Page 23 of The Blue Hour

‘That’s a snazzy jacket you’ve got there,’ Grace says. Marguerite giggles. ‘It doesn’t look terribly warm, though.’ Marguerite shakes her head, looking up from beneath lowered lashes, as though she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t. ‘Will you come in for coffee?’ Grace asks, and the old woman nods and smiles again, trotting along at Grace’s side towards the house.

Marguerite is in her seventies now, but unlike Grace she remains wiry and agile, her tanned forearms lean and muscled. She places the bucket outside the door and takes off her wellies, padding into the house in damp-socked feet. Her eyes light up when she sees the table piled high with papers; after a few attempts to stop her picking things up and putting them down in the wrong place, Grace gives up. She makes coffee whileMarguerite marvels at sketches and old photographs, smiling toothily at Grace whenever she recognizes something or someone.

Suddenly, she stops. She looks at Grace, her expression grave. ‘There is a man at the harbour,’ she says solemnly. ‘He is watching you.’

Out at the harbour? Grace walks over to the window and picks up the binoculars on the sill. ‘Now?’ There are no cars parked at the harbour wall, she sees no one at all.

‘Non, non, il y a deux jours.’

‘In English, Marguerite,’ Grace says, replacing the binoculars. ‘I don’t understand you otherwise.’

‘Not today.’ Marguerite shakes her head. ‘There are two days, maybe three days, four, five. A man. Watching, waiting.’

Grace nods. ‘It’s all right, he was just someone who needed to talk to me.’ Marguerite probably means Becker, though she might not. She’s been drifting into dementia for years now, a slow decline at first, but it’s picking up – almost two years of lockdown-induced isolation have surely not helped; she is frightened of strangers and her memories are jumbled, characters from one life popping up in another. ‘You don’t have to worry about him,’ Grace says, ‘he came over to see me, but he’s gone now.’

‘He comes back?’

‘Yes, maybe …’

‘Oh.’ Tears well in Marguerite’s eyes, her fingers working at the ends of her hair.

Grace sits at her side. ‘It’s OK, Marguerite. He’s not a bad man. You don’t need to be frightened of him. You don’t need to be frightened at all.’

‘Yes,’ she says, shaking her head as she says it, ‘yes, yes.’

‘He’s not … he’s not Stuart. Stuart is not coming back.’

‘No,’ Marguerite says. Tears run down her cheeks; she wipesthem away with the tips of her fingers. ‘But maybe yes?On ne sait jamais.We can never know.’

Grace takes hold of Marguerite’s hand and squeezes her fingers. ‘We do know, don’t we? I’ve told you. He’s not coming back.’ Stuart was Marguerite’s husband; he’s been gone more than twenty years and she’s still terrified of him. ‘Come on now, look at these pictures, there you go.’ Grace pushes a shoebox full of unsorted photographs towards her. ‘You take a look at those while I get the coffee.’ Marguerite does as she’s told, chattering away to herself quietly – possibly in French, Grace can’t make out any words. Grace makes a strong batch of coffee – she knows just how Marguerite likes it – and places a mug and the sugar bowl on the table, watching in amusement as Marguerite spoons sugar into her drink,one, two, three…

‘That’s enough,’ Grace says, laughing as she stays the older woman’s hand. Marguerite giggles.

Blowing on her coffee before tasting, she sips, smiles. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Very good.’ She takes another sip, swinging her legs under her chair, and looks around, cocks her head to one side like a fox listening for prey. ‘Where is he, your friend?’

‘My friend? You mean Vanessa?’

‘Yes.’ Marguerite nods. ‘Where is he?’

‘She’sgone, Marguerite, a while ago now, you remember? You came to her funeral.’ The smile drops from Marguerite’s face. ‘She was very sick, for a long time, and then she died.’

‘Ah, non.’ Vanessa always had time for Marguerite, she was kind to her without ever intruding on her privacy. One of Vanessa’s gifts, knowing how to give people what they needed.

Now Marguerite is tearful again, and this time Grace’s attempts at distraction with more photographs and sketches are unsuccessful. ‘But where is he, your friend?’ Marguerite asks again, her brow knitted.

This is how it goes. There is always another question, another friend, another man, another something or someone to be afraid of. And a moment later, it’s forgotten.

When Grace offers to drive her back across the causeway, Marguerite demurs. ‘Good for me,’ she says, grinning, mimicking marching. ‘Keep me young!’ Her front tooth, a porcelain replacement for one lost years ago, has become discoloured by nicotine and coffee; it gives her a neglected air. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she sings, kissing Grace on both cheeks. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ And off she goes, bucket swinging, down the track towards the sea, chattering her thank-yous into the wind.

Back in the kitchen, Grace restores order to her stacks of letters and photographs; she flicks quickly through the pictures in the shoebox, most of which are unlikely to be of great interest to anyone. Becker is welcome to them.

Finally, she turns to the Carlisle letters: the ones she and Vanessa wrote to each other over an eighteen-month period when Grace left the island and took a locum job in the north of England, the year following Julian Chapman’s disappearance.

These are hard to read.

January 2003

Dear Vanessa,

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