by Ruth Ware
It’s a shock – as I stand there, reading the paragraph again and again, I feel my skin prickle with it, and I have to steady myself against the table. It has happened. The thing I’ve spent so long fearing. It’s finally happened. And yet, it’s not as bad as it could have been. There’s nothing about it being treated as a suspicious death, no mention of coroners or inquests. And as the days wear on, and my phone doesn’t ring, and there are no knocks at the door, I tell myself I can relax … just a little.
And yet, I am still tense and jumpy, too distracted to read or concentrate on TV in the evenings with Owen. When he asks me a question over dinner my head jerks up, torn from my own thoughts and unsure what he said. I find myself apologising more and more.
God, how I wish I could smoke. My fingers itch for a cigarette.
Only once do I crack and have one, and I hate myself afterwards. I buy a packet in a rush of shame as we pass the offy at the corner of the road, telling myself that I am going in for milk, and then – almost as a pretend afterthought – asking for ten Marlboro Lights as I go up to pay, my voice high and falsely casual. I smoke one in the back garden, and then I flush the butt and shower, scrubbing my skin until it is pink and raw, ignoring Freya’s increasingly cross screeches from the bouncy chair just inside the bathroom door.
There is no way I am feeding my child stinking of smoke.
When Owen comes home I feel riven with guilt, jumpy and on edge, and at last, when I drop a wine glass and burst into tears he says, ‘Isa, what’s the matter? You’ve been weird ever since you came back from Salten. Is something going on?’
At first I can only shake my head, hiccuping, but then at last I say, ‘I’m sorry – I’m so sorry. I – I had a cigarette.’
‘What?’ It’s not what he was expecting, I can tell that from his expression. ‘Blimey … how, when did that happen?’
‘I’m sorry.’ I’m calmer now, but still gulping. ‘I – I had a few drags at Kate’s and then today, I don’t know, I just couldn’t resist.’
‘I see.’ He takes me in his arms, rests his chin on my head. I can feel him thinking what to say. ‘Well … I can’t say I’m thrilled. You know how I feel about it.’
‘You couldn’t be more pissed off at me than I am at myself. I felt disgusting – I couldn’t hold Freya until I’d had a shower.’
‘What did you do with the rest of the packet?’
‘I threw them away,’ I say after a pause. But the pause is because this is a lie. I didn’t throw them away. I have no idea why not. I meant to – but somehow I shoved them into the corner of my handbag instead before I went for my shower. I’m not having another one, so it doesn’t matter, does it? It all comes to the same thing. I will throw them away, and then what I’ve said will be true. But for now – for now, as I stand there, stiff and ashamed in Owen’s arms … for now it’s a lie.
‘I love you,’ he says to the top of my head. ‘You know that’s why I don’t want you smoking, right?’
‘I know,’ I say, my throat croaky with tears. And then Freya cries out, and I pull away from him to pick her up.
He is puzzled though. He knows something is wrong … he just doesn’t know what.
Gradually the days form a kind of semblance of normality, though small touches remind me that it’s not, or at least if it is, it’s a new normal, not the old one. For one thing, my jaw hurts, and when I mention it in passing, Owen tells me that he heard me last night grinding my teeth in my sleep.
Another is the nightmares. It’s not just the sound of the shovel on wet sand any more, the scrape of a groundsheet across a beach track. Now it’s people, officials, snatching Freya from my arms, my mouth frozen in a soundless scream of fear as she is taken away.
I have coffee with my antenatal group as usual. I walk to the library as usual. But Freya can feel my tension and fear. She wakes in the night, crying, so that I stumble from my bed to her crib to snatch her up before she can wake Owen. In the daytime she is fretful and needy, putting her arms up to be carried all the time, until my back hurts with the weight of her.
‘Maybe she’s teething,’ Owen says, but I know it’s not that, or not just that. It’s me. It’s the fear and adrenaline pumping through my body, into my milk, through my skin, communicating themselves to her.
