Together

by Julie Cohen

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

This is not a great love story.
This is a story about great love.

On a morning that seems just like any other, Robbie wakes in his bed, his wife Emily asleep beside him, as always. He rises and dresses, makes his coffee, feeds his dogs, just as he usually does. But then he leaves Emily a letter and does something that will break her heart. As the years go back all the way to 1962, Robbie's actions become clearer as we discover the story of a couple with a terrible secret - one they will do absolutely anything to protect.

Perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes's Me Before You, David Nicholls's One Day and M L Stedman's The Light Between Oceans.

Release date: June 4, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

 

Chapter One

September 2016

Clyde Bay, Maine

Robbie woke up when it was still dark outside. They’d slept with the windows open and he could hear the surf on the rocks. It was such a constant sound that he rarely heard it any more, but this morning he did. He could hear Emily’s breathing, too. He lay there in his bed for a few moments, listening to her breath and the water, both steady and familiar, as if both of them could go on forever.

Emily’s face was turned away from him but her body touched his, her backside snug against his hip, her ankle curled around his so her toes rested against the sole of his foot. Most mornings he would roll over on to his side and put his arm around her waist, and she would nestle back against him in her sleep, and they would stay there for a little while, long enough so that when he got up, leaving her asleep in their bed, he would still feel the warmth of her pressed against him and he would go about his morning routine, recalling the scent of her hair.

If things stayed as they were, if they progressed as they would, he knew this would be the one thing that would never change. Not the rhythm of their sleep or the pattern of their touching. They had slept together this way on their first night together, fifty-four years ago, and every night since then that they hadn’t slept in the same bed was a wasted night as far as he was concerned. Robbie knew his body would remember Emily’s even if he allowed himself to live long enough for his mind to forget her.

It would be enough, to live for these moments of touching. For himself, it would be enough. But he had to think of Emily.

Since the day he had met her, over fifty years ago, everything he had done was for Emily, and this was the last thing he needed to do for her. Now, while he could still do it.

Robbie eased himself away from Emily without disturbing her. He sat up on his side of the bed. He was eighty years old, and aside from a twinge from the old wound in his thigh in the rainy weather, he was in pretty good shape, physically. He still more or less recognised himself in the mirror these days, though his hair was almost entirely gone to grey and he had the leathery, ageless skin of a man who had spent most of his time outdoors. His body probably had ten, fifteen more years in it. Preserved by the salt: that was what they said about old sailors.

Without thinking too much, he got dressed in the near-darkness, as he did almost every morning except for some Sundays. He went downstairs trailing his hand over the banister railing he’d carved himself out of a single piece of oak. He’d had to take the front door frame out to get the railing in the house. Back in 1986 – Adam had been ten.

He tested himself on dates like this now, reiterating the facts, so maybe they would stick. Adam married Shelley in 2003. We moved to Clyde Bay in 1977. I met Emily in 1962. I was born in 1936, during the Great Depression. I retired in 19 . . . No, I was seventy, or was I . . . where are we now?

Robbie looked up. He was in the kitchen, where he’d built the cabinets with his own hands. He was filling the pot for coffee. Every morning he did the same thing, while Emily slept upstairs, and soon Adam would come downstairs, yawning, to do his paper round before he went to school.

A dog nudged his leg. ‘Just one minute, Bella,’ he said easily, and he looked down and it wasn’t Bella. This dog had a white patch on his chest, and it wasn’t Bella because Bella was pure black, it was . . . it was Bella’s son, it was . . .

Another dog yawned noisily and got up stiffly from the dog bed in the corner of the kitchen, a black dog with grey on his muzzle and a white patch on his chest. Robbie looked from the old dog to the young dog and the young one nudged his hand and wagged his tail and he was Rocco. It came back to him in a rush. This was Rocco, and the old one was his father, Tybalt, and Bella was Tybalt’s mother and had been dead for thirteen years.

Robbie’s hand shook when he opened the door to let the two dogs out.

It was like the fog that came in silently and out of nowhere, and socked you in so solid you couldn’t see a single thing, not even your own sails. In a fog like that you could only navigate from instruments, not from sight – but with this fog, none of the instruments worked. You were in waters you knew like the back of your hand, but you couldn’t tell where you were. You could strike a rock that you’d avoided a million times before; that you knew like an old friend. Or you could head in completely the wrong direction and never find your way back.

