‘You bloody well are,’ she says. ‘Over a grand this trip’s cost. Go on.’ She shoos me off down the street. ‘Have the time of your life. Take some pictures. Come back with beautiful stories for our babies.’
I take a last look down at my feet; the pavements here are treacherous enough without throwing an undone bootlace into the mix. ‘The chances of her finding me are tiny,’ I say, but Laura has already closed the door, and I realise that I was talking to myself anyway.
It’s a five-minute walk from our house on Wilbraham Road to Turnpike Lane Station, less if you cut through Harringay Passage, a useful if rather Dickensian passageway that halves our grid of streets. I cross Duckett’s Common, looping around the swings and slides where our friends’ children play. Broken glass crunches under my feet.
Sweat is pouring off me already, cooling in my beard. For all the salt on my lips, it’s the lie that sits bitter on my tongue. There’s no way I could possibly have checked the passenger lists. That sort of thing is basic data protection. I can’t believe Laura didn’t pick up on it. When her anxiety’s active, she gets super-powers of perception. Paranoia alerts her to even the tiniest shift in my body language and she picks up the slightest dilution of the truth.
I only ever keep things from her that I know will upset her.
Turnpike Lane Tube Station is still closed when I get there, its art deco splendour undermined by crappy shop hoardings and peeling billboards. At precisely 5.20 a.m. the iron lattice gates are pulled wide by a TfL worker in a royal blue fleece. The only other passenger is a tired-looking black woman in a tabard, probably off to clean some office in the city.
I glide down the escalator, lost in thought. It seems unlikely that Beth will be on my ship, but not impossible that she will be somewhere on the Faroes. I’m glad to be travelling alone, and that I don’t have to think about Laura’s safety. I have been protecting my wife against the fall-out of what happened on Lizard Point for so long. I will do anything to keep it that way.
Chapter 3
LAURA
10 August 1999
The National Express coach was stationary on the A303 outside Stonehenge. It seemed like half the world was travelling into the West Country for the eclipse. The sky was the same grey as the standing stones, the ancient clock on the soft green hill. If I had to be stuck in traffic, this seemed like an appropriate place; people don’t realise that Stonehenge was once used to predict eclipses as well as mark midsummer. But after over an hour staring at the sacred site, even I was struggling to remain awestruck.
Every time the weather report came on to the coach driver’s radio, a rake-thin man with a straggly druidic beard sitting near the front would stand up, clap his hands and give us the update. The chances were we would be clouded out. My fellow travellers to the festival in Cornwall mostly whooped and cheered anyway, in a younger, cooler version of the famous British stoicism that had seen our grandparents through the Blitz and our parents through caravanning holidays. For them, it seemed, the eclipse was just an excuse for a festival; a bonus if they witnessed it, but if they didn’t there would still be the music. Kit cared deeply about the eclipse, and I knew there would be a corresponding gloom in his mood.
He, along with Mac and Ling, had already been on the festival site for two days, setting up the tea stall that would hopefully turn a small profit. I hadn’t eaten since my breakfast meeting with the man from the recruitment agency, and I’d changed in the toilets at Victoria Coach Station. The clothes I’d worn for my job interview were stashed in my rucksack. I kicked my army boots, pressing them down as though on to an accelerator, and wondered if I’d get to Lizard Point before nightfall.
Eventually the coach squeezed through the bottleneck, which was caused not by roadworks but drivers rubbernecking at the debris of a pile-up. Soon Wiltshire gave way to the chalk horses of Dorset. By lunchtime we were in Somerset. The chemical toilet got blocked somewhere in Devon. When we entered Cornwall, a genuine cheer went up. The chimneys of disused tin mines seemed to sprout from the hills almost as soon as we crossed the border, and here and there the county standard, the distinctive black flag with its white cross, fluttered proudly. I felt the press of the sea on either side as England petered into a peninsula and the familiar weight building inside me to know that on the southernmost point of the county, Kit was waiting for me.
We had been together six months at that stage. That time was less a honeymoon period and more a fugue state. It should have derailed our university finals, but Kit reaped the rewards of a lifetime of study and a photographic memory, and I fluked it with a question about the one text I’d studied and a ready supply of amphetamine sulphate. Kit insists it was love at first sight; I think it took about twelve hours. We agree to differ.