Every Vow You Break

by Julia Crouch

  ‘If we’d married,’ Hillary corrected him, ‘you would have been President of the United States.’

  Lara would probably have been a reverse Hillary, holding Stephen back while Marcus went on to be the star. But perhaps everyone would have been happier like that?

  She continued up the stairs and found Stephen’s bedroom. The scent of him was strong in there, and she closed her eyes, breathing him in. A big, king-sized bed, perfectly made up with crisp linen, stood in the middle of the far wall. Beside it on one of the bedside tables was a pile of books, novels mostly: Roth, Bellow, Updike.

  She peeled off her snot- and wine-stained top, thinking she would just quickly change, then make her way back downstairs. But she needed a pee, and there was an en suite bathroom so immaculate it could have been in a five-star hotel. The toiletry items on the open shelves – aftershave, shaving soap, razor, toothpaste – were evenly spaced, each one turned to show its best side. Two towels were neatly folded over a metal radiator, and the rest were wound up in a wooden recess in the limestone wall, their clockwise-curled faces like a nest of fluffed-up ammonites. She marvelled at the man who lived in this way.

  As she sat and peed, she noticed a row of pill bottles on top of the tall spotlit mirror over the sink. When she was done, she stood on the toilet lid and looked at them.

  In amongst the vitamins and herbal supplements, she saw a plastic bottle of Xanax, a blister pack of Valium and a bottle of Prozac, which she shook and found to be half-empty. Not so surprising in America, even for a Brit, she supposed. She jumped down. Poor man, she thought, all on his own out here, with only his art and his books and his pills for company.

  Looking in the mirror, she took off her bra and washed her underarms with Stephen’s soap, patting them dry with his towel and anointing them with his deodorant. She didn’t want to sweat on his lovely shirt. Then she replaced everything back where she found it, positioning it exactly.

  Back in the bedroom, she buttoned up the cool cotton shirt. It was too big for her, of course, but not ridiculously so. Stephen was tall, but he was slim, so she felt less swamped than on the few occasions when she had worn Marcus’s clothes. She remembered a time in Cambridge when, drunk, she had fallen from a punt wearing a white dress that turned transparent when wet. With a little persuading, Marcus had given her the shirt off his back to cover her modesty, and in return had received a nasty dose of sunburn. She had felt particularly lost in that shirt.

  She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on Stephen’s bedroom wall. He had been right. The colour went beautifully with her olive linen trousers. She rolled up the sleeves and undid another button at the neck.

  Picking up her soiled top, she moved towards the bedroom door. But something held her back. Without really meaning to, she sat on what she knew would be his side of the bed and opened the drawer in the bedside table.

  For a second, her heart stopped. Inside, right on top of everything else, was a photograph. Smiling up at her, her bob its original undyed black, her skin as yet unlined, her slim arm around a beaming Stephen, was her own nineteen-year-old self. She picked up the photo and peered closer. She was wearing that red floral crêpe dress with the slightly puffed sleeves, the dress she remembered living in that summer. From the angle of her other arm, she must have been taking the photograph, pointing the camera back at herself and her lover. Behind them the billowing tops of an ancient woodland outlined a blue sky and a green meadow.

  She remembered that day as if it were yesterday.

  Marcus was in rehearsal from early morning, going straight into an evening performance of Henry IV, Part One. Not being in the Henry, Stephen was free, and he wasn’t called for rehearsal either. So, grasping their opportunity, they hired a car and drove south towards the rippled grassland of Dover’s Hill, near Chipping Camden, where they ate strawberries and drank champagne before tiptoeing off to make a nest among the oak trees that had watched over that land since Norman times. And there, on that Gloucestershire hill riven with Iron Age workings, they made love properly for the first time.

  Afterwards, they lay wound together, making plans for their future. She would tell Marcus that it was all over; they would disappear from him and move to London. She would go to drama school while Stephen worked and looked after her. And then they would be actors together and live in a house in Camden with its own front door and a long Persian carpet running along the hallway.

