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The iPad Sam helped her order last March is on the kitchen table. She opens Facebook – Sam helped her with this too, so she could keep in touch with her old Clapham friends, plus Susy, Mike, Helen and Daryll and the rest of the Sea Shanty Chanteurs. He helped her with Zoom too but she had no patience for it, preferring FaceTime by far. It took some getting used to, but a one-to-one video is far and away better than those awfulCelebrity Squaresboxes where by the time you’ve figured out who’s speaking, someone else is, and every time you want to chip in, which in Joyce’s opinion is how conversation works, the whole thing seems to freeze.
She sifts through the countless Facebook Naomis, but there is no Naomi Harper. Either she’s gone private or she’s no longer there. Or, of course, being no fan of Joyce, she has unfriended her or even blocked her. But having not looked at the profile since Sam showed it to her almost a year ago, there is no way of telling when or if Naomi has deleted herself. Or why.
‘Odd,’ she mutters to no one but herself.
Sitting back in her chair, she sips her by now lukewarm tea. Why the dickens would Naomi delete her profile at a time when most people are living through their computers? What is she,shyall of a sudden? Perhaps not so keen to broadcast her life once her fella left her, eager as she always was to show the world that she was living the dream, that she was the bee’s knees. Or is there another reason, something orsomeoneshe wanted to keep secret?
Not for the first time, Joyce wonders about how Naomi was after Sam left. She must have beenseethingthat he had finally found the courage to walk away, especially if she then found out she had a bun in the oven. But she ran him ragged. The sight of him on her front step in the rain that night is one Joyce will never forget. Ashen, he was, his eyes black, looking like he had at ten years old when she’d returned from the hospital to break the news about his mother, her own beloved Frida, always so full of life it had been beyond torture to watch it empty out of her like milk from a carton. A bad memory wrapped up in another bad memory. The night Sam left Naomi, Joyce hadn’t seen him in over two months – two months! – but there he stood in the dark, soaking wet, shaking from head to toe.
‘Can I come in?’ That was what he said. As if this wasn’t his home, as if it wouldn’t always be his home.
Later that night, once she’d dried him out and fed him and poured him a large glass of her best brandy, he told her that when he’d floated the idea of the two of them moving in with Joyce for the duration of the lockdown, he and Naomi had had a terrible fight. It had been building for months. He hadn’t had time to call ahead, had simply thrown his belongings into his van in blind panic and driven over.
It wasn’t until the next morning that he told her he’d trespassed onto Cannington Viaduct and spent a long time looking over the edge. He didn’t name what he’d almost done. Didn’t need to.
‘The main thing is,’ she said, holding one of his hands in both of hers, ‘you’re here now, love, and that’s what matters.’
The following evening, having been awake all the night before chewing it over, she said, ‘Sam, listen to me. I’m going to pay what you owe on the mortgage. Let her keep the flat.’
He looked at her, horrified. ‘I can’t. I can’t let you do that.’
‘You can. You’ll get everything I own anyway one day. May as well have this bit now you need it. Make a clean break. She has no claim on you then.’
Joyce closes Facebook and returns her gaze to the sea. A clean break. No claim on him.
But despite her best efforts, could that dreadful woman have a claim on him after all?
CHAPTER 4
What follows is an extract of a letter from Naomi Harper to Sam Moore, which was found by police in the glove compartment of Joyce’s MG after Sam was arrested.
Dear Sam,
When I saw you today, I so wanted to tell you the truth, but I couldn’t – I just couldn’t.
I’m back home now and Tommy’s asleep, so I thought I’d try and get everything down while it’s clear in my mind. Funny, my horoscope this morning said: Something startling will happen today. And I know you’d laugh even though you’re a classic Virgo, but you see, something startling did happen, didn’t it? Nearly startled the life out of me. I thought I was over you, but I don’t think I am. I’m literally shaking.
It was hard seeing you today, really hard. You look so well. The colour is back in your cheeks, and your hair looks nice a bit longer like that. You’re still so handsome, so built, so tall. It was quite gutting actually. Not sure about the beard though. Only joking! And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with living with your gran, especially now she’s getting older. That house was too much for her even before – the cleaning took her ten hours a time, and OMG, the repairs! Do the windows still need replacing? They must be mostly filler by now. I remember how the wind used to make the bedroom windows bang sometimes – it used to whistle under the doors too. It was freezing, wasn’t it? We used to have to wear woolly hats and jumpers in bed, didn’t we? Great sea view of course, but brrrr.
