by Clare Boyd
‘We don’t know for sure that she didn’t try to get him some kind of help.’
‘That would have meant telling someone her son was a drug addict.’
‘She’s that worried about appearances?’
John raised one eyebrow at me, as though to say, What do you think? He was right, of course. Camilla would stop at nothing to keep the Tennant family name intact.
‘Are you going to talk to her about it when she gets back?’
‘Yes,’ he said, scratching his nose, sounding unconvincing, adding quickly, ‘But what about you in all this?’
‘Me?’
‘How would Freud explain you?’
‘I’d bore him.’ I laughed.
‘I mean, in terms of us?’
I wanted to thump my chest with my fist to stop the fluttering feeling that was building inside. A silky thread of ribbon was winding its way up from deep inside me. I felt a long-lost connection reforming between my heart and my mind.
‘We were a mistake,’ I murmured.
‘Dilys was the mistake.’
‘Don’t go there, John.’
‘Why?’
I threw both palms up at him, in a ‘stop’ motion. ‘Actually, you know what Freud would say? He’d say you love the chase and you love the secrecy. Just like your mother and your brother,’ I replied angrily, trying to keep my voice down, aware of the children next door.
‘Then he’d be wrong.’
‘We were a mistake!’ I insisted. ‘You said so yourself!’
‘Because I was in love with you and I was scared!’ he blurted out.
‘What?’
More quietly, he repeated, ‘I was in love with you. And I still am. And I always will be.’ His hands flopped by his sides.
‘No.’ I shook my head. I had heard what I had feared most, and I had heard what I had longed for. I wanted to rubbish what he had said, to dismiss it as a flight of fancy, a fantasy notion in the midst of a troubled marriage. ‘No,’ I repeated. ‘You loved Dilys… You said…’ My voice failed, tears choking me.
His grey eyes were as clear as the wide sky above my tiny house, and they rested on me, softly drawing me into him, holding me, contradicting me, reassuring me it was not too late.
‘I couldn’t break my brother’s heart.’
‘But you did! We did. We broke it for ever!’ I cried.
I ran from the room, upstairs to my bedroom.
I couldn’t fathom the magnitude of it. Whilst John had been unavailable to me, in a true sense, I had been safe. Safe from blame, protected by my denial. But John’s disclosure flooded into my system, taking me over completely. He had pushed open a door in my brain, letting air on smothered, forbidden feelings, releasing the truth. By trying to shed light on the shady areas of everyone else’s lives, their secrets – Robert’s pharmaceutical habit, Camilla’s knowledge of his thieving – I had been blotting out my own. It had been a distraction to prod around in the Tennants’ hiding places, hoping to find blame elsewhere. I did not have any right to be the accuser.
I began hyperventilating in a wave of sweat and tears and I collapsed onto the bed. My stomach boiled and tossed. With a monstrous urgency, I wanted to rewind years of my life to tweak a moment of fate, to go back in time and start again.
By letting John go, on the night of the wrap party, I had made the biggest mistake of my life. A settling for something almost right, rather than what I had known, deep down, was right. The combination of Robert’s addiction, John’s misplaced loyalty, and my insecurities had overridden our basic instincts. Our combined neuroses had won.
I had never before known what it felt like to regret, to truly regret. Regret was an emotion I dismissed as folly, believing it was a warped form of nostalgia. A regret was like a failure that festered, that you couldn’t learn from, that you couldn’t be philosophical about. Our missed opportunity to choose each other could not be considered a regret or a failure. That ‘failure’ would encompass the life I had shared with Robert, and I could never regret Robert. Could I? But my muscles seemed to be cramping with regret, with a yearning to change the past. If I had known that John had felt the same about me, if I had left Robert when I should have, Robert would still be alive. If I had not found those pills in Camilla’s cabinet, if John had kept his feelings under wraps, I would not have been forced to turn the spotlight on myself, now, to hold myself accountable. Raw, ravaged guilt bobbed up in my mind like rancid trash in the sea.
