Swimming in the Shadows Read online

  ‘My mum’s all right – you’ll like her. Anyway, convenience is a great incentive to turning a blind eye. There are only two bedrooms in the flat and I’m sure she’d much rather have us staying with her instead of putting up in some B and B.’

  At that moment I could not help wishing that Rob’s mother had been as straight-laced as my own. An escape to a B & B would have cut down enormously on all that togetherness which lay ahead of us.

  It was after ten when we arrived. The flat was in a modern block with a parking area near the main doors. Rob’s mother buzzed us in through the intercom and he led the way along a corridor to where his mother awaited us in the doorway of her flat. Everything about her was small and neat. She was a bright-eyed, white-haired lady wearing a red knitted dress and pearls. Her hair was permed and discreet eye shadow and lipstick had been applied; not just for our benefit, I thought, but because she was the kind of woman who would have felt undressed without them.

  Rob looked enormous alongside her. He put down the bags, gave her a bear hug then stepped aside while she took both my hands in her small ones and kissed me on each cheek. ‘It’s lovely to meet you, Susan,’ she said. ‘Come inside, you must both be exhausted.’ Rob had yet to tell her that we were getting married, but I saw the swift appraisal all the same, the relief at finding that I did not have a nose ring, or bright pink hair, did not look like a bimbo or a tart. I reflected that she probably didn’t get to see many of his girlfriends – he lived too far away – so when he told her that he was bringing someone down she must have guessed there was something in the wind.

  The flat was extremely tidy, like its occupant, though she had made the room bright with pictures, pot plants and cut flowers. Rob and I sat together on the settee while his mother bustled in and out of the kitchen, making hot drinks. I took care to let him see me stifling another yawn. There was an inevitable interlude of enquiries about the journey – which way had we come down and how had the traffic been, but then she said, ‘You must be very tired after the drive. I expect you want nothing more than to get to bed. Don’t feel you have to sit up just to be polite.’

  I was only too delighted to take my cue: ‘I must admit, I am really whacked …’

  ‘You go and get your head down, dear. Your room is the first door on the left and the bathroom is right next door.’ She smiled. ‘There will be plenty of time for me to find out all about you tomorrow.’ She turned to Rob, mercifully oblivious to the way I had all but choked on my last mouthful of tea. ‘Now, I know you like a lie-in on a Saturday, so I thought rather than make a big thing of breakfast, we could all go out for lunch. The Riviera Hotel is very nice – do you remember it? The big one on the Esplanade?’

  As I settled beneath the duvet I realized that I was genuinely weary. Even so, I lay awake for some time in the unfamiliar bedroom. I knew that I was being ridiculous – investing her words with suspicions which simply were not there. She was just a harmless old lady. I had maintained my deception for years in the face of all-comers and there was no particular reason why she should present a problem. All we had to do was get through a day (half a day if I could hang out the Saturday lie-in for long enough) of chatting and exploring whatever Sidmouth had to offer. Then, first thing on Sunday we would be back on the road again, our engagement announced, her curiosity satisfied and me safely off the hook until whenever we met again – which given the distances involved wasn’t going to be any time soon. So why was I losing sleep? Was it just that I had worked myself up to expect a problem? Or did I genuinely have a bad feeling about this whole enterprise – a feeling in no way diminished by my first look at the little old lady in the red dress, with those bright blue eyes which seemed to see right through me?

  THREE

  Sometimes I even tried to deceive myself. I told myself lies about Rob, saying that I had not wanted him to fall in love with me. I always knew that a relationship with Rob represented too much of a danger, so of course I never wanted him to fall in love with me – but it wasn’t true. I wanted him desperately. I wanted him to love me back for real, not just as a passing romance but for keeps. Children would call it pretending. Let’s pretend that you’re a knight and I’m a beautiful princess. The gentle art of self-deception. Let’s pretend that I’m not really married to someone else.

  All this I thought about as I lay in Rob’s mother’s spare bedroom, where the morning sunshine was forcing its way through the floral-print curtains.

  ‘Penny for them?’

