My mum walked back over to me and kissed me on my forehead. The unexpected show of affection had me close to tears – it had been such an emotional day.
‘I would never stand in the way of your happiness, darling.’
On some level, it struck me as a strange thing to say. ‘And I would never think such a thing,’ I replied, my voice thick with unshed tears. ‘You’re amazing. Thank you. For everything.’
Aaron wandered over to one of the windows and gazed out at the darkening evening. A little while earlier, he had opened the electronic gate so that the taximan had a clear run of the house and we would see him coming.
‘Taxi’s here, Margaret. No, no, please don’t rush,’ he said, seeing the way me and my mum tensed at that announcement. ‘Take all the time you need, I’m going out to pay the man, now.’
I squatted down so that I could look Becky in the eye. ‘I love you, baby, but you have to go home with Granny, now. It’s Mummy’s and Aaron’s wedding night tonight, and people that have just got married have to be alone on their wedding night. It’s tradition.’
The words rang hollow in my own ears. My little girl needed me, I was abandoning her; what the hell was I playing at?
You’re being a selfish bitch.
I knew that voice was right, too, but I couldn’t back down now because the wheels had been set in motion and I wanted, no, I needed to be alone with my husband, if only for tonight.
‘No,’ she said.
But her sobs had eased and inwardly, I breathed a sigh of relief. I pressed home my advantage:
‘Yes, sweetheart. It’s late and it’s way past your bedtime. I love you so much, baby, and I know you understand because you’re such a big, clever girl now.’
I wrapped my arms around her and breathed in the scent of her hair; she smelled like sunshine.
‘Can I come tomorrow?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘Yes. Yes, you can.’
In that moment I resigned myself to the fact that Becky would be with us tomorrow. And was that really so bad, I asked myself? It was beginning to look like one night alone with Aaron would have to suffice.
‘Come on, sweetheart, it’s time to go,’ Mum said.
To my amazement, Becky allowed herself to be gently prised off my legs, and her little hand curled in my mum’s.
There was a cold space on my legs where her body had been pressed against me and I experienced a momentary, savage pang of loss.
It’s all right, you can stay tonight, I almost said, but the words got lodged in my throat.
Aaron took that moment to re-enter the room. Even though he had been gone all of two seconds, my heart leapt at his reappearance. He went straight over to Becky and crouched down before her.
‘Hey, you should be happy. This is the start of our brand new lives together, and in a few days time, we’ll be eating ice cream and building sandcastles to our hearts’ content.’
To my surprise, she turned her head away from him and pinged back towards me, clutching my legs like we were attached by an invisible length of elastic.
Aaron stood up, throwing me a helpless look.
No, it was more than helpless, I realised. He was hurt. I smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile and ever so gently, prised Becky off my legs. Her sudden aversion to Aaron had confused me too, especially as she so badly wanted to stay here tonight.
She just wants me, I thought sadly. She just wants me and I’m not letting her have the one thing that she wants.
My mum pasted on a bright smile, for which I was inordinately grateful.
‘Come on, sweetheart, you’re staying with me tonight. Let’s go home and have some coco.’
I bristled slightly when Mum referred to her home as Becky’s home, but I didn’t say anything, telling myself that I was just being petty.
Aaron kissed my mum on both cheeks. ‘I’m so happy you were with us today.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
‘Goodnight, sweetheart, I expect we’ll be seeing you tomorrow,’ Aaron said to Becky.
He threw me a wry smile. So much for the honeymoon period, it seemed to say. But he looked so gentle right then, so understanding, that my heart all but exploded with love for him. Together, the four of us trudged outside to the waiting taxi, with Aaron hovering somewhere behind.
Mum opened the back door of the taxi and turned to face me as Becky resolutely clung onto me. Aaron passed my mum Becky’s booster seat, and she accepted it with a smile, proceeding to quickly secure it in place as I bent down to hug my daughter.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?’ She had stopped sobbing and nodded morosely. ‘Good girl. I love you, have a nice sleep.’
‘Love you, Mummy.’
I squeezed her one final time and me and Mum shoehorned her into the seat, clicked the seatbelt into place and shut the door behind her. I walked with my mum round to the other backdoor of the car before hugging her one final time.
‘Thanks for being with me, today.’
She hugged me tight. ‘I only want you to be happy. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’ Abruptly, she broke off the hug and swiped at her eyes. ‘Now be gone with you, this is your wedding night, remember?’
Yes, I remembered all right. How could I forget? I shut the door behind her when she had climbed into the back seat and waved to them as the taxi pulled away.
When I glanced behind myself, Aaron had gone.
* * *
I re-entered the living-room in time to see the taxi disappear through the gate at the bottom of the endlessly long stretch of driveway. I remained standing at the window, my forehead resting against the windowpane, watching as the gates slowly swung inwards behind the retreating vehicle in the darkening sky.
Aaron must be in the kitchen, I thought, pressing the buttons by the fridge to close the electronic gates.
I felt dreamlike and strange as I stood there, as if I were an actress in a play. But they only problem was, I didn’t know my lines.