Behind the cupboard doors, an arm’s reach away from where I lay on my bed, I pictured the box I had stored there, carefully hidden under a tartan blanket, sitting in the dark, like a crouching animal. It contained a few of Robert’s possessions, and one letter that I had wanted to forget, that I had debated on burning, that I had never wanted John to read. Should I ransack the box, tear out the letter and run down to John with it now?
I could hear orchestral music from the television drifting up the stairs, reminding me of the three girls engrossed in their film. My heartbeat raged, sucking oxygen from my brain, dizzying me, unsteadying me. They, too, had been victims of our selfishness.
No longer could John and I carry on pretending that we were innocent parties in Robert’s death. Our betrayal had been fatal. Our bleeding hearts dripped with guilt. We were the cause. We were an impossibility.
We were too late.
Chapter Thirty
John
‘Shit. Shit. Shit,’ John mouthed, under his breath, trying to pace a kitchen that couldn’t accommodate more than two steps one way or the other. He was trapped. The children were next door. He couldn’t leave. He’d told Francesca he loved her! What the fuck had he done?
It had taken him just a few seconds to say what he had spent sixteen years holding back.
‘Shit. SHIT,’ he repeated, staring into the sink, wishing he could be sick into it.
‘That’s two in the swear box, Daddy,’ Beatrice said.
John swivelled around, rearranging his features into something palatable for his daughter. ‘Everything okay?’
‘My knees are ouchy.’
‘Oh, darling,’ he said, crouching down to her level, touched by the sight of the two clean plasters over her tiny knees, reeling from what he had just told Francesca. ‘I’ll kiss them better for you,’ he teased, puckering his lips, knowing she would not let him go near her sore knees.
‘No!’ she giggled, jumping back and trying to run away, but he scooped her up, careful not to bash her knees, and gave her a big hug, blowing raspberries into her neck.
‘Can I have some chocolate biscuits, Daddy?’ she asked.
‘Ah, so that’s why you came in.’
‘Alice wants one.’
John laughed. ‘Right. Yes. Well, if Alice wants one, we’d better find one.’
He heard Francesca’s footsteps coming down the creaky stairs.
His heart was in his mouth. He began opening cupboards, to look for biscuits, to climb inside, to be busy and distracted, like looking away before an injection. More cupboards. Open, shut. Open, shut. One after another in a comical fluster.
She was in the room. He didn’t dare turn around. He stared at the Marmite pot and the honey jar, shifting them around in the cupboard, pretending a packet of biscuits might be lurking behind them.
‘Daddy, you’ve looked in that one already,’ Beatrice said.
‘What are you looking for?’ Francesca’s voice was hoarse.
‘Alice wants a chocolate biscuit,’ Beatrice said.
Francesca’s scent reached him and her hips budged him out of the way. That gentle nudge could have sent him crashing to the floor.
‘There’s a very chocolatey packet in here, I think.’ There was a smile in her voice.
She was bending into the fridge, her body close enough for him to feel its heat. How he dreaded seeing her face again, but he craved it too. What would he see? What signs would she leave in her beautiful features? Had he changed them?
Still with her back t
urned to him, she handed Beatrice a biscuit. ‘One biscuit for Alice.’
Beatrice stared at it in her hands, and hesitated before going. ‘She wants three.’ Beatrice said.
Francesca laughed. ‘What a greedy guts!’ She handed Beatrice two more biscuits.
Off Beatrice went and around Francesca twirled.
Her dark eyelashes flared around her big brown eyes, holding back a blink. The brown of her iris was a deeper hue, and the searching, reciprocated love was as warm and unfettered as it had been in his dreams. Then she blinked. The blink was like a slice of a shutter lens, triggering reality. All of a sudden, he could see the real-time ravages of what he had said. Her eyes were rimmed red and swollen. Her cheeks were pink and hot, her lips dry and sad.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘No. I’m not all right,’ she replied, brushing her fringe back, crossing her arms over her chest.
