Chapter 1
The Night Daniel Didn't Come Home
By nine o'clock on Friday evening Amara Hale had cooked enough pepper soup for six people, and there were two of them.
She stood at the stove in her gray cardigan with the wooden spoon in her hand and looked at the pot. It had been simmering since six. The kitchen was warm and thick with the smell of scotch bonnet and uziza and the dried fish her mother had pressed into her hands at the church door on Sunday, wrapped in newspaper and a lecture. Steam fogged the window over the sink. Beyond the fogged glass the rain was falling on the back garden in long slanting threads, bouncing off the shed roof, drumming on the lid of the compost bin, filling the November-looking dark of an evening that was, by the calendar, still only October.
Daniel was meant to be home by now.
She did not say it aloud. She was not the kind of woman who said such things to an empty kitchen. She took the lid off the pot and stirred, and the soup turned over on itself in a slow amber swirl, and she tasted it, and added salt it did not need.
He had said Friday. He had said it on Monday morning, in the hall, with his overnight bag at his feet and his raincoat half on, and then again on the phone on Tuesday night, and again, more briefly, on Wednesday. Friday, Mara. I'll be back for dinner. Don't cook anything fancy. And she had said, When have I ever cooked anything fancy? And he had laughed, that low surprised laugh that came out of him whenever she was funny without intending to be, and said, Never. That's why I'm coming home.
She turned the heat down to its lowest blue flicker and went to look at the clock in the hall.
The house on Marsh Lane was a narrow Victorian terrace, red brick going to black along the damp course, with a front door the color of old wine and a brass letterbox that Daniel had polished every second Sunday for fifteen years. They had bought it the autumn after the wedding, with a mortgage that had frightened them both, and for the first six months they had eaten off the floor because they could not agree on a table. There was still a pale shape on the hallway wallpaper where the first wardrobe had stood. There was a place on the third stair that creaked in the key of G. There was a green leather chair beside the telephone table, inherited from Daniel's one-time landlady and never replaced, in which, on a thousand evenings, he had sat with the phone between his shoulder and his ear arguing cheerfully with a supplier while Amara stepped over his legs with laundry.
The telephone was the kind with a cord. It was a landline in the age of the mobile, and the only reason it survived was that her mother refused to speak to her on anything else. Beside it sat the answering machine, a gray plastic box with a little window and a single button. The red light on its face was blinking. It had been blinking for weeks. She knew that the way she knew where the creak in the stairs was, without looking. It would be the dentist, or her aunt in Enugu, or the council, and some evening soon she was going to sit down and listen to every one of them and clear the machine. She had been meaning to do it since September.
The hall clock said nine fifteen.
She took her mobile from the pocket of her cardigan and checked it, again, though she knew it had not rung. There was nothing from Daniel since Wednesday night. Not a text, not a missed call. Twice that afternoon she had stood at the window of the archive's reading room with her hand around her phone, looking down at the wet gray roofs of Wexcombe and the river sliding between them, and told herself that a man at a conference does not text his wife every two hours. And twice she had called him anyway, and twice her call had gone straight to a polite recorded voice telling her that the person she was calling was not available.
Not available. It was not even his own voice. That was what unsettled her. For fifteen years she had been able to leave him a message and hear him on the other end of it, rueful and dry, saying, You've reached Daniel Hale. I'm either in a meeting or in the bath. Leave a message and I'll pretend I got it in time.
She called again now, standing under the pale shape on the wallpaper. She listened to the flat voice say the phone was not available. She hung up before the tone.
"He's asleep," she said, to the hallway.
The hallway, which had been her only audience for most of the week, said nothing.
She had gone with him to the door on Monday morning.
She went back over it now as she carried the soup to the table, the way she went back over the catalogues of the archive on the nights she could not sleep, entry by entry, to see whether anything had been misfiled. He had burned the toast. That was the first thing. He had burned the toast every morning of their marriage with a kind of unshakable and affectionate incompetence, and she had stopped putting bread under the grill for him in about the third year, when she understood that it was a ritual, that he liked the smell of it going wrong. He had stood at the counter in his shirtsleeves with a blackened slice in his hand, humming something tuneless through his teeth, and she had come up behind him and put her arms around his waist and her cheek against his back, and felt the hum going through his ribs like the purr of something large and contented.