Seeing you today brought back so many memories. I suppose you’re the only person I want to talk to about them, the only one who’d remember what I remember. Like when we came back from Ibiza that time and the courgettes you’d planted had turned into marrows and Joyce made that bolognese sauce and she put it in the marrows for dinner. Do you remember that? She put star anise in it. I’d never tasted it before. I didn’t eat the marrow – it was all watery – but I ate the sauce, didn’t I? It was delicious. See? See how much I remember? We had some good times, didn’t we? I know that’s easy to forget sometimes, but we did.
Thing is, I probably shouldn’t have lied to you today, but now I’m home, I don’t know if I’ll ever tell you the truth. Even now that things are finally easing up, I’m not sure I’ll see you, especially if we’re avoiding each other, which I suppose we will be. Maybe you’ll come over this way. Maybe I’ll bump into you at the market one Saturday… but it’s not like you’d bother with the market without me, is it? The way I see it, there’s no real need to tell you. Because the thing is, Sam, we live separate lives now. And that’s on you.
I don’t have to tell you anything. Not anymore.
CHAPTER 5
I think anyone who knew Sam would’ve said he wasn’t what you’d call an alpha male. He wasn’t fey or effeminate or anything, just a bit quiet. I always thought he was like the jazz he loved so much: you had to listen to the pauses. His love of music came from his gran, I think, as well as the gardening; it’s just a shame he never inherited her business smarts. She’d had a successful chain of launderettes in London back in the day, but she was a local girl originally – local girl makes good, returns to her roots a rich woman. When she came back, she bought the big Georgian house up by Ware Cliff. This is going back twenty years; I was just a kid. By the time I met her, she was as much part of the landscape as the famous Jurassic geology.
Sam needed someone with more of a grasp on the material, administrative aspects of life, and I guess that’s where Naomi came in. He told me she always handled the money side of things, and there was no surprise there, I can tell you. Money flew out of his hands, and working out budgets with him was a nightmare; I could laugh just thinking about the constipated look he’d get on his face, the panic-induced glazing of the eyes. In the end, I’d do the calculations for a prospective job and tell him how much he should charge me for the work. It takes a lot of trust to operate like that, but obviously, in the cold light of what happened, I think it might’ve been better to have insisted he become a bit savvier. I let him down in that regard as well as so many others.
Working as well as we did together, I guess I always hoped that one day Sam and I would become business partners, and OK, I’ll admit, maybe more. I didn’t think he saw me that way; he wasn’t one to pick up on signals even if you stood there in your underwear pointing to the bedroom – not that I ever did that. Christ, no. But as the year went on and he and Naomi got closer, we hung out less and less. And maybe here too I let him down. If I’m guilty of something, it’s of not saying enough – to him or to others. If I had, maybe the disaster could have been averted.
I didn’t tell him, for example, that Darren had once told me that the Harpers had a bit of a rep over in Bridport. Naomi’s dad had done time for burglary, and Darren had heard her mother was a tricky one. But I wasn’t about to start slinging mud at another woman’s family so I could get the guy. As for expressing my concern to the lads, as the weeks went on, the bottom line was he was obviously hiding his relationship from them. It wasn’t for me to divulge information he wasn’t ready to share. I didn’t want to break his trust or cause him to feel ashamed and end up isolated.
Or by that do I actually mean I didn’t want him to distance himself fromme? With hindsight, can I honestly say I wasn’t secretly flattered to be his confidante, that I didn’t hope that our closeness might spill over into something else? God knows. I know now I should have taken the risk of him turning away from me. Maybe if I had, I could have stopped him. Maybe I should have told Darren. Maybe Darren would’ve taken him for a pint and had a word. Maybe Darren would’ve said,Mate. Slow down.
The fact is, I didn’t do any of those things. But back to Sam: there he is, under the bathwater, eyes closed, the pulse of blood throbbing in his temples.
