It’s weird watching Eliot in Louise’s kitchen, opening cupboards, pulling open drawers, making tea as I sit here at the table exhausted and sweaty after a long shift. If someone had told me this would be happening one day, I’m not sure I would have believed them. Even when I see Eliot at the Moreaus’, at a family barbecue, we chat, but only ever strictly small talk, the way you do with someone at the till in Sainsbury’s—to pass the time, to fill an awkward silence. But I feel like something has shifted, just slightly. The gap between us that was left that night; that sudden, harsh, irreparable-seeming tear, doesn’t seem so huge. And I am glad.
“It’s nice of you to sit with Louise,” I say as he busies himself at the hot kettle, dropping a tea bag into a cup.
“She’s cool,” he says. “Knows a lot of shit, eh?”
I shrug. “I guess so.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “She doesn’t really speak to me some weeks.”
He pours water in, a tiny smile on his lips. “Or you don’t speak to her, more like. Still one sugar?”
“What do you mean? And yes. Still one.”
Eliot gives a shrug. “I’m just saying, you’re quite tough sometimes, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean that you’re…” Eliot stands back, folding his arms, waiting for the tea bag to brew. “Well, you’re a bit of a closed book, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“And so is she.” He simply nods. “So, two closed books living together.” He closes his hands together, a teaspoon in one, and smiles. “Voilà. A house of no words.”
I stifle a laugh, pressing my lips together as he squeezes the tea bag, adds milk, and looks at me, eyebrows raising as if to say, “See? I’m right, aren’t I?”
He places the tea in front of me and sits back down where he was. “So, I’ve been thinking about what we talked about on the car ride up to Mum’s.”
“About the live band? For the STEN?”
Eliot stops and shakes his head. “No. Well, yeah, I have been thinking about that, too, but that’s not what I was going to say.”
“Oh. Right.”
“I was thinking more about what you told me, about the cards.” He leans forward slightly. “About your dad. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, actually.”
I nod, feel warmth tingle across my skin at those words. There’s something about the way he says them that makes me trust him, and although a tiny voice asks if I should, I shake it away.
“Me too,” I say. “I tried calling my mum again last night. Nothing. Not a single call or text or even email back.”
Eliot grimaces, hand at the dark stubble of his chin. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s how it’s always been.”
The clock on the wall above the cooker ticks, and Eliot looks at me. “So, I was thinking we should go,” says Eliot. “To the address.”
“To the one on the cards?” I ask pointlessly, feeling my heart plummet with dread.
Eliot nods. “I think if we do, maybe something might make sense, someone might know something…”
My hands tighten around my mug. “Eliot, I—I don’t know.”
“It’s fifteen minutes away. I’m happy to knock if you don’t want to. But… I dunno, with these things, I find it’s better just to say fuck it, and face it, you know?” He’s leaned back in his chair, elbow bent resting on the back, slouching. I don’t think I have ever in my life seen Eliot panicked or worried. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
“Everything,” I say across the table. “I—I don’t know.” I place the mug down, suddenly going off the steaming cup of tea in my hands—and a good tea, made just how I like it, with a mere swirl of milk. He needed no reminder.
Eliot waits, watching me, his face soft, sympathetic. The calm of the kitchen, and of him, relaxed, no pressure, helps settle my nerves. I remember Lucas calling me, three or four years ago, to say Eliot and his wife, Pippa, had divorced. “He’s a mess, Em,” he’d said. “Stayed up till two this morning with him, just talking. He’s not sleeping, not eating, and God—he looks ill.” I try to muster that image of Eliot as I look at him now. I can’t.
“When?” I ask him.
Eliot shrugs, and gestures with a hand to the sun streaming through the kitchen window. “Now looks good?”
“No,” I say, without even thinking, and Eliot laughs. I look up at him, his eyebrows raised, a warm smile tugging at the corner of his lips, and I take a breath.
“I mean… I need to shower first,” I say. “Then maybe we can go.”
* * *
Where we are doesn’t look like the Ramsgate I remember, the streets I’d walk to school, to Georgia’s house, to the train station, to college. The houses are terraced and small in this little cul-de-sac. Sixties-built, with neat lawns and bushes. And I recognize it from Google Maps. There are rosebushes by the front door and a single potted lollipop of a bay tree in a terra-cotta pot. I sit in Eliot’s truck, beside him, the engine off.
“I don’t recognize this street at all,” I say into the still silence of the truck.
“So, it’s not where you might’ve once lived. A friend of your mum? A family member?”
I shake my head. “No. We lived in Cheshire from when I was about nine, after Den left. Then we moved back before I started secondary school. Into a flat. Maisonette. A different one from the one we lived in with Den. I’ve never lived in a house. Not somewhere like this.”
Eliot nods. “Maybe it’s worth asking,” he says gently. “Ask them if they know your mum. They might even know your dad.”
“But my dad lived in France. In Brittany.” The nerves rattle through me as I say those words, and Eliot nods slowly. “Well, still,” he says, “worth an ask, right?”
I look up at the house. Small. A little shabby, but neat. Cream roller-blinds at the windows at half-mast, large, mustard-yellow sunflowers in a vase on the windowsill downstairs. “Do you think I should… just knock?”
Eliot nods once enthusiastically. “Definitely. And in my experience, people are mostly nice and want to help.” And it’s that thought, that ideal, many, I’m sure, would counter, that gives me the courage to pull open the truck’s passenger-door handle. The door squeaks as I push it open. I look at the house, then look over my shoulder at Eliot, who watches me calmly, one hand on the wheel.
“Eliot? Would you…”
“Come with?”
I nod.
Eliot smiles. “Sure.”
Together we walk up the path, Eliot a step ahead, hands in his pockets, walking as though he’s bowling up to a bar in a pub he’s been in hundreds of times before. Before I can talk myself out of it, I press hard on the bell on the door frame, and it rings, like an old-school telephone. Inside, a dog barks. And now I realize I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to word it. I don’t know how to ask, and I feel my hands begin to sweat.
“All right, all right, you silly old mutt,” says a man behind the door. There’s a jangling of keys. By the sound of his voice, I’d hazard a guess at midfifties, maybe older. And Scottish. A strong accent.