‘Why have you shown me your bruises, Lydia? If you don’t want him to know about it, and if you want to stay in your marriage, why have you chosen to let me see what he’s done to you? There must be a reason for it.’
She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, closing them for a moment. ‘I just want to make it stop,’ she says.
I see my own face as it once was – the girl I was before my first marriage – and I am dragged back across the decades, forced yet again to revisit the past. I am back in that hospital room, as I have been so many times in my head and in my sleep since that day: the bleeping of monitors, the white noise of the nurses’ voices; the brain-splitting silence that followed, and that continued when I was back home, ringing with a continuity I believed would be permanent. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try to escape it, I have no choice but to return there.
I am so sorry, Mrs Hunter.
I was young, I had no independence; I had relied on Damien for everything, having embedded myself in the trap he had carefully set for me. I had been scared by the two lines that had emerged on that stick, filled with self-doubt and with the fear that I wasn’t ready; that I would never be ready, and that I would never be good enough. The weight of imminent responsibility threatened to overwhelm me. After it, there came the other emotions: the panic, the excitement, the anxiety, the anticipation; the swell of love that bloomed in my chest and grew with the curve of my stomach.
There’s nothing more we can do now.
In that moment, I hated the nurse more than I hated anyone: more than I hated Damien for what he had done to us; more than I hated myself for having stayed. My anger towards her remained with me for the duration of my hospital stay, until I was sent back home to four walls soaked in the memory of a night that had only recently passed. In the silence, I heard the echoes of his anger played on repeat: the slammed doors, the expletives spat through gritted teeth, the thud of his boot as it made contact with my swollen stomach. I felt the emptiness that had engulfed me when I knew something was very wrong, as though time had stopped and I was trapped in that moment, destined to stay there for ever no matter where my life might later take me. Being angry with the nurse meant ignoring the reality that the man who had ruined everything and was to blame for all my suffering was the very person I had chosen and welcomed into my life.
The hate I carried stayed with me and grew like a cancer, infecting the handful of relationships I still had that had existed beyond the man I had married. Eventually, even those few remaining friendships – if I can be generous enough to describe them as such – were lost to the person I had become; a person I didn’t recognise and didn’t want to accept was really me. It was only years later, when I was finally able to start again – all of me, like a kind of rebirth – that I was able to form relationships, and it was not long after this that I met Sean.
‘It won’t stop,’ I tell Lydia. ‘Not unless you end it.’
I watch her as she places the final flower in the vase and tilts it to rest in the position of her choosing. She tips her head to one side as she assesses her creation.
‘There,’ she says, stepping back to admire her handiwork, ignoring my last statement as though she has somehow been unable to hear me speak. She picks up the vase before turning and handing it to me. ‘Where are you going to put them? I don’t think they like direct sunlight.’
I take the vase and look at Lydia, urging her to meet my eye. I glance at the long sleeves she wears to cover the marks I know lie under them. A smattering of bruises along her arm, ribs that have been used as a punchbag, but what other injuries is Lydia Green concealing beneath her clothing, and just how deeply do her psychological wounds run? How long will it be before her husband’s violence extends itself to their children?
It wasn’t my fault, he will say. This is what you make me do.
And now I know I can’t be silenced by the past. No matter what my previous mistakes might be, I can’t allow this woman to expose herself to a danger that might prove to have been avoidable if only a third party had stepped in and spoken up. I need to be the voice she doesn’t have; I need to say the things I wish someone had given voice to for me all those years ago, before it was too late. I can’t allow her to become another Christine Blackhurst, and so I utter the words I never thought I would hear myself say again, speaking them because I know they need to be heard, and as much as I wish there was someone else to say them, in this moment I am all she has.
‘You need to leave him.’
For a moment, there is nothing. No reaction from her, as I might have expected: no silent tears of reluctant acceptance, no nod of acknowledgement; just an expression of detachment that is almost strong enough to suggest she hasn’t heard me. She stares at me and through me, as though she is seeing something else. I put the vase on the breakfast bar behind me, hating the weight of it in my hands.
‘What about the kids?’ she says finally.
‘They’ll understand,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe not straight away, but eventually they’ll come to know how their father has treated you and they’ll understand that you made the right choice for all of you.’
When I reach out to her, touching my fingertips to her arm in a gesture of solidarity, she looks at my hand as though she doesn’t know how to respond. We are two women who have so much in common, yet we couldn’t be further apart.
‘It will ruin their lives,’ she tells me.
There is a silence in which she watches me, waiting for my response. If she thinks I haven’t considered the children in all this, she couldn’t be further from the truth.
‘What if it saves their lives?’
Her reaction stamps itself across her features; her top lip curls and her eyes narrow at the suggestion that her husband might ever hurt their children. She shakes her head, adamant that I couldn’t be any further from the truth.
‘He would never hurt them,’ she says.
‘How do you know?’
‘It won’t happen,’ she insists. ‘He would never lay a finger on either of them.’
‘Until he does, and then you’ll never forgive yourself for it.’
