.’

‘You mean break the rules?’ says Rebecca. She’s in a peach silk nightdress, showing the aged skin at the tops of her arms. Her face is shiny from being cleansed, toned and moisturised before being allowed to relax into sleep. ‘They’ll kick us off.’

‘They’ll kick Marianne off anyway, when they discover she never handed in her mobile.’

‘It was an honest mistake, I’ll hand it in first thing tomorrow.’ I lean over the side of the bed and pull my handbag out from under the bed by its leather strap. David bought it for me in Barcelona while on a stag weekend for a work colleague. A coach had been commandeered, and the back rows of the aeroplane given over to their testosterone-fuelled two days. I never asked for details. Instead, I enjoyed a secretive delight at the thought that he had stopped to buy a handbag even though he had been in the midst of a male adventure. I take out the phone from the inner pocket and stare at it.

‘Are you going to phone him?’ says Rebecca, in a stage whisper.

But the choice is wrenched away from me. I’m grateful. ‘No signal.’ I drop the phone on the bed. ‘I wonder why they make you give up your phone if there’s no signal anyway?’

‘Psychology.’ Rebecca taps its screen. ‘Whether the phone works or not, it connects you to your normal life. Once it’s locked away, you’re going to commit to the week more, to meeting new people, forming new ties. Because on a subconscious level you’re much more likely to feel vulnerable, and forget the people who usually keep you safe.’

‘Do you think reading your mum’s declaration really will help you?’ interrupted Kay.

‘I don’t know.’ I slip the phone back into the bag and push it under the bed once more. ‘What else could?’

‘All right then. Tomorrow night. We’ll go and find it. Be ready.’

‘Are you serious?’ says Rebecca.

‘Yup,’ Kay tells her, with a level stare.

Rebecca sighs. ‘Well then. You’d better try and get some sleep if you’re both going to turn into hardened lawbreakers.’ She is our mother figure. Kay rolls her eyes at me, then returns to her own bed.

I lie down once more. The rest of the night passes in a deep, deliberate silence. The cold air crackles with thoughts that have no place to go.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘So she’s gone too,’ said Arnie. ‘She won’t be coming back.’ He undid the zipper of his grey ski jacket and pulled one arm free, then the other, carefully, so as not to knock his pint. ‘Sorry, but there it is.’

‘No, she’ll come back,’ said David.

Arnie smiled at him, baring his grey teeth. ‘Is that right?’ He raised his voice to the rest of the bar. ‘He’s still got hope, this one.’

David remembered a story Marianne had once told him about her father. Her first boyfriend had left a message on the answering machine, dumping her, back at the age when face-to-face talking between boys and girls didn’t happen. Arnie had played it for her when she got back from ballet class. He’d also played it for the neighbours, who were round having drinks that night, and they’d had a long discussion in front of her about how she should just get over it and not mope about such a stupid boy. Arnie hadn’t considered it to be her private business at all, apparently, and David had wondered if Marianne had exaggerated the story, as she sometimes did, for dramatic effect. But now he suspected it was true after all.

‘So what’s going on?’ said Arnie. He took a long drink of his pint, then patted his thin moustache with his fingers and wiped the moisture on the front of his jacket.

‘Did she talk to you? Phone you, at all?’

‘No. But I wouldn’t expect her to. You, on the other hand, should be her closest confidante. Shouldn’t you?’

‘I am,’ David said.

Arnie shook his head. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but it has to be your fault. Your wife’s not happy, it’s your fault. Trust me.’

So this wasn’t about a father protecting a daughter; this was about men being left behind. Abandonment was not the same, however it happened, no matter what Arnie might think.

‘Drink your beer,’ Arnie said.

Getting drunk in the pub – this was his idea of mutual support.

The Cornerhouse was one of those pubs that people walked past regularly and never went into. It sat where the less developed end of Wootton Bassett high street turned a sharp left into seedier territory, such as DVD rental places with ripped posters in the windows and dry-cleaning places sporting filthy net curtains. There was a sign hung on the roof of the little pub that promised Sky Sports, and then three stone steps down into the barely lit room where a few wooden chairs and thick, round tables squeezed up together to leave room for a skittles alley and a dartboard. David had never been in there, although he had known it was Arnie’s second home for years.

At the back of his mind had been the idea that it was a pub by invitation only, for those older men who all knew each other and didn’t want to have to deal with young idiots when they socialised. The quiet murmurings, half-hidden under the strains of early Elvis from the radio behind the bar, were not about women or cars or jobs, David guessed. He didn’t know what they talked about, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t know for another thirty years or so, when, one day, he’d find the urge to step inside a place like this and find a lot of tired old men looking back at him without judgement.

‘All right, Mags?’ said Arnie, to the woman behind the bar. ‘Another two here.’

Mags retrieved two pint glasses from the stack behind her and pulled at the pumps with muscular efficiency. Her arms were bare; she wore a stretchy white top with straps that had entwined with the lace straps of her bra, in a shade of red that clashed with her curly, purplish hair. David imagined her to be in her early fifties, with heavily wrinkled skin under her arms, flapping as she pulled their pints, but her blue eyes, intense in the bristling mess of mascara, looked younger, more alive than the patrons of the pub. She was looking straight at him.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘I’m not a waitress.’

David got up and took the pints from the bar.

‘Nine pounds, lovey.’ He paid the money.

‘Is this your son-in-law, then, Arnie?’ she said, not taking her eyes from him.

‘That’s him. The daughter’s only gone off to Skein Island and left him.’

This news was greeted with fresh mutterings from the other men. David carried the pints back to the table.

‘Like mother, eh?’ said Mags, with some degree of satisfaction evident in her voice as she switched off the radio. ‘Right, well, it’s eight o’clock.’ And that was the end of the conversation about Marianne. How unimportant she was to them. It was a strange relief to not have to field questions, to explain the inexplicable. Apparently this leaving business was something that women did, apart from Mags, who seemed to have transcended female status. Old men knew not to be surprised when women left. Instead they merely nodded, and pulled their chairs closer to the bar as Mags retrieved a small green box from behind the rack of spirits.

Arnie rubbed his hands together and gave David a wink. ‘You’d better watch this time, see how it goes.’

‘What?’

‘The game,’ his father-in-law said, as if that explained everything. Mags opened the box, and took out four small painted cubes, one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. She placed them on the bar. David glanced back at Arnie; he was leaning forward, his attention fixed on the cubes. Mags stood back, her hands on her hips. Her expression was difficult to read. There was pleasure there, David thought, but she was trying to hide it under a veneer of watchful superiority. She was in charge, that much was obvious. The men did not move from their seats, but they were all hooked to the cubes, their eyes glued to the wooden sides, lined up in a row.

David felt Mags’s attention on him once more. ‘You in?’ she said.

He shrugged.

‘Not good enough. Come back when you’re in.’

‘He’s with me,’ said Arnie.

‘Not good enough.’

‘It’s okay,’ David said. ‘I should go, anyway. I’ve got a teleconference in the morning.’

Arnie pulled a face. ‘Right, well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?’

‘Will you let me know if she rings again?’

‘Course.’ But Arnie wouldn’t look at him. David picked up his leather jacket and put it on, feeling the men around him wishing him gone. Mags had turned back to the cubes, tapping them with a purple fingernail, one at a time, the noise like the tick-tock of a metronome, counting out the seconds until he left.

He walked to the door, stepped outside, pulled it shut behind him. He started a brisk walk back to his empty house, then gave in to temptation, and headed instead for the library.

David crouched and waited.

Blame was an organism. It grew, and stretched, and multiplied in unexpected directions. Although it had a pinpoint-sharp focus on the unknown attacker, its outer edges also encompassed Marianne’s father, and the other women she worked with who had left her alone to close up. He hated himself for letting her leave. He should have leapt out of bed when he first spotted the open wardrobe door and the absence of her suitcase. He imagined, nightly, living that moment of realisation again, acting fast, throwing himself in front of their car.

