Silver Bay by Jojo Moyes

Author:Jojo Moyes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781848947467
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2008-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Mike

The dog-walkers had stopped waving to me. The first morning I ran past them, I assumed they hadn’t seen me. Perhaps my woollen hat was pulled too far down over my face. I’d got used to our little morning exchanges, and had found myself looking out for familiar faces. But on the second morning when I lifted my hand in greeting and they turned away their faces, I realised that not only was I no longer anonymous but, in parts of Silver Bay, I was now public enemy number one.

The same was true at the local garage, when I pulled in for fuel, at the supermarket checkout and in the little seafood café by the jetty when I sat down and tried to order coffee. It took nearly forty minutes and several reminders to arrive at my table.

Vanessa was bullish. ‘Oh, you’re always going to ruffle a few feathers,’ she said dismissively. ‘Remember that school development in east London? The people in the flats opposite were funny about it until they discovered how much it would push up the value of their properties.’

But that had been different, I wanted to say to her. I didn’t care what those people thought of me. And, besides, Vanessa wasn’t having to confront Liza, who managed to behave both as if I were no longer in existence and treat me with a kind of icy resentment.

On the one occasion I had found her alone in the kitchen – Vanessa had been upstairs – I had said, ‘I’ve told your aunt. I’m going to try and stop it. I’m sorry.’

The look she gave me stopped me in my tracks. ‘Sorry about what, Mike? That you’ve been living here under false pretences, that you’re about to ruin us, or that you’re a duplicitous sh—’

‘You told me you didn’t want a relationship.’

‘You didn’t tell me you were already in one.’ As soon as she said this her expression closed, as if she felt she had given too much away. But I knew what she had felt. I had rerun that moment in the car as if it were on a spool tape inside my head. I could have recited word for word what we had said to each other. Then I was reminded of my own duplicity on so many levels, and at that point I usually rang Dennis or found some administrative task to do with the development. That’s the beauty of business: it’s a refuge of myriad practical problems. You always know where you stand with it.

I told Vanessa why I thought the development was no longer right as the plans stood. She didn’t believe me, so I took her out on Moby One with several tourists and showed her the dolphins. Yoshi and Lance were courteous, but I felt an almost physical discomfort at the lack of good-humoured conversation, and I missed Lance’s caustic insults. I was no longer one of them. I knew it and so did they.

That sense of silent disapproval followed

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