‘Alone at last.’
I jumped back from the window, my heart slamming. ‘Jesus, you frightened me,’ I half gasped, half giggled.
Tendrils of guilt clung to me for the way Becky and I had parted. I knew I had been selfish and harsh, but this was my wedding night, dammit. Was it really so much to ask to want to be alone with Aaron on this one, precious night?
Yeah. Maybe it is.
I turned back to look at the closed gates. They were just so far away. We were so isolated out here and a little trickle of excitement coursed through me.
I am so completely alone with my new husband.
Yes, alone at last indeed, with my darling, gorgeous husband. Sealed in my love nest with the man of my dreams.
Aaron remained in the doorway and he leaned casually against the doorframe, his feet crossed at the ankles, watching me with a lazy but avid interest that had me squirming in a mix of arousal and inexplicable discomfort.
Suddenly, my mouth was bone dry, sapped of all moisture. I didn’t understand why I should be so nervous, but I found that I trembled slightly under his watchful gaze.
No, not nerves, I thought. Expectancy.
I settled my rump on the window sill, sure that he would come over to me at any moment and take me in his arms.
It didn’t happen, and I fumbled in my mind for something to say. Well, this is strange, I thought, I was usually so comfortable around him. But the way he was watching me so intently right then was making me distinctly uncomfortable.
‘Are you going to stand there all night?’ I asked, making light of my confusion.
‘I’m just waiting.’
‘Waiting? Waiting for what?’
‘Waiting to make sure that they don’t come back.’
I frowned at his strange reply. ‘Come back? How do you mean?’
He smiled at me, and crossed his arms, still leaning against the doorframe. ‘Have you ever waited for someone’s back to be turned so you could do something that you w
eren’t supposed to do, only for that someone to come right on back and catch you in the act?’
I licked my dry lips. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Oh, I think you do. Like, you want to go through your partner’s phone, or you want to watch porn on your computer, or you’re a damn kid and you want to steal a cookie from the cookie jar. You can guarantee that the second you do, that certain someone will reappear, because they forgot their car keys, or their wallet, or maybe because they simply don’t trust you.’
I looked at him blankly, hearing the words, but not hearing them, because they mostly made no sense to me. The man standing there looked like Aaron, he even sounded like Aaron, but this was not the Aaron that I knew and loved. That deeply sarcastic, spiteful lilt to his voice wasn’t something that I had ever encountered before, and I thought that he must be playing a cruel joke on me.
My hand fluttered to the skin of my exposed chest, as if my fingertips could still my wildly beating heart. I caught myself in time and snatched my hand back down, realising how ridiculous I must look; like a bad impersonation of a wilting, pathetic heroine from out of some lame, Regency romance drama.
‘I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’
‘I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’ he mimicked in a high, falsetto voice.
I could only stare at him in disbelief, not actually believing that he was mimicking me. My face must have been a picture for he burst out laughing.
See? This is all just a joke, I thought. Not a very funny one, but a joke just the same. But there was no way that I could bring myself to laugh along with him.
‘Aaron, this isn’t funny.’
‘Oh, I think it’s very funny. The buzzer hasn’t sounded for the gate, so that’s a good sign. It goes off in every room of the house if someone’s at the front gate.’
I didn’t know that, and right then I couldn’t have been less interested. I was rooted to the spot, unsure of what to do, where to go.
‘Why are you being like this?’
‘Like what? I’m not being like anything.’
A lump rose in my throat as unshed tears stabbed behind my eyes, but I refused to give into them. Without fully understanding why – yet perhaps on some level I did understand why – I knew that it was vital that I kept my cool.
This was all wrong. Aaron was wrong.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Why don’t you sit down on the sofa, have a drink with me? I don’t know about you, but I sure could use one.’
Was he drunk? Was this what the problem was? I cast my mind back through the day’s events. He hadn’t drunk that much over the course of the afternoon – certainly no more than I, or anyone else had.
No. This was nothing to do with him having had too much to drink.
When he walked over to the drink’s cabinet, which was between the two sash windows, I tried not to flinch as he passed me.
‘Sit, Joyce, for goodness sake, you’re making me anxious just hovering there,’ he said with his back to me.
I was making him anxious? My God, that was rich. But something compelled me to sit, nonetheless. Part of me wanted to storm out of this room right now, screaming blue murder at him for being such a pig-bastard, but the other part of me, perhaps the more sensible part, held back. The part that was hardwired to a primal instinct all members of the human-race possessed in the face of great danger.
The instinct of survival.
So I sat down, making sure to keep my expression neutral despite the way my heart raced and my body trembled.
‘That’s better. Now, what would you like to drink?’
‘Whatever you’re having,’ I answered swiftly.
He twisted his head round to smile at me, and the effect it had on me was the equivalent of someone tipping a bucket of ice water over my head. I had never noticed before quite how perfect his teeth were; so straight and white and symmetrical.
I didn’t like them at all, I decided. His smile was soulless and predatory.
