‘What kind of power did he have over you?’ Max asks quietly. He struggles to control his voice. ‘When you first came back to us, you were covered in bruises. Your back and hips black with them. And your ribs sticking out like a starving child…’ He feels a hard sob in his throat.

  Eva places her fingers over his lips. They rest, light and cool, on his skin. ‘I know what he did was… bad. But I’ll never forgive you if you hurt him,’ she says. ‘You don’t understand. Nobody does.’ She swallows, sitting upright, looking away. ‘It makes me feel alone.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re right.’ He bows his head. ‘But I’ll try to,’ he promises her. ‘And I’ll try to let it go. For you.’

  She isn’t a child anymore, he realises. He reaches out to her, touching her newly cut hair. She doesn’t move. He takes her chin in his hand and gently turns her head so that they’re facing each other. Her eyes are bright, challenging.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he asks quietly. ‘I said I’d try.’

  She nods and ducks her head to rest her cheek on his shoulder. Carefully, he puts his arms around her. He has to hold her differently now. The love is the same but rules and boundaries have changed. He remembers how she clung to him when she found the chick in the egg and knows that she’ll never need him quite like that again. He shifts his position on the chair, accommodating the shape of her head, the strong line of her jaw.

  53

  Mum is unpacking some groceries from a brown paper bag. Milk. Bread. A bag of apples. She shakes her head. ‘I’ve just heard something extraordinary.’ She pauses and looks at me. ‘Robert Smith is dead. It looks like he killed himself. They found him at the foot of the castle walls.’

  Robert lies in long grass, his limbs contorted like a smashed puppet. His neck is broken, the spinal cord snapped. His eyes stare up at me, unseeing, filmed in dust. Half-breed, his dead lips whisper.

  Billy. And the next thought that comes into my head is that he loves me that much. Enough to kill for me. I shut a door in my mind. The door to those thoughts. I must be a bad person. Robert is dead. I’m sorry. God. I’m sorry. I don’t know whom I’m apologising to. I can’t feel my feet. I stumble backwards into a chair, and my head slumps forwards, heavy in my hands. The room pitches and I close my eyes.

  Mum is bending over me. Her voice comes from a distance. ‘I’m sorry. How stupid to blurt it out like that.’ She touches my shoulder. ‘Darling. I would never have… I didn’t think you knew him very well.’

  I bite the inside of my lip, folding my hands together to stop them trembling. ‘No.’ I force my voice not to shake. ‘It’s just a bit of a shock. What happened?’

  She’s running the tap, filling a glass for me. She’s talking, telling me that there’s going to be an inquest. Apparently everyone in the village is gossiping about it. Some girl in Ipswich has gone to the police, claiming he raped her. Mum hands me the water and I take a sip; it trickles into my throat, cold and slightly earthy. She sighs, ‘They’re saying that it was probably fear or shame that made him do it–throw himself off like that.’

  Robert wouldn’t commit suicide. He wasn’t the sort of person to feel shame. The police will work it out soon. I picture the struggle, shadows flickering across the dark roof, a hidden moon and Robert’s desperate scrabbling against the ancient stone, the long drop below lurching towards him. Or perhaps he was already dead before he fell. His neck broken with a professional twist. I should feel something–guilt, sorrow.

  Alone in my room, I stare out of the window at the garden, noticing the trees, alight with crimson, gold and orange leaves, blazing above shaded grass, the sun low over the horizon. I frown, concentrating, forcing myself to picture Robert, to find pity inside me. But what I feel is relief. He will never step out of the bus shelter with a smirk, or wait for me by the oak tree. He’ll never touch me again. His eel tongue and searching fingers are done–they’re cold flesh on a mortuary slab. Only the truth is that if I’d had to face up to Robert again, I think I would have handled it better now. I wish I could have told Billy that. I’m stronger because of him. Billy must have wanted to punish Robert as badly as Dad wants to punish Billy. It’s all mixed up in my head, making me feel crazy. When I told Billy about Robert, was I giving him a death sentence? I think so. Now I do. But I didn’t know then. Did I?

  It seems unreal. No court will let Billy go this time. I’m afraid for him. I stare into the mirror, but I don’t see his face anymore. I’m returning to myself. I am clean, tamed, with my washed face, the knots and tangles of hair chopped out, so that it looks like it always used to, tight curls to my shoulders. The glitter in my eyes is less wolfish, less wild. It is a strange kind of loss.

  ‘Eva?’ Faith is standing by my door.

