Page 108 of The Love of My Life
Charlie sits down next to me after a while. Charlie, who’s only here because of Jill.
I send her another message, while Charlie eats a pasty.
‘I think we should walk into the village and get a pint,’ I say, when we’ve finished our food. ‘Have a think about where else we can look.’
Charlie stands up, dusting himself down. ‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘Not sure it feels right to be in a pub when we could be looking for her.’
‘Of course. I ... Look, Charlie, I’m sorry I planted the idea of the shed. It seems absurd now.’
Charlie thinks for a moment, poking at a little shock of marram grass with his boot. ‘The more I think about it, the more I agree with you, actually.’ He points to the beach, just below where we’re standing. ‘It’s always been here that we’ve had picnics. Always here that she used to spread out our towels and the windbreaker on beach days.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’ He stares down at the sand, remembering sun cream and bottled water, sandcastles and dinghies. ‘This is her spot.’
I turn my back to the sea, to look at the shed again. Behind it, a golf course runs along the beach for a mile or so. I wonder if any of the regulars might have noticed a woman, walking – maybe sitting here in the evenings? There’s a couple of golfers who are probably within shouting distance.
‘Charlie,’ I begin, and then I stop.
There is a strange synergy between me and Janice Rothschild, no matter how far we have circled from each other since Charlie was born. The day I bumped into her and Jeremy on this beach, four years ago, I felt her before I saw her.
And I feel her again now. She’s here. Close by.
I turn around to look at Coquet Island. The lighthouse, long-abandoned, sits at the far end, blinking briefly in the sun. I follow back to the land, and scan slowly across the village of Alnmouth.
Where are you?
I search along the lane to the car park, across the golf course, to the coastal path above the exposed rocks.
Up to the horizon, back down to where the grass peters off into scrub and sand dunes. Then back to the coastal path above the rocks again.
‘Charlie,’ I say, carefully. ‘I really do think we should go to the village. Ask around again. I know your Dad told the shop to call him if Janice came back in, but she could have gone into a cafe, a pub, the deli – I think we need to ask all of them. And then I think we should go to your house, sit down and make a proper plan. We need to find her.’
It doesn’t take him long to give in. He’s exhausted.
We walk back to the village together, my son and I. As we turn up a lane to the High Street, I turn back once more to look, careful Charlie doesn’t see me.
There.
That’s where she is. I’m certain of it. But I don’t know if it’s safe to take Charlie there. I don’t know if we’ve arrived just a little too late.
Chapter Sixty-Two
EMMA
Charlie falls asleep within minutes of sitting on his parents’ spotless cream sofa. I want to get him a proper pillow, a duvet, but I resist the urge. He’s an adult, and he doesn’t want to be mothered, least of all by me.
I leave him a note to say I’ve gone for another walk, and slip out of the door.
The wind has cleared and it’s warm. There are more people on the beach now, some in the sea, which sparkles cheerfully all the way to the horizon. A child flies a kite, yelling at his dad, who is doing it all wrong.
The cabins I spotted earlier appear above the path, immaculate, recently painted. Adirondack chairs lined up outside in the sun, expensive-looking sun shades. They’re exactly the sort of thing people pay vast sums of money to pretend to camp in: faux-rugged exteriors, interiors decked out with champagne glasses and luxury down-filled duvets.
Exactly the sort of place you’d go for a ‘nice private breakdown’ if you didn’t really like roughing it, but you loved Alnmouth beach.
She’s here. As soon as I spotted them, just a few hundred metres up from the sheep hut, I knew.
*
