Chapter 2
It was only a ten-minute walk from the terrace house in a quiet back street in West London to the Thames.
She took the quickest route down to the waterfront where she would pass by the Georgian houses and pubs that lined the northside of the river.
When she reached a wrought-iron streetlamp and a sign that read ‘No cycles’, Gemma veered off the footpath onto a set of lichen-covered steps leading to her favourite spot on the foreshore.
Wild daisies were blooming among thistles and weeds edging the riverbed.
A seagull squawked, a jogger’s tread slapped the path, and in the distance an overland train clattered across the bridge. There was noise, yet it was peaceful.
Gemma paused for a moment. Her heart was pounding and she was breathless, as if she’d been running.
She felt stressed and tense. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply.
The air was damp and smelled of impending rain.
Another breath in and another one out. The panic lessened.
The nausea eased. She opened her eyes, took to her knees and focused her gaze on the hotchpotch of pebbles, rocks and mud.
To the uninitiated, that is all it looks like, but when you train your eye, the exposed shore comes alive with the remnants of the river’s thousands of years of history.
This is what mudlarkers want to discover.
With the river at low tide, a couple of dinghies lay stranded on the shingle.
Metres away, the water was flat and shimmered like an oil slick.
As far as she could see, there was no one else on the beach or the river.
A rock dug into her knee. She moved to a squatting position.
Annoyingly, her kneepads were still at the house – she’d forgotten them in her haste to escape.
Gemma zoned in on a small area directly in front of her.
Noise from traffic, pedestrians and roadworks became distant and indistinct.
Modern life began to fade, and the frenetic pace of the city dissipated. Time seemed irrelevant.
Although this section of the river revealed less than parts closer to the city, where life and industry had been more concentrated in the past, things could still be found.
Sometimes pieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relating to the rows of Georgian houses along Strand-on-the-Green, or objects from the various pubs, some of which date back four hundred years.
Eventually, she spotted a rounded piece of glass lodged in a small trough in the mud.
Holding her breath in anticipation, Gemma carefully scrapped away a fine layer of sandy mud to reveal a bottle.
She tugged at the neck, but it was stuck.
She removed more mud, immersing herself in the task.
She wanted, for a few minutes at least, to be transported to a long-ago world, parallel to this one, where she could let her imagination wander – and wonder about the stories behind the objects she unearthed.
Where she could forget that her life had just been turned inside out and what it meant for her future.
She knew it wouldn’t be easy, but if she could, for a moment, push it all from her mind – pretend, even, that the previous couple of hours hadn’t happened – then the act of mudlarking would give her comfort.
Finally, after some gentle persuasion, out popped a narrow, clear-glass bottle resembling an oversized test tube.
It had a moth-coloured stain at its base – residue of whatever liquid it had once held that, without the protection of a stopper, had long since evaporated.
She turned the bottle over, wiped away muddy debris and imagined what had once been inside.
Victorian medicine, perhaps? And who had owned it: a doctor or a patient?
She rinsed it in a pool of water, dried it on her top and slipped the bottle into a pocket of her rucksack.
She could make use of it to store her collection of centuries-old pins found mudlarking.
Immediately, she spotted another piece of glass.
This time a modern-day marble. It came out of the mud easily, like a gobstopper popping out of someone’s mouth.
She held it to the sky, the yellow and orange swirls making it look as if she’d plucked a tiny planet from the solar system.
She rolled it between her palms, felt its cool smooth surface, then dropped it onto a smooth patch of silt.
The marble rolled effortlessly for a moment before hitting a small rock.
It fell into a small hollow in the mud and nestled there as if content with its next resting place.
Gemma straightened up and looked out across the river.
What a cruel irony it was that the most important attribute for mudlarking was a sharp pair of eyes.
You need to be able to spot straight lines and perfect circles among the wonky, unsymmetrical features of Mother Nature.
The curve of a button, the straight line of a tile, the bend of a buckle.
So, where had her sharp vision been in her marriage?
If Adam had not been happy, why hadn’t she realised?
When had he first strayed? What had Gemma done – or not done – to make Adam feel and act how he had?
She had so many questions. Her mind was in a muddle and she was unable to come up with a definitive answer to anything.
She picked up a stone and threw it with force.
It skimmed the water once, then sank. She threw another, and another.
As the last of the ripples faded away, she stared blankly ahead, no longer searching for anything, her thoughts now preoccupied with the disintegration of her marriage.
Despite Adam’s devastating change of heart, she still loved him.
Not the falling-in-love way when you’re first married – she didn’t think that lasted forever – rather, the comfortable love where you don’t have to navigate the world alone.
She loved the security and comfort she had felt in her marriage.
But what about the man she had married?
Just as no relationship is all symmetry and perfect circles, nor are people.
Everyone is full of quirks and crooks and imperfections.
Sometimes, it’s actually the idiosyncrasies you fall in love with.
When Gemma met Adam, she was okay with him having to have the last word or the way he left clothes all over the bedroom floor.
What she admired was his impressive drive and ambition.
With his running, he didn’t just jog around their suburb a couple of mornings a week, he trained for a half-marathon.
When he said he wanted to upskill in his senior pharmaceutical management position, he enrolled in an MBA and did it part-time while working full-time.
The commitment he put into everything was inspiring.
He was a boundless force of energy that continually astounded Gemma.
He exhibited the sort of self-assurance she would have liked a small stake in.
A twenty-per cent share would have been nice.
Sure, sometimes Adam could be so driven that occasionally she felt a little bit forgotten about. But isn’t the secret to a successful marriage accepting that your partner is as flawed as you are?
What if she’d excused some of his flaws as being inconsequential when, in truth, they’d been detrimental to her? To their relationship? Clearly, there’d been cracks and she’d been blinkered to them. Had she been living a lie?
Gemma began to cry. Her vision blurred and she didn’t see a weathered brick stuck in the mud, angled off-centre.
She clipped it with her boot, lost her footing and landed with a thud, grazing her hands.
She rolled onto her back and very quickly a wet patch began soaking her bottom.
Is this what it’s come to, she thought, lying in a puddle, staring at the sky, having to accept a fate not of your making?
She turned her head to the river. Two large swans lifted themselves out of the water.
Their wings flapped loudly, agitating the river below.
Skimming the waterline, they flew away, honking their departure.
Gemma looked up at the sky and let the world around her carry on, as it always had and always would.
Yet, here she was, her world having changed irrevocably.
What on earth was she to do? One option was to stay there until the river came to take her away.
Because it would. Where there’s a low tide, there’s a high one, and the Thames goes in and out every day like clockwork, rising in some parts by more than seven metres.
She wondered what would be said about her if the river took her as its own and she was eventually found?
One female, circa mid-thirties, pale-skinned and freckled.
Chipped around the edges and with a broken heart.
Dressed for gardening but without a spade.
Possibly lost. Foul play only attributable to the husband, who decided his significantly younger physiotherapist was worthy of, not only treating his rotator cuff, but breaking up his marriage.