  I nod and she comes in, throwing herself onto the bed to watch me. ‘Are you putting on make-up?’

  ‘No.’ I turn and smile at her.

  ‘Are you OK? You look sad.’

  I get onto the bed with her, leaning against her slight shape. ‘I am a bit sad. But it’s hard to explain.’ I take her hand and her fingers close around mine, squeezing. Her skin is smooth and warm against my own, and I look down in surprise. ‘Your fingers?’

  She smiles, ‘The warts are gone. I just woke up one day. The day you came back. And they weren’t there anymore.’

  She leans over to pick up my sketchpad left open on the covers, and begins to leaf through it. It’s filled with quick drawings made from memory in chalk and pencil. She stares down at the pagoda wreathed in mist; a clutch of tern’s eggs in shingle. She turns the page and contemplates Billy’s face. She closes the book and puts it on the side-table.

  ‘You miss the Wild Man.’ She rests her hand on my leg for a moment.

  ‘Billy?’

  She nods.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You were together for so long. Just the two of you. And now you don’t see him anymore.’

  I nod. ‘Nobody else gets it.’

  ‘You’ve been inside another world.’ She begins to hum ‘Moon River’. We lie down together, and I feel the vibration of her lungs, the song wavering around us, her frail voice only just holding the melody. She’s inherited tone-deafness from Granny. I’m crying, silently, listening to my sister singing in the winter afternoon.

  November 1984

  I’m going to have to repeat a year at school, start again with my A-levels. After that I want to try out for art school. Billy told me I’d be an artist. He’d muttered it into the folds of my clothes, his lips moving against my back; but his voice had been urgent, as if it was essential to tell me there and then, as if he was running out of time. As if him telling me would make it happen.

  In the kitchen, Dad is talking about buying a new boat in the spring. We can’t decide whether we should get a Laser or a Firefly. Dad thinks that the Laser would be better for racing. Band Aid comes on the radio–‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ I turn it up.

  My mouth is full of toast and honey when Silver leaps to his feet, hackles up, and begins his deep barking, howling like the Hound of the Baskervilles.

  ‘Someone’s at the door,’ Dad says. ‘Shall I get it?’

  I swallow, wiping my mouth. ‘No, don’t worry.’

  I shut the kitchen door behind me, locking Silver in with Dad. I hear muffled barking and Dad shouting ‘Shut up!’ as I open the front door.

  I don’t recognise him at first. His hair is light brown, longer. It has a curl to it. He is barefaced without dark eyeliner or powder. He’s wearing an old denim jacket, ripped jeans with holes at the knees and a pair of trainers. He smiles, ‘Hi. It’s been a long time.’

  I’m unable to move, except to clasp my hands over my mouth.

  Marco puts his head on one side. ‘Does that mean you’re pleased to see me?’ He opens his arms. I hesitate for a moment before stepping inside them. I smell clean clothes and a hint of aftershave. My shoulders are stiff. My front teeth bang against his collarbone.

  ‘You don’t look like a goth,’ is all I can think of to say.

  ‘And you’re thinner.’ He holds me at arm’s length, looking at me. He hugs me close.

  I clear my throat, pushing my hair out of my eyes, stepping away from him. It feels disloyal to let him hold me, disloyal to Billy. After I’ve taken him inside and Silver has jumped around, smelling him, and Dad has shaken his hand and said, ‘So you’re “M”?’ with his eyebrows raised, I take Marco for a walk down to the river wall, because I’m jittery and nervous and I need to be alone with him.

  It is grey and cloudy, the wind sweeping in from the sea, blowing gulls high overhead on outstretched wings. The trees are nearly all bare now. Black twig branches scratch the sky with dark fingers. I tuck my coat around me and we walk side by side, not touching. I’d imagined this moment so often in the pagoda, thinking of it as something beautiful, a happy ending, but now it feels awkward and strange.

  ‘The thing about goth music,’ he’s saying, as if there has been no pause between the last time I saw him and this, ‘is that there’s no message in it. I’m into music that makes a difference now. Like this whole thing with Band Aid. Bob Geldof has shown that pop music can change things.’

  ‘How did you know I was alive?’ I ask, interrupting him. ‘Did you read about me in the papers?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m rambling aren’t I? I’m nervous.’ He cranes his head to see me. ‘Your sister wrote to tell me. I didn’t contact you immediately. I was away and I wanted to give you time, you know?’ He tightens his grip on my arm. ‘It’s a big thing, what you’ve been through. God,’ he spits, ‘that bastard.’