He didn’t finish making the coffee. He found a piece of paper and a pen and he sat right down at the kitchen table and he wrote Emily the letter he had been composing in his head for days now. He wrote it quickly, before the fog came back and stopped him. The words weren’t exactly as eloquent as he wanted them to be. There was so much left unsaid. But then again, he’d always told Emily that he was no poet.

I love you, he wrote. You’re my beginning and my ending, Emily, and every day in between.

And really, that was everything he meant anyway. That summed it all up.

He folded the letter carefully and wrote Emily on the outside of it. The letter safe in his hand, he went out the kitchen door to the yard, where the dogs greeted him with wagging tails and tongues.

It was the grey light before dawn. Tybalt and Rocco followed him as he walked around the house that he had built for Emily and himself. He checked the windows, the porch steps, the doors, the shingles; he peered up at the roof with its three gables, and the chimney. He’d spent the summer doing repairs. Planning ahead, for this day.

There was nothing left to be done here. It was all sound; she should be fine for the winter, when it came. And after that, Adam would help her. Maybe William would come back and help her, too.

A wild rose bush grew against the cedar shingles on the side of the house. Last month the bush had been ablaze with blossoms; now there were only a few left to face the end of summer. Avoiding the thorns, he picked a rose off the bush. It was bright pink, with a yellow centre. The petals were tender and perfect.

He whistled for the dogs and they came into the house with him. He tipped some food into their dishes and refreshed their water bowls. He stroked their heads and scratched behind their ears.

Then he went upstairs to their bedroom, carrying the letter and the rose.

She was still asleep. She hadn’t moved. He gazed down at her. Her hair had threads of silver and sunshine, her skin was soft in sleep. She was the girl he’d met in 1962; the girl he felt like he’d waited his whole life up till then to meet. He thought about waking her up to see her eyes again. They were the same colour that the sea had been the first time he’d ever seen it, back in 1952, a shade of blue that up till then he had never even been able to imagine.

But if he woke her up to see her eyes for the last time it wouldn’t be the last time, because she would never let him go.

And if he put this off and put this off, one day the fog would surround him. It came in stealthily, but all at once. One minute you could see clear – and the next moment you were blind. And more than blind: you couldn’t even remember what it was like to see.

He placed the letter on her bedside table, next to the glass of water she kept there. It would be the first thing she saw when she woke up. He put the wild rose on top of it. Then he bent and kissed her, gently, on her cheek. He breathed in a lungful of her scent.

‘I’d never have forgotten you,’ he whispered to her, more quietly than the sound of the ocean outside.

He made himself stand up straight and leave her there, sleeping. He’d thought it would be hard but there had been a harder time, once, walking away from her. That first time they had said goodbye.

This time was easier than that. Now, they had so many good years behind them. Every one of the years they’d spent together had been good. It had been worth it, every single bit.

Robbie went through the front door so he didn’t have to see the dogs again. He walked down the porch steps and down the sloping path to the end of their yard. Across the road and along the little path cleared in the brush, the twigs snagging his trousers till he was standing on the rocks on the shore. Grey Maine granite, darkening to black, and when you looked at it closely there were little shining chips of mica like diamonds in it.

He took off his shoes and socks and left them on a high rock, untouched by spray. He left his shirt and trousers folded up beside them. Then, barefoot, he stepped on to the furthest rock, which was wet with surf and slippery with seaweed.

He’d thought it might be foggy today, but it wasn’t. It was all clear ahead of him and the sun was beginning to rise. It was gold and pink, not far off the colours of that wild rose he’d left beside Emily. It was going to be a good day, the kind of day where you could see Monhegan Island on the horizon. Lobster pots bobbed on the water, blue and white and red. He knew who owned all of them and knew what time they’d be coming in their boats to haul them up. Not for a little while, yet.

He had enough time.

Robbie jumped into the water. His body made barely a splash into the waves.