I feel constantly on edge, the muscles in my neck like steel cords, perpetually braced for something, some bolt from the blue to destroy the fragile status quo. But when it comes, it’s not in the form that I was expecting.
It is Owen who answers the door. It is Saturday, and I am still in bed, Freya beside me, sprawled out frog-legged on the duvet, her wet red mouth wide, her thin violet lids closed over eyes that dart with her dreams.
When I wake, there’s a cup of tea beside my bed, and something else. A vase of flowers. Roses.
The sight jolts me awake, and I lie there, trying to think what I could have forgotten. It’s not our anniversary – that’s in January. My birthday’s not until July. Crap. What is it?
At last I give up. I will have to admit ignorance and ask.
‘Owen?’ I call softly, and he comes in, picks up the stirring Freya and puts her to his shoulder, patting her back as she stretches and yawns, with catlike delicacy.
‘Hello, sleepyhead. Did you see your tea?’
‘I did. Thanks. But what’s with the flowers? Are we celebrating something?’
‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’
‘You mean they’re not from you?’ I take a sip of the tea and frown. It’s lukewarm, but it’s wet, and that’s the main thing.
‘Nope. Take a look at the card.’
It’s tucked beneath the vase, a little anonymous florist’s card in an unsealed, unmarked white envelope. I pull it out and open it.
Isa, it says, in handwriting I don’t recognise, probably the florist’s. Please accept these as an apology for my behaviour. Yours always, Luc.
Oh God.
‘So, um … who’s Luc?’ Owen picks up his own cup of tea and takes a sip, eyeing me over the top of the cup. ‘Should I be worried?’
He makes the comment sound like a joke, but it’s not, or not completely. He’s not the jealous type, but there is something curious, a little speculative in his gaze, and I can’t blame him. If he got red roses from a strange woman, I would probably be wondering too.
‘You read the card?’ I ask, and then realise, instantly, as his expression closes that that was the wrong thing to say. ‘I mean, I didn’t mean –’
‘There was no name on the envelope.’ His voice is flat, offended. ‘I read it to see who they were for. I wasn’t spying on you, if that’s what you meant.’
‘No,’ I say hurriedly, ‘of course that’s not what I meant. I was just –’ I stop, take a breath. This is all going wrong. I should never have started down this track. I try – too late – to turn back. ‘Luc is Kate’s brother.’
‘Her brother?’ Owen raises an eyebrow. ‘I thought she was an only child?’
‘Stepbrother.’ I twist the card between my fingers. How did he get my address? Owen must be wondering what he’s apologising for, but what can I say? I can’t tell him what Luc really did. ‘He – there was a misunderstanding while I was at Kate’s. It was silly really.’
‘Blimey,’ Owen says lightly. ‘If I sent roses every time there was a misunderstanding I’d be broke.’
‘It was about Freya,’ I say reluctantly. I have to somehow tell him this but without making Luc sound like a psycho. If I say – bluntly – that Luc took my child, our child, away from the person looking after her without permission, Owen will probably want me to call the police, and that’s the one thing I can’t do. I have to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘I – oh, it’s complicated, but when we went out to the dinner I got a babysitter, but she was a bit young and she couldn’t handle things when Freya kicked off. It was stupid – I shouldn’t have left Freya with a stranger, but Kate said the girl was experienced … anyway Luc happened to b
e there so he offered to take Freya out for a walk to calm her down. But I was cross he hadn’t asked me before he took her out of the house.’
Both of Owen’s eyebrows are up now.
‘The guy helped you out and you chewed him out, and now he’s sending roses? Bit over the top, no?’
Oh God. I am making this worse.
‘Look, it was a bit more complicated at the time,’ I say, a trace of defensiveness coming into my tone. ‘It’s a long story. Can we talk about it after I’ve had a shower?’
‘Sure.’ Owen holds up his hands. ‘Don’t mind me.’
But as I grab a towel from the radiator and swathe my dressing gown around me, I catch him looking at the vase of roses on the bedside table, and his expression is the look of a man putting two and two together … and not really liking the answer.