The library was a small, grey, one-storey building, rectangular with a porch area into which the main doorway had been set. The outside light above the doorway was operated by motion sensor; every time David shifted position it clicked on to throw a sickly bluish glow over the path and the privet where he hid, and when it clicked off again it left David with the temporary illusion of absolute, icy darkness, blanket thick.

And, of course, nobody came.

There was another reason to be here. It made him feel closer to Marianne. She loved her job: the smell and the feel of well-used books, the joy of recommending a tense thriller or a slushy romance to her customers.

He shifted his weight on to his left buttock and stuck out his right leg, flexing his foot. The exterior light clicked on as he worked out the cramp in his calf with his fingers. Agonising, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. In The Cornerhouse, ten minutes’ walk away, Arnie would be drinking and watching television, playing the game with the cubes. David wondered what the prize was; it had to be good, to have captured everyone’s attention so completely. Or maybe they had nothing else to live for.

He heard the light footsteps behind him only a moment before he heard the voice.

‘Stand up.’

It was a woman. Hope leapt in him, but an instant later evaporated. It wasn’t Marianne. It was too harsh a voice, too confident.

David did as he was told. The woman must have come from the far side of the library, working her way along the small, gravel path that ran along the back of the building, where the bins were kept.

‘Put your hands behind your head,’ she said. He linked his gloved fingers around the back of his neck. She sounded so calm. He guessed she was a policewoman, maybe, but still, his major concern was that he didn’t move too quickly and frighten her.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’

It was too complicated to explain. ‘Can I turn around?’ He didn’t know why, but he thought seeing her face might help.

There was a pause. Then she said, ‘Yes, all right. But keep your hands up, okay?’

The politeness of it was surprising. He moved around to face her. She was standing underneath the exterior light, eyes hidden in the shadow thrown by the brim of her neat hat, mouth straight. How petite she was, short and slim but with a wide stance, her feet planted in sensible black shoes.

‘My wife was working here last night, and she was approached by an assailant. I just thought I’d see if he was hanging around.’

She lifted her chin and gave him a view of her eyes. There was recognition in them. Did he know her? He felt certain he didn’t.

‘You’re Mr Percival?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you got ID on you?’

‘Yes, in my pocket. Can I…?’ He lowered his hands and reached into his coat pocket to bring forth his wallet. She came closer, just a few steps, and held out her free hand in a precise, direct manner, as if she was in charge. Which, now he thought about it, she was. The sensation of her gaze on his driver’s licence, then on his face, wasn’t unpleasant. He risked a small smile, which she returned. ‘I had the same thought,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d just have a quick check round. Sometimes men like that come back to the same haunts.’

So it hadn’t been ridiculous after all. David nodded, trying to keep either vindication or disappointment from his expression.

‘How’s your wife?’ she said.

‘She’s gone away for a few days.’

She snapped his wallet shut and handed it back. She didn’t seem surprised, but maybe that was the training she received, to be calm in the face of all situations. He envied her. ‘I think you should probably go home now.’

‘Yes.’ But he couldn’t move, or say more. A knot was forming inside him, a strong, hard knot of despair for this wasted night, for Marianne’s refusal to let him help her. It threatened to choke him, drove tears up into his eyes, and the worst thing was that it was happening in front of this tiny, serious policewoman. His loneliness, made visible to a stranger, pulling tighter around his stomach as he struggled for self-control.

‘Do you want a lift home?’ she said. He shook his head.

‘No, I insist, I can’t leave you alone like this. You live near the park, right? I know your wife, a little bit. I’m a regular at the library. Come on, the car’s parked on the other side of the alley.’ She kept talking as she walked away, so David followed her, amazed by how confidently she strode without looking back, as if she didn’t realise how tiny and vulnerable she looked to him.

Her name was Samantha, Sam for short. She was a community support officer. She had a way of talking that didn’t tire the ears, even though on the drive back David had not noticed a pause in the flow of her speech on subjects such as the traffic problems of the high street and how the town needed better lighting. It was not entertaining talk, but it was easy to listen to. He could have stayed in the car for hours without feeling any pressure to respond, and so at the end of the drive he accepted her invitation of a cup of coffee. It turned out she lived around the corner from him anyway. He must have seen her around before; that would explain why her face was so familiar, yet utterly unremarkable. He couldn’t have described it to anyone else, except to say that it was neither pretty nor ugly. And that, too, was a soothing thing about her. When he looked at her he was not reminded of Marianne’s beauty.

Sam’s lounge seemed odd to him. It was so different from the cream curtains and wooden flooring of his house. Here, the room seemed crowded by the dark squashy armchairs, the radiator painted red to match the bookshelves and the fringed lampshade. He took a seat in a rocking chair, of all things, next to the small television, and knew straight away that she lived alone. The décor was too individual, and a small cuddly toy, an owl with enormous yellow felt eyes that were peeling around the edges due to age, sat in one of the armchairs, looking proprietorial.

He listened to the sound of the kettle boiling, and waited. Eventually she came in carrying a circular silver tray, her stab jacket undone, her hat removed, but still there was powerful formality in the way she placed the tray down on the glass-topped coffee table and handed him one of the mugs.

‘I know your wife,’ she said. ‘She recommended some thrillers for me. She was really helpful. I’ve been thinking about what happened to her. That’s why I stopped by the library at the end of the shift tonight, just in case there was anyone there. The thought of it makes me sick, someone like that, prowling around the town, looking for a woman who won’t be able to stand up to him. This should be a safe place for people, for families.’ She sat down in the armchair opposite him, clutching her own mug, her face composed, even though her words had been strident. He couldn’t work her out.

‘I thought maybe it would be someone from the Swindon estates,’ he said. ‘Some of those are pretty rough, and we’re practically a satellite town for Swindon now, aren’t we?’

‘It’s kept its own personality,’ she said. ‘You’re not from here, originally, are you?’

‘My parents still live in Cheltenham, where I grew up. Marianne’s from Bassett. Her father’s always been here, mainly in The Cornerhouse.’

Sam raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment.

‘Are you from here, then?’ he asked her.

‘No.’

He got the feeling he’d strayed into unwelcome territory. He said, ‘She’s gone to Skein Island. My wife.’

‘No men allowed, right? The feminist thing. She’ll soon be back, I’m sure.’

He nodded, but that way she said it made him think of his parents. He had stopped telling them things years ago because they always gave the same sort of kindly, unrealistic reaction to bad news. They lived in sheltered accommodation together, sharing a ground-floor flat that cost him a great deal of money, but their fragility demanded special care. His father had a tendency to forget where he’d put things, and his mother nurtured an obsession with old notes, from greeting cards to shopping lists, for no discernible reason. He never bothered them with the details of his life.

She sipped her coffee. ‘Maybe it’s post-traumatic stress. She’s been through a terrible experience, even if nothing happened. She was very brave at the time, but people fall to pieces afterwards, sometimes.’

‘Of course, I’ve thought of that, but I can’t help her through it when she’s on an island where no men are allowed.’

She stood up. ‘Do you want some more coffee?’

He checked his watch; it was past ten. ‘No, I should head off home. I—thanks. For the lift.’

‘No problem.’

She led the way through the hallway, which was painted in an oppressive dark green, with varnished wooden banisters that had red wool strung between them, each strand bearing rows of tiny brass bells. David brushed them with one hand as he walked past, and they tinkled.

‘Early warning system,’ she said. ‘In case someone broke in. I know, it’s stupid, but in my line of work it can be difficult to relax at night. Thoughts go round your head.’

‘Of course,’ he said. He pictured her lying in bed, listening for the tinkle of bells.

She opened the front door. ‘Listen, David.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Don’t hang around outside the library any more, okay? The police are handling it.’

He wondered what the difference was between a policewoman and a community support officer. The thought of her standing out there on her own, with nothing to protect her, not even a proper police rank, scared him.

‘I can help,’ he said.

She blinked. ‘It’s my job.’

‘He tried to attack my wife.’

‘Yes, I understand that. But you don’t want to get into a situation you can’t handle.’

He stepped past her, feeling her flinch away, and then did up his coat in the cold air. The walk would only take a few minutes, but the temperature had dropped further and the pavement was slippery underfoot. Sam was right; the estate did need better lighting at night.

