‘No,’ said Beth. ‘You saved me. In more ways than one. You saved me.’ An awkward silence trailed in the wake of her words, broken only when Beth shook herself like a dog flinging off water. ‘Well!’ she said brightly. ‘Supper won’t cook itself.’
While she chopped and stirred, I put some music on and lined up the trio of candles on the mantel. After a couple of glasses of wine, Kit took out the lens and screwed it on to his camera, unable to hide his delight at his new toy.
We lay face-to-face in our bedroom that never truly got dark, hoping our whispers wouldn’t travel through the gap in the door.
‘How much was that lens?’ I said. ‘Like, a hundred quid?’
‘More like a grand. They go for up to three, brand new.’
‘What?’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s like she’s trying to buy our support.’
I tried to look in his eyes but they were only glitter in the half-light. ‘How can she buy us? We’ve already testified.’
‘She’s trying to keep us onside, then. I’m worried something’s going to come up in this appeal and it’ll go to a retrial. And that by having her here, we’ll invalidate the whole thing.’
‘Only if we tell people she’s been here. Unless they’ve got like a private detective on her case, who’s to know?’
Kit tensed and I could tell it was an effort for him not to raise his voice above a whisper. ‘This is what I was afraid of. Getting drawn into a whole mess of lies. One lie always needs another one, and then another one. It’s started already. Unless you’re totally straight from the beginning, you’re fucked.’ I froze and then remembered he wasn’t talking about my secret trip to the courtroom. I put a hand on Kit’s chest to calm him down.
‘She just needs a friend.’
‘Laura.’ He caught hold of my hand. ‘How can you seriously expect to forge a genuine friendship with someone you met like that? It’ll always be hanging over you. You’ve already done more than your bit.’
‘What do you want?’ My voice threatened to break its whisper. ‘You want me to tell her to go?’
Kit shushed me, then said, ‘Honestly? Yes. I haven’t got room in my head for this, let alone my flat. It’s more than I can do to look after my brother. I’m not like you. I don’t want to rescue every waif and stray.’
‘You said,’ it was an effort to control my voice, ‘you said, when we were first together, that that was what you loved about me. That I cared about things. And issues. And people.’
He flopped back on the pillow. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did. I do. But sometimes I wish you gave the same attention to things a bit closer to home as you to do your causes.’
He kept his back to me. In the room next door, Beth rolled over, and the futon creaked a reminder, as if any were needed, that we were not alone.
Chapter 32
KIT
20 March 2015
The sky through the porthole is a wash of light grey nothing, and pre-emptive disappointment takes away my appetite. I didn’t go looking for Beth after all and this morning I’m tortured by the missed opportunity.
My bag is heavy with my camera kit; lens filters, rain covers, my sturdiest tripod. For a moment I’m tempted to leave the whole thing in my cabin, sod the lot. I’m weirdly close to tears. Everything always feels more highly charged in the hours before an eclipse.
They open the Princess Celeste’s restaurant just before dawn, serving a continental breakfast. I eat breakfast, or rather drink coffee on an empty stomach, with Jeff Drake. He doesn’t comment on my new clean-shaven look. Why would he? He knew me looking this way for years and has only seen me bearded the once. And if he’s seen my performance on video, he doesn’t comment on it. He has the distracted air of a man whose mind is on higher things. It is his task to decide where our best chances are.
‘Where do you reckon?’ I say, taking a slurp of coffee. I must find out the blend for Mac. ‘North side of the island? South?’
‘I’m afraid you need to rephrase the question, Christopher,’ he says, sprinkling sugar over a halved grapefruit. ‘It’s more a case of the least-worst scenario. Predicting the movements of heavenly bodies is a piece of cake compared to forecasting weather.’
There’s a certain look that eclipse chasers get on their faces when it’s going to be clouded out; an enforced jollity, a determination to enjoy whatever happens. But you can’t mask disappointment like that, no matter how hard you try. I feel a kind of responsibility for Richard; it’s my fault he’s here. I feel like it’s the least I could do, to bust the clouds for him.
‘Sometimes the clouds part at just the right moment,’ I say as we trudge down the gangplank to the waiting buses. ‘You only need the smallest gap in the cloud for it to all come good.’ I’m talking for my benefit as much as his.
The harbourside is thronged with people, a press of bodies tighter than at any music festival. Above the sea of heads, and across a gridlocked road, I can see six yellow coaches with Princess Celeste cards in the windows. I steer Richard towards the coaches; the location has been decided at the last minute and cards in the window tell us we’re bound for halfway up Húsareyn, a mountain overlooking Tórshavn harbour. Only amateurs go for the top of a mountain. Too high and the cloud comes down to meet you, obscuring the view from the ground.
With so much human activity it’s weird how one other person’s eyes, their stare, can make itself felt, but there’s something, a kind of heat, at my left shoulder, or perhaps I just see it out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head slowly with a familiar sense of foreboding, but it’s just a middle-aged man with a shiny head and flip-down shades clipped on to thick glasses. He breaks into a broad grin.