One thing was for sure, Kitty thought, rubbing her eyes: this man understood depression. She’d never read a book that took you so deeply inside the head of a depressive and it was a disturbing experience, which was somehow mirrored by the cataclysmic weather. Dawn was breaking outside with a faint pink glow but still the rain hammered down, bouncing off the sun-parched ground, and the opposite shore of the lake was obscured by low-hanging cloud. Even at eight o’clock it was still so dark that Kitty needed to use her lamp for reading. She decided to drive to the vacation park coffeehouse for a latte and some human company. The novel had put her in a gloomy, introspective mood.
Jeff wasn’t there, but the coffeehouse was full of campers sheltering from the elements. Kitty found a corner and plugged in her laptop to charge, listening to the complaints of the holidaymakers who had hoped to go hiking, canoeing or rafting and instead found themselves with long hours to fill and squabbling children to entertain. The windows misted up with their breath and the loud babble made Kitty feel desperately lonely and, for the first time, homesick. No one paid her any attention as she opened her laptop. First she went to the Guardian website and read about the news back home and the issues that were concerning Guardian readers: government cuts, immigration; the usual stuff.
Her cursor hovered over her email icon and, steeling herself, she clicked to open it. One thousand eight hundred and seventy-five emails were waiting, she was told, and she sipped her latte as they began to flash into her inbox. Tom’s name was prominent among them – the name ‘Tom Fisher, Tom Fisher, Tom Fisher’ flashed past her eyes like strobe lighting – and her chest felt tight. Whatever he had to say, she wasn’t ready to hear it, but she couldn’t help noticing the email headings: ‘I’m so sorry’, ‘Please get in touch’, ‘Urgent – I need to speak to you’, ‘I will always love you’, ‘Please can we talk?’ She let her eye skim down the list but didn’t open any of them. There was a pain in her chest, beneath the ribs on her left side: a hard rock that nagged like a tumour. She tried taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly but the pain persisted. She put her hand over her heart and felt it beating more rapidly than usual and that made her panic. She couldn’t breathe.
Kitty yanked the plug from the wall and closed the laptop, tucking it beneath her arm as she squeezed past the huddle of campers, stepping over backpacks and small children to reach the exit. There was a yell of communal protest when she opened the door, letting in a gust of rain, so she stepped out into the squawl and closed it quickly behind her. She got behind the wheel of the car and pulled out of the car park but her heart was hammering too fast and her breathing was too jagged for her to drive. After a few hundred yards she pulled in to the roadside and bent forward, resting her head on the steering wheel.
What did it mean? Was Tom saying ‘I will always love you but I love Karren as well’? ‘I will always love you but I want a divorce’? What kind of love was he talking about exactly? A month had gone by since that morning when she checked the messages on his mobile phone but she wasn’t ready to hear from Tom yet; that much was obvious. She had been foolish to open the email account. It would take more time before she was able to deal with that situation and all its repercussions. It merely underlined her sense that her marriage had failed, that she had failed.
In her head she heard her mother’s voice berating her: ‘Why are you such a quitter? You take piano lessons then get bored; you start tennis coaching then don’t want to go back. You never stick at anything.’ Was it true that she was a quitter? She had stopped piano and tennis and drama and all those other extra-curricular activities because her mum had such high expectations; she had to be a prodigy at everything. When she rang home with the news she’d got a 2:1 in her journalism degree, her mum had commented, ‘What a shame. If only you’d done a bit more work …’ She could just imagine the deep sighs if her mum could see her now, hunched over a steering wheel, her heart overbeating with anxiety.
She forced herself to breathe regularly, counting to five between breaths and trying to make her mind go blank of everything but the in breath and the out breath, as they taught at her yoga class. A truck sped past with a whoosh, covering her windscreen with a wave of surface water.
She knew she needed to keep herself occupied, and reading Dmitri’s next novel was not going to hack it. Then she remembered the overgrown patch of weeds behind the cabin that she’d been waiting for the right moment to deal with. It should be easier to uproot them now the earth was softened by rain. She’d get soaked to the skin but it would give her a real sense of achievement to clear that patch. It was flat and treeless so maybe she could do some planting there. Keeping busy was the best way to cope with a broken heart.
Chapter Twenty
The rain continued all week but at least it was still hot. Kitty spent her time clearing the earth around the cabin and it was like working under a power shower as the torrents beat down on her back and steam rose from the freshly dug earth. It was tough work that left her streaked in mud, with muscles that ached in new places every day. She used her camping stove to heat noodles and make tea indoors, and spent the evenings sitting in her swing seat on the covered porch, drinking wine and reading Dmitri Yakovlevich’s remaining novels.
They were rich and in some ways surprisingly modern stories, with an overriding theme of love and loss. His male characters were more in touch with their emotions than any man she knew, endlessly analysing their reactions to events, but his women were all slightly idealised, a little too perfect, maybe. Could any male writer create convincing female characters? she wondered. The last two novels, the ones written in America, could easily have been published in the present day. The writing was clean and spare, but evoked glorious images that filled her head until she felt she knew the people in his stories as well as if they were her companions in the cabin. They were complex and flawed but never dull. Was that what Dmitri was like?
Kitty remembered that she held the copyright to these novels, as part of the inheritance. She should try to get them reissued. Perhaps she would contact his last publisher, Random House, and ask if they might be interested. She could imagine them selling well with modern covers and intelligent broadsheet reviews. She could write a feature about her great-grandfather and explain how she came upon his story … but she would have to find out more about him first. He was still a shadowy figure with a biography that consisted of a few dates and places and huge gaps in between.
One afternoon, when the rain was coming down in sheets, she heard a car pulling down the track towards her cabin and she dropped her spade to watch. It was a police car with two officers inside. One of them opened his window and called out: ‘You Kitty Fisher?’
She was astonished, and before she answered ‘yes’, her mind had invented a dozen different reasons why they might be there. Had she breached her car-rental agreement? Was there a problem with the ownership of the cabin? Did she owe local taxes for something?
‘Your husband reported you as a missing person back in England,’ the closest officer explained. ‘They tracked you down from your credit card use and the vacation park told us you were here. Is everything OK, ma’am?’
It had never occurred to her that Tom would call the police. What an idiot! ‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to come out all this way,’ she gasped. ‘Please – come in for coffee and I’ll explain.’