  I realized then that he was awake and had perhaps been watching me for some time. I turned to him and smiled. ‘I was thinking how happy I am – and how lucky I am to have you.’ I kissed him, one kiss leading to another until we were making love, the whole business conducted in furtive silence out of unspoken respect for his mother, whose walls were thin and whose spare room door did not quite meet the beige carpet. It may have been this concern for her finer feelings which prompted me to say afterwards, as we continued to lie in bed, disputing half-heartedly about which of us would use the bathroom first, ‘Do you think it might be better if we didn’t mention getting married this visit?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it’s a lot to spring on her, isn’t it? The first time she’s ever met me – in one breath, “Hey, Mum, this is Susan,” and in the next, “Oh and by the way, we’re getting married.”’

  ‘You’re not having second thoughts, are you?’

  ‘About telling her this weekend – yes.’

  ‘About getting married?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It would be so much easier if we could just live together like everyone else does – but if I say this now you will feel rejected and I can’t bear that.

  ‘I just feel as if it would be – I don’t know – good manners to let her get used to me for a while. It’s not as if we’ve set a date. There will be plenty of other opportunities to break the news.’

  ‘Not exactly plenty … It’s not as if we’re down in Devon every other weekend.’

  Her knock on the door startled us both. ‘Hello in there – I heard you talking, so I know you’re awake. Would you like a cup of tea in bed?’

  ‘Cheers, Mum, but we’re getting up now.’ As if to make good this statement, Rob scrambled out of bed and wrapped himself in his big blue dressing gown.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ came the disembodied voice from the hall, but he was already opening the door en route for the bathroom, our discussion about whether or not to break the news left unresolved.

  It stayed that way for the rest of the day. She provided us with a late breakfast of croissants, juice and coffee, after which we went for a walk along the Esplanade. The wind was coming in from the Channel, pushing foamy waves up the shingle beach, tossing cascades of droplets into the air where they caught the sunlight and turned into a million tiny rainbows against the clear blue sky. The conditions made conversation difficult, but I sensed the likelihood of a grilling once we sat down to lunch.

  The waiter at the Riviera Hotel obviously recognized Rob’s mother. She probably lunches here regularly, I thought. I had been steeling myself for the interrogation to begin at once, but I had forgotten all the fussy little preliminaries, the removal of coats, the aperitif in the bar, decisions over the menu – and just when the gentle dispute between Rob and his mother about whether he had eaten there with her before had run its course, the waiter arrived, ready to show us to our table. Then there were our starters to be tasted and commented upon, someone noticing that it had begun to cloud over and might soon begin to rain, questions about Rob’s cottage – had he got that problem with the central heating boiler sorted out? I knew it was only a postponement, not a reprieve. At any moment now Rob’s mother, while managing to stay on the right side of polite, would start to pose a variety of enquiries about where her son’s new girlfriend came from and who her family were. Yet all through our main course Mrs Dugdale confounded my expectations by keeping her curio
sity politely under wraps, making easy conversation about anything and nothing.

  The time came to choose our pudding. ‘If you like pavlova, Susan, you should really try theirs – it’s absolutely heavenly.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Rob interrupted. ‘Before we commit ourselves on this, you’d better come clean. It isn’t fair to encourage Sue to fill herself up at lunchtime, then produce some sort of gargantuan gateaux you’ve made when we get back to the flat.’

  ‘I’m sure Susan has a very healthy appetite …’

  ‘So you have baked a cake. I might have known.’

  ‘Well of course I have. You know I always bake when you come down.’

  ‘The trouble with you, Mother, is that you always think everyone needs feeding up.’

  ‘Do have a pudding, Susan, and take no notice of my son. You are under no obligation whatsoever to eat any cake later if you don’t want to. And don’t think any of it will be wasted, because what you don’t eat I’m going to wrap up for Rob to take home. Not that I want you to think I’m the sort of silly woman who sends her grown-up son home with food parcels,’ she added. ‘But I know very well that in spite of his protestations, he is extremely fond of home-made cake.’

