in a cramped, dark space. She is afraid, but not of her immediate surroundings. This is her hiding place. Bad things don’t happen to her in here. Bad things happen when he comes to take her out of it.
The voices come at her from the darkness.
He’s getting closer.
You think the South Atlantic is far enough? Idiot, you can run to the moon and he’ll find you.
‘Stop it.’
In her dream she can feel the cold wall against her face. She pulls the duvet up over her head, trying to shut out the voices.
Joe won’t let you go. He’ll never agree that you’re fit enough.
Unless you sleep with him. That might work.
‘Shut up. For God’s sake, shut up!’
Maybe he’s found you already. Have you thought of that? Maybe he’s just fucking with you. Any time now, there’ll be that knock on the door. Honey, I’m home.
A knocking sound wakes her, to find no difference between sleeping and waking. She is still crouched in a small dark space, huddled in a duvet, damp with sweat. Sometime in the night she has crawled into the under-stairs cupboard again. The knocking from her dream is going on, loudly, insistently, on her front door
Stiff, trembling, she opens the cupboard door and gets to her feet. Through the glass of her front door she can see the silhouette of someone on her doorstep. In her pyjamas, she creeps forward.
‘Who is it?’
Her whisper gets an indignant response. ‘Harold from next door. Your car’s blocking the road. You can’t leave it like that.’
Her car is back? How is this possible?
‘Look, love, I don’t want to be a pain, but if you don’t move it, I’m going to have to call the police. You couldn’t get an ambulance through at the moment, or a fire engine.’
‘I’ll move it,’ she tells him. ‘Give me a minute.’
She finds shoes and a coat and grabs her car keys from the hall table. When she opens the courtyard door, she hears her neighbour doing the same thing next door. He appears at her side.
‘Were you drunk?’ he asks her.
She can’t exactly blame him. Her car bonnet is in the parking slot, the rest of it sticking out into the road at an angle. No normal person leaves a car like that.
Watched by a scowling Harold, she climbs inside. The seat is too far back. The mirror needs adjusting too. She starts the engine and reverses out, before backing the car properly into its space.
‘Thank you,’ she says to Harold.
As she returns to her house, the thought strikes her that not only did her car mysteriously reappear but her car keys did too. They were not on the hall table when she went to bed, she knows this for a fact.
She sinks to the cold hall floor and thinks: This, this is what despair feels like.
35
Felicity
Felicity spends the next two days trying, and failing, to learn more about her newfound marital status. Her phone calls to the registrar have proven fruitless, as she has nothing more than her own name to offer them. She has no idea what her married name is.
Nor can she think of anyone who might be able to help. She had few close friends at university and has lost touch with all of them since. In any event, they weren’t really friends. She has never really made friends.
For what feels like the first time, she wonders why.
She has been unable even to put a timescale on her marriage. The silver lily gift would date back to their student days, making it likely she and Freddie met at Cambridge, but without an idea of his second name, or the college he attended, her old university can’t help.
She makes an appointment for the locksmith to change her locks later that week and devises, for the next few days, a plan that should keep her home safe. She locks every window and tucks the keys away at the back of a kitchen drawer. She bolts her front door top and bottom and arranges a pyramid of empty cans behind the back door before she leaves, squeezing herself out through the narrowest of gaps. If she doesn’t send the cans tumbling when she arrives home, she will know someone has been in before her.
Late on Monday, it occurs to her that she might be divorced, that the marriage failed, maybe in a messy and painful fashion, and that that might be the reason she has blanked it from her mind. The surge of hope is