‘Sorry.’ He felt shamefaced.
‘I’m with Paul now.’
‘You’re serious about him?’
She shook her head, opening her mouth as if to say no, but she did not. She said very quietly, ‘Your mum would never allow it.’
‘Mum can’t stop us.’
She wrapped her arms around her middle. ‘I meant Paul and me.’
But he knew she had not meant that.
‘I’ll deal with Mum.’
She stared up at him, her face pale, her lips open. The recollection of the golden flecks of rain and the smell of turpentine came flooding back to him. Sixteen years on, he was still struck by her; and tickled by the memory of their chat at the boot of her car.
‘Chromatically pitch perfect.’ He chuckled.
A small smile. ‘I was such a show off.’
‘You were funny.’
Her cheeks flashed pink. ‘Berry Smoothie,’ she grimaced, holding her face.
‘What’s the hot new colour these days?’
She pointed to his whisky. ‘Arsey Brass is trending right now.’
They both grinned at each other. Her brown eyes warmed his whole being.
Nothing could touch him now. Not even his mother. It was as though he had conquered the world. He had no plans or intensions or missions; he simply wanted to enjoy the feeling of opening up to the woman he had been in love with for so long, armed with the inner knowledge that she, too, had probably been fighting the same instincts. Anything seemed possible, even in the face of the breakdown of his marriage, even in the face of a confrontation about Robert with his mother – possibly his final confrontation, if that was how she wanted it to go – when she returned from Italy.
John was determined to be with Francesca. Whatever the price. Perhaps they had already paid the price: Robert’s death was their brutal punishment, a life sentence.
He conjured up the crystal-clear image of Robert’s face on the bridge that night, knowing he could never explain to her why he had been there, and what he had read in his brother’s eyes.
Telling her would mean losing her. It was a price that he was not willing to pay.
Chapter Thirty-One
Francesca
The roads were winding and empty. Alice had fallen asleep. Mostly she would chatter during car journeys, and I would wish she would stop for a second to give me space for my own thoughts. Today, I was so grateful to her for the peace. Last night, she had woken up three times with nightmares about black metal monsters stamping on her head.
I had ten minutes before we reached the pub that Paul had booked for lunch. I should have cancelled. What had happened with John yesterday made me want me to cancel everything, cancel life… or cancel everything in life except John.
But that could not be.
Foolishly, naively, I had drawn him into my quest for answers, into my aggressive search for the truth – so-called – to bring his mother down, to reveal her true nature. She had caused untold damage by keeping Robert’s secret about the Seroquel, but, in all honesty, my attention on Camilla had been a smoke screen.
Until the time came when I was brave enough to open the box that hid in my bedroom cupboard, to read that letter again, to air my own secrets, I did not deserve to cast aspersions, I did not deserve a future with John.
‘You okay?’ Paul’s face was in the car window.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I opened my door.
‘Is she asleep?’
‘She had a bad night last night.’
‘You look exhausted.’
‘We had a bit of a shocker yesterday.’ I climbed out of the car and woke Alice up. She felt heavy as I lifted her out of her seat. Paul reached out and offered to carry her. I hesitated, but decided to pass her over.
She nuzzled into his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist.
Once we had settled at the table, Alice perked up and she ran to the playground with Georgie and Sylvie.
I told him about Beatrice’s narrow escape. ‘I really thought the van had hit her. It was horrible.’
‘But she’s okay now. Just a few grazed knees.’
I was irritated by his flippancy. He was dismissing the fear I had felt. I wanted him to understand.
‘Robert was killed by a car. The doctors said he would have survived the fall if that car hadn’t hit him.’
Paul’s face paled. ‘What a shit thing to know.’
‘He jumped onto a dual carriageway, Paul,’ I reminded him tetchily. ‘He must have known he’d be hit by a car.’
