Chapter Eight #3
‘Not really,’ says Imogen. ‘No more or less than anywhere else. Every time I rewrote the scene with a different setting, the essence of what went on between Iris and Robbie was the same, anyway.’ She breaks off, and when she speaks again, her tone is musing.
‘I suppose that’s what shone through for me, writing it all those different ways.
It was such a miracle that they got to see each other again.
They were in the midst of a war. Either of them could have been killed, long before they met.
They could have been stationed at god knows how many other places.
But they were thrown together, in their childhood home, after nearly a decade of separation.
It gives me goosebumps even now, thinking about it. ’
I get them too, hearing her say it.
‘I think that was why I was never too precious about which of Tim’s settings we used,’ she says. ‘I realised it doesn’t matter where Iris and Robbie met. It just matters that they did.’
I nod, struck by the perfect truth of it.
‘Does any of that help?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I say, and it really does.
I might not have my nugget of gold yet, but I’m getting closer, I can feel it.
Thanking Imogen, I leave her and her daughter to their morning, and, cradling my silent phone, once again pick over everything Nick and I shot last night.
I replay Ana’s directions (‘This isn’t some meet cute,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the plane waiting for Robbie outside. The terror of where he’s about to go … ’), and remember the weight I felt, staring into Nick’s eyes.
I recall our every move and turn of expression, and realise, with a jolt, that neither of us smiled.
For everything we tried, we never tried that.
It comes to me that we were so focused on portraying Iris and Robbie’s foreboding, we forgot what must, in that moment, have trumped everything else for them.
It’s the emotion that Imogen captures so perfectly in her writing, and which I experienced over and again in my dreams last night, but haven’t consciously registered until this second, because it just felt so instinctive, and now that I finally see it, really, blindingly obvious.
Because although I have no doubt that dread was a near-constant feature of Robbie’s and Iris’s too-short love affair, I’m not actually convinced it would have got a look in at their reunion.
Not in that moment of them first locking eyes on one another.
It’s like Imogen said, it really must have felt miraculous to them.
So, they’d have been full of wonder, surely?
Happy, too.
More than anything, happy.
I’m pretty confident they’d have smiled.
I’m in no rush to share my epiphany. I’ve messed up so much lately, I want to be really certain I’m on to something before I involve anyone else.
Gathering my things, I return to my room, grabbing the key card Ana gave me, then leave again, heading into the old section of the house, up the echoing servant stairs to Iris’s room.
You’ll work things out here, Ana said. I know it.
I must know it too, because why else would I have come?
It unsettles me that I have. I wasn’t lying to Nick when I told him I had no plan to return. If anything, the memory of my hallucination (because what else could those flares and roaring planes have been?) frightens me all the more, now that I’m here, pushing Iris’s door wide.
Yet, as I step into her room, and soak in its ghostly stillness – that sense that she and Clare have only just this moment walked out – I realise that I was always going to find my way back here this morning.
I think I’ve probably been wanting to do it ever since I woke.
Iris’s bed is still rumpled from my body.
On the bureau, her hairgrip remains lying where I left it, next to the nail polish stain.
Instinctively, I go to it, raising it to my own loose hair.
It slides in easily, its touch triggering a tingling that radiates outwards, closing around my scalp.
I flex my neck, feeling the tingling spread, and keep my stare fixed on my pale reflection in the mirror.
It still doesn’t fit, not in this glass.
I look harder, and, as I blink, the tingling in my skin surges, my face seems to evaporate, and I see another reflection entirely.
I yank the grip from my hair.
‘Stop.’ I breathe. ‘Enough.’ My shaken voice fills my ears. ‘You’re doing this to yourself.’
I’m tempted to leave. Run back to the secure, soulless luxury of my room.
It’s what I tried to tell myself to do after I heard those planes.
But, just as then, I don’t go anywhere.
I move to the window, compelled to know whether everything outside will look as it should.
And, to my shuddering relief, it does. I see the catering truck, pulled up outside the hangar where everyone’s filming, and a smattering of crew, darting around in the mist. Huge security and studio lights are positioned across the base which, in the cold light of day, once again appears reassuringly synthetic.
Disneyfied. High above it all, a helicopter circles, doubtless carrying some pap photographer, waiting to snap a sellable shot.
I wish them luck in this weather. Except I don’t.
Not at all. I hate them, and their obsessive diarising of my body and my life. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.
A sound comes, cutting through the helicopter’s throbbing. It’s that bird again: the one with the haunting call that gave me shivers the day I arrived, and who now makes me turn, searching for it in the heavy sky over the woods.
I can’t see it. It must be too far away.
But, as its call goes on, I shift my focus downwards, to the trees, thinking of Iris and Robbie meeting within them, in their old cottage of some sort.
And suddenly, I no longer want to be in Iris’s room.
I don’t want to be in the house.
I want to be out in the woods, searching for Iris and Robbie’s cottage myself.
So, without hesitation, or pause to consider how improbable it is that I’ll find it, that’s what I set off to do.