  ‘It’s not that simple, Marco.’

  Marco stops and looks at me, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

  I turn my back on him, wrapping my arms around myself.

  ‘Did he touch you?’ Marco puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘All those months together.’ He gasps, ‘God, what did he do?’

  ‘No.’ I shrug Marco’s fingers away. ‘He didn’t touch me and I don’t want to talk about it. I’m sick of people thinking they know when they don’t.’

  ‘OK,’ he sighs, ‘I’m sorry. But you can’t blame me for thinking it. Don’t be like this, Eva. You’ve been in my head. But after you didn’t turn up, I thought you’d changed your mind. Gone off me.’

  ‘Something happened to stop me getting on the bus.’ I pause but he doesn’t ask me what and I go on quickly. ‘Look, it’s not that I’ve changed my mind exactly.’ I examine his face; his languid gaze meets my stare and nothing happens inside. No butterflies opening their wings. ‘But I’ve changed, Marco. I’m different.’

  ‘You mean it’s over?’ He picks at the frayed edges of his jacket.

  ‘I think you’ve moved on too.’ I look at him with eyebrows raised. ‘Don’t tell me that there haven’t been other girls…’

  ‘Well, yes, but,’ he colours slightly, ‘I thought you were… that you’d gone.’

  ‘I’m not angry, Marco.’ I put my hands in my pockets, hunching my shoulders against the wind. ‘I don’t blame you. I just think I need time, you know. Like you said, I’ve been through something big. I’m not ready for a relationship.’

  He shrugs. ‘Maybe it’s just as well. I’m going to be travelling a lot now. With the band and everything.’

  We stand together and I feel released. I touch his hand lightly. He’s a stranger. We’re looking over towards the island. He nods, ‘I wrote you a song.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I reply, but I’m looking at the shape of the distant landmass, the inky sketches of the pagodas against the sky.

  Marco left to catch the train back to London. He told me that his band had signed a deal with Island Records. ‘Funny,’ I said, thinking aloud.

  ‘What?’ He frowned, not getting it.

  ‘Nothing.’ I thought of Billy crouched over the fishing line, telling me we didn’t need music when we had the sea and the wind. I still have his coat. Faith slipped it over my shoulders when we were in Ted’s boat. It hangs in my wardrobe, fusty, smelling of him. The tin of letters is in the pocket, and I worry that he must be missing them.

  Billy was right. Mum and Dad are my real parents. But I did have another mother, a birth mother, and she was only a little older than me. She died because of me. I try to imagine her long blonde hair and pale skin. Dad said that Suky had somehow known that she was having a girl. She’d been embroidering a blanket for me. He said that he remembered dragons, dragons blowing out flames, spreading wings across blue fabric. I won’t contact my uncle. I know that he’s the man that Robert had been talking about–the posh bloke with sweat on his lip, fingers trembling on a glass. Whatever he can tell me about my mother will only be his story of her. I’ll never know the truth. And perhaps it’s enough to believe that she loved me, even though she never saw me, never held me in her arms. There must be something of her in my features, in my voice or mannerisms. When I sign my name now, sometimes I draw a tiny dragon next to it, and it’s like a sign between me and her.

  54

  Clara and Max are in bed together. It’s the middle of the afternoon, but they have the house to themselves. Clara won’t let him speak; she runs her tongue across his lips, slots her limbs into the spaces left by his, searching for the way they used to be. Her fingers feel for the familiar shallow dip at the base of his throat, hands working across his flesh as if she is sculpting him. She imagines the skeleton weight and density under his skin, the mystery of pale angles opening and closing. He cries out, and she presses her mouth into his neck.

  Max rolls over and looks into Clara’s face, smoothing the hair back from her forehead. She pulls him close, her arms around his shoulders. They lie, skin against skin, breathing together. Outside, the wind whistles through the bare chestnut tree, stirring the old swing into ghostly movement.

  After a while, Clara asks, ‘Are you sorry, that you didn’t take the new job?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I would have felt bad about leaving my clients. I feel a loyalty to them. God knows why. None of them pay their bills on time.’

  ‘Or ever.’

  They laugh, and Clara rolls on top of him, holding his wrists. There is a struggle, Max pulling her towards him, Clara resisting, before she collapses and slides into the hollow of his shoulder, letting her cheek rest against his chest, breathing in the familiar, potent tang of sex.