"You'll miss the train," she had said.
"I'll get the next one." He had turned inside her arms. He was a tall man, a head above her, with a long face that was serious until it wasn't, and eyes that were gray in the morning and green by evening. He had put his hand on the back of her head and kept it there. He had not said anything. It went on a little longer than a goodbye ought to go on, a long still held moment in the middle of the kitchen with the smoke alarm threatening to go off, and she had felt, quite clearly, the pulse in his neck against her forehead going far too fast.
"Daniel," she had said. "What is it?"
"Nothing." He had kissed her hair. "Work. A lot to do."
"You're allowed to be nervous. It's an important contract."
"Brightwell," he had said, and smiled, and the smile had been perfectly normal. "Martin says if I land it I'll be doing the Christmas speech."
"Heaven help us."
"Heaven help me." He had picked up the bag. At the front door, with his raincoat half on and one arm still looking for its sleeve, he had stopped, and turned back, and looked at her in the doorway of the kitchen, in her old gray cardigan with her hair tied up in the green scarf she wore to cook. He had looked at her as if he were memorizing the arrangement of the room.
"What?" she had said, laughing a little, uneasy. "Have I got fish on my face?"
"No." He had shaken his head slowly. "No, Mara. You're perfect. You're just where I left you."
Then the door had closed, and the letterbox had rattled, and she had stood in the hall hearing his footsteps go down the path in the rain, and had thought, with the odd dry clarity that came to her in the first minutes of any morning: I will remember that I thought something was wrong, and that I told myself it was the contract.
Now, on Friday night, she sat down at the table and did not eat.
At ten past ten she did what she had been refusing to do all evening, which was to rummage through the last three days for evidence that she was being foolish.
There was the call on Tuesday, a good one, nearly forty minutes, with the sound of gulls behind his voice and the clink of a spoon against a mug. He had told her the flat was ridiculous, rented while the firm's own office on the quay was being painted. Rented by the week, through a man he knew on the docks, because the hotels in Dunmarrow were booked solid for a trade fair. Slanted ceilings, a radiator that knocked like a prisoner, a bed he said was shaped like a boat. I'm sleeping at a thirty-degree angle, he had said. Wake up with all the blood in my head. She had laughed until she had to put the phone down on the pillow.
And there was Wednesday evening. She went back over that one with more care, because Wednesday had been the last time anyone had heard from him, and because on Wednesday, in the middle of cooking, with the phone tucked against her ear, she had been talking to someone else.
Martin had rung at a quarter to eight.
She remembered it exactly. She was standing at this stove, in this cardigan, with a half-chopped onion on the board and the radio murmuring the shipping forecast, which she kept on in the evenings for the beauty of it and for the company. She had known who it was before she lifted the receiver, because nobody else rang at that hour on a weeknight, and because she could picture him: a broad man in a green sweater, squinting, laughing, his thinning hair standing up in the wind of some sailing trip long ago.
"Amara, my love," he had said. His voice was warm and a little tired, a bass voice with a sandpaper edge. "Tell me you're not eating alone."
"I'm eating onions alone. It's very romantic."
"Dan not been on?"
"Last night. He's fine." She had wiped her eyes with her wrist. "He says it's the strangest place he's ever slept. He's absolutely loving it."
"Is he." There had been a faint pause, the sound of a lid being unscrewed, a glass being set down. Martin was always doing something while he talked: a pen, a glass, the little plastic click of the insulin pen he used before his dinner. "He's been working himself half to death on this one. I told him to take a few days when he's done. Where have they put him? A hotel?"