He had always been a strong swimmer. It was easy for him. Part fish, Emily called him. He kicked through the waves. Even after being warmed all the summer long, the water was cold enough to take your breath away, but if you kept moving you would be all right, for a while, at least until the current took you. Pieces of a boat that was wrecked on Marshall Point, a quarter mile from here to the north, had been found all the way up in Newfoundland.

He swam and he kept his eyes on the horizon. It took him a long time to tire out. Long enough so that he saw the top curve of the sun rising up from the water in front of him, a brilliant light, shining all the way along the water to him. It would shine through the window of the room where Emily slept and it would touch her cheek and her hair.

Robbie kept swimming until he couldn’t swim any more and then he let the water carry him away, into something bigger than himself, more vast than memory.

 

Chapter Two

July 2016

Clyde Bay, Maine

The cake was eaten, the iced tea drunk; Emily sat in the afternoon sunshine at the picnic table in their garden, holding Robbie’s hand. A breeze came off the ocean and kept it from being too hot.

‘I wasn’t expecting a cake,’ she said to Adam and Shelley, ‘but it was delicious. Thank you.’

‘We couldn’t let your anniversary go by with just ice cream,’ said her son. ‘Forty-three years is nothing to sneeze at.’

‘Only seven more years till you make it to fifty,’ said Shelley, their daughter-in-law.

Robbie squeezed her hand under the table. Francie, their youngest grandchild at four, wiped a blob of buttercream off her cheek and said, ‘What’s an anniservary?’

‘Anniversary. It’s a celebration of the date that two people got married,’ her father, Adam, told her. Francie had Adam’s blonde hair and Shelley’s dark eyes and freckles. The two elder ones, Chloe and Bryan, were pure redheads, unlike anyone else in the family. Sometimes Adam made a joke about recessive genes and the postman, which always ended in Shelley swatting him.

Rocco dropped a ball at Bryan’s feet and the boy was up, throwing it across the lawn for the Labrador to chase. Tybalt, the elder dog, lay panting in the shade of a tree. Chloe, who at twelve preferred to stay with the adults, drew faces on the table with spilled iced tea and said, ‘Where are your wedding pictures, Grandma? I’ve never seen your wedding dress.’

Emily smiled. ‘That’s because I didn’t have one. We eloped, your grandfather and I.’

‘Because I’m a born romantic,’ declared Robbie. ‘I swept your grandmother off her feet and she couldn’t rest until I put a ring on her finger.’

‘I seem to recall that you were the one who insisted on giving me a ring.’ She touched it with her thumb: a gold band in the shape of two clasped hands.

‘Can I see it?’ asked Chloe, and Emily twisted it off her finger. It wasn’t easy; her knuckles had swollen with age. She dropped it into Chloe’s waiting palm and watched her granddaughter turning it over, admiring it. ‘It’s like it doesn’t end,’ she said. ‘One hand turns into another one and then they hold on to each other.’

‘That’s exactly why I chose it,’ said Robbie. He took it back from Chloe and presented it to Emily, who took it and slipped it back on, smiling.

‘Was it love at first sight?’

Chloe was quite interested in love at first sight, Emily knew. The girl read book after book of young adult romance, most of it involving horrible illnesses, terrifying alternative futures, or vampires. Emily had read a few of them herself, on her granddaughter’s recommendation. She enjoyed them very much.

‘Absolutely at first sight,’ said Robbie. ‘The minute I saw your grandmother, I knew she was the only girl for me. And you knew the same, didn’t you, Emily?’

‘I knew you were very handsome. I can’t say marriage was on my mind right at that exact moment.’

‘You knew I was the most handsome man you’d ever seen,’ corrected Robbie.

‘Yes.’ She smiled, looking at his silver hair, still a full head of it. His dark eyes still had their twinkle, and his mouth quirked with good humour and confidence. ‘The most handsome man I’d ever seen. Also the most full of himself.’

‘With good reason.’

‘With very good reason.’

‘Where were you?’ asked Chloe.

‘In a train station,’ said Robbie. ‘I saw her across a crowded room.’

Emily squeezed his hand again, quickly. ‘No, darling,’ she said. ‘It was in an airport.’

He blinked at her, his face clouding and then clearing almost instantaneously, fast enough so that no one else but her would notice. ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. An airport, in 1972.’

‘In Florida,’ said Adam, ‘where I was born. We’ll have to go down there, one day. I don’t remember anything about it.’

