Holly said, 'Thanks.'
'For what?'
'I don't know. Trying to understand what it must be like.'
They had arrived at a mossy stone arch that crossed the river. It looked a thousand years old. The mist was deeper here. It pooled in the roots of the trees. He could feel the cold rising from the water.
He said, 'This isn't about your sister.'
She let go of his arm and turned to face him. There was an anxious comma between her eyes. 'I know that. But everything has been. For a really long time.'
She stood on tiptoes and kissed him. Then she grabbed the lapels of his coat: 'Well, say something.'
But he didn't want to hear his voice -- he wanted to be someone else, in this good moment.
He said, 'You already know what I want to say.'
She slipped an arm round his waist and hugged him as they walked across the river, towards the pub.
They got back to the house at 10 p.m. It was dark. Graham and June had gone to bed at 9.30.
Nathan and Holly were both a little drunk. For ten minutes they stood on the doorstep, kissing. Then Holly dug out her key and let them in.
In the hallway, she said nothing. He followed her carefully upstairs where she showed him the spare bedroom. There was a small vanity unit in there. Clean towels, a tube of Aquafresh toothpaste. There was even a toothbrush, still boxed, laid out for him. Holly said goodnight and closed the door. Nathan kicked off his shoes and socks and shirt, and leaned over to clean his teeth and wash his face. The existence of the small vanity unit made him feel obligated to do so.
There was a stealthy rap on the bedroom door.
He whispered, 'Come in.'
Holly was barefoot in creamy silk pyjamas. He glanced at her and felt uncomfortable and glanced away.
She said, 'Are you okay?'
'Fine. I'm good.'
She made a comical face.
'Goodnight then.'
'Goodnight.'
She closed the door. He listened to her, sneaking like a burglar back to her childhood bedroom.
He lay down and closed his eyes.
He opened them again.
Perhaps this had been Elise's bedroom.
But he knew it wasn't. Of all the places he'd been since the night of Mark Derbyshire's Christmas party, this house was the one place that Elise Fox was not. Her absence from it was absolute.
Nathan turned off the bedside lamp. His eyes were startled by the unfamiliarity of the darkness. It took time for them to adjust to the moon-tinted edges of the room. But he must have slept, alone in that darkness, because he woke to the first hints of the dawn chorus.
He got up and got dressed. He removed the duvet from the bed and left it folded there, with his towels alongside it. He slipped out the front door.
Outside, it was cold and wet. He was tired and the engine, in the country stillness, made a loud and lonely sound.
He went home first, to shower and shave, and was not late for work.
20
Sometimes, in those early days, they weren't sure where to go. Trips to the theatre or the cinema seemed contrived -- but there was tacit agreement that Nathan should not invite Holly back to his flat, not even for a video and a Chinese takeaway. The moment she crossed his threshold would be charged with too much significance.
So they met at lunchtimes and ate at a nearby brasserie, or they met after work and spent an hour or two talking in the corner of some quiet pub or wine bar. Gradually, Nathan's neurotic desire to provide her with novelty began to diminish, and one place became their regular venue -- a stone-flagged bar in the basement of an Italian restaurant. Often, it was empty but for the skinny Russian waitresses, playing eighties pop on a cheap stereo. If it was empty, they sat in a corner anyway, and ordered something to eat and a bottle of wine.
Holly would tell him about her day. He learned a great deal about the day-to-day operation of being an estate agent. And he learned that Holly wasn't happy at work.
She'd taken a Business Studies degree at Southampton. Graham and June would've preferred her to do something else, something useless like English -- but Holly hadn't seen the point then and she didn't see the point now. She'd wanted to run her own business since she was fourteen years old.
Elise had changed all that. The job at the estate agency was supposed to be a temporary solution, something to bring in the money while their lives were off-kilter. But their lives were still off-kilter, and Holly was still an estate agent.
She didn't like her boss, a dick called Neil who had an eighties flick and a supercharged BMW. He was about twenty-two and still spotty round the chin -- but he had four children and an ugly house about which he never stopped boasting.
Holly still intended to be her own boss. It wasn't even a question of capital: her parents would remortgage their house, if necessary, and she had some savings - after all, she hadn't been paying rent for quite some time. Plus, her social life had been non-existent.
Then she dipped her head, exactly as she always did during these moments, and drew her finger around the rim of her wine glass. 'But the timing, you know.'
She told him about her parents.
'Dad was in the navy. It always gave him, what would you call it, this self-confidence. Like a dignity thing. But Elise, that sucked all the confidence from him. He's housebound. He potters all day in the garden or in his study. He won't go further than the garden gate for weeks on end, not even to go to the pub.'
This was the pub across the green where, two or three times a week since Holly was young, Graham had met his cronies to play dominoes, and poker at Christmas. One of those cronies had been Mark Derbyshire, whose name was no longer mentioned in the village.
'The press conferences were terrible for him,' she said. 'He used to throw up before leaving the house. I had to help him out to the car, like he was an old man.'
'Does he talk about her?'
'He can't. He just acts as if you're not talking. It used to drive me up the wall.'
'But not any more?'
'Well sometimes, yeah. But there was this one Sunday morning, I heard him crying. He was sitting on the floor behind the door of his little office. Just saying 'My God, my God' over and over again, muffled, like he was biting his fist and trying not to cry. Like it hurt, y'know, like he was in physical pain. This is, like, a week before Elise's twenty-first.'
Nathan rested his jaw on his hands, saying, 'Oof.' And then, not wanting to hear the answer, he said, 'Your mum?'
'Mum used to be a secretary - she's organized. After she got married, she did work for charities, action groups, whatever. PETA, the WWF, the Women's Institute, homeless charities. She'd do this thing for the WI - she'd go to dodgy estates and teach single mothers and families on benefit how to budget - how to do cheap, home- cooked meals.
'So she knew what to do, to help her cope. She set up the foundation . . .'
This was the Elise Fox Foundation.
In time, other families of lost children had pledged effort and capital; the Foundation expanded, growing to offer a counselling service to the violently bereaved and to those, like June, whose grief lacked an object.
June had never sought therapy - the Foundation was her therapy.
But it grew so large that she became oppressed by it. Now she was its chair. Fund-raising and day-to-day operations were handled by a woman called Ruby, who lost her daughter on a French campsite in 1991.
With Ruby, June was at liberty to discuss Elise as something other than a girl whose primary characteristic