‘The same goes for The Cornerhouse,’ Sam said. ‘That’s not a place I’d advise you spend any time in. You know where I am if you need anything. Goodnight.’ She shut the door.

David stared at it, then started taking small, careful steps home on the icy pavement. Her last warning made no sense to him. He turned it over in his mind, and as he did so he realised what had seemed wrong to him about her lounge. There had been no photographs in that otherwise homely space: no family, no friends, no scenes from holidays once taken. Didn’t women always love photographs? Marianne had covered their own house in them, all framed neatly, all hung in prominent places: the mantelpiece, the coffee table, every single wall.

There had been the bells, a warning for some possible future, but no photographs on show. He realised he had never met a woman before who didn’t, in some way, continually reference her own past, through her choice of friends, or through cherished cards, or photos. Maybe she was a different kind of woman altogether.

The thought excited him.

CHAPTER FIVE

Each stroke – the lift of the limb, the fall of drops on the surface of the water – is a soft, slow revelation of relaxation. I am swimming on my back, with my eyes open, devouring my delicious solitude.

Rebecca and Kay opted for a yoga class instead, and I’m glad. In their company I’m a different person, fitting in with their thoughts and ideas. I have never felt so malleable. It is the island, working upon me, taking away everything familiar. I should be shelving books right now. I should be standing behind the library desk, giving out my stamp and my smile. Instead I’m formulating a plan to break the rules. I’m going to read something that was never written to be read.

I reach the deep end of the pool and turn, my body curving like a comma, and start on another length.

The lifeguard sits in the tall chair set back from the shallow end, and I can feel her attention upon me, not in an uncomfortable way, but simply as a bored onlooker, like a housewife watching daytime television. After a few lengths, I notice she has climbed down the rungs and approached the poolside. The illusion of separation between us is broken. I swim up to her feet, taking in the serious blue eyes and the muscular calves as the woman kneels down and leans over to me.

‘The pool’s closing for lunch in five minutes.’

‘Okay.’

‘Usually it would be open all day, but the other attendant is off this week, so I don’t have cover. For the lunch hour.’ She has a Scandinavian accent I think.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I say, ‘if you want to go ahead and have lunch. I’m a strong swimmer.’

‘It’s a question of liability.’

‘Yes, I can see that. Okay.’

‘So, five minutes, then?’

Something peremptory in her tone forces my hand. I say, ‘I’ll get out now, if you like,’ and pull myself out, my thighs slapping on the cold raised lips of the tiles.

The woman walks away. But she’s not offended; she returns with a soft, cream towel from the rack by the changing room door. She holds it out, and I stand up to take it, and wrap it around myself.

The swimming pool is a beautiful space, filled with sunlight from the row of tall clean windows that look out over a stretch of field, and the blue beyond. The roof is a wooden pyramid, very unusual in design, with slats interlocking to form a spire. There are dark blue moulded plastic seats along the wall opposite the windows, lined up exactly, and it feels like being inside a church. I find I’m reluctant to leave. I could have gone on swimming for lengths that multiplied into miles.

‘It’s so calm,’ I say. ‘It must be peaceful, working here.’

‘No. We have to stay alert. Ready for anything.’

The cold is setting in. I excuse myself and skitter around the edge of the pool to the changing rooms, where I dress mechanically, in layers designed to trap heat. When I step out into the foyer, with my wet hair soaking into the back of my jumper, the lifeguard is sitting on one of the tubular stools in the tiny café area by the main door. She has a sandwich on the table in front of her, the cling film wrapper partially peeled back.

‘What time will you open again?’ I ask. I watch her not eat the sandwich. She is staring at it with what appears to be intense dislike.

‘A couple of minutes.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You want my sandwich?’

‘No, thanks. Don’t you like it?’

‘It’s got tomato in,’ she says, as if that explains everything.

I am caught between my desire to swim and the thought of climbing back into my clammy costume. Eventually she says, ‘You picked a really quiet week for your holiday. Usually the pool is so busy. What’s your name?’

‘Marianne.’

‘I’m Inger.’ She half stands on the metal bar between the legs of her stool, and holds out her hand. I shake it, and find myself smiling, tickled by the incongruity of the gesture.

‘Are you happy?’ she asks.

‘Um… yes, pretty happy.’

‘Enjoying your holiday?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good,’ says Inger. ‘I thought you looked sad, in the pool. That’s why I couldn’t leave you in there alone. Sometimes people do dangerous things when they’re sad.’ She says it in such a matter-of-fact tone, while lifting up the corner of the top slice of bread to examine the filling.

‘Really? You mean – in the pool?’

She shrugs. ‘It happens. I’ve had four try to drown themselves. Three, I saved. They could throw themselves off the cliffs, but no, they have to come to the pool instead. Off the cliffs would be much quicker and easier for everyone. But they don’t really want to die, do they? They want me to save them. Being saved is a good feeling. It gives meaning to your life, I’m thinking.’ Inger sweeps up her sandwich and throws it, overhand, into the blue bin next to the main entrance. It’s a fair distance, but the sandwich lands squarely in the bin. Inger doesn’t look in the slightest bit pleased with herself. Maybe she makes the throw every day.

‘That must be stressful, though,’ I say. ‘Being the one that does the saving.’

‘I like it. It’s the one I didn’t save that bothers me. She drank pool cleaner first, from the storage area. We keep it padlocked now.’ She stands up and stretches, then puts her hands on her hips. She looks ready for anything. ‘You can get changed again now if you want to carry on swimming.’

‘I might leave it for now, actually.’

‘I’ve put you off? I’m sorry. Listen, every swimming pool has a few deaths. Every street, every house, someone has died, yeah?’

‘You seem really…’ I can’t think of the right word and settle, eventually, on, ‘Scandinavian.’

Inger laughs. ‘It’s true. I’m from Denmark. I hope you have a good time while you’re here. You should go to the cinema tonight. They’re showing Jodie Foster films this week. There’s a discussion group afterwards, if enough people come.’

‘Are you going?’

‘For sure.’

Her casual invitation fills me with the confidence to ask my own question. ‘Can I ask – did you know Amelia Worthington?’

‘I met her a few times. She was very old when I started here. She didn’t leave the white house, and staff don’t get invited up there often. Not even now Mrs Makepeace is in charge. She keeps to the house too.’

‘Did you have to do a declaration? When you first started working here?’

Inger hesitates, then says, ‘I first came as a visitor, for the week. I was a manager at a bank in Copenhagen, and I was interested in Buddhism – this was eight, nine years ago. So I thought a free week, alone, to meditate, would be good. I spent the week trying to sit and clear my mind. Have you ever done that? Meditation? It’s very difficult. I couldn’t stop thinking. I wrote in my declaration all the things I’d thought about, and when I read it back to myself I knew I didn’t want to go home.’

‘So you didn’t?’

‘I talked to Mrs Makepeace – she was Lady Worthington’s assistant back then – and she said they needed a pool attendant. I’m a strong swimmer. I stayed.’

‘Didn’t you have family?’

‘I had a boyfriend.’ She smiles a little. ‘He wanted to see other women anyway. I let him see all the women he wanted. Except me.’

‘And what happened to your declaration? Did you finish it?’

‘It went into the vault, with the others, I guess.’

‘The vault?’

‘Up at the white house. The basement is an archive. That’s the point of the island, right? These stories, sealed up, like a time capsule. A record of what it means to be a woman.’

‘Could you see it again, if you wanted to? Your declaration?’

‘Why would I want to?’ says Inger, with such puzzlement on her face. ‘Once you’ve changed your life, why would you want to read about what you were before? I don’t think that’s a healthy impulse. Look, come to the cinema tonight, and stay for the talk, and maybe you’ll understand more about making a declaration.’

‘Yes, okay, thanks.’

‘Back to the pool. It’ll be a quiet week for me.’

I nod. ‘Hopefully no suicide bids, then.’

Inger shrugs, as if it is impossible to tell when somebody might decide to throw themselves into the deep end.