She grabs her bag, already getting ready to leave. I could let her go – I could let her walk back to her home and to her husband, to a life in which I know she is unsafe – or I could try to stop her returning to a situation that I know will only deteriorate over time. The type of abuse that Lydia has endured only ever gets worse. I have seen it for myself. I have lived it.
‘You’re wrong,’ she snaps.
I reach out a hand again, knowing that I can’t touch her this time, but also that if I let her walk away, it will be yet another regret I must then learn to live with. I hold my palm open to her in a gesture of surrender, hoping that what she has seen of me over these past few weeks is enough to convince her that I am on her side. Perhaps I should let her go, but I can’t. The fear of ‘what if’ is much greater than the sickness that roils in my stomach when I think of the past.
‘Don’t leave like this,’ I implore her. ‘I know none of what I say is what you want to hear, but I also know that deep down, you know what I’ve told you is right. Things will only get worse, Lydia – I’ve seen it too many times. Please,’ I say, stepping back as she tries to get past me. ‘Just think about what happens next time.’
I don’t expect her to stop, but she does. It is as though my words trigger a thought that hasn’t previously occurred to her, although at some base level – regardless of how much she may have tried to ignore it – she must have considered the extremes to which her husband’s violence might one day extend.
‘I love him,’ she says. The words sound small and feeble, pathetic in so many ways; so agonisingly simple. Everything should be so easy for her, and yet it couldn’t be less so.
I know my words are going to hurt her, but sometimes the cruellest of truths can turn out to be the kindest, and so I speak them anyway, prepared to accept the consequences of their aftermath. ‘But he doesn’
t love you, Lydia. Love wouldn’t treat you like this.’
She steps back a few paces and lowers herself onto one of the stools that line the breakfast bar, dropping her bag onto the tiled floor. With her head in her hands and her face hidden from me, she cries. There are a thousand words of comfort I would love to be able to offer her, but I know there is nothing I can say that will ease the weight of the decision she knows she faces.
I wait, letting her empty her sadness until she is ready to speak again.
‘You’re right,’ she says, wiping the cuff of one of her sleeves across her eyes. ‘I need to leave him. I’m going to do it.’
She gives a nod as though reasserting her decision, as though reassuring herself that she is capable of what she knows she must do.
‘Just tell me what I can do to help you.’
She shakes her head. ‘You can’t do anything. No one can. I need to do this for myself.’
She stands and puts a hand out to me, which strikes me as curiously formal given the circumstances. I take it in mine, her palm as cold as I felt it on the first morning we met.
‘Keep in touch,’ I say. ‘Let me know you’re okay.’
She nods, and I follow her out to the hallway, my heart already filled with dread at the thought of what this woman is about to face. Uncertainty is a particular kind of threat, one that can’t be prepared for. Knowing Josh as I feel I now do, I realise there is no way of predicting how he will react to the news of Lydia’s leaving.
Maybe she won’t tell him, I think. Perhaps she will wait until he’s at work to pack her things, get the children and go.
She stops at the front door and turns to me. ‘Thank you. For everything.’ She leans towards me and puts an arm out. We embrace briefly, but as she pulls away, her hand lingers on my arm, her fingers closing around it. Her fingertips dig into the flesh, and then she pulls away and smiles, the moment over so quickly that I doubt for a second whether it took place at all.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she says, and then she is gone.
I watch her get into her car and leave. I close the front door and turn back to the house, trying to dispel the ghosts of the past that have gathered in the hallway to greet me now that I am alone again. A face appears in front of me, as vivid and real now as it was all those years ago. I close my eyes, tightening them as I try to will Christine Blackhurst from my consciousness.
When I return to the kitchen, I see Lydia’s bag still on the floor where she dropped it. I hurry back to the front door with it, but I am too late: she is already gone. I retrieve my mobile phone from the hallway drawer where I left it this morning, wondering how she got into her car and assuming her keys must have been in her pocket. I search for her number. When I make the call, and Lydia’s phone starts to ring, I hear a ringtone coming from the handbag. Of course, I think; her mobile is still in her bag, along with the rest of her things. As I reach inside and retrieve it, I end the call on my mobile, but not before I see the word that fills the lit screen to announce an incoming call from my phone number.
BITCH.
A punch delivered by an invisible force catches me in the stomach, winding me. A sharp intake of breath fills my lungs with air as I press the central button on Lydia’s phone, but it is now asking for a passcode, and what I think I saw – what I know I saw – is already gone. With my own phone, I call her number again. The screen in my other hand lights up once more; the word is there again, unmistakable. BITCH. My number is not stored in her phone under my name: instead, this five-letter insult stares at me from the screen. Why?
Before I have time to stop myself, I have put both phones down and am scrabbling through her bag, rifling through her belongings: a packet of chewing gum, a petrol receipt, a small leather purse. Fingers shaking, I open the purse and slide an array of cards from one of the compartments. Doubt lurches in my gut as I move aside the top card: a £25 gift voucher for a popular department store. Then I see it, at the bottom of the next card, a membership card for a gym; something so ordinary and everyday yet with the power to send my brain rattling and my balance reeling. The next card is a bank card, and after that, a driver’s licence that bears her photograph: not the woman who has come to this house every week for the past couple of months, with her conservative dress sense and her scraped-back hair, but the woman I saw in the pub last night, the glamorous and happy woman who is a far cry from Lydia Green.