  It was a remarkable day for many reasons, but most particularly because, for the only time in their short and intense affair, they were not involved in any sort of subterfuge – at least, not once outside the Stratford-upon-Avon town boundary. While affairs were commonplace in the incestuous theatre community there, they were usually between actors living away from their spouses. For Lara, barmaid promoted to wife of a company actor, cavorting publicly with someone else would have been unthinkable. So her liaison with Stephen had to be secret.

  It was mad – she knew it at the time – but it had been unavoidable. Had she been older, more embedded in her marriage, had she not heard about Marcus marrying her on the rebound, she might have been better equipped to resist Stephen. But she knew back then, from the moment that he walked into her bar and looked at her, that he was bound for her.

  If only they had met a year earlier. If only she hadn’t married in such haste. She looked at the photo and reminded herself that, even then, the twins were secretly dividing their cells inside her. Even when she first met Stephen they had been there. The dates proved it. She had gone over and over this point.

  And had she and Marcus repented at leisure? It hadn’t been so bad, had it? The worst thing was the mourning she went through when Stephen left.

  She had blundered into the Garrick Inn, light-headed and nauseous, not sure of how it was going to go with him. The doctor had assured her she was ten weeks pregnant. She had been seeing Stephen for eight, so she knew that the baby – she had no idea at that point about it being twins – was Marcus’s. She slipped into the seat beside Stephen in the smoky back bar. He grabbed her hand underneath the table.

  ‘You look beautiful today,’ he said. ‘Especially beautiful.’

  She closed her eyes, looked down, breathed in deep, then levelled her gaze directly at him and told him what was on her mind and in her womb. The blood drained from his face.

  ‘You’re sure?’ he said after what seemed to her like her entire lifetime.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure of the dates?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fat tears rolled down her first-trimester flushed cheeks. She hadn’t dared to imagine what might happen at this meeting.

  ‘But I could bring it up as my own,’ he said, taking her hand now above the table. ‘No one need ever know.’

  Outside – and she didn’t know why she could recall this detail so clearly – a convoy of vehicles with sirens went by, stopping all motion in the pub, making it impossible to talk, filling the bar with disco-flashing blue lights.

  But what if it turned out to look like Marcus? she thought. Stocky, red-hair genes coursed through his entire family. How on earth would Stephen – tall, slender and dark – ever pass off a mini-Marcus as his own?

  ‘I have to tell Marcus,’ she said in the lull that followed the siren cacophony. ‘I would never, ever forgive myself if I didn’t.’

  Stephen sighed as if he, too, saw the impossibility of their situation, then he put his hands across his face. Lara sat and looked at him, feeling like a tightrope walker with no safety net beneath her. When he eventually looked up, his eyes shone hot with tears.

  ‘But then you’ll be bound to him for ever, and I’ll just be in the way,’ he said.

  ‘It could work …’ she said, fiddling with the beer mat, which she had peeled into thin, curled strips.

  The bar seemed to be closing in on her; the dull tang of nicotine caught in her throat and made her feel sick.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t break up your family now there’s a
baby to think about as well.’

  ‘No—’ she said, reaching again for his hand.

  ‘I’ll disappear,’ he said. ‘I’ll disappear, and you’ll never see nor hear from me again.’

  During that evening, she had ill-advisedly drunk two pints of Guinness, and he more pints of Abbot than she could count. In the end, they found themselves walking along the river, away from the theatre, killing time until Marcus’s show finished; she had arranged to meet him after seeing Stephen to tell him she knew not what.

  As they reached Shakespeare’s church, he stopped and drew her into the bushes, where they had an inglorious, weeping, farewell fuck. Afterwards she stood up and brushed the bits of old leaf and twig from her brown corduroy skirt – again, the details she could recall shocked her – and she railed at him, called him a coward, demanded that he stayed to fight for her, to love her. How on earth could he throw away what they had?

  ‘We belong to each other,’ she said.