Outside, on the short walk back to the bungalow, I picture that basement filled with declarations. What do those stories mean? Do they have to mean anything? And yet I can feel the pervasive magic of wanting to put down my own words, separating my life into before and after, altering my ideas about the person I want to be.

Am I turning into my mother?

Or maybe that process has already begun, in the library, in the face of that unknown man. Or earlier still, when my mother left. Yes, people are changed forever when the people they love decide to leave.

‘I think she makes the only choice she can. I mean, she has to avenge him, right? Sometimes we live on instinct and no matter how much we know it’s not a good idea, we can’t listen to anything but our hearts.’ The slim woman in jeans and a cream cable-knit jumper touches the space between her breasts with both hands, and I sit back as the other women in the circle nod. It is the kind of statement that divides people into two categories: those who believe in the all-embracing power of love, and those who think that the first group are a bunch of self-indulgent idiots. I desperately don’t want anyone else to work out that I think I once belonged to the first group. Now I’m not so sure.

Rebecca, sitting on my right, nudges me, then says in her loud voice, ‘I think you always have a choice.’

‘Yes,’ says Inger, from across the circle. She is wearing a black dress, which surprises me. It’s a sheath, the kind of glamorous garment that belongs to a formal event, not on this island. Still, there can’t be many opportunities to dress up. ‘I think it’s fine to want revenge. It’s fine to act on it. But you have to know you’ll pay the price for it. Be aware of what it means, yes, and think it through.’

‘And that makes it okay?’ says Rebecca.

‘No, but it makes it methodical,’ I say. I like Inger’s practical solemnity. Sitting a few rows behind her in the screening room, I found myself watching the back of Inger’s head more often than Jodie Foster’s deliberations. There had been, in the way she leaned forward during the emotional moments of the film, a feeling of intense concentration emanating from her. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to concentrate on something in that way. Right now, only half of me is in this group. The other half is wondering how Kay is doing on her mission to find a way into the basement of the white house without being detected.

The meeting peters out into general chatting about lives back home, and I am silent once more as Rebecca categorises everyone’s experiences and attempts to make sense of them. She really can’t help herself. Later, we stand side by side at the sinks in the toilets, and she at least has the grace to look embarrassed.

‘Do you know what?’ She washes her hands, using the pink soap from the dispenser. ‘Other people’s problems are much easier to deal with. But I do wonder if my way is the right way. Who’s to say facing up to it and moving on has to work? Why couldn’t we all just pretend the worst things never happened and refuse to confront them?’

I’m pretty certain by now that Rebecca isn’t a person I would get along with under usual circumstances. ‘When you told that woman with the abusive husband—’

‘Sophie.’

‘When you told Sophie she could leave, you think you could have said something different?’

Reflected in the mirrors are shiny taps, the clean sheets of the walls, and Rebecca’s grim smile as she says, ‘Do you think Sophie will ever leave him? I wonder if it matters what I say to her. Or if he’ll beg, and promise to go to counselling, and next thing you know she’ll be in the casualty department with bruises the shape of his fingers around her neck. Again.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I tell her. I have to believe in the possibility of change, it seems. ‘You never know. This island has a strange effect on people.’

‘Like your mother? You think she hadn’t already decided to leave before she came here?’

‘I don’t know.’ I rip a handful of dark blue paper towels from the dispenser, and hand some to Rebecca.

‘Was your father abusive?’ she asks me.

‘He was a normal dad. Until she didn’t come back. And then he ignored me, that’s all.’ I think of piggybacks, of ice creams, of hands keeping me afloat in the swimming pool, locked under my tummy while I kick, and suddenly I feel ashamed of ever forgetting that side, instead of seeing only the shadow of him, lurking in The Cornerhouse. I throw the paper towels in the bin. ‘Come on. Kay should be waiting for us.’

‘Listen, I’m not sure that this thing with Kay is such a good idea.’

‘Let’s just see what she’s found out,’ I say. ‘Maybe there’s nothing.’ But it doesn’t feel that way. There is excitement buzzing through me. Something is about to happen.

Standing outside the cinema, under the light from the old-fashioned streetlight placed at a crossroads in the gravel path, Kay hops from one foot to the other in her big, black boots as we walk over to her. ‘That took ages!’ she says. ‘Did you dissect it scene by scene?’

I hear a cough behind me; Inger is approaching in her sheath dress, coatless, with a large bunch of keys in one hand. ‘Thanks for coming along,’ she says.

‘I enjoyed it.’

‘Me too. The pool’s open from ten tomorrow, if you want a swim.’

I watch her go, sure-footed, swinging the keys. She doesn’t seem to feel the cold at all.

Rebecca leans over and whispers close to my ear, very loudly, ‘I think she suspects something.’

Kay rolls her eyes. ‘Is this whole thing not melodramatic enough for you, then, Rebecca?’

‘I just think it isn’t a good idea to start doing things that are morally wrong because you happen to both think that the ends justify the means. What happens when you get caught?’

‘So we’re definitely going to get caught, are we?’

‘Yes, actually. Because that’s what happens to criminals.’

‘Like the Nazis, you mean? Like Klaus Barbie, living out his life in South America, soaking up the sunshine?’

Rebecca flicks back her hair and turns up the collar on her coat. ‘There is no point trying to have a rational discussion if you’re going to bring up Nazi Germany. That’s totally uncalled for. As a comparison. And didn’t he get caught eventually?’

‘Listen,’ I say, before it can get any worse, ‘I don’t want to upset anyone. I’m not going to torture people or run away to Bolivia. I just want to see one declaration. Just one. I won’t look at anyone else’s, I promise, Rebecca. And besides, it’s probably locked up too tight for me to even get near.’

‘Heh,’ says Kay. ‘That’s what you think. Come on. I’ve had a quick look round the grounds of the white house, and I think I’ve found a way in. Maybe we’ll even uncover the mummy of Amelia Worthington, still signing acceptance letters, with a fountain pen in her bandaged hand.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not doing anything of the sort. And I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk about it around me, either.’ Rebecca sticks her hands into her pockets. ‘I’m going back to the bungalow now. I think you should come back and play a board game and forget all about this, Marianne. There are other ways to find your answers. You don’t have to become your mother to understand her, I promise you.’

It is so polished, such a slick thing to say, that it is impossible to take it seriously. I tell her, carefully, ‘We’ll be back really soon, okay? We’re just going to take a look. That’s all.’

Rebecca stares at me, and I return the gaze. She is not my mother, and she doesn’t get to tell me what to do. I’m now absolutely certain that I don’t like her. Eventually Rebecca drops her eyes and walks away.

‘Right,’ says Kay. ‘It’s this way. It gets really dark but I’ve got a pocket torch.’

‘You brought a torch with you?’

‘And a penknife. I’m that kind of woman.’

I’m not sure exactly what kind of woman brings a survival kit on holiday but I’m grateful to have that small circle of yellow light from the torch as I stumble along the paths, following, hoping Kay isn’t leading us over a cliff. The sea makes boisterous crashing noises below, even though the night is still, and the clumps of wild grass catch at my feet; the thought occurs to me that the island is trying to stop us from reaching the house. I push it away and keep moving towards that bobbing pool of torchlight.

The light splits into segments, fractured by the rungs of a wrought iron gate. Kay moves the torch to the left, along the line of the hedge, to reveal a small hole, maybe made by one of the sheep, only a few yards away. ‘Come on,’ she says. We squeeze through the privet, and I emerge with the feeling of having been scraped into a new world. The rough grass has become a lawn, and the torchlight reveals the white cube of the house up ahead, with circular black windows, like shark eyes in the deep.

I catch a flicker of light in one of the windows. ‘Turn off the torch!’

Kay snaps off the beam. There is no further movement from the upper window. Eventually my eyes adjust to the point where it is possible to move forwards, small steps. I’m grateful for the flat, straight lawn underfoot. The house takes on an iridescent quality, glowing, reflecting the moonlight. We reach the nearest wall and I find myself taking Kay’s hand and finding warmth in the corresponding squeeze.