‘Disney?’ suggested Francie immediately, climbing on to her father’s lap.

‘Maybe.’ He kissed her blonde head. ‘Or we could go to England, where your Grandma was born.’

‘So you eloped and moved from England to America?’ Chloe pursued. ‘You didn’t have a dress or flowers or anything?’

‘We just sailed off into the sunset together,’ said Emily.

‘In the same boat you have now?’

‘It was a different boat, back then.’

‘You got your feet wet,’ said Robbie. ‘But I rescued you.’

‘We rescued each other,’ said Emily. ‘And we’ve never been apart since, except for a night or two here or there.’

‘That’s so romantic,’ sighed Chloe. Emily swallowed hard, seeing across years the echo of another twelve-year-old: this one with dark hair instead of red. That was exactly something that Polly would have said, all those years ago. She glanced at Robbie, to see if he had caught it as well, but he was just smiling at his granddaughter.

‘Actually,’ Emily said, ‘romance is quite exhausting. I like everyday life much better.’

‘Not me,’ said Chloe.

‘Your parents have just as romantic a story,’ said Robbie. ‘They met over the photocopier.’

‘Your father,’ said Shelley, ‘was never prepared for his morning American History class and always got to school early to copy worksheets, just at the time when I was trying to photocopy poems for Honours English.’

‘It took her half a semester to figure out I was doing it on purpose,’ Adam said.

‘Ugh,’ said Chloe. ‘Nothing romantic ever happens in a school.’

Emily saw Adam and Shelley exchange a look – the complicity of married couples, communicating without words.

Bryan, aged eight, ran up. He was breathing hard. ‘Grandpa, Rocco wants to go for a swim. Can I take him?’

‘Not here,’ said Adam. ‘The current’s too strong in front of the house.’

Robbie stood up. ‘I’ll walk you down to the bay,’ he said. ‘You can throw a ball all you want for him there down by the landing. You won’t all fit in the dinghy but I can borrow Little Sterling’s launch and give you a ride if you want. Want to come, William?’

‘I’m Francie,’ said Francie.

‘Well then, do you want to come, Francie?’

The little girl hopped off her daddy’s lap and put her hand in her grandfather’s. ‘Can I have an ice cream at the store?’

‘You just had ice cream,’ said Shelley, but Robbie winked at the little girl and said, ‘Shh, don’t tell your mother.’

‘I’ll come too,’ said Chloe. ‘Mom, can I borrow your phone?’

Shelley rolled her eyes, but handed over the phone.

‘Are you coming, Em?’ asked Robbie. ‘I’ll buy you an ice cream too. The biggest ice cream you ever saw, for my sweetheart.’

‘Adam will come with you, won’t you, Adam?’ Adam nodded, and Emily kissed Robbie’s cheek. ‘I’ll stay here and do the dishes. Dry the dogs and kids off before you let them back into the house.’

He kissed her and she watched him go, accompanied by their son, surrounded by grandchildren and dogs. Other than the grey of his hair, from the back he could still be the man she’d first met all those years ago, before they’d imagined any of this was possible.

 

He’d called Francie ‘William’.

In the kitchen the two women filled the dishwasher, working in an easy rhythm. Some of Emily’s friends had problems with their daughters-in-law, but Emily knew she was blessed. Shelley told her about their plans for the rest of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, taking the kids up to Rangeley where Shelley’s family had a camp on the lake. They’d stay up there a couple of weeks, so the kids could play with their cousins and Shelley could catch up with her extended family. ‘It’s the best part of being a teacher,’ she said, wrapping up the remainder of the cake. ‘The summer holiday.’

‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ said Emily. ‘You love your students.’

‘You could join us. You and Robbie would be really welcome, and we’ve got an extra bedroom. You could bring the dogs; they’d love the lake. My brother has a little sailboat he doesn’t even know how to use.’

‘I’d like that. I’ll have to ask Robbie. He’s doing some work around the house this summer.’

‘Adam said that, from the looks of it, he’s got about six projects going at once. He was complaining because Robbie had always told him to finish one job before starting the next.’