Later that day, when Owen has taken Freya out to Sainsbury’s to buy bread and milk, I take the flowers out of the vase, and I shove them deep into the outside bin, not caring how the thorns prick and rip my skin.
On top of them I shove the week’s rubbish in a plastic sack, pressing it down as though the accumulated garbage can cancel out the presence of the flowers, and then I slam the lid down and go back inside.
My hands, as I rinse them under the tap, washing away the blood from the thorns, are shaking, and I itch to call up Kate or Fatima or Thea and tell them what Luc has done, unpick his motives. Was he really trying to apologise? Or was it something else, more subtle, more damaging?
I even go as far as picking up the phone and bringing up Kate’s number – but I don’t call. She has enough to worry about, they all do, without me adding to their fears over what could be nothing but a simple apology.
One thing that bothers me is how he got my address. Kate? The school? But I am in the phone book, I realise with a sinking sensation. Isa Wilde. There are probably not that many of us in north London. It wouldn’t be that hard to track me down.
I pace the flat, thinking, thinking, and in the end I realise I have to distract myself from my thoughts or I will go mad. I go up to the bedroom and empty out Freya’s clothes drawer, sorting out the too-small Babygros and rompers from a few months ago. The task is absorbing, and as the piles grow I find I’m humming something between my teeth, a silly pop song that was on the radio at Kate’s, and my heart rate has slowed, and my hands are steady again.
I will iron the outgrown clothes and put them in the loft in plastic boxes for when – if – Freya has a baby brother or sister.
But it’s only when I come to pick up the pile and take it downstairs to where I keep the iron that I notice. They are stained, with minute pricks of blood from the roses.
I could wash them, of course. But I’m not sure if the bloodstains would come out of the fragile, snowy fabric, and anyway, I realise as I gaze at the spreading crimson spots, turning to rust, I can’t bring myself to do it. The things, the perfect, innocent little things, are ruined and soiled, and I will never feel the same way about them again.
I LIE IN bed that night, listening to Freya snuffling in her crib and Owen snoring lightly beside me, and I can’t sleep.
I’m tired. I’m always tired these days. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Freya was born, but it’s more than that – I can’t seem to turn off any more. I remember the mantra of visitors when she was a newborn – sleep when the baby sleeps! And I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, don’t you get it? I can’t ever sleep again, not completely. Not into that complete, solid unconsciousness I used to have before she came along, the state Owen seems to slip back into so easily.
Because now I have her. Freya. And she is mine and my responsibility. Anything could happen – she could choke in her sleep, the house could burn down, a fox could slink through the open bathroom window and maul her. And so I sleep with one ear cocked, ready to leap up, heart pounding, at the least sign that something is wrong.
And now, everything is wrong. And so I can’t sleep.
I keep thinking about Luc, about the tall angry man in the post office, and the boy I used to know so many years ago. And I am trying to join them up.
He was so beautiful, that’s what I keep remembering. Luc, lying out on the jetty in the starlight, his fingers trailing in the salt water and his eyes closed. And I remember lying beside him, looking at his profile in the moonlight and feeling my stomach twist with the sickness of desire.
He was my first … well, crush, I suppose, although that word doesn’t do justice to the way the feeling hit me. I had met boys before, friends of Will’s, brothers of my school friends. But I had never lain in the darkness within touching distance of a boy beautiful enough to break your heart.
I remember lying there and putting out my hand towards his shoulder – my fingertips so close that I could feel the heat from his bare, tanned skin, silver in the starlight.
Now, as I lie in bed beside my baby and the father of my child, I wonder. I imagine putting out my hand, and Luc turning in the quiet moonlight, and opening those extraordinary eyes. I imagine him putting out a hand to my cheek, and I imagine kissing him, as I did once, all those years ago. But this time he would not flinch away – he would kiss me back. And I feel it again, welling up inside me, the kind of desire you could drown yourself in.
I shut my eyes, pushing down the thought, feeling the heat in my cheeks. How can I be lying in bed beside my partner, fantasising about a boy I knew nearly two decades ago? I am not a girl any more. I am an adult, a grown-up woman with a child.