‘This way,’ Kay whispers. She leads me along the wall, around the corner, to a flight of stone steps that lead down below the line of the lawn to a small door, wooden, with a brass ring for a handle, and a large keyhole set above it. Gathered around the foot of the door are unused terracotta plant pots, arranged in order of height, and a trowel.

I reach for the brass ring and Kay shakes her head. She points instead to a sash window further down, half-open, easy to climb through. She turns the torch back on and shines it through; I see an undecorated room, stone walls and floor, and a washing machine standing in the corner next to a mop and a bucket. There’s an archway that leads to what looks like a corridor, and a high shelf, upon which wait bottles of bleach and loo cleaner, and four small tins of paint.

‘What do you think?’ whispers Kay.

I don’t want to think. I want to be done with this, and I want my answers, so I ignore my instincts and climb through the gap in the window, sliding on my belly, feeling the buttons on my coat snag on the ledge, then pull free. I stand up and breathe in washing powder, a chemical brand that irritates my nostrils. I have to suppress a sneeze.

All is silent. I cross to the archway and look down the corridor, which ends in an abrupt flight of stairs upwards. There is a grunt, and then Kay comes up behind me and shines the torch down it, revealing faded 1950s wallpaper, a pattern of huge white orchids against what must once have been a vibrant yellow background. There are three doors: two on the left and one on the right. I walk to the first door on the left and put my hand on the cold brass knob. I decide against it. I don’t know why. I’m picturing the library of declarations: a huge space, rows of shelves, alphabetically filed, although I’m probably being old-fashioned and there will only be a broom cupboard with a computer and a hard drive for these many thousands of words. Still, for some reason I turn to the door on the right. I walk up to it, and wait for Kay.

The beam of the torch reveals four squares painted on the wood a little below eye-level – one red, one blue, one yellow, one green – in a row, the lines exact, the paint vibrant under torchlight. I run my fingers over them, feeling the slickness of the paint. They feel familiar to me, these four squares. A logo for some product I have forgotten.

Kay puts her head close to mine. ‘What is it?’ Her voice contains a tremor of fear that strokes my spine and grabs me for the first time. I manage to say, ‘I don’t know.’ I put out my hand and turn the doorknob. It opens easily, swinging back, and I find myself looking into the large space I had imagined, with tall metal shelves forming aisles, ceiling-high, filled with black lever arch files.

Kay puts her hand around the door and I hear a click; the overhead strip light flickers, then gives out a steady, yellow glow. She switches off her torch.

The room is spotless. I walk down the first row of shelves and see no dust, no disorder. Kay starts down the aisle next to me.

‘What’s your surname?’ she calls, softly.

‘Percival. No, wait, that’s my married name. Spence. My mother’s name was Vanessa Spence.’

‘I’ve found “S”,’ says Kay.

The surnames are printed on the sides of the files. It occurs to me that she might have made the declaration under her own maiden name. ‘Wait – it might be under March as well.’

‘You check “M”, then.’

I walk down the row, turn the corner, start down another. The ‘MA’ section is high up; I have to stretch up to read along the row. There is only one March, so I take it down and hold it in my hands. The folder is just like the type I once used at school. I try to slow my breathing, to think about what I want to find out, but it’s too difficult to be rational. I give up the battle to control it and open the folder.

A clear plastic pocket is attached to the rings of the spine, and inside the pocket is a sheet of yellow, A4-sized paper.

At the top, like a letterhead for an expensive hotel, are the words

SKEIN ISLAND

And underneath

It’s not her. This is someone else, some other March. It’s the story of a woman who is nothing to do with me.

I slide the sheet back into the pocket and replace the file on the shelf. I walk around to where Kay is standing, and find her sliding folder after folder from the shelf, reading maybe the first line from the paper within before replacing them.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘These are more boring than I thought they would be, actually. Did you find your mum’s?’

‘It’s not here.’

‘But everyone who comes here writes one. Maybe she used a pseudonym.’

‘Or maybe she never came here at all,’ I say. If not, where did she go? How can I possibly find out anything, when the one fact I’ve been holding on to is a lie? I walk through the rows until I find the final files – ‘Z’. There are only a few folders there, and then an empty space. Beyond that, there is a brick wall and, set into that, a small cupboard door, perhaps half the size of a normal door. Painted upon it are the four squares: red, blue, yellow, green.

Next to the door, on the ground, is a red plastic tray with three of the black A4 lever arch files in it. I squat, and open the top one. The clear plastic folder within holds a sheet of aged cream, expensive writing paper with no letterhead, and on it, in delicate, looping handwriting, is written:

I close the file.

I stand up, and open the cupboard door.

Inside is a dark space, a wall of black, and I feel the depth of it, stretching back and back. There is a waft of warm air, musty, over my face. From deep inside, something shifts. It is moving. It moves towards me.

I slam the door.

Kay is standing a little way behind me. She says, ‘What?’

‘It’s a cupboard,’ I say. I can’t think of any other words to explain it.

‘We should get going,’ says Kay. ‘Guess what I’ve just noticed?’ She points above the cupboard door; in the corner of the ceiling there is, suspended, a small, black camera, with one blinking red light. ‘We’d never make professional burglars, would we?’

Rebecca was right. Nothing has been gained, and I have been caught in the act: the act of breaking yet another promise.

‘Ah, never mind, we’ll just say we were curious. No harm done.’ Kay takes my hand. ‘Besides, I bet they don’t even check it. If they were monitoring it, some security guard would have turned up by now, right? And it’s not even pointing the right way. At that angle all it’s picking up is this little bit of the room. Come on.’

I hold on to the folder, keep it safe against my chest, as Kay pulls me from the room, through the basement, and pushes me out of the half-open window. All is still.

This kind of darkness, I can cope with. It is not absolute, or consuming, like the black of the cupboard. Something about that cupboard has sparked my imagination, I tell myself, as Kay takes my hand once more and we begin to retrace our steps across the island. Imagination can do the strangest things to a person. It can crawl into a small space and make it grow. I’ve discovered something that should not have been found. I feel it.

We don’t speak, all the way back. We reach our bungalow. The lights are off; I’m sure Rebecca is lying awake in the dark, waiting for us to turn on the bedroom light so she can claim we woke her up and scold us like children. Instead Kay turns on her torch once more and shines the beam at the folder, still in my arms. ‘Is that one of the declarations?’ she whispers. ‘I thought we didn’t find one for your mother.’

‘This is someone else’s.’

‘So you’re just stealing random ones now? Weirdo.’

‘I’ll tell you about it in the morning.’

‘Aren’t you coming to bed too?’

‘Not yet,’ I tell her. She shrugs, hands me the torch, and wanders over to the bedroom.

I sit at the kitchen table and angle the torch on its surface so I can read in its light. I put the folder in front of me and run my hands over it. Skein Island library has stolen my mother from me, put her firmly out of my reach once more. But I have stolen something from it. Something important. The first declaration.

I open the folder, and I begin to read.

I switch off the torch and the darkness reaches out to me, wraps me up. Outside, the wind blows, loud and lonely, over the emptiness of the island: the bungalows, in which a few of us, strangers to each other, sleep; the still, blue depths of the swimming pool, untouched by the wind and rain; the rough grasses that cover the cliffs, giving way to a long gravel path that leads up to a blue front door of a silent white house.

I creep into the bedroom and undress. I slide under the duvet, and lie there, listening to my breathing, trying to make my body relax into sleep, unable to cast the images of Amelia’s story from my mind.

A thought occurs to me.

Someone pointed a camera at the door in front of the cupboard at the back of the library. My heart tells me it is not to stop people from getting in. It is to stop something from getting out.

CHAPTER SIX

David didn’t change clothes after work.

He Googled ‘Skein Island’, read the Wikipedia entry and found a few old photos from the sixties of women holding hands in a circle, and of the outside of the chalets where they stayed. As the evening drew in, he made an omelette, then watched a documentary about the Arctic Circle. He sat very still, on the sofa, listening for sounds outside the front door such as the scrape of a key in the lock, the drag of a suitcase up the path. Eventually, he picked up his wallet and left the house.

At The Cornerhouse, Arnie was in his usual seat, sipping a pint. David raised an arm at him, then dropped it. He walked across the room, weaving around the tables and the other men in their small, huddling groups, and was greeted with an expression of surprised dislike.