I watched his broad back as he poured the drinks, listening to the sound of the liquid glugging from out of a bottle and sloshing against the glass.
He turned around, a drink in each hand, the amber liquid in the crystal tumblers glittering beneath the light from the chandelier.
‘Whiskey,’ he said, handing me a glass before sitting in the leather tub chair opposite the white leather sofa on which I sat. ‘Cheers.’
He drank deeply from the glass, and when he had finished drinking, I expected him to say something more, but he didn’t. He just sat there staring at me, a disgusting smirk on his face, his body stock still and his thighs spread in a distinctly macho way that wasn’t his usual style. Or, as I was slowly beginning to realise, was absolutely his usual style; it was the way that he had held himself before that was the lie.
I took a swig of the whiskey, and it burned a trail down my esophagus, but I refused to wince. I was scared. No, scrap that, I was more than scared, I was terrified, but I was also absolutely buggered if I was going to let him know that. I knew I had to take charge of this situation which was rapidly spiralling out of control and with exaggerated slowness, I stood up, still clutching the whiskey glass.
‘I am going to bed in Becky’s room. We’ll talk in the morning,’ I said icily.
I had debated whether or not to announce that I was getting a taxi to my mum’s right now, but ultimately, I decided against it. I didn’t want a scene, not on my wedding day. I didn’t want an ugly showdown in my damned wedding dress on the wrong side of eight o’clock and after too many glasses of champagne. I felt vulnerable and stupid.
A complete failure.
No, this conversation could wait for morning; I would face this head on in the welcome light of day, stone-cold sober and with my wits about me.
And not in my bloody wedding dress.
Turning with my head in the air and with as much dignity as I could muster, I made for the door. I had only taken three steps and had reached the end of the sofa when Aaron called out to me:
‘One word for you, dear wife: Becky.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Him saying Becky had the desired effect. It turned me instantly to stone as surely as if I had eyed Medusa herself.
For a moment I was unable to move, physically winded by the conflicting emotions that smashed through me. I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep, steadying breath before turning around to face him.
‘Don’t you fucking dare even say her name, you fucking bastard.’
I never swore, as a general rule – not like that, anyway. I was shaking in a potent mix of rage and fear. I could feel the way my life, my very existence was unravelling at a rate of knots, and it had left me breathless.
‘Sit down, Joyce,’ he said, his smug smile falling like the proverbial lead balloon.
I sat down, because his saying her name like that changed everything. I glared at him expectantly, feeling very much like sparks might be shooting from my eyes.
‘Do not swear at me like that again, Joyce. It’s common and disgusting; you are better than that.’
‘What do you want from me?’
The smile was now fixed firmly back in place and I looked at him in stark disbelief. How could I ever have thought his face was anything other than hateful and cruel? The symmetrical face was obscenely handsome, so much so that it made him ugly. Not a trace of basic human kindness, of humanity, tainted his otherworldly perfect features.
‘I want your compliance. If you don’t obey me, Becky and your mum will die. If you do as I say, if you please me, then you, me and Becky will be able to live together as a perfect family of three.’
And there it was. The ugly truth and the absolute one thing I didn’t want to hear. The indirect threat he had made just now to Becky’s safety was one thing, but to directly threaten her life, as well as my mother’s, was quite another.
‘You leave them out of this,’ I said in a voice so low and steady it surpri
sed even me.
He threw back his head and laughed, like I had just told the best joke in the world. ‘And why would I want to go and do a thing like that?’
My eyes blurred with tears and hastily I blinked them away. ‘Leave them out of this,’ I said one more time.
Oh, will you relax, Joyce? I’m not interested in them, I just want you.’
Try as I might, I couldn’t get my head around any of this. None of it made a scrap of sense. I tried to organise my racing thoughts, to make sense of what he was saying.
But I couldn’t.
‘Why me?’
As soon as it was out of my mouth, I was aware of how lame it sounded. But I figured it was as good a question as any, that I had to start somewhere if I wanted to understand.
‘Why does any man want any woman, Joyce? Since I’ve been spending more time in Cornwall, let’s just say I took a shine to you. It may have been the first time you saw me that day on Porthmeor beach, but it wasn’t the first time that I saw you.’
I licked my dry lips, ordering myself to hold it together. ‘What do you mean?’
I was alarmed to discover that I wasn’t sounding quite so self-assured anymore.
‘I first saw you a couple of weeks prior to our first encounter, walking that dumb dog on the beach with your daughter. I was sitting in my Range Rover by the roadside next to the beach, just gazing out to sea and contemplating the meaning of life, when who should walk past my window but you. You actually brushed against the wing mirror on the driver’s side on your way to the steps leading down to the beach. You are a creature of habit, Joyce, and sure enough, most days you came back at the exact same time.’
He laughed and a dizziness swept over me because I could picture those steps he was talking about so clearly in my mind… I always took them every time I went to the beach.
Yet I couldn’t remember seeing Aaron’s Range Rover. But then, I reasoned, why would I? He feasibly could have been watching me the entire time.
The Silenced Wife Page 19