  ‘I’m gone, Lara,’ he said, looking down, his palms spread upwards. Then he leaned towards her and kissed her one last time before disappearing into the shadows. Leaving her shafted in every way, in the dark, all alone, feeling like a part of her had been sliced away without anaesthetic.

  If only his promise that she would never see him again had held fast. But after wresting him from the clutches of his RSC contract for ‘psychological reasons’, his impressive agent got him a job in a no-budget, quirky thriller set in the Shetlands. The film went on to become that year’s unexpected indie hit, winning the big prize at Sundance and launching the phenomenon of Stephen Molloy on to the world stage. And there he was, everywhere, in her face all the time.

  Time passed though, and with it a measure of healing took place. She came to her senses a little. The twins, who taught her a new kind of love, kept her busy, too. She arrived at the conclusion that you win some and you lose some. Battling with the contradictory feelings of infatuation and exasperation her two babies inspired in her, she was usually too taken up to follow his all-too-public progress. And she convinced herself that, with his full and starry life, Stephen would have forgotten all about her anyway.

  But his confession at the party, and now this photograph, made her realise that his departure must have been more painful for him than she had imagined. She wondered whether he had kept the photo to hand since they had parted in Stratford. Or had he just dug it out of a long-forgotten box in a corner of his attic once he knew she was here in the same town as him?

  She looked back at the photograph of her young self, wondering what she would tell her if she had the opportunity. Had it been so awful, staying with Marcus? Her feelings about her husband ebbed and flowed, but wasn’t that normal? Sometimes she could persuade herself that she loved him. Others she would find herself daydreaming, plotting elaborate escape plans that shocked her with their detail. She would empty their bank account, disappear, reinvent herself and get a little job in a shop to pay the rent on a simple bedsit. Or she would engineer an affair with someone inconsequential, then make sure Marcus found her in flagrante, thereby putting the onus on him to eject her. She sometimes found herself casting around the bus on the way to work, looking for candidates. He’d do, she would think. She wondered sometimes how it would be if Marcus were suddenly to die – keeling over from a heart attack, perhaps, or in one of those planes that fell out of the sky. Would it be sorrow she felt? Or would it be relief?

  She opened Stephen’s bedside drawer a little further to put the photograph away. But her hand was stayed by what she saw nestling there, only just visible under a pile of ironed linen handkerchiefs: the handle of a revolver.

  Lara lifted the handkerchiefs to one side and bent to examine the gun, the first she had seen at such close quarters. Why would Stephen have it here, beside him in his bed? Perhaps this is what people did in America, especially if they lived too remotely for anyone to hear them scream, or so far from a police station that by the time the cops arrived, an intruder hell-bent on harming you would have been able to do whatever they pleased.

  She touched the gun with the tip of her finger and shivered as she pushed out of her mind a picture of Marcus cowering in front of its barrel, flinching as it fired …

  But this was rural Trout Island, where no one ever locked their door. Not downtown Detroit, or Chicago. Surely you didn’t need guns out here.

  ‘Lara?’ Marcus called up the stairs. ‘Are you OK up there?’

  The sudden intrusion of her husband’s voice made her jump. She replaced the pile of handkerchiefs, put the photo back exactly as she found it, closed the drawer and picked up her dirty top, readying herself to go downstairs. She felt as if she had opened Pandora’s box.

  ‘Jesus, I thought you’d been eaten by a wild beast or something,’ Marcus said as she turned the corner of the staircase. He stood in the hallway with another full glass of red wine in his hand.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, seeing her glance at his drink. ‘The food’ll mop it up.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘Stephen’s gone to help the kids. They’re complaining they can’t find any snakes.’

  ‘Is it safe?’ Lara said. ‘Should they be actively searching them out?’

  ‘He says there’s only one poisonous snake around here and even that doesn’t kill you. The copperhead or some such. Come on,’ he said. ‘He poured you another drink – over there, by the counter.’