‘I thought this place wasn’t good enough for you.’

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ David said.

‘It’ll have to wait. Game’s about to start.’ Arnie pulled out a seat and nodded towards it. David sat down and looked back at the bar; Mags was there, her hands on her hips, and the four cubes were already lined up on the counter.

‘I’m not serving,’ warned Mags.

‘He knows,’ said Arnie.

‘Is he playing, then?’

David opened his mouth, and Arnie laid a hand on his arm. ‘Course he is. Why else would he be here?’

‘Right.’ She fixed David with her gaze. ‘You’re after Geoff, then. Come on, Geoff, get yourself up here.’

One of the men sitting by the bar stood up and fiddled with his striped tie. He wore thick bifocals that magnified his gaze. Even without them, it would have been impossible to miss that his attention was fixed on the cubes. He crossed to them, and stood in front of them, blinking. His hair was sleek and black; combined with the glasses, he reminded David of a mole.

‘Go on, Geoff, make a choice, there’s a dear.’

‘I, um, don’t know.’

The tension in the room was growing. There were perhaps ten men sitting at tables, fanning out in a semi-circle from the bar, nursing their pints, leaning forward.

Geoff moved his hand towards the cubes, then withdrew it. David heard the men’s exhalation of breath, and realised he’d been holding his own breath too. He whispered to Arnie, ‘What’s the game about?’ but Arnie flapped his hand until he was quiet again.

‘What did you choose last time, love?’ said Mags, crossing her arms under her breasts, displaying her cleavage in her sheer blouse like a bird fluffing out its feathers.

‘Blue,’ said Geoff. He had a gruff voice, but the tremor within it was easily audible.

‘And was that lucky for you?’

He flinched, and said, ‘No.’

‘Well then, probably best to keep away from such an unlucky colour,’ she told him, with a conspiratorial raise of her eyebrows.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right. Green.’

Mags picked up the green cube and turned it over and over between her long, painted fingernails. ‘You sure?’

Geoff pushed the bridge of his glasses back up his nose with one finger. Nobody else moved. ‘Yeah,’ he said, eventually. ‘Yeah.’

She handed him the cube. He held it in the palm of his left hand and touched the top surface with his right index finger, then squeezed it between finger and thumb.

The lid of the cube popped open.

Geoff reached in, very carefully, and pulled out a small white square of paper.

The room sighed, a slow release of excitement. David glanced at Arnie, and saw a strange mixture of sympathy and relief on his face as he sat back in his chair, his shoulders slumped.

‘Another IOU, is it?’ said Mags. She plucked the white square from Geoff’s hand, along with the green cube. Then she popped the paper under one bra strap, and gave Geoff a big smile, her teeth bared to the room. ‘I’ll have to think of something else you can do for me. Right, who did I say was next?’ David watched her head turn toward him, and she fixed him with a calm, superior gaze. Some sort of power emanated from her; the power of a High Priestess at an ancient ceremony, he thought, or maybe the power of an aging diva, on stage, certain of the undivided attention of her audience.

He broke the gaze, and appealed to Arnie. ‘Listen, all I want to know is what happened on Skein Island. Did your wife’s letters ever mention what took place there? Why she decided not to come home?’

‘Why do you want to know? Marianne will tell you all about it when she gets back, won’t she? Or are you not so sure of that any more?’ He chuckled, a sound like a dry cough. ‘We’ll talk about it after.’

Mags tapped each cube with a long fingernail, three times each, like a summoning ritual.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ said David.

‘Then get out.’ Arnie stared him down.

Mags called, ‘Come on, handsome, get up here and pick a colour before closing time. You can’t do any worse than Geoff, can you?’ She pointed to Geoff, who had retreated to a far table, slumped over, his chin in his hand. Still he watched Mags and the cubes. David got the feeling that if Geoff had been given the opportunity to guess again, he would have taken it, no matter what it cost him.

‘How much time do you think we have?’ said Mags.

David stood up. He walked over to Mags and the cubes. He had the strongest suspicion, from the way she held her chin high and grinned at him, that it wouldn’t matter what colour he picked. She already had the result planned, and, whatever it was, she was looking forward to it.

But the cubes were close now, and they exerted a pull that he hadn’t experienced before. He wanted to touch them. And he wanted to win. It was an exciting sensation, this desire to play. For the first time since Marianne had left he felt in control once more.

It was purely his decision – to play, to guess, to name the colour. He looked at each one in turn, and thought through his options, forcing himself to take his time.

The cubes had markings on them. Carvings. Intricate work. The red one bore a shield, the blue a short sword, or a knife perhaps. The green had one long straight line on it, and the yellow had a scroll. They looked heraldic, or maybe older. Classical in design.

It would be too obvious to go for green. Yellow or blue, perhaps? Blue was the colour of truth, of sunny skies and deep seas. Marianne loved blue. The night before she had left for Skein Island she had been wearing her favourite dark blue waistcoat.

Yellow, then – a scroll could contain answers. But the pull to the red cube was too strong to deny.

‘Red,’ he said.

Mags lifted her eyebrows and opened her mouth. It was such an artful expression of surprise that he felt sure it must be fake. ‘Sure?’ she said.

He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of changing his mind.

‘Yes.’

‘Right then. Bit of an action man, we’ve got here. No messing. Here you go.’

She picked up the red cube and he held out his palm for it, just as Geoff had done before. It was warm and wooden. He felt around the top, found a small depression and pushed it in, and the lid popped open.

Inside was one black marble.

David took it from the cube and held it up. The intense concentration of the men as they focused on the marble was overwhelming; he felt them lean forward, yearning for it.

‘First time lucky,’ said Mags. ‘Come on.’

‘Where?’

‘A trip to the back room,’ she said, as if he should have known. She adjusted the ruffles on her scarlet blouse and smacked her lips together, and a mixture of terror and sexual desire swept over him, horrified him. He was a prisoner to it.

‘No, I don’t need it. One of the others can go,’ he said. He put the marble back in the cube, closed it up, and put it back in line with the others.

‘Doesn’t work that way, dear.’ She grabbed his hand. He felt the points of her fingernails pressing into his skin. ‘You play, you pay.’

‘No, I—’

Arnie came up beside him, patted him on the back, and David found himself walking around the side entrance of the bar, the other men crowding around him, pushing him onwards.

‘You always win first time out,’ whispered Arnie, in his ear. ‘To give you the taste.’

‘Just relax and enjoy it,’ said Mags. She held out a shot glass, half-filled with a brown, viscose liquid. ‘A shot of brandy. To get you going.’

‘Going where?’ he said, and everyone laughed. Reality was fading; everything was moving more slowly. He couldn’t remember why he was afraid. He took the glass, drained it, said, ‘That wasn’t brandy,’ as he tasted oranges and something fresh, like mint. He was getting an erection.

One of the men said, close to his right cheek, ‘I don’t know anything about Skein Island. She never talked to us again. All she left was a note.’

‘But the letters,’ David said. Was it Arnie talking? ‘The cards. Birthday cards.’ His voice sounded deeper, like an echo in a cavern, the sound spreading low, through the muscles of his abdomen.

‘I’ve got a lady friend in Bedfordshire. I asked her to send them.’ There was a snort, and hot, beery breath filled David’s nose. The smell was unbearably potent and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. ‘Couldn’t let Marianne think she’d been deserted. But that’s what happened. Gone, she was. She wanted to be gone.’

Mags shoved Arnie and the other men back, flapping her hands, then led David down the corridor that ended in a windowless storage room, filled with orange crates of empty bottles, cardboard boxes and silver kegs.

Set in one wall was a small, white door with four coloured squares painted upon it: red, blue, yellow and green. Mags opened it with a large brass key, attached to a gold chain around her neck, and it swung back to reveal a total, consuming blackness from which palpable warmth emanated. From within the dark, David sensed a want, a need. Something called to him. It was as if Marianne had said his name; he felt his erection twitch in response.

He stepped through the doorway.

