She looked around her, turning from side to side. The empty world stretched out in front of her and she heard herself panting. Breath in, breath out. Where was he? Where was he? She picked up the fleece that Charlie had left half buried in the sand and held it to her face.
They sent two helicopters and little crowds gathered, thrilled by the glamour of impending disaster. ‘He’s how old?’ they asked, so that they could be part of the drama. They watched the boat go out with a kind of awe. Afterwards, when they got home, still sticky with salt and sand, they would talk about it in hushed tones with half an eye on their own, safe children and turn on the news, hoping for the end of the story. Some people stayed and organised themselves into lines and walked methodically across the dunes as far as the car park and then back again. Some of them had sticks, and Carrie thought suddenly of similar lines of people going across a moor, turning over the heather for clues. The boat moved slowly across the water as if it had all the time in the world.
It started to get dark, but Carrie still stood waiting on the beach. Damian wanted her to go into the lifeguard’s hut and have a hot drink but she had to stay where Charlie could find her.
‘Come on, Carrie, there’s nothing you can do …’
Someone had given her a coat to wear, but she was still shaking. She couldn’t feel her body but it was moving strangely, as if she no longer had any control. He would come, if she waited long enough. He would surely come. It was inconceivable that he wouldn’t. How could she leave this place without him? He would put his arms around her neck and she would lift him off the ground and hold him close and smell the salt on his warm skin.
Chapter Six
The first day in the shop was a huge success. The story that Carrie had managed to muscle into the local paper and the fliers she and Jen had stuffed through countless letterboxes had done the trick and there had been a steady stream of customers, most of whom hadn’t left without purchasing at least something. They had opened Trove at just the right time to catch the pre-Christmas buying frenzy. Carrie liked to think that it catered for all tastes; a necklace strung with silver filigree butterflies and seed pearls for the girl who had everything, or an old leather-bound volume of sea birds for the father who claimed not to want anything at all.
To Carrie’s amazement, it turned out that Jen was an incredible salesperson. She might look as if she got herself dressed in the dark, but when it came to other people she knew exactly when to suggest a colourful accessory or to wait outside the changing room and turn disaster into triumph with the perfect garment for diminishing hips or emphasising lovely legs. ‘Everyone has something beautiful about them,’ she announced grandly, the effect of her words in no way diminished by the mince pie crumbs that had attached themselves to her frontage. Carrie watched, amazed as she sold a vibrant red cloche hat to a timid-looking young girl in beige who left the shop grinning from ear to ear, ‘You look like a forties heroine, darling’; a cerise and black lace basque to a man who had come in looking for a bath set for his wife’s birthday, ‘Lingerie, so much more adventurous don’t you think?’; and a set of vintage cushions covered in blowsy cabbage roses to a woman who had described her house as minimalist. ‘There’s only so much white a body can live with, after all.’
At around four o’clock, a group of carol singers from the local school gathered outside the shop, and Carrie and Jen propped open the door and stood on the step to hear a somewhat chaotic rendition of ‘Away in a Manger’. The soft light cast by their lanterns gave their faces a radiance and a solemnity that was timeless. Except for the odd headphone wire that hung down from under their hats, they could have been children from any century. After they had finished, all fifteen of them shuffled in for mince pies and little star-shaped chocolates and then shuffled out again, being very careful not to knock into the glass baubles and candles that lined the shelves in the shop. Carrie put a ten-pound note in their bucket and they moved on up the road, lanterns swinging, pushing each other and giggling. Jen watched Carrie’s face as she looked at the departing children.
‘How you doing?’ she asked, shutting the door after them and linking her arm through Carrie’s arm.
‘I’m fine,’ said Carrie. ‘Really. I always look for his face when I see a group of children. I probably always will. It’s a kind of reflex now. I look at children two or three years older than he was when he went and it gives me an idea of how he might look now, how tall and stuff.’
‘It’s hard to imagine someone getting older when you can’t see them. Those age progression images that you see on the TV news always look really strange,’ said Jen.
‘I imagine the parents looking at the picture a computer has generated of their child, and thinking, “I would never have done her hair like that” or, “I wouldn’t have put her in that blouse”. It must be terrible to see an approximate child and know that’s all you are ever going to see,’ said Carrie, and Jen saw her clench herself against the words. The pain was always there, waiting to launch itself at her.
‘Anyway, it makes me happier, not sadder to see children having fun and doing all the things they should be doing,’ Carrie said, moving around the shop, straightening the clothes on the rails and re-stacking items that had fallen out of place.
At six they shut up shop and Jen went home to ‘soak my feet and have a bloody big glass of red wine’. Carrie placed more orders, looked through some catalogues she had been sent and totted up the day’s impressive takings. It was eight before she finally left the shop. When she unlocked her bike, she discovered that the back wheel had developed a puncture. Cursing the rip-off merchant who had had the audacity to sell her a bike with such worn rubber tyres, she started to push it home along the narrow streets. The air smelt of coal fires, once the fuel of the railway workers who used to live in these small terraces. Now of course, most of the houses had underfloor heating and shiny, wall-mounted radiators – real coal fires were simply a fashionable accessory, not a method for keeping warm. A couple walked past, sharing a bag of chips with two wooden forks. They looked so happy, so carefree in their matching hats, like another species thought Carrie bitterly, and the chain fell off her bike.
‘Fucking. Fucking. Hell,’ she said and gave it a good kick.
‘What’s that bike ever done to you?’ asked an amused voice behind her and Carrie turned round to see the man from across the road walking towards her. She made the kind of small coughing noise that was shorthand for, ‘Yes, ha, ha, very funny, now leave me alone,’ but he stopped and surveyed the offending machine.
‘Ah, the chain’s off,’ he announced. She bit back her impulse to congratulate him on his keen powers of observation and started wheeling her bike along the pavement. He fell into step beside her.
‘I don’t think I have ever properly introduced myself,’ he said. ‘I’m Oliver Gladhill. Carrie, isn’t it? Mrs Evans at number eight told me your name. I was going to come round, so I’m glad I’ve bumped into you now. I’m having a party for Christmas. I’ve been in the house for almost a year, and I still don’t know most of my neighbours.’
‘What a lovely idea,’ said Carrie. If he thought that getting the Roses and the Foxtons in the same room was a good way to spread festive spirit she didn’t want to be the one to burst his bubble. Let him find out for himself that the two families were fighting a bitter, bloody battle that went back so long that nobody, least of all the participants, knew what had provoked it. If you asked Greta Rose, with her pinched mouth and singular lack of bloom, she would say that the fault lay with the Foxtons and a garden wall that had moved five inches to the right in the middle of the night. Ask Lydia Foxton – who had a competitive streak that made Paula Radcliffe look easy going – about the origins of the enmity and she would claim
