‘Sometimes it confuses her having me here. She forgets I live with her. Forgets she has children, or grandchildren. I don’t think having you around will make things worse. It’s more company for her and talking to people is good. Plus, I need you here.’
Kate pictured again the Lena of her childhood, tough, rough around the edges, desperately caring in her own unorthodox way, and was haunted by regret. The sense of loss was too big, too impossible to wrap her mind around. How she wished she hadn’t lost those years. ‘It was very good of you to do this,’ she said. ‘Really, Em. Lena’s lucky to have you.’
They had all been lucky to have had Lena.
Emily stopped pacing and pulled the cuffs of her jumper down over her hands to hide her ruined nails. She nodded. ‘I needed somewhere safe to go. After—’
‘Joe.’ His name, once again, shaped the very air, changing its texture and altering Emily, making her shrink. She turned to her dresser and began rearranging items in the film of dust that covered its surface.
She shook her head quickly. ‘Look, I don’t want to talk about him. Not yet.’ She sounded brittle, as if she might snap at any moment, fracturing along old fault lines like an ancient piece of china. ‘Why don’t you tell me about Ben, and your life in New York. It all looks so wonderful.’
Emily thought about the pictures she’d ogled on Kate’s Instagram: the fantasy perfection of Ben, with his designer suits, model-esque physique and artfully scruffy hair. How could a relationship with such a man be anything less than perfect? She’d studied every photo Kate posted online in minute detail, when that were all she had left of Kate: the skiing holidays and nightclub posing, the fancy restaurants and gallery openings, the whole rich, luxuriant life Kate had immersed herself in, slipping into a new persona like a new skin. Emily was just one of hundreds of thumbnail friends to grace her page – a fragment of memory clinging steadfast as a barnacle to a rock. Ignored, just another insignificant face. Until now.
Kate must have reasons for coming beyond old loyalty and the desire to rekindle their friendship. She couldn’t have been altogether happy with her life if it was so easy to shed that glossy new skin and leave it all behind.
Kate played with a strand of hair. ‘I will tell you,’ she said, ‘but not now. I don’t really want to talk about Ben yet either. It’s complicated. He’s there … and I’m here.’
‘At least you didn’t marry him.’ Emily’s habit of saying the first thing that popped into her head without a thought was in some respects an admirable trait, but it didn’t always win her friends.
Kate was used to it. ‘No, not yet.’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘So, the subject of men is off the table for us both.’
Emily gave her a rueful smile. ‘I suppose so. What do you mean not yet?’
Kate gave a languid wave, deftly dismissive. ‘A question for another time. When I don’t feel like I’m drowning with tiredness.’
Emily nodded. ‘Of course, sorry. Actually now would be a good opportunity for you to have a rest while I make dinner. I was thinking after we eat we might take a walk over to the farm and visit Dan.’
Kate was half consumed by a jaw-cracking yawn. She felt a shiver of trepidation and pleasure at the prospect of seeing Dan again. ‘Fine. Not the resting part. I think maybe a shower instead. If I fell asleep now I’d be out for hours.’
‘OK. You know where the bathroom is. And your room – it’s the same one you always had. Do you need me to show you?’
Kate shook her head and got up from the bed, the soft quilt and pillow doing their utmost to drag her back.
*
As Emily clattered down the stairs, Kate tugged the suitcase across the hall and stepped into the bedroom that had always been hers – stepping back in time. Nothing had changed: not the blue forget-me-knots on the bedspread or the candlewick blanket; not the walls painted the colour of cornflowers or the tarnished silver mirror hanging a little askew above a rickety chest of drawers; not the little, wooden bed beneath the window or the smell of fabric softener and dust, or the windows that could do with a clean, but still revealed the most beautiful, picture-perfect view in the world. However far she travelled, Kate did not think it was possible to top the view from her Bluebell Bank bedroom.
A hard lump of emotion invaded her chest, pushing into her throat and threatening to undo her. A heavy cloak of nostalgia settled around her, shimmering all shades of happy and sad, and every hue between. Knowing better than to let jet lag and wistfulness hook her, Kate made herself keep busy. She unzipped her case and dug around for her toilet bag, which she carried down the hall as she went to take a shower.
The bathroom had gotten an overhaul since her last visit, thank goodness: new shower, fresh paint, pristine white porcelain. The shower itself used to be a trickle of lukewarm water from the rubber tube that attached to the taps, in an ancient, freezing stone bath so scratched and stained it was impossible to tell what colour it really was. Not that Kate had cared back then. She would have made do with a daily dip in the river if Lena hadn’t forced her to bathe occasionally. Now she lined up an array of expensive products and stepped into the steamy cubicle with a luxuriant sigh.
As she soaped and shampooed, she felt the last vestiges of tension from that final fight with Ben ebb away. His incredulity had rung in her ears all the way across the Atlantic (‘You’re going to quit your job to go and run some mouldy old bookshop! Why? You don’t even read books. And who is this girl you never talk about whom you claim is your best friend all of a sudden?’)
Fair points, both. Kate couldn’t adequately explain the inexorable pull across the ocean. The Cottons. Bluebell Bank. Emily.
She had known she would come the instant she opened the email, sitting in the middle of Ben’s big bed wearing silk sleep shorts and a Edinburgh university T-shirt as she waited for him to return, framed by the New York night sky through the picture window: velvet and purple and polluted with the glow of a million firefly lights.
The email was so perfectly Emily that she could hear Em’s voice in every typed word, could hear the Merlot talking, and she wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
For six years, Emily had been no more than a fragment of memory; a stab of guilt that pierced in the depths of a sleepless night; the unbidden thought that came to mind when least expected – hurrying through Time Square late for work, or boarding the subway and catching sight of a countenance or gesture that tipped her headlong into reminiscence.
No messages, not a single word, save the depressingly formal thank you note. Until that email.
Quitting her job, telling Ben, purchasing the ticket, saying goodbye to her friends – all of those things were items to tick off her list, and she did them all with a brisk, unemotional vigour. It was accomplished quickly, simply. Before she knew what was happening she had a suitcase by the door of Ben’s apartment, a one-way ticket tucked between the pages of her passport and a lot of confused people clamouring for a better explanation.
Kate did not fully understand her choice either, but she knew enough: this was redemption, for both of them; the joy of rediscovering a simpler time, retracing their steps. Emily had been the key to Kate’s salvation, enveloping her in her big, loving family when all she knew was neglect and cold and that sinking feeling accompanying the clink of wine bottles.
Now it was Kate’s turn to do the saving.
Kate hadn’t packed the right clothes, didn’t own the right clothes: she was now a city girl through and through. But now that she was here that didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered: not the differences between her and Emily, the way they’d let circumstances come between them or the divergence of their paths; not the doubts and uncertainties Ben had exploited to try to convince her to stay.
Stepping from the shower, Kate still felt bone-achingly tired – neither the tight confines of her airplane seat nor the snoring of her supersized