'That's my fault. Keeping you talking.'
'No, not your fault,' Amy said.
'The man I saw you with,' Teresa said. 'Who was he?'
'At the hotel, you mean?'
'No. just now. In the market.'
Amy looked away, across the line of cars and vans, towards the sea. 'I'm not sure who you mean.'
'I thought 1 might know him,' Teresa said.
'How could you? You coming in last night, getting in late.'
'That's what 1 thought. Well, it doesn't matter.'
'No, 1 suppose not,' Amy said, her hair flailing across her eyes.
CHAPTER 7
Nick was already in bed and lounging around with that morning's newspaper when Amy came upstairs and went into the bathroom. He heard her brushing her teeth. A little later she walked into the bedroom and began undressing. He watched her as he always did. She was used to him lying there at night watching her, and didn't seem to mind. To him she still looked the same naked as she had always done. Everything that he had found attractive in the old days was unchanged by the years.
His parents and her husband had been cremated on the same day, less than a week after the massacre, and he and Amy had met at the crematorium. She had been waiting outside the chapel when he emerged, blackcoated, darkeyed, swathed in misery, alone, not supported by any of her friends. They had simply stared at each other. lt was one more upheaval in a week of upheavals, a time of shock when nothing was a surprise. Afterwards they walked back down to the town, side by side, noticing other hearses moving up towards the cemetery on the Ridge, and the attendant camera lights and film crews, and the reporters.
He had no one left, and she was also alone. Subject to powerful feelings neither of them had tried to control, he took her back with him to the hotel in the afternoon, they were together that night, and had stayed together ever since.
That was still a time when people were able to speak about it. There were reporters everywhere, nowhere more than in
the White Dragon, where many of them stayed, and telling the story of what Grove had done became a way of trying to deal with what happened.
Later, it was no longer like that. The survivors found that it was not after all a way, that it added somehow to the horror of what had occurred. Those enquiring faces and voices, sometimes polite, sometimes intrusive, the notepads and tape recorders and video cameras, led quickly to the headlines and pictures in the tabloids, the suffering translated into a series of cliches. At first it was a novelty for people in Bulverton to see the town and its people on television, but then it quickly sank in that what was being shown to the world was not what had actually happened. lt was only an impression gained by outsiders.
Gradually a silence fell.
But five days after the shootings, when Amy and Nick came together again, was still in the time before anyone had learned media sophistication. People spoke from the need to explain, to try to make sense of the upheaval in which they were caught up.
That first night, still in distress after the funeral, Nick woke up into darkness and heard Amy sobbing. He turned on the light and tried to comfort her, but something unstoppable was flowing out of her. lt was not long after midnight.
He sat up beside her in the bed, staring down at her naked back as she sobbed and groaned in her misery. Looking at her, unable to offer comfort, he remembered what she had been to him in the good times, when she was unpredictable, funny and sexy, and causing endless trouble between him and his parents. For a few weeks back then he had never been happier in his life, and that euphoria of being a young man with an attractive and sexually compliant girlfriend had borne him on for months after it had all started going wrong.
She said, her voice muffled by the pillow, 'Nick, if you want to make love again, we can do it.
Then I'll leave.'
'No,' he replied. 'That's not it.'
'I'm cold. Please cover me.'
He loved to hear her voice, the familiar accent and intonation. He fussed around with the pillows and bedclothes, trying to make her comfortable and warm, then lay down once again beside her with his arm cradling her. A long time passed in silence.
Then Amy said, 'Your mum never liked me, did she?'
'Well, 1 wouldn't say'
'You know she didn't. 1 wasn't good enough for her son. She actually said that to me once. lt doesn't matter now, but it used to hurt me. She got her way in the end, and you went off to London.'
'We'd split up months before that.'
'Three months. lt pleased her, anyway.'
'I don't think'
'Listen, Nick, I'm trying to explain something.' When she breathed in he could still sometimes hear a sob in the sound, but her voice was steady. 'I started hanging around with jase after that. You probably didn't know him, but your parents did. He often came in here with his mates, he liked a few drinks. jase had his bad ways, and 1 never went along with those, but 1
saw the best of him. 1 didn't fall for him straight away, it took a couple of years, but he was always around, often had been even when 1 was going out with you. 1'd been at school with him, but he wasn't in my crowd then. He was just one of the lads 1 knew from the village. Up the road, where you never went. You wouldn't understand someone like Jase, because all you'd notice about him would be the way he got drunk or drove his car with the stereo on loud or went berserk at football matches.