  ‘God, I missed you,’ he says.

  She murmurs an agreement and raises her head to look at him. ‘Max,’ she says slowly, ‘do you think it’s doing Eva some good going to see that therapist? She seems more settled somehow, more herself.’

  He nods. ‘It must be good for her to have someone neutral to talk to. A safe place.’

  ‘I keep wondering… how do you think Faith knew about the island?’

  Max makes a sound in his throat and she hears it echo inside his ribs, passing into her cheek as a tremor on her skin. ‘I don’t know.’ He shifts his arm under her head. ‘Instinct? Telepathy?’ He stares at the ceiling, frowning. ‘All I know is that I didn’t listen to her, take her seriously. And I should have.’

  ‘No. Don’t do that,’ Clara says quickly. ‘Don’t feel guilty. It sounded so far-fetched. We did what we thought best.’ She rolls over to glance at her watch. ‘I’ll have to get up in a minute,’ she says. ‘Got to pick her up from her class.’

  ‘I can get her.’

  They both hear it. A distant boom, echoing out in waves, but it’s big enough and loud enough to rattle the glass of the window. Clara sits up, her mouth open. Max swings his legs over the side of the bed and strides to the window, the curves and planes of his naked body vulnerable in the winter light.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘There’s smoke coming from the island. I think one of those old landmines has detonated.’

  With her heart beating fast, Clara scrambles out of bed to stand beside him. A plume of smoke rises from the hulk of the island, spreading black and acrid into the sky. Clara shivers. She reminds herself that she knows where both her girls are, and that they are safe. He slips an arm over her shoulder.

  ‘If anyone was in the middle of that, there won’t be much left I’m afraid,’ Max says in a low voice.

  Clara frowns. ‘Maybe it’s the military,’ she suggests. ‘They could be clearing the land.’

  They stand in silence for a moment, Clara thinking about Eva, realising that it could have been her stepping onto the shingle with the bomb under it. She doesn’t say anything. She is certain that Max is thinking the same thing.

  The island is a silhouette against a pale smoke-stained sky. It will always look different to her now that she knows how it concealed her lost child from her. Those months apart from them, when she was held prisoner, have given Eva a new strength, something to fit inside her passion and give it shape. Clara remembers the tiny baby with clenched fists and a big howl. From the moment that Max placed her in her arms, Clara knew that Eva was a survivor. It is Faith that has surprised her with her determination and bravery. Faith’s certainty that her sister was on the island is a mystery, something they’ll never understand. But people are extraordinary, she thinks, unknowable, as islands are, half-hidden and full of shifting contours. ‘I feel so lucky,’ she murmurs. ‘As if we’ve all been given a second chance.’ And Max squeezes her hand.

  They turn away from the window and the view of the island, moving around each other in the way they always have as they collect clothes and slip on shoes. They don’t look back at the spreading clouds obscuring the outlines of the pagoda, smoke shapes rising heavily, lifting enormous wings into the sky.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I’ve located this book in Suffolk and some of the places I mention, like Ipswich, are of course real. I’ve included the myth of The Wild Man of Orford, based on written evidence recorded in the 1100s. When writing about the castle in Without You, I was inspired by my childhood memories of Orford Castle. In order to create an island lying just off the Suffolk coast, I used the military history and geographical details of a fascinating spit of land known as Orford Ness. The Ness is a large area of shingle and sand, mudflat and salt marsh, that lies between the river and the North Sea. In 1913 the War Department created airfields there for the Experimental Flying Section. Since then it’s been used for top secret experiments on a range of weapons, with hulking ‘pagodas’ added in the 1950s to contain the blast from atomic weapons. Because the area was a bombing and rocket range, dangerous debris remains, including unexploded bombs. It is a bleakly beautiful place, with shingle, lichen and grasses making a backdrop to the rolls of rusting wire, crumbling concrete slabs and listing barns left behind by the military–and of course the distinctive and forbidding shapes of the pagodas themselves, visible from miles away. The spit, shrouded in secrecy for most of the twentieth century, was home to German prisoners of war, many of whom died of influenza and were buried in the local graveyard. The spit’s contours are ever changing as sand and shingle shifts with the movement of water. Hares, foxes and rabbits run under a huge sweep of open sky. Each winter there are battering winds from the North Sea, and always the cry of the sea birds as they swoop restlessly over shingle and wave. Although I made use of much of this rich material to create the island in Without You, the island itself is fictional, as are the caravan site, the village and Holt House.