The men were cheering, very far away. A sweet smell enveloped him, like a cloud of perfume left behind by a beautiful woman at a party. He wanted to find her; he pushed through a crowd of faceless people to reach her. The cheering grew louder, ahead of him, becoming the rise and fall of many people. His legs were being pushed apart and he felt something large between his knees, under his buttocks. He fell backwards, ended up sitting astride it, and it began to move at speed, towards the thin, horizontal strip of intense blue daylight – the purest, cleanest sky he had ever seen. His body shook under the pressure, the sensation of speed, and the cheers became deafening, drowning out his own heartbeat as he crashed into the living picture at the end of the tunnel.

His hands were full; he looked down, and saw a long wooden pole and thin strips of leather. The horse upon which he sat had a black mane that was streaming in the wind, and when he looked up he saw the enemy, ahead, dressed in black and thundering towards him on an enormous charger. There was nothing else for it but to lean forward, brace himself for impact, and swing around the lance, aiming for the breastplate, trying to block out all other thoughts but to win.

The collision was the most intense delight of his life; he felt his lance crack into the chest of his opponent, who reeled back and fell to the ground. The crowd roared their approval, banging drums, clapping hands to make a cacophony of elation. He dropped his broken lance and saluted them, over and over. The cheers only grew louder. A pink haze filled his vision, then encased him in slick, warm wetness. It was her, his prize.

He was soaked in the ecstasy he had won, drowned in it, pulled down and through, for the longest time. Then the pink haze of her love withdrew, along with her scent, and that final loss caused a crescendo of intense pain. He was a hero no more. Just plain old David, abandoned. Lonely. It was more than he could bear.

After an age, the visions receded just enough to bring him back to his body. He got to his feet and staggered forward until he collided, hard, with a solid wall. The shock of it brought tears to his eyes. He put his hands against freezing brickwork and crouched down, making himself as small as he could manage, hoping she wouldn’t find him again and take away everything he had ever known, ever loved. He had been aware of that power in her, so much greater than his own, so different from the soft, tentative touches of women he had known.

Like Marianne – so tender, so hesitant to let him possess her, to find enjoyment in sex, at the beginning. Then that last night, when she had demanded pleasure. And he had given her what she wanted, but it had made him uncomfortable to be her object. That unsettled feeling had turned out to be the first tremors of the earthquake that now shook him to pieces, left him unsalvageable.

The thought of Marianne flooded into his emptiness. He punched the wall – once, twice. Again. He felt the pain, the blood on his knuckles, but the pain was welcome. It reminded him of what he was, of his ability to protect himself, to overcome, as a man should. But the wall did not shrink away from his fists. There was no way out of the darkness.

A bright light switched on overhead.

David looked up, squinting, and made out the plastic casing of a security light. A cobweb was strung between it and the wall. A light film of drizzle hung on the strands of the cobweb. The banality of it was bewildering.

‘I told you not to come back,’ said a woman, near his right ear. He flinched away from her voice, and she said, ‘What have you done? Jesus.’ She knelt in front of him. He managed to stay still as she picked up his hand and examined his knuckles. ‘Can you get up?’ She was surprisingly strong, pulling him up to his feet, and her black jacket, white shirt, neat black hat, suddenly became familiar.

‘Sam.’

Under the security light she was as bright as an angel. ‘I told you he wouldn’t come back here.’

He couldn’t understand what she meant. Then, in a rush, he placed himself outside the library, and the confusion hit him hard, gave him an attack of shivers. How had he got there? He had no memory of leaving the pub. ‘I didn’t…’

‘Have you been drinking?’

He remembered the glass Mags gave to him, and nodded. ‘The Cornerhouse.’

‘Right, well, you’ve had enough.’ She tugged his arm, and he followed her to her car. During the drive, he kept getting traces of the distinctive perfume, but every time he turned his head towards it, it disappeared again. It hadn’t been real, not real in the way that Sam was. He began to understand that he’d had some sort of hallucination. Never had feelings been so intense, so painful, so pleasurable.

Sam pulled the car up outside her house, and he followed her inside. She motioned for him to follow her upstairs; he brushed the string of bells hanging from the banisters, and the tinkling noise was pleasant, restful. How amazingly tired he was, but Sam steered him into the bathroom, and got him to sit on the side of the bath as she dug out antiseptic, cotton wool and plasters from under her sink. She examined his knuckles, then began to dab at them with the antiseptic.

‘She’s not coming back,’ David said. He wasn’t sure if he was talking about Marianne or the woman who had encased him in the vision. He wanted them both.

‘Of course she is. It’s one week at a holiday camp. She’ll be back, and she’ll be so pleased to see you. That’s how a holiday works.’

‘Not this one.’

‘What makes you think Skein Island is any different?’ Sam peeled the backing from a large fabric plaster and smoothed it over his middle knuckle. ‘It’s just middle-class, middle-aged women discovering themselves. Am I doing the right things? Living the right life? Who the hell knows? Seven days on an island off the coast of Devon isn’t going to tell you, but it’s free and it’s better than getting drunk and punching walls.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, automatically, to the bitterness in her voice. He reached out and touched her face. She looked so angry, so young. How could she be so dismissive? She let him cup her chin, and the anger faded as he told her, ‘I’m so sorry that you found me like this. I don’t understand what’s happening. I’ve had some kind of… dream.’

‘I told you to stay away from The Cornerhouse. The men who come out of there are wasted, and they can’t wait to go back again. It was investigated a while back. We thought maybe they were drinking home brew, something really strong, but we didn’t find anything. You don’t want to end up like that. You’re freezing. Come on.’

‘No, I need to tell you—’

‘Come on,’ she told him, and he got up and trod along behind her, across the corridor to a darkened bedroom, warm from the radiator under the window. She drew the purple curtains and pulled back the duvet on the neat bed. ‘Take off your clothes and get in.’

‘No, I should go…’ But he couldn’t find the will to move, and when she crossed to him, crouched down and started to remove his shoes, he had the strongest desire to cry. It was all he could do to stand there and keep his face still, in case she looked up.

She put his shoes neatly against the skirting board, then took off his socks and slipped them into each shoe. Then she stood up and started on his shirt. He let her work the buttons, pull it from him, and when she put both hands against his chest the warmth of her was astounding. ‘Get into bed,’ she said.

‘No.’

He stared at her, watched her take in his denial. He couldn’t obey her instruction; he had to find control once more.

‘Get in.’

‘No.’

‘Please. I… Please, get warm.’

He put his hands over hers, then led her to the bed, and pulled her down with him. Underneath the duvet, he wrapped his arms around her; she moved back against him, her bottom pressed into his groin.

‘There,’ he said.

They didn’t talk. Although he was tired, he couldn’t get close to sleep. It evaded him every time he grew near to it. He matched his breathing to Sam’s, in and out, and he thought of how quickly everything had changed. He could not have imagined, only a week ago, that he would be in bed with another woman. Only terrible men did that, not men like him. And yet it did not feel wrong to be there. Sam was fully clothed, and he still had his trousers on, and it wasn’t even about who was wearing what. It was a comfort at a terrible time. It was as if a death had happened, and those left had to find a way to carry on. How they carried on mattered to nobody any more, nobody important.

‘This is really happening,’ she said. ‘Yes. It’s okay.’

‘You don’t get it. Nothing ever happens to me. I feel like I’m always waiting for something, a moment.’

He put his hand on her breast. He wanted to show her how easy it was to change fate. ‘I know how it feels. To want things to be different.’

‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t want things to be different. I want me to be different.’ She touched the back of his hand, and he took it as a sign that she wanted him to continue, to stroke her nipple, bring her to feeling. He touched her with the curiosity of exploration, without sexual thoughts in his head, and remembered the girl who had lived down the road when he was little, and the games they had played together – looking at each other, wondering how it all fit together. The delight in the fact that people fitted together at all; that was what came back to him through the night, and even the next morning, as he watched her make coffee and toast in her tiny kitchen, and realised he couldn’t wait for the end of the week. He had to see Marianne.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Sam, once they had eaten.

‘That’s not true. I’m just not sure what it does mean, that’s all.’