‘Is that so?’ said Emily vaguely. ‘Well, he must have a lot of repairs to do. It was a hard winter. Have you heard from William lately, by the way? He hasn’t called since last month.’

‘He sent an email last week with some photos of the kids. I’ll forward it to you, if you haven’t got it.’ Shelley opened the refrigerator to replace the jug of milk, and paused. ‘Er . . . what’s this?’

‘What’s what?’

Shelley took something out of the refrigerator and held it up. It was Robbie’s wallet.

‘He’s going to have trouble buying ice cream without this,’ said Shelley, beginning to laugh.

Emily turned away quickly, back to the dishes, before her daughter-in-law could see her face. ‘One of the kids must have put it there as a joke,’ she said, indistinctly, rinsing a glass. Though she knew it had not been one of the kids.

 

Fireworks exploded in the distance, over Clyde Bay, around the point a quarter mile from their house. Some years they watched them from the boat, with a view of the lights on the shore and the fireworks reflected on the water. This year the kids had left too late and Emily had been too tired to bother with getting the boat off their mooring. The main problem with being older: being tired. And this afternoon, happy though it had been, had been a strain, too, with watching Robbie and watching Adam and Shelley to see if they noticed, if they understood.

William had called late in the afternoon to wish them a happy anniversary. It was only three o’clock where he was in Alaska. He’d called her phone instead of the house phone and from the look that Adam and Shelley exchanged when she answered the call, she knew that one of them had sent him a text to prompt him to ring. She pretended not to know as she chatted with him, told him about the cake and the sunshine and how the dogs and kids had tracked half the beach into the house with them. William’s laughter, a continent away, sounded just like Robbie’s.

‘Your father would love to speak with you,’ she said, and passed the phone to Robbie. ‘It’s William.’

She watched as Robbie took the phone. ‘Hello, son. Yes, thank you. All good there? Good, good.’ A silence, and Emily tried to hear if William was speaking on the other end.

‘You probably want to talk with your brother.’ Robbie handed the phone to Adam, and Emily drew the familiar sigh.

Now, from the spare bedroom they used as an office, Emily could see flashes through the window, though she couldn’t see the fireworks themselves. Wrapped in a dressing gown she sat at the desk and checked her email. As promised, Shelley had forwarded her William’s email as soon as she’d got home. Emily opened it and gazed with pleasure at the photographs of William’s two children. It was tough for him, splitting custody with their mother; but he only lived a couple of miles from her and saw them almost every day.

The girl, Brianna, most resembled what William had looked like as a child: gap-toothed, dark-haired – even a haircut much like William had had in the 1970s. Emily supposed everything came back into style, eventually. Brianna posed with her older brother John in front of a lake and pine trees, with fishing rods in their hands. Alaska looked a lot like Maine, though William said that they had even more vicious black flies there.

She was about to call Robbie to come in and look when she saw that she had another email as well, from someone called Lucy Knight. The subject was Christopher.

 

Dear Emily,

I hope you don’t mind my emailing you out of the blue like this.

I thought you would probably want to know that Christopher passed away last month. I would have told you sooner, but everything seems to take so much more time for me since he’s been gone. He didn’t suffer; he died in bed, suddenly, of a heart attack. I woke up and he was gone.

I know we never met bar the once, but Christopher often spoke of you, as a colleague and a friend. He regarded his time in South America as – he never said in so many words that it was the happiest, because, as you know, he could never be anything but kind – but he spoke of it as one of the most productive times in his life, as the time he felt he did the most good. He was a fine man and I was very lucky to have him. I miss him very much.

Yours sincerely,

Lucy Norris Knight

 

She put her hand over her mouth. Christopher.

‘Sweetheart?’ Robbie came in and rested his hand on the back of her chair. ‘Coming to bed?’

‘I . . . was looking at a photo of Brianna and John and I just got this. About Christopher.’ She swivelled the chair so that Robbie could read the email over her shoulder.

‘Oh, Em, I’m sorry.’ He pulled up a second chair and put his arm around her shoulders.

She had tears in her eyes. ‘Sometimes I think of him. I often wondered how he . . . but I didn’t ask. I don’t know how Lucy got my email address. That’s his wife, Lucy. She must have looked it up somewhere.’

‘Polly?’