I was taking it out on him. It was unfair of me.
‘I don’t know how you got through that night.’
A lump like an ice-cube formed in my throat. ‘It stands as the single, most defining part of me. It’s who I am now. I was changed by it completely. It’s hard to explain.’
I was challenging him to understand that my life had been cut into two halves. Before and after. They were two different lives in my one being. Two different Francescas: one that he could never know, and one that sat before him now. I had been the happy wife of a successful film producer. I had become the widow of a suicidal addict. The tragedy was complex. It was tinged with violence and guilt and secrecy and shame. Could he understand? Was it too much to ask of him?
‘Don’t you think you’ll ever get through it?’
I felt like a teacher at the beginning of a child’s education, already beaten by what they would have to teach the children in the years ahead, already knowing I could never teach them what they needed to know to survive in the world. Maybe it was unfair to try to teach Paul what was in my head. Maybe it would be like the teacher breaking it to her five year olds that her lessons would never prepare them for the miseries that might come their way, however well they learnt their times-tables. It would be corrupting and pointless, especially when there was the chance they might well sail through life without a trauma like mine. If Paul was with someone else, someone less damaged, he would not have to learn about my sadness and my regret and my confused feelings for a man I could never have. It would be unfair to set out to teach him that.
‘I am getting through it.’
‘But you say it defines you.’
‘That doesn’t mean it defines me in a wholly negative way. There are things I’ve learnt that I would never want to unlearn.’
‘Like?’
‘Empathy. I see people differently now. I judge less. And, after he died, I experienced such kindness from everyone around me. Even now, it moves me.’
‘I know what you mean. After my divorce, I think I felt like that. Not that I’m saying a divorce is anything like what you went through.’
‘There are different sorts of traumas in life.’
‘You have been very brave.’
I had heard this before. I was not brave. Brave people go into burning buildings to save lives, like Paul. Brave people swim across oceans to raise money for the sick. Brave people get up on stage and sing to hundreds of people.
‘I’m not brave. I’m broken.’ I smiled, worn out.
‘You look ve
ry much in one piece to me.’
‘I’m a Tennant,’ I said, with mock pride.
I wanted to be brave – a brave person like him. All widows were brave. All firemen were brave. We were one of a kind. That’s what Paul believed. By telling me I was in one piece, he was willing it; he was tacitly agreeing to leave my damaged self alone, unruffled and hidden away, possibly for ever. He had no idea how far down that self could bury itself. In a raw state, I had brought an element of her to life, just now, for him, just today. I had brought the two Francescas together, and he would be naive to believe that the whole of me could be formed as one again so readily. If he was happy with that, then maybe I should be, too. Operating on two levels was one way to live, I supposed: one level for interacting with others, and another level for my internal life. John and I had achieved that separation over the years. Mistakenly, we had merged them yesterday, and we would have to prise them apart again to stay safe.
‘It’s funny. From the outside, the Tennants have everything.’
‘That’s what Camilla desperately wants everyone to believe.’
‘I never wanted to tell you before, but I heard there was this couple who lived in the village years ago, when Robert and John were young lads, and there was some kind of big falling out between them and the Tennants.’
‘What about?’
‘Dunno, but they left the village really suddenly, I heard. Sold up, took the kids out of school and were never seen of again.’
‘Because of a fight?’
‘The rumour was that Camilla was having it off with the husband. But I don’t know if that’s true.’
‘My god. Really?’ I was appalled. In spite of Camilla’s controversial behaviour, I had always viewed Camilla and Patrick as an ideal partnership, perfectly balanced.
‘Robert never said anything?’
‘Nothing. Ever. Neither has John.’
‘I guess some secrets are better kept,’ Paul said, reaching for the menu.
‘I guess so,’ I said, wondering how much Robert or John had known about this, at once fearful of what John was capable of keeping from me, questioning how much he, too, had learnt at his mother’s knee.