‘It means you were lonely and drunk.’

‘No, I wasn’t – listen, I have to go. God, that sounds awful, but I really do have to go.’

‘You’re going there, aren’t you? Skein Island? There’s no way to get on it. They don’t take men.’

‘I’ll find a way,’ David said. The thought of persevering, and accomplishing, was all that was keeping him going. He needed to see his wife, to tell her what he had learned last night. Maybe her mother had never gone to the island after all. Maybe she was dead, had been dead for years. That could be the starting point for solving the mystery together. The case of the disappearing mother, and the father that covered it up for years.

He could picture it clearly, and how it would play out. At the end they would be the triumphant husband and wife.

‘Go on then,’ Sam said. ‘Just forget about last night. That’ll be easier for everyone.’ She had curled in on herself, her lilac dressing gown pulled tight over her breasts, no strength visible in the dropping lines of her tiny body.

‘No, I don’t want to forget it, okay? I’ll come and see you when I’m back. We’ll talk properly.’ But he did want to forget it, was already filing it away as a stupid mistake after some sort of hallucination that he never wanted to think about again. Except that the two things had become linked in his mind. Being wrapped up in his vision, and in her. Being the centre of a fresh, clean world.

He kissed her on the cheek, and she pushed him away. ‘I hope it all works out for you.’

‘You too.’

He let himself out of her house, and ran home, pumping cold, cold air into his lungs, calculating what he was going to pack and how much money he would need to find a way onto Skein Island.

Nobody would take him.

The afternoon sky began to darken, and the few fishermen left on the quay all told him the same thing: men weren’t allowed there; it wasn’t worth the money David was offering to break the rules; couldn’t he tell that a storm was coming? They were battening down the boats, and heading inside for the evening. But when David followed them into The Ship and Pilot, a small, grey pub set back from the harbour wall, he found a mass of old men with grizzled, suspicious faces, eyeing him as he stood in the doorway.

David took a few steps forward. The small fire in the grate was barely flickering, and the wood upon it hissed. Hanging from the ceiling, suspended with catgut, were dusty bottles containing delicate sailing ships built from matchsticks and tiny scraps of cloth. On the mantelpiece – one long stretch of dark, uneven wood – sat four small cubes. Red, blue, yellow, green. He felt the pull of them.

He stepped back, nearly fell over his own feet, and hurried outside, to their laughter.

In the harbour, the solitary boats were pulling at the hefty blue ropes that moored them, tossing their heads like horses at the approaching rain, visible over the channel. David stood against the thick sea wall and looked around, at the hills, pressing close. He couldn’t return to Wootton Bassett, not now he’d seen the cubes here. They were a secret that every other man somehow understood, and from which he had been excluded. Finding Marianne, conquering this adventure, was more important than ever. If he could solve one mystery, he could solve them all.

‘Night’s getting in.’

So he had been under observation; a young, heavy-set man was watching him from a small, blue fishing boat. A stuffed doll, like a scarecrow, was tied tight by its waist and neck to the prow. The man was heaving up a rope, hand over hand. David watched as an empty, crusted lobster pot, stinking of the bottom of the sea, broke free from the waves and was tossed on to the deck.

‘Will you take me out?’ David said. The scarecrow had been dressed in a blue overall and a sou’wester. In contrast, the young fisherman wore black jeans and a grey ski-jacket, modern, stylish. His long curly hair flopped around his ears in the wind.

‘I’m just putting her to bed.’ He didn’t have much of a local accent.

‘I’ll pay anything you like.’

‘Where do you want to go, eh? Night fishing?’

‘Skein Island.’

The fisherman laughed without making a sound. ‘You can’t get on there, mate.’

‘Just to look. From the boat. Just to sail round it once and come back again.’

‘It’ll be a rough ride.’

‘That’s fine,’ David said. He got out his wallet, sensing victory. ‘How much?’

‘We’ll do that later. Come over and put on a jacket.’ The man set out a metal walkway from the side of the boat to the quay, and David edged across its slippery surface.

He had sailed before, at South Cerney, when he was a teenager – a friend’s father had kept a boat moored there – but this grey sea, choppy with intention, was very different from that calm stretch of water. The boat bucked underneath his feet as they hit the mouth of the harbour, and as the rain picked up so did the swell of the waves. David stood next to the fisherman at the wheel in the tiny cabin, undecorated apart from a small ceramic mermaid placed on the sill of the window, her arms stretched up, exposing enormous breasts with red-tipped nipples. The wheel was turned first one way, then the other, apparently without thought, somehow making sense of the ocean.

‘Your wife out there, is she?’ The fisherman nodded. ‘We get ’em every now and again. Lovesick types, jealous types. You don’t look like the usual.’

‘What do they usually look like?’

‘Thick. It’s no good depending on women that way, is it? Either you’re on top or they are. Dog eat dog. Eat bitch.’

In a fit of pure malice David said, ‘Married, are you?’ already knowing the answer.

The man gave his silent laugh, shoulders shrugging. ‘You won’t catch me playing that game.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

‘You mean that’s what you used to say.’ He was right, of course. During A Levels, sitting around in the common room with their legs slung over the frayed arms of the chairs and a ghetto blaster playing rap or indie as loud as they dared, he and his friends had talked about girls as the enemy. To be overwhelmed, taken, given what for, then left if they became too demanding in some way that was never specified. It had felt expected of them to talk that way, no matter what they felt inside about themselves or their sexuality, which had to remain hidden from view. Women were seen as a mysterious foe back then, lying in wait across a wasteland of years, shrouded in fog. Not quite real.

‘There it is,’ said the fisherman.

Ahead, cliffs rose from the sea, close and dark. David watched the fisherman turn the wheel, and the boat struggled against the surging waves, drawing parallel to the island.

‘Once around and we’re heading back.’

David nodded. ‘I’ll just go out on the deck, get a better look.’

‘Hold on to the rail, then.’

He slid back the cabin door and stepped on to the deck. The rain and wind hit him like an attack; he braced himself, managed to close the door behind him, and gripped the rail, feeling terror of the deep seep into him.

Marianne was on that island, and he couldn’t get any closer. He had harboured visions of diving in, swimming across clear water with powerful strokes of his arms, to find her on the shore, waiting, with a look in her eyes that unmistakeably meant I love you. But the walls of the cliffs, the black rocks that surrounded them, were a rebuttal of his imaginings. He couldn’t see anything but the rock face.

He looked at his hands on the rail. The strength of them, holding on.

The man at the library had tried to make Marianne obey, bend to his will, and she had told him no. How had she done that? All the power in his body was nothing compared to her – her ability to change the situation, take life and shake it out, make it work out differently. His hands couldn’t hold her; the cubes had shown him that. A woman’s power to control men – Marianne, Mags, the damsel from the back room of The Cornerhouse – beat back the strength of his grip every time.

He let go of the rail.

At first he kept his balance, tilting his body to keep upright, riding the motion of the boat. Then it bucked, so hard and fast, like a bull underneath him, and his thighs hit the rail and his body went over, turning a full somersault into the rain. The liquid ice of the water encased him and froze him, instantly, leaving no way to move, no way to think. When he surfaced, sucking up a breath as huge as the sky, he realised his lifejacket was the only thing that had saved him, bringing him up to the surface.

What are you doing? said Marianne, quite clearly, in his ear. He couldn’t reply. The waves slapped his face, ripped at his hair and throat. The boat wasn’t close; he couldn’t see it anywhere. He tried to swim in a circle to catch sight of it, and couldn’t even manage that. The sea kept dragging him onwards, insistent, and suddenly a black rock loomed up at his face. He threw out his hands, caught it, felt the slam and the scrape of his body against it, couldn’t hold on, and was tossed back. Stinging ribbons of pain twined around his palms and wrists, and then he was thrown at the rock again. This time he didn’t get his arms out; his head connected with the rock, and there was no pain, no sea, no island. Just the sense that something had to be done, didn’t it have to be done? And Marianne saying, David, David, what are you doing? over and over in his left ear, her voice so sad, so sorry, that all he wanted was to hold her and tell her that everything was going to be—