Where Love Lies (7 page)

She wraps the mac around my shoulders. Suz holds the umbrella above all of our heads. With the rain not falling on me, I can feel how wet I am. My hair streams down my back. My fringe is plastered to my forehead. ‘I’m fine,’ I tell Molly, beginning to shiver.

‘What happened to your hand? It’s bright red.’

‘Oh. I burned it on the iron. It doesn’t hurt.’

Molly tuts and puts her arms around me. ‘Come along with me, we’ll get you into a hot bath and then some dry clothes. A nice cup of tea.’ She begins to draw me towards the Old Vicarage, but I stop.

‘I think I might have left the iron plugged in.’

‘Then we’ll go to the cottage.’ She pulls me the other way. Over Molly’s shoulder, I see Suz wink at
me.

‘I’ll get back to work and leave you in Mum’s capable hands.’

‘I honestly only came out for a breath of fresh air,’ I say.

‘A nice cup of tea, and some salve for that burn. You’ll be good as new, you’ll see.’

At Hope Cottage, she fusses. She makes me sit, wrapped in a blanket, on my sofa while she draws a bath for me and finds me dry clothes. While I’m in the bath she brings me a cup of
tea, carefully averting her eyes from my body among the lavender-scented bubbles which she gave me for Christmas. She perches the cup on the edge of the bath. ‘You could get a lovely white bathroom suite for this,’ she says, backing out, ‘it would just brighten up the room. Now relax, warm up.’

We haven’t redecorated the upstairs bathroom; the tub, sink and toilet are a violent salmon pink, to
match the flowery wallpaper which is peeling in one corner. The tiles have contrasting flowers. We don’t use the pink bidet so I’ve put a spider plant in it. It seems to be doing quite well.

I lie back in the hot water, my burned hand propped on the side of the bath so it doesn’t sting. I’d like to think more about this feeling about Ewan, and why it hijacked me. But I can hear Molly in the cottage,
talking to herself busily. It sounds like she’s finishing ironing Quinn’s shirts, and then I can hear pots and pans going in the kitchen.

I rest my head on the back of the tub, gazing up at the ceiling. Maybe it’s the presence of my mother-in-law, but the euphoria I felt on the common has drained out of me, leaving me feeling heavy and tired. Lavender has always reminded me of a jumper I found
in a charity shop once. It was pale blue wool, lovely and light, but washing didn’t remove the smell, and whenever I wore it I smelled like an old lady. Now, because of the bubble bath, it reminds me of Molly. The gold-coloured wrapping paper she used at Christmas, sprigged with holly. Molly holly. All the gifts kept till after Christmas lunch, just as the Wickhams had always done it.

A light
knock on the door makes me start and open my eyes. The water is tepid and the bubbles have nearly all gone. The door opens and Quinn pokes his head in. ‘Hello, love. Did I wake you?’

His hair is wet and when he comes into the bathroom, he smells of rain. He touches my shoulder with a cool hand. ‘Mum’s downstairs. She says you were traipsing around the common in the rain like a water nymph.’

‘She never used those words, did she?’

He shakes his head. ‘She’s made us a stew.’ He puts down the toilet seat and sits on it, gazing at me. ‘Sorry about that. I know you’re a grown-up who should be able to walk in the rain if she wants to, but you know what Mum’s like.’

‘She’s only being kind. Besides, Suz was out like a shot with an umbrella.’

‘It’s a bit like a goldfish bowl, the common.
Are you all right? You burned your hand?’ He picks it up gently, examines the bandage his mother put around it.

‘It’s fine. I’ll live.’ I yawn. ‘I’m worn out though.’

‘I’ll tell Mum you want an early night. I’m sure she’ll take the hint.’ He stands and picks up his toothbrush.

‘Quinn? Do you ever think about your ex-girlfriends?’

He catches my eye in the mirror and gives me half a smile. ‘You
mean, besides the ones I run into in the pub and on the street on a daily basis?’

‘You make it sound as if you dated most of the village.’

‘Only one or two. And no, I don’t think about any of them, or not in any way except as friends.’ He looks down, squeezes toothpaste. ‘Do you think about your exes?’

‘Oh, something today reminded me of someone I used to know a long time ago.’ He begins to
brush his teeth, his back to me. He’s waiting for me to say more, and for a moment, looking at the back of his neck, how the hair curls there when it’s damp, I think I might tell him.
Isn’t it weird
, I’d say,
that I felt ten years of distance vanish
.

Isn’t it strange that I could still feel anything about him
.

But this isn’t what you say to your husband, in your bathroom, as he brushes his teeth.
You don’t admit these feelings about another man, not if you still have them, not even if, until today, you thought they had faded.

‘A long, long time ago, in a land far away,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not important. How was your day?’

SOMETIMES WHEN HE
came home from work, Felicity was trying to draw. Sometimes she was waiting for him, full of questions, wanting to share in his day. Sometimes she was in the middle of a spontaneous DIY project. He came home one evening last September to find she’d ripped up every single downstairs carpet and thrown it into the front garden. Which was fair enough – they were hideous patterned
things from the 1960s, which was apparently the last time the Ogdens had bothered to decorate – but he’d been planning to get some professionals in.

‘Look!’ she’d told him, standing in the middle of the dining room, their furniture pushed to one side so she could get up the underlay. ‘These floorboards! Aren’t they gorgeous? I knew they would be. Look at this.’ She dropped to her knees and pointed.

‘I think that’s woodworm,’ he said.

‘Yes. But it’s beautiful, all the curved holes.’ She frowned. ‘We have to get rid of it though, I suppose, before we fall through.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘An experiment on what?’

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

He sniffed. ‘Christmas.’

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

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

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

‘A million taxis.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you miss her?’ he asked, finally.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not quite right for what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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