Chapter 18

18

Becker recoils as though struck. Is this it? The start of Vanessa's illness? For the first time since he started reading her notebooks, he feels as though he is intruding. It is not just the feeling of someone sneaking a look at a private diary, glimpsing something deeply personal, it's worse than that: he knows what the author does not, he has seen the terrible ending before she has even conceived of it.

He puts the journal down. It is late, past midnight, his head buzzes with exhaustion and yet he knows he won't sleep. He's alone, and ill at ease. Helena has gone to London, suddenly but not entirely unexpectedly. Her sister is having one of her periodic relationship crises, during which Helena is generally summoned to advise, console. Conspire. Thick as thieves, the two of them.

She'd already left by the time he got home this evening. He'd had to drive all the way down to Penrith to look at a couple of sculptures Sebastian is interested in – very nice, but the seller was asking too much for them – then on the way back, a digger somehow slipped its moorings and fell off the back of a lorry on the M6. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but it added two hours to his journey.

He found a note when he arrived home:

Crisis in Chelsea! Seb's giving me a lift to the station. See you Saturday. Xxx

Now he feels anxious and frustrated. Does her sister really need her? There will be another boyfriend next month, and another breakup a month or two after that.

He reaches for his wine glass and brings it to his lips. It's warm and tastes sour. Getting to his feet, he pours it down the sink, rinsing out the glass and filling it with water from the tap. He takes a long draught, watching his reflection in the window. He looks pale, his eyes sunken into their sockets. Turning away, he returns to the table and sees that the pages of the notebook have turned by themselves. He is looking at a fresh page.

Cold, a fine mist hanging over the island, the sea restless.

Walking in the wood this morning I found a bone, picked clean.

If he believed in signs, if he believed in ghosts, he would think that she was here in the room with him, that she had turned the page on her illness herself, guiding him towards the thing he was looking for:

Walking in the wood this morning I found a bone, picked clean.

Perfectly white, almost luminous, dry and smooth. When I picked it up, I found that it was broken, cracked almost all the way through. I knew at once what I wanted to do, I could see the whole of the new piece.

I took the bone to the studio – it is elegant, slender and tactile, light and yet somehow substantial. Sheep, perhaps? Or deer? G would know.

The feeling I had, when I held it, I think it is a feeling of control.

He reads those last few lines over and over: this is it. This must be it. She found the bone, and she thought it was sheep, or deer. There is nothing strange or sinister about it. He leans back in his chair, exhaling slowly. He is relieved, he realizes, genuinely relieved – which means that he must on some level have suspected something of her. How stupid of him! Grace said it was stupid, and she was right.

He reads on.

Marguerite came to see me this morning. She asked after Grace and seemed confused not to find her here. When I told her that Grace is in Carlisle, that she's been gone more than a year now, she got terribly worked up, she kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.

I gave her a brandy, which cheered her up a little. She started speaking to me in French, I could only understand one word in three, but there was a lot of talk of bad men. She seems to be losing track of the here and now – just a few moments after I told her Grace was in Carlisle she said that she had seen her. I asked when did you see her? Today? Last week? She kept saying, ‘before the sun rises'.

I felt frightened. I started to imagine Grace had come back, that she was here somewhere, on the island, in the wood, watching me. It seems utterly stupid now but after M left I actually phoned the surgery in Carlisle and asked to speak to her. They said she was with a patient, that she couldn't come to the phone. I felt so ashamed. How could I be afraid of her? What has become of me? Of us?

Becker closes the notebook. He feels bewildered – he has no idea who Marguerite is, or why Grace is not on the island – but his overwhelming sensation is simple relief. Vanessa found the bone in the wood, she found the bone and picked it up, just like she'd pick up a pebble from the beach, there's nothing more to it than that. There will be no fundamental reassessment of who Vanessa Chapman was, there will be no disgrace – not for her and not for James Becker, her cheerleader-in-chief.