He reaches behind the seat, pulls out a small jewellery box from his bag and passes it to her. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, is the piece of frosted beach glass that they found last week. It’s now on a filigree silver chain. He knows she loves necklaces.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ she says, suddenly overcome with emotion. ‘Thank you.’
‘I wasn’t totally sure about the sizing.’ He stares at her neck, a look of intense concentration on his face. ‘Whether it would be too loose. I wanted it to be snug – you know, like a choker.’
She lets him fasten it, her neck tingling at his touch, but then the clasp catches a pinch of her skin at the back and she flinches. ‘Ouch,’ she says, playfully. It might be her imagination but he seems to hesitate a moment too long before apologising.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s a little tight.’
*
Kate glances across at Rob’s smooth, sleeping body and slips quietly out of bed, wrapping a cotton dressing gown around her as she steps out onto the terrace. It’s a warm August evening and no one can see her here. The isolated house, all glass and oak and concrete, is cut deep into the Cornish hillside and faces out to sea, which is empty tonight, apart from the winking lights of tankers moored in the distance off Falmouth.
‘You OK?’ Rob calls out.
She swings around. It’s too dark in the bedroom to see him properly.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says, turning back towards the bay, where a ribbon of moonlight has been laid across the water.
A moment later, his arms are wrapped around her from behind. ‘Come back to bed,’ he whispers in her ear.
She can feel him against her, a familiar swelling. She rests her hand on his smooth forearm and thinks again about the necklace he gave her earlier, his insensitive response to her squeal of pain. It still niggles.
‘Thank you for the present,’ she says. He must have just been tired. Hardly surprising after a long week at work and then the flight down.
‘Not too tight?’ he asks.
‘It’s perfect.’
Back inside the bedroom, they snuggle up in the darkness. In all other respects, he’s played it well this evening. He ran her a bath with Moroccan rose oil and brought in two glasses of chilled champagne. Her exhaustion of earlier slipped away. Afterwards, he was the one who fell asleep almost instantly, like a laptop closing.
‘Talk to me,’ she says now, quietly. ‘Tell me about your week.’
She still doesn’t understand exactly what Rob does in London. One of the articles she read about his meteoric career described him as a serial ‘techpreneur’, the youngest ever founder of a British ‘unicorn’ company and a pioneering champion of something called ‘direct neural interface’ technology – the interaction between brain and machine. She likes the sound of unicorns. The ‘disruptive’ tag is less appealing. He also runs a charity on the side that puts on art shows in hospitals, which is how they met.
‘That’s so interesting,’ she offers, filling the silence. ‘You’ve developed an app, you say, that makes women wake up in the middle of the night begging to give their man a blowjob? That’s incredible. What a smart, selfless piece of coding.’
He nudges her playfully. And then all she can hear is the faint in and out of his breathing, and the sound of the waves below.
Sleep soon starts to lap at her own consciousness, but something’s preventing her from dropping off. What Rob said about doubles last weekend has been on her mind all week. She hasn’t been able to forget it, his words chasing her through her days of painting and nights of restless dreams. And I’ve already met mine, a long time ago. What must it be like to actually meet your double? And when did Rob encounter his? Where? We’ve all got a double out there somewhere, watching, waiting. Shadowless. It’s revealed an unexpected side of him. A new insight.
She turns over, her interest piqued all over again. She remembers being fascinated by identical twins in primary school. The teacher used to tell her off for staring at them in class. Maybe it was an early challenge to her powers of recognition. Spot the difference. And there was the French-exchange girl at secondary school who apparently looked just like her. That had freaked her out.
She lies there, sleepless, her thoughts running loose and wild. What if the French girl were to suddenly come back into her life, discover her on Instagram, decide she’d like a piece of Rob… What was it he said? It’s well within the bounds of probability for all of us to be found by someone with an exact physical likeness. Would Rob be attracted to her? The woman would have a fight on her hands if she tried it on with him. Kate smiles at the ceiling. It’s a preposterous thought. But then she recalls Rob’s tone of voice, how serious he’d been, and her stomach tightens. He’ll take over my life, me, you, the house, my company, all that I’ve achieved, everything’s that’s precious to me. Imagine living with that sort of fear. And what if it became reality? She shoves the idea to the back of mind.
Secretly, she’s thrilled that Rob has been so honest with her, admitted to such fragility. It’s a sign that he trusts her, no longer feels obliged to be the strong one all the time. She will ask him about it again when he’s unwound from London. Diplomatically, of course. Tomorrow they’ll walk the coast path and swim, have coffee at their favourite café overlooking the harbour. She starts to drift off to sleep, warmed by the prospect.
And then she’s awake again. Her eyes spring open in the darkness, the sound of blood pulsing in her ears. Rob always insists that he sleep on the right side of the bed. He’s a creature of habit, of quotidian routine. Tonight he’s lying on the left. Should she prod him? Check he’s not been replaced by his double? Relax. She’s being silly. It’s just another sign that Rob’s loosening up, going with the flow a bit more. She rolls over, searching for sleep again. He might be helping her to recover, but she’s doing him some good too.
Saturday
3
Kate
Kate’s up early the next morning, trying to paint Stretch on his bed. It’s not easy as he follows her every time she walks over to the sideboard to make a tea. She loves this room, a vast atrium of a kitchen, one end of which she uses as a studio. The room doesn’t face north, but there’s so much glass that it feels like she’s painting en plein air.
The sea below the house is as still as a millpond this morning, like a painting, streaked with cyans and ceruleans and framed by a high cirrus sky. In the distance, Gull Rock stands sentinel off Nare Head, the headland where she walks with Stretch, who loves to dart along the hidden paths between the yellow-flowering gorse.
Rob will be back soon, answering emails, making calls. No boundaries, never stops. She’s a fine one to talk, trying to paint on a Saturday morning.
‘It’s just not happening, weenie toes,’ she says to Stretch, who lifts his head from his bed at the sound of her voice. She puts her brush down and clutches her mug of tea, studying the canvas, trying not to panic. It will come back. Rob is certain.
She picks up the canvas to show to Stretch. ‘What do you reckon? Can you see yourself?’ She moves the picture around like a hairdresser with a mirror. ‘No? More like a guinea pig, you think? A piglet?’