  ‘It was very kind of you to bake specially for us,’ I said. ‘And I love cake, so I’m sure I can manage to eat some pudding now and some cake later.’

  ‘It was a pleasure,’ said Mrs Dugdale. ‘Visitors provide me with a good excuse to keep my hand in. Do you enjoy baking or are you too busy with your job?’

  ‘I never really got into baking,’ I said, ‘living on my own.’

  ‘Mum is an absolute demon,’ said Rob. ‘She does about six Christmas cakes for various people every year. If I were you, I’d get your order in now and she’ll put you on her list. The whole operation starts sometime around June.’

  ‘I do mince pies too.’ Her blue eyes lit up. ‘For the Christmas bazaar, and for friends.’

  ‘I’m afraid my mince pies usually come out of a box,’ I said.

  ‘Mince pies out of a box.’ Rob pretended to chide me. ‘Mentioning that in front of the Kitchen Crusader is like telling Batman that the Penguin’s on the loose in Gotham City.’

  Mrs Dugdale smiled her twinkly smile again, completely disarming me with all this inconsequential talk of seasonal confectionery, before saying, ‘You know, Susan, ever since you got here last night I’ve been trying to place where I’ve seen you before.’

  I was caught completely off guard. A mass the size of a Christmas cake abruptly took up residence in my chest, where it tried to force the air from my lungs while my heart beat against it in thunderous protest. I couldn’t risk one of those ‘did you ever live here’ or ‘visit there’ conversations, so I tried to cut her off with: ‘Well, I expect it was when you were still living in Richmond. We could easily have seen each other there.’

  ‘No dear,’ she said. ‘It can’t have been in Richmond, because I moved down here long before you went to work in Lasthwaite – and didn’t Rob tell me that you lived somewhere in the Midlands before that?’

  I maintained a fixed smile while cursing the fact that Rob had never bothered to mention his mother was some sort of female Sherlock Holmes, who apparently committed every little detail she was told to memory, so that you couldn’t gloss over anything without tripping up.

  ‘Actually,’ she continued, ‘I was going to ask if you had a sister. I’ve been thinking about it all morning – trying to remember where I’d seen you before – and when the waiter brought the menus across just now, it suddenly came to me. You look just like a girl who used to work in a hotel that a friend and I stayed at in Keswick.’

  ‘I don’t have any sisters.’ Keep smiling, keep it light. Keep breathing steadily, in and out, in and out.

  ‘Sue’s an only child,’ Rob volunteered.

  ‘And I’ve never worked in the hotel trade.’ Might as well throw in a lie for good measure.

  ‘How funny,’ said Mrs Dugdale. ‘I’ve generally got such a good memory for faces. Not that you would normally remember someone like that, but there was a problem over our bathroom, you see. We had to change rooms and this girl who served the meals at the hotel helped us with our luggage. She looked so like you, and I remember her voice was similar – another girl from the Midlands – it could almost have been you. It was at the Heather Bank Hotel in Keswick.’

  ‘A doppelgänger,’ I said. ‘They say everybody has one.’ I managed to sound interested, but not too interested.

  ‘Did you see that thing in the papers last week?’ Rob asked. ‘About those people who look like famous celebrities? They get paid to turn up at parties, pretending to be Marilyn Monroe or the queen. There’s a special agency apparently. What a weird way to make a living.’

  I blessed him for providing a diversion. Hotel guests fell into two categories: those for whom the staff were part of the fixtures and fittings and therefore completely unmemorable, and those much more dangerous guests who were capable of recognizing the person who had served them their dinner, or helped them move their luggage, when they ran across that person again years later. Mrs Dugdale evidently fell into this latter category. For my part, I could honestly say that I did not recognize her from my time as Louise at the Heather Bank Hotel. In small hotels there was always a multitude of white-haired old ladies who all merged into an amorphous crowd – if not before their departure then very soon after it. Moreover, the odds were stacked in favour of the guest: there were only a handful of staff and thousands of little old ladies. Inwardly I cursed my bad luck – of all the hotels in all the world …

  Nothing more was said about the hotel in Keswick, and whether I had satisfied her curiosity or not, I managed a bravura performance as a prospective daughter-in-law, complimenting her on the cake, insisting on helping with some washing up, admiring old photographs of Rob and taking an interest in anecdotes about his childhood, his late father and his sisters.

