I didn’t know how long it had been going off, but I suspected a long, long time. My head ached, and I lay for a long moment trying to orientate myself before I managed to reach out and silence the clock in case it woke Judah.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stretched, trying to work the kinks from my neck and shoulders, and then levered myself painfully up to vertical, climbed out of bed, and made my way through to Judah’s kitchen. While the coffee percolated, I took my pills, and then hunted in the bathroom for painkillers. I found ibuprofen and paracetamol, as well as something in a brown plastic bottle that I vaguely remembered Judah being prescribed when he twisted his knee in a football match. I opened the childproof lid and inspected the pills inside. They were huge, half-red and half-white, and looked impressive.
In the end I chickened out of taking them, and instead pressed two ibuprofen and a fast-acting paracetamol into my palm from the assorted blister packs on the bathroom shelf. I gulped them down with a cup of coffee—black, there was no milk in the empty fridge—and then sipped the rest of the cup more slowly as I thought about last night, about my stupid actions, about Judah’s announcement. . . .
I was surprised. No, more than surprised—I was shocked. We’d never really discussed his plans long-term, but I knew he missed his friends in the US, and his mum and younger brother—neither of whom I’d met. What he’d done . . . had he done it for himself? Or for us?
There was half a cup of coffee left in the jug, and I poured it into a second mug and carried it carefully through to the bedroom.
Judah was lying sprawled across the mattress as if he’d fallen there. People in films always look peaceful in sleep, but Judah didn’t. His battered mouth was hidden beneath his upflung arm, but with his angular nose and furrowed brow he looked like an angry hawk, shot down by a gamekeeper midflight and still pissed off about it.
I set the coffee cup very gently on his bedside table and, putting my face close on the pillow next to him, I kissed the back of his neck. It was warm, and surprisingly soft.
He stirred in his sleep, putting out one long tanned arm to loop over my shoulders, and his eyes opened, looking three shades darker than their usual hazel brown.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“Hey.” He scrunched up his face and yawned, and then pulled me down beside him. For a moment I resisted, thinking of the boat and the train and the car waiting for me at Hull. Then my limbs seemed to melt like plastic and I let myself fold into him, into his warmth. We lay there staring into each other’s eyes, and I reached out and tentatively touched the Steri-Strip across his lip.
“Think it’ll re-root?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so, I’ve got to go to Moscow tomorrow, and I don’t want to be messing around with dentists while I’m out there.”
I said nothing. He closed his eyes and stretched, and I heard his joints click as he did. Then he rolled onto his side and put his cupped hand gently over my bare breast.
“Judah . . .” I said. I could hear the mix of exasperation and longing in my voice.
“What?”
“I can’t. I’ve got to go.”
“So go.”
“Don’t. Stop that.”
“Don’t, stop? Or don’t stop?” He gave a slow lopsided smile.
“Both. You know which one I mean.” I pulled myself upright and shook my head. It hurt, and I regretted the movement instantly.
“Your cheek okay?” Judah asked.
“Yeah.” I put a hand up to it. It was swollen, but not as much as before.
His face was troubled, and he put out a finger to stroke the bruise, but I flinched away in spite of myself.
“I should have been there,” he said.
“Well, you weren’t,” I said snappishly, more snappishly than I’d meant to. “You never are.”
He blinked and pulled himself up on his elbows to look at me, his face still soft with sleep, crumpled with marks from his pillow.
“What the . . . ?”
“You heard me.” I knew I was being unreasonable, but the words came tumbling out. “What’s the future, Jude? Even if I move in here—what’s the plan? Do I sit here weaving my shroud like Penelope and keeping the home fires burning while you drink Scotch in some bar in Russia with the other foreign correspondents?”
“Where’d this come from?”
I just shook my head and swung my legs out of bed. I began pulling on the pile of spare clothes I’d left on the floor after the trip to A&E.
“I’m just tired, Jude.” Tired was an understatement. I hadn’t slept longer than two hours in the last three nights. “And I can’t see where this is heading. It’s hard enough now when it’s just the two of us. I don’t want to be your wife-in-every-port stuck at home with a kid and a raging case of postnatal depression while you’re getting shot at in every hellhole this side of the equator.”
“Recent events kind of imply I’m in more danger in my own apartment,” Judah said, and then winced as he saw my face. “Sorry, that was an asshole thing to say. It was an accident, I know that.”
I swung my still-damp coat round my shoulders and picked up my bag.
“ ’Bye, Judah.”
“ ’Bye? What do you mean, ’bye?”
“Whatever you want.”
“What I want is for you to stop acting like a goddamn drama queen and move into my flat. I love you, Lo!”
The words hit me like a slap. I stopped in the doorway, feeling the weight of my tiredness like something physical around my neck, pulling me down.
Hands in pale latex, the sound of a laugh . . .
“Lo?” Judah said uncertainly.
“I can’t do this,” I said, my face to the hallway. I was not sure what I was talking about—I can’t leave; I can’t stay; I can’t have this conversation, this life, this everything. “I just— I have to go.”
“So that job,” he said, the beginnings of anger in his voice. “The one I turned down. Are you saying I was wrong?”
“I never asked you to do that,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I never asked you. So don’t you put that on me.” I hoisted my bag up onto my shoulder and turned to the door.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to stop me. I walked out of the flat reeling like I was half-drunk. It was only when I got on the tube that the reality of what had just happened hit me.
- CHAPTER 5 -
I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say . . . I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.
I had spent the train journey avoiding thoughts of Judah and trying to distract myself with research on the trip ahead. Richard Bullmer was only a few years older than me, but his CV was enough to make me feel hopelessly inadequate—a list of businesses and directorships that made my eyes water, each a stepping-stone to an even higher level of money and influence.
When I brought up Wikipedia on my phone, it showed a bronzed, handsome man with very black hair, arm in arm with a stunningly beautiful blonde in her late twenties. Richard Bullmer with his wife, the heiress Anne Lyngstad, at their wedding in Stavanger, read the caption.
Given his title, I’d assumed that his wealth had been handed to him on a plate, but it looked, from Wikipedia at least, as if I’d been unfair. The early part of the picture was cushy enough—prep school, Eton and Balliol. However, in his first year at university his father had died—his mother seemed already to be out of the picture, it wasn’t entirely clear—and the family estate had been swallowed up in death duty and debts, leaving him, at nineteen years of age, homeless and alone.
Under those circumstances, the fact that he got through Oxford with a degree would have been achievement enough, but he had also created a dot-com start-up in his third year. Its stock market flotation in 2003 was the first in his string of successes, culminating with this boutique ten-cabin cruise liner conceived as a super-luxury retreat for hopping the Scandinavian coastline.