I stare at the card in my hand, at the photograph that looks up at me and smiles, mocking me.
The woman who is not Lydia Green.
The woman whose name is Lucy Spencer.
Without thinking about what I am doing, I reach for the vase of flowers and hurl it against the far wall. The glass shatters into pieces as it falls upon the tiled floor, a scatter of purple petals lying among them.
Ten
Josh
Karen has called Lucy’s mobile several times during the past week, leaving voicemail messages in which she cancels all future sessions with the two of them and makes it clear she wants no further contact from either of them. He knows what the messages mean – she has found out their secret. It is just as Lucy planned it. She has told him everything now: how she left her handbag at the house knowing that curiosity would get the better of Karen; how she went back to collect it, and how when she went through her cards, she found them placed in a different order to that in which she had left them. There is no doubt about it: Karen has seen her identification. She knows that Lydia doesn’t exist.
And yet when Lucy turned up at the house to collect her bag, Karen said nothing about what she had seen. She didn’t question Lucy or even hint at what she now knew.
He can smell alcohol on Lucy’s breath. Things are getting worse for her, though she would never admit it.
They expect Karen not to answer the door, but she does. Her face is set in stone; her lips are pursed as though she has a sour taste in her mouth. She looks unusually dishevelled and is without make-up, her skin mapped with fine lines that are more noticeable now that they are free from their mask of foundation.
‘I assume you’ve picked up my messages.’
‘Of course,’ Lucy says, and smiles. It is a smile filled with venom, and he sees the contempt returned in Karen’s response. ‘You’ve left enough.’
‘I don’t know what you’ve been playing at here,’ Karen says, her voice faltering on the words, ‘and I’m not interested enough to hear an explanation. You need to get off my property before I call the police.’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Lucy says calmly. ‘What exactly are we supposed to have done?’
He knows what it is to be on the receiving end of Lucy’s anger; she has a temper that is controlled so effectively that it can seem at times not to exist at all. He knows the passion with which her hatred of Karen fuels her intent, and he realises now the extent of her manipulation. He has allowed her to pull his strings, persuading him that they should be here, though he has known for weeks – has felt since their first visit to Karen’s house – that this is all wrong. Until recently, things always seemed to be easier when he allowed Lucy to dictate his life for him. Now he understands the consequences of his attitude.
‘Fraud,’ Karen says flatly.
Lucy laughs. It is a spiteful, hate-filled sound that rings in his ears, and he feels sorrier for Karen now than he ever has. They have made things so much worse for themselves, and now they have made them so much worse for Karen too. But of course that is exactly what Lucy wants.
They shouldn’t be here. This is not her fault.
‘You offer a service,’ Lucy says, stretching her arms out wide as though delivering a sermon. ‘We paid you for that service. I don’t see a crime in that.’
‘I don’t know why you came here,’ Karen says, ‘but whatever game you’ve been playing, it’s over now. It’s cost you a fair bit, this little charade. I hope it was worth it.’
‘Every penny,’ Lucy replies with a smile.
Karen lo
oks at each of them in turn, her eyes wide with disbelief and an element of panic that she is unable to hide. He sees fear in her eyes, and he remembers what that feels like.
‘Come here again and I will call the police,’ she says, and she shuts the front door hurriedly, leaving them standing on the path.
‘Bitch,’ Lucy says, her hands balled into fists at her sides.
‘What were you expecting?’ he says. ‘To be invited in for a cup of tea and a piece of cake? If we’d done things differently, maybe she’d still have spoken to us. We could have got to the truth. This isn’t her fault.’
‘We know the truth already. What is it with you?’ she asks spitefully, her voice dripping with anger. ‘Apart from the fact that you fancy her? I know you love an older woman, but she’s past it even by your standards.’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
He could do it now: slap the silly cow from her feet and leave her humiliated on the pavement, but instead he turns and heads back down the path, desperate to be away from this place and as far as he is able to get from her.
‘Don’t you dare walk away from me!’
She grabs his arm and her fingertips dig through his jacket, pinching his skin. He swipes her hand away, knowing that if he wanted to, he could hit her to the floor as easily as touch her. He has never done it, though the thought has crossed his mind so many times.
‘You’ve fucked everything up, you know that?’
He laughs. There is only one person who is responsible for doing that, and they both know who that is, despite the fact that she still won’t bring herself to admit it.
He loses his balance as he turns to her. ‘What’s his name?’
‘What?’ She stares at him indignantly, continuing the charade of innocent victim. ‘Oh God, you’re not still on about that, are you?’
‘I’ve seen the texts,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve seen those photos he sent you. They’re disgusting. You’re a hypocrite.’
The Divorce: A gripping psychological thriller with a fantastic twist Page 15