  ‘She really likes you,’ he said as we lay in bed together that night. He had said nothing about our getting married and Mrs Dugdale was too polite to fish – not even asking anything about our living arrangements – although perhaps it was obvious from our conversation (she was ruddy Miss Marple, after all) that we still maintained separate establishments. ‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘I like her too.’ Which would have been completely true if she had not been so infernally sharp.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning,’ he said.

  We were both keeping our voices low – consideration lending a touch of conspiracy to our conversation. ‘What about?’ I asked, in little more than a whisper.

  ‘About not telling her that we plan to get married, and I think you’re right. Telling her this weekend would be like a fait accompli – not that she’s really got any say in the matter, but if we come down again in a couple of months and tell her then it will be nicer, somehow. Not so in your face.’

  ‘I’m sure that would be better,’ I said. I imagined her a few weeks hence, lunching with friends and telling them that Rob was bringing me down again. ‘It sounds serious,’ one of them would say, and another one would add that it was about time too. They would all be the sort of women who wanted their children to have nice weddings: everyone in big hats, with the grandchildren who had already been provided by other offspring acting as page boys and bridesmaids. I pictured the empty pews on my side of the church and felt slightly sick. No relations. Who on earth can claim to have no relations? Alongside me, Rob was saying something about introducing me to his sisters soon, while I made non-committal ‘mmm’ noises, and thanked my lucky stars that neither of them lived near enough to have joined us in Sidmouth for the day. Always with new people there was that chance of recognition – not from the hotel work, an unlucky, million-to-one coincidence, but from the newspapers who’d printed my photo after my disappearance. Sooner or later someone was going to spot my resemblance to Jennifer Reynolds, and if a good memory for faces ran in the female si
de of Rob’s family …

  It seemed to me in that moment that if one of us was rather short on relatives, Rob had more than enough for both of us.

  FOUR

  We set off for home after breakfast on Sunday morning. Rob’s mother kissed me goodbye – one on each side, lips brushing my cheeks so that I caught a hint of her discreet floral perfume. She was so petite, so utterly Good Housekeeping and Elizabeth Arden that I found myself wondering how on earth she had ever produced a hulking, outdoorsy type like Rob, but perhaps he had taken after his father’s side of the family.

  Our journey home was uneventful. We listened to the radio and talked. Normal, safe, unimportant topics. Nothing more was said about doppelgängers or hotels in the Lake District, so I was able to relax in the happiness of the moment: Rob and I travelling together, not looking to the future nor troubling over the past. When we reached my cottage, he insisted on carrying my small weekend bag to the door, although he declined to come in. I didn’t press him, because I knew that he had a stack of Year Nine projects waiting at home which had to be marked by the morning. He kissed me goodbye and I stood on the doorstep, waving him out of sight down the lane.

  Heb’s Cottage had been the only property available for rent in the district when I had been offered a job in Lasthwaite the previous year. It was a typical Dales cottage almost a mile from the village, out of sight of any other habitation, but in many ways the isolation suited my purpose and the place had quickly become ‘home’. By the time I unlocked the door that afternoon the central heating had already switched itself on, so the place felt warm and welcoming. Casual visitors might have thought the furnishings rather spare, the style bordering on minimalist, but to my eyes it was a safe haven, comfortable and uncluttered.

  I went straight through to the kitchen to make myself some coffee, and as I waited for the kettle to boil I thought about Rob and his mother, and the way her kindly, uncomplicated welcome only seemed to make things even worse. Why on earth had I agreed to marriage, with its inherent legal complications? Why hadn’t I decried the whole institution as outmoded, stood firm as an independent woman at the start of the nineties surely should and told him that it was just a worthless piece of paper? Because secretly, said a treacherous voice inside my head, you adore the romantic in him. The very fact that he wants to marry you is dangerously appealing. He proposed with roses and champagne – how the hell could you refuse?