‘I doubt it. I don’t think Polly knows it. It must have been a search engine or something.’

‘Maybe Christopher had it.’

‘He never emailed me. I saw him for the last time at my mother’s funeral.’ She shook her head. ‘I think of him now and I just picture him the way I knew him at Cambridge. I can’t picture him an old man, or even as he was when we were – when we were in Bolivia together. I see him skinny, with that hairstyle he had, so neat, and those horn-rimmed glasses he used to wear. There’s been a whole lifetime since then. Isn’t that funny?’

‘He was your best friend.’

‘For a very, very long time, yes, he was. Until you.’ She put her palm on Robbie’s cheek and he turned into it and kissed it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s sad news.’

‘I knew him so well. I knew everything about him, once.’ She scrolled down the email, but there was nothing else. Just the fact of Christopher’s death, and the kind words from his wife, who was obligated to send her nothing but had anyway.

‘He knew,’ she said. ‘He knew . . . that . . .’

Robbie frowned slightly. ‘He did?’

‘I told him, once. Or he half figured it out. When we were still at Cambridge, doing our exams. We only spoke about it once and he never mentioned it again. Not even when you and I . . . when I left him.’

‘Do you think he told his wife?’

‘I don’t think so. Christopher was a gentleman. I told him to keep it a secret and he would have done. He was a good man.’

Robbie gazed at her. ‘That means,’ he said, slowly, ‘that no one else knows, now.’

She nodded.

‘Not Polly?’ he said.

‘I don’t even know if Polly is still alive. But I don’t think she knew. She didn’t want to know. Not Marie?’

‘I never told Marie.’

‘So no one knows.’

‘Only you and me,’ said Robbie. ‘We’re the only people left alive who know it.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Just you and me.’

‘Then we’re free,’ he said. ‘Finally, you and I are free.’

 

Chapter Three

 

 

When Emily woke up, Robbie was gone. She put her hand out to touch his pillow and it was still warm, still bearing the imprint of his head. The sun had risen and was shining through their bedroom window.

When they’d first moved to Maine, they could only afford seafront property by buying a lot with a near-derelict house on it: a boxy, strict Victorian farmhouse, weathered and sagging, with holes in the roof. Robbie had renovated the house so extensively that little of the original footprint remained. It was a three-gabled, cedar-shingled house with a wide porch on the side facing the ocean, white trim on all the doors and windows, and a garage workshop on the side. But sometimes, when Emily looked up at the house, she could see the ghost of that old nineteenth-century building standing there, too.

The original master bedroom had been at the back of the house, facing the woods, but Robbie had moved it to the front, facing east and the water. He wanted to hear the ocean as they slept, and he wanted to see the sun rise.

In practice, he was usually awake before sunrise, even since he’d retired.

Emily smiled and listened for him around the house. He whistled, sometimes, moving from room to room. He always listened to rock music, but he whistled Bach. She didn’t even think he consciously realised he was doing it. It was a thread of sound that tied their years together: along with the dogs’ toenails on the floor, children’s footsteps, the radio in his workshop, the constant susurration of the sea.

She didn’t hear him this morning, but she kept listening anyway.

The phone rang; she let it go for a couple of rings to see if Robbie would pick it up downstairs, since at this hour it was bound to be for him, not her. When he didn’t, she reached over for the extension on his bedside table.

‘Dr Brandon?’

She recognised the voice at once: he’d never quite lost his Quebec accent. ‘Good morning, Pierre.’

‘I wondered if maybe you wanted to come down to the boatyard? It’s not a problem, we’re always glad to see Bob, but—’

She sat up straight. ‘What’s he done? Is he all right?’

‘Oh, nothing to worry about. He’s fine. But maybe you want to come down, you know?’

She dressed in a hurry and left in her own car, noticing that Robbie’s truck was gone.

Pierre hadn’t changed the name of the boatyard when he bought it from Robbie on his retirement; the sign was still painted blue on white, Brandon’s Boatyard. Pierre had had it repainted recently, from the looks of it. When she got there, Pierre was waiting for her near the entrance to one of the work bays, standing next to Little Sterling, both with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups in their hands. Pierre was small and scrappy, descended from generations of woodsmen; Little Sterling, despite his name, was a mountain of. . .