And Luc … Luc is not that boy any more. He is a man, and an angry one. And I am one of the people he is angry with.
BEFORE THE SALTEN reunion I went months, years even, without speaking to the others. But now the urge to talk to them is like a constant itch on my skin, a craving beneath the surface, like the cigarettes I suddenly want again.
Every morning I wake up and I think of the packet that is still shoved down in the bottom of my handbag, and I think too of my mobile phone with their numbers stored in it. Would it hurt so much, to meet up?
It feels like tempting fate, but as the days tick past, and the urge grows stronger, I start to justify the idea to myself. It’s not just Luc’s unwelcome gift of flowers – although talking that through with them would be a relief, it’s true. But I feel the need to make sure they are OK, bearing up under the pressure. As long as we stick to our story – that we know nothing, that we saw nothing – there is precious little evidence against us. And if we all stick to that account, they will have a hard time proving otherwise. But I am worried. Worried about Thea in particular, about her drinking. If one of us cracks, we all break. And now that Ambrose’s body has been discovered, it is surely just a matter of time before we get a call.
It plays on my mind, the idea of that call. Every time the phone goes I jump and look at the caller display before answering. The one time it was a withheld number, I let it go to answerphone, but there was no message. Probably just a cold caller, I told myself, dread churning in my stomach as I waited to see if they would ring back.
They didn’t. But I still can’t stop myself playing and replaying the call in my head. I imagine the police asking about the timings, picking apart our account. And there is one thing that I keep coming back to, imagining their questions gnawing at the issue like a rat at a knot, and I don’t have an answer.
Ambrose committed suicide because he was being sacked for gross misconduct. Because they’d found the drawings in his sketchbook or in his studio or something of that kind. That’s what we have always thought, all of us.
But if that’s the case, why were we only called into the meeting with Miss Weatherby on Saturday?
It’s a timeline I have spelled out again and again in the middle of the night, as Owen snores beside me, and I cannot make sense of it. Ambrose died on the Friday night, and that day at school was entirely normal – we went about our lessons as usual, I even saw Miss Weatherby at evening prep, and she was completely calm.
Whe
n did they find the drawings, and where? There is an answer stirring in the back of my mind, and it’s not one that I want to face up to alone.
Finally, about five or six days after the piece in the Guardian, I crack and I send Fatima and Thea a text.
Are either of you around to meet up? Would be great to see you.
Fatima texts back first.
Could do coffee this Sat? Can’t do anything before then. 3pm somewhere central?
Great, I text back. That works for me. Thea?
Thea takes twenty-four hours to reply, and when she does, it’s with her usual brevity.
P Quot in S Ken?
It takes me a good ten minutes of puzzling before the penny drops, and when it does, Fatima’s reply comes before I can type out my acceptance.
Ok, 3pm Sat at Pain Quotidien in South Ken. See you there.
‘Can you look after Freya this Saturday?’ I ask Owen casually that night, while we’re eating supper.
‘Sure.’ He forks pasta into his mouth and nods through a mouthful of Bolognese. ‘You know that. I wish you’d go out more. What’s the occasion?’
‘Oh, seeing friends,’ I say vaguely. It’s true, but I don’t want him to know the whole truth – that I’m meeting Fatima and Thea. He would wonder why, so soon after I saw them at Kate’s.
‘Anyone I know?’ Owen says, and I feel a prickle of irritation. It’s not just that I don’t want to answer, it’s that I don’t think even a week ago he would have asked the question. It’s those flowers of Luc’s. Owen said nothing when he came home and found them gone, but he is still thinking about them. I can tell.
‘Just friends,’ I say. And then I add, stupidly, ‘It’s an NCT thing.’
‘Oh, nice, who’s going to be there?’
I feel my heart sink, realising the lie I have backed myself into. Owen and I went to NCT classes together. He knows all of them. I’m going to have to be specific, and as Kate always said, it’s the specifics that catch you out.
‘Um … Rachel,’ I say at last. ‘And Jo, I think. I’m not sure who else.’