“I think I’ll cancel my appointments today,” says James, finally breaking the silence.
In the garden, the siskins sing their songs—tilu, tilu, tilu—and the weak October sunshine begins nudging its rays through the grey curtains.
I squeeze James’s hand. “I’ve missed you,” I tell him.
“I’ve missed you too.”
I nuzzle his neck, and I look, really look, at him. “Make love to me,” I whisper.
James takes me in his arms, and slowly, over the course of the next hour, he kisses me from head to toe. He fulfils my request, more literally than ever before.
When we are finished, I roll onto my side, looking at the black smudge beneath the cling film on my wrist. It looks like an oil spillage. I can just about make out the letters L and Y. “Lie,” I say quietly.
“Pardon?” James kisses me behind the ear.
“I never want to lie to you again.”
“That’s good. I don’t want to lie to you either.”
“I’ve got a secret.”
The sun shines more brightly now. With my back to James, I look at the white wall opposite me, and I talk about Evie. I don’t mention Center Parcs or Mars. I simply talk about a woman I met while I was away from home. I explain that although nothing happened, there was a space between us. A space that was significant.
PART THREE
30
“He’s been gone for nearly three weeks. Staying with his parents in Penzance. He won’t answer my calls.”
“That sounds stressful,” says the woman with a Northern Irish accent, who identified herself as Rachel at the start of our phone conversation.
“It is.” I’m out of breath, navigating my way over spiky grey tufts of marram grass. I’m walking over sand dunes, heading away from the main beach, towards the cliffs at Kelsey Head.
“What was it that made James feel he wanted some time away?” Rachel asks.
She probably thinks I’m being abused. Or I’m addicted to drugs. Or I’m depressed. I’m not depressed.
TripAdvisor says that at low tide, you can see an Argentinian shipwreck here. The tide is lowish now, but it’s rising, and I can’t see anything except water.
“James went away because of something I told him. It was something that happened back in June. Me and another woman. All we did was lie together.”
“What were your feelings towards her?”
I scramble over a large rock, careful not to slip on the seaweed. A few years ago, a scourge of toxic turquoise algae appeared on Porth Beach. It bloomed after a long, hot summer, killing the fish and irritating people’s eyes and skin.
“I was intrigued,” I say eventually. “And jealous. I wanted to be inside her. Not sexually. I mean, I wanted to feel what it was like to be her. Is that weird?”
Finally, I come to a long vertical slit in the rocks. The entrance to Holywell Cave.
“Did you speak to James about these feelings?”
“No, of course not.” I step inside the slit. “He wouldn’t understand. I barely understand.”
Inside the cave, I can make out limestone formations, like poured concrete. Higher up, there’s another, smaller cave entrance. Fresh water is trickling out of it.
The rocky steps leading up there look slippery, but I reckon I can climb them if I take it slow. I’m going to have to put the phone down, though, so I wait where I am for now.
“What did James say when you told him about the woman?”
I think back to that day. The sun through the curtains. The sting of the tattoo. The question James asked several times, which I did not manage to answer for him: Why?
“He told me that he knows things have been difficult. He’s seen me struggling since the start of the year, since he suggested we try for a baby. If he’s honest, he saw me struggling before that too. He thought trying for a baby would make things better. He made a mistake. He shouldn’t have asked. He feels bad.”
“And the woman? What did he say about her?”
“He told me that a relationship is a collage. New layers bury old ones. There are dark bits, bright bits, rough bits, smooth bits. He told me that our glue pot is empty. There’s nothing left to stick the pieces together. The glue is trust. The trust is gone.” That’s not all James said. He also said: “Fuck you, Solvig.”
“Do you think that the trust can be rebuilt?”
I look down at my hiking boots. I’m standing in a puddle. You’re not meant to come here when the tide is rising. I shouldn’t hang around. I say: “How are you meant to know what you want?”
“You’re not sure that the trust is worth getting back?”
I look at my wrist. The scab looks like a grey cloud. I’m hoping that when it falls off there’ll be something glorious underneath, but I know that there won’t be. It’s just an illegible scrawl. In places where I’ve pushed too deep, I’ve got subcutaneous ink seepage. Blowout, James called it. The ink has blurred like a permanent bruise. At least the infection has subsided. Turns out I didn’t clean the area properly before I started. James made sure to tell me about wound aftercare before he left for Penzance. That’s the kind of person he is.
“I was pregnant,” I tell Rachel. “For five weeks and five days. Or, technically, if you go from conception, less than a fortnight. We were trying for nine months. I didn’t know if it was what I wanted, but then it happened, and I was excited. And then it ended, and I was sad.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, Solvig.”
I take a quick look at the time. I need to hurry up. “That woman—the one I lay down with—was pregnant. I felt like I wanted to find her sexy, but I didn’t. When I was pregnant, James said I was amazing, gorgeous . . . all these things I didn’t feel.”
“I wonder if there’s a way that you can—”
“It’s like the Venus of Willendorf
