‘No thanks, Tilda.’
She went into the kitchen to check. It was spotless, as ever.
Tilda even rearranged the fridge letters which said sweet, silly things like I love you Mum and No 1 Dad, and made sure they also said We need milk.
She opened the fridge door. Tilda’s attention to detail extended to making sure that every level of the fridge had its own produce: dairy, fruit and meat, with eggs, wine and milk neatly slotted into the side section. Maybe she would have that drink. She took out a bottle of Pinot Grigio. There was enough for a decent glass left in the bottom. She poured it into a tumbler and slung the bottle into the recycling bin.
They had been married sixteen years, nine of them spent here in Coldharbor, where she had watched her husband vanish into a world of his own, a world in which the language of seals seemed to mean more to him than anything she had to offer.
That was what men did, of course, she thought: they displaced you, diminished you and then deserted you. What had happened to her interior-design business? It didn’t take a lot of money with it when it went bust, but it took away her pride, her sense of self-confidence. Leo had tried to help, but typically did so in the most hurtful way. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. That’s where your talents lie, and that’s what you should stick to,’ he would say. ‘Do what you do best.’
She had told him over and over that teaching qualifications gained in the UK did not allow her to teach in America, and that she would have to retrain. But he didn’t listen. He just told her to face the facts: she was not good enough to be an interior designer, exterior designer, any kind of designer, at least not here on the Cape; she didn’t have the talent. It might have worked in Scotland, where they think haggis is haute cuisine, but it wouldn’t here. Cape Cod was stiff with designers, artists, interior decorators and every kind of smart-ass, trendy, boutique-owning fashionista.
The business collapse didn’t finish them, nor her drinking, nor his endless belittling of Scotland (why did he hate the place so much?).
What lay between them would always lie between them. It looked down from the mantelpiece, from the painting in the sitting room and from her bedside: Julian with the uncertain look of a 9-year-old in his first school uniform; Julian on the beach, tousled hair and head poking out from a sand burial; Julian aged 10, the last picture, on his bike outside the bookshop on Main Street. He had gone on the research trip in the Zodiac rubber dinghy the next morning with his father.
Margot took the wine into the bedroom and placed it on the bedside table beside the framed portrait of her son. She kissed the tips of her fingers and laid them gently on his forehead. She turned the frame to the wall, drank some wine and lay back on the bed. There were only ever two painkillers that worked for her and drink was one of them. The postman had been, the housekeeper had gone, and Leo was God knew where. She pulled up her skirt and let her hand drift between her legs, fluttering her fingers like butterfly wings.
She thought of the last time at the Squire bar in Chatham, the fisherman with salt tang on his body, the dragon’s head tattoo entwined around his thighs with long tongues pointing to his crotch, and whisky on his breath. It was quick, sordid, car-park sex. And why not? It was great. It made her feel good just thinking about it; not because it was any kind of revenge against Leo, far from it. But because, as she told herself, it was my choice, my pleasure, my sex, my lust, and I’ll have it how and when I want. I am a mother of two – well, one now – and with a husband lost to the sea just as all those widowed women on the Cape lost their husbands to the sea.
The sea is made of women’s tears, they say on the Cape, and they’re right. I know how those widows feel. I don’t have affairs; too bloody complicated, and anyway, you always wind up with a needy, whining man telling you he loves you more than anything in the world, when all he really wants is guiltless, risk-free, zero-cost sex. I will take my pleasures as and when I want to. She raised herself on to an elbow, drained the glass of wine, took the phone off the hook and reached into the bedside drawer. It was always there, her ever-dependable friend, none too discreetly covered by a clothing catalogue. She wondered if Tilda knew. She didn’t care if Leo knew or not. She lay back on the bed thinking of the fisherman with salt on his skin and whisky on his breath.
The Dark Side was a steakhouse on the main street of Coldharbor with a long teak bar that stretched the length of the building to a small conservatory overlooking the inner harbour, called Eel Pond, at the back. The place was unlit except for candles which cast their flickering light over every table. Summer or winter, day or night, the Dark Side was always the same.
Kemp sometimes used the place for meetings with colleagues and overseas visitors when he felt such occasions would go better with a drink: they always did. But he and Sandy mostly used it as an unofficial headquarters for emergency lunches or drinks when one of them had something interesting to report, gossip to discuss, grumbles to share. Today was definitely an emergency meeting. Kemp bought a copy of the Herald and pushed open the swing doors of the Dark Side, standing on the threshold for a moment to allow his eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom.
The Cape Herald was a local daily paper packed with the news the locals really wanted: court reports, road works, sewage spills, the latest inane decision of the Barnstaple county municipal authorities. After twenty years on the paper Sandy Rowan was senior enough to leave the small stuff to the trainees who (amazingly) still came in every year from college media courses wanting to learn how to be journalists. Sandy never understood it. Every kid you saw these days was glued to a laptop, mobile or iPod, yet here they were, queuing up, year in year out to work in an industry that created its main product by squirting ink on to pulp made from dead trees.
Sandy specialised in the big stories: the Kennedys in their Hyannis compound (the paper made sure it was very respectful to them); tracking the tourist dollars to check that at least some of local tax-take went back into the sewage-treatment plants, the roads and the schools; and of course Cape Cod’s most famous institution: the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies.
What had made Sandy something of a Cape celebrity was his weekly column, a collection of controversial news, views and reviews about life on the Cape. The column appeared on Tuesdays, with a photograph that made him look a lot younger than his forty-six years, under the rubric ‘Rowan’s Ride’.
Sandy did not set out to be controversial, and intensely disliked over-opinionated columnists who peddled fake moral outrage from the dubious vantage point of their own shallow lives. But he took pride in exposing cosy consensual opinions held to be self-evident because they had been repeated for so long. This did not always make him popular.
When a touring theatrical company put on one of the more celebrated plays of the twentieth-century American canon, Sandy had caused outrage with his review, which began:
Eugene O’Neill tried to drink himself to death on the Cape, at his house in Provincetown to be precise. Pity he didn’t succeed. Have you ever sat through five hours of Long Day’s Journey into Night? Try it. It will make the rest of your life feel like you made it to heaven early.
The editor stood by his star columnist, up to a point. But Sandy was never asked to review a play again.
He was already at their table when Kemp arrived.
‘The usual, please, Cleo,’ said Kemp, smiling at the tall, pale waitress, who had already mixed his favourite drink.
He sat down, checked his BlackBerry, and then pocketed it as Cleo emerged from the gloom with a long glass of chilled green tea, cut with lime juice and ginger ale and served with crushed ice, a slice of lemon and a sprig of mint. Leo called it ‘green dawn’, a name he had dreamt up along with the recipe. One day he would get round to taking out a patent and would market it as one of the world’s best-tasting health drinks – one day. In the evening he added a double shot of vodka, to put a little kick into the health habit.
‘Trouble?’