"A flat. Short let. Above a chandler's on the quay, I think he said." She had been looking at the dark rain on the garden, reciting, the way you do when somebody asks you something you happen to know. "It smells of tar and rope, apparently. He says you can see the lighthouse from the bed. Honestly, Martin, he sounded about eleven years old."
"Lovely," Martin had said. "That's lovely." There was another pause, short and soft. "Well. Tell him I'll bring a bottle on Friday. He'll have earned it."
"I will."
"Get some sleep, Amara."
"You get some. You sound dreadful."
"I'm fifty-two," said Martin. "It's allowed."
She smiled now at the memory, in the cold kitchen, with the untouched soup going skinned and cold in the bowl before her. Dear, solid, unfashionable Martin, who had introduced her to her husband at a dinner party in the summer of 1989, who had stood beside Daniel at their wedding with his ring-box shaking in his hand, who had sat with her in the corridor of St. Aldhelm's when her father died. Seventeen years of Sunday roasts and bad jokes and borrowed ladders. If anything was wrong, Martin would know. If anything was wrong, Martin would have rung her.
She got up. She scraped the soup into a container, and put it in the fridge, and stood with her palm against the cold white door.
She did not, then, remember the other thing about Wednesday. The thing she would only recall months later, in a room full of rain and dust, with her hand on the cover of a book. How, when she had said above a chandler's on the quay, the kitchen had been quiet. How the shipping forecast on the radio had been naming sea areas, one after another, in that calm steady voice, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight. And how, on the other end of the line, for the length of a single breath, Martin Ashby had stopped moving.
At half past eleven she gave up and went to bed.
She did it the way she did most things, methodically, with a faint feeling of performing for an invisible inspector: the back door locked, the chain on the front, the lamp in the hall left on because Daniel hated to come into a dark house. She cleaned her teeth. She took off her wedding ring and put it on the saucer by the bed, as she did every night, and then, for no reason she could have defended, put it back on.
The bed was too large. It was always too large when he was away, a wide cool country of linen with a dent on his side and the pale scent of his shampoo coming up from the pillow. She lay on her back. She counted the cracks in the ceiling, which she had counted before, and there were eleven.
She did not sleep. She lay with her eyes open and listened to the house. The tick of the cooling radiator. The old pipes muttering in the wall. The rain, softer now, blowing against the window in handfuls like thrown rice. Once, at some hour that belonged to neither night nor morning, she heard a car go slowly down Marsh Lane and stop outside, with its engine idling, and she was on her feet and at the curtain before she had decided to move.
The street was empty. The lamp at the corner threw a trembling orange circle on the wet black cobbles. A bin lay on its side. Across the road, the window of Mrs. Gethin's front room showed the blue light of a television turned low, and above the rooftops the sky was the color of a bruise beginning to heal.
There was nobody in the car. There was no car.
She stood with the heavy curtain in her hand and her heart going, and then she let it fall.
You're being ridiculous, she told herself. He'll ring in the morning. He'll say his phone died, that he fell asleep on the train, that he's on his way, that he's sorry. She said it in her mother's voice, in her sister's, in her own. She said it until it sounded true. And then, in the narrow dark between the first gray light and the last of the night, with the rain stopping and the first bird starting up in the pear tree outside, she fell at last into a thin and restless sleep, one arm flung above her head.
She dreamed of water. Dark water, still, with something white turning slowly beneath the surface.
The phone woke her at twenty to six.
It was not her mobile. It was the landline in the hall, the old gray telephone with its curling cord, shrilling in the dark house with a harsh brazen insistence she had not heard in months. She was on the stairs before she was awake. She missed the creaking step. She took the last three in a stumbling rush, her bare feet slapping on the cold boards, her hand skidding down the banister, and in the thin gray light from the hall window she saw it ringing on its table by the green chair, and above it, on the answering machine, the little red light still steadily, patiently blinking.
She picked up the receiver. It was cold and heavy in her hand. And before anyone spoke, in the half second of crackling nothing on the line, with the whole sleeping house standing around her like a held breath, Amara Hale knew with absolute and terrible certainty that the man she had married was never going to come home again.