  Taking her wine, Lara followed Marcus on to the back deck, blinking in the light outside after the dark interior of the house. The back garden was an overgrown scrubby meadow ending in a hen house with a pile of logs neatly stacked up against it. Squatting by the side of the woodpile, Stephen and Olly poked at something with a stick. Bella hung back, holding on to Jack.

  Lara noticed how Stephen took the same stance as her son. Mirroring, wasn’t it called? An attempt at winning someone over by making gestures similar to their own. It seemed to be working, too. Normally offhand and distant with adults, Olly was chatting with Stephen as if he were his best friend. Or perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, as the famous film star, Stephen had a better opportunity to win her son’s favour than most.

  ‘It slid in there, Mum.’ Bella winced. ‘It’s about a metre long and hideous …’

  ‘It’s not dangerous,’ Olly said.

  ‘Look!’ Stephen stepped backwards, away from the woodpile, brandishing the snake on the end of his stick. Curling itself up and lashing its head around wildly at whatever had dislodged it from its cool hiding place, the creature was every bit as long as Bella’s estimate. It looped up and off the stick and everyone jumped backwards.

  ‘Whoah,’ Olly said. And he and Stephen bent as one to watch the snake make its quicksilver retreat across the meadow, towards the trees.

  ‘Suits you,’ Stephen said to Lara as he straightened up, his hand resting on Olly’s shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The shirt. The colour’s really good on you.’

  ‘How much land have you got here, then?’ Marcus asked, looking around him. The meadow was about the size of a football pitch and beyond it thick forest rose on all sides. A couple of tracks, big enough for a suitably rugged vehicle, disappeared into the darkness of the trees.

  ‘Around five thousand acres,’ Stephen said. ‘Mostly forest. But if you go down thataway,’ he pointed to the track to their right, ‘I’ve got a pond that’s great for swimming and fishing. I’ll take you over there one day in the Wrangler. Or we can walk. It’s about a mile.’

  ‘I’d love to walk there,’ Lara said. ‘And swim.’

  ‘We’ll do it,’ Stephen said.

  A rustle in the trees behind them made them all jump. Lara saw terror flash across Stephen’s face as he swung round to see what had made the noise.

  ‘Look, Jack, another deer!’ Bella said, pointing out the receding white rump. ‘And a baby deer.’

  ‘It’s called a fawn,’ Olly said.

  ‘Baby deer,�
�� Jack said firmly.

  ‘It’s just a deer, then,’ Stephen said to no one in particular. Only Lara seemed to read the relief in his remark. Then he turned and smiled at Marcus. ‘More wine?’

  By the time they sat down to eat, the sun had gone down behind the wooded hill, spreading a spidery gloom over the house. Stephen switched the lights on low and lit candles around the table. Then he opened the windows to let the air, which was cooling with the approaching storm, circulate through the room. With it came a resinous smell from the heat-sweltered trees, giving the lofty space the feeling of a cathedral after the swinging of the censer. But the pressure in the atmosphere made Lara feel dizzy, as if she were about to implode.

  Stephen served up the stew – venison, he said, that he had shot and prepared himself. Perhaps, Lara thought, that explained the gun, although wasn’t hunting more usually done with rifles? As they passed round the plates, the lights in the house flickered and somewhere, not too far in the distance, a deep roll of thunder rumbled, making the glasses on the table shiver.

  ‘Not long now,’ Stephen said.

  ‘What’s it like being so famous?’ Olly said, tucking into his stew.

  ‘Olly,’ Marcus said, accepting Stephen’s glass refill.

  ‘No, it’s a good question, Olly.’ Stephen sat down and rested his elbows on the table. ‘It’s not something I ever wanted or planned. It just sort of happened. As an actor, you tend to say yes when someone offers you work. You’re never really in control. And my work just took me in this direction. Of course, I’ve earned good money, and I can buy whatever comforts I could ever need in this world, but I’ve paid the price. So many things that you’re able to do are impossible for me now. For instance, I can’t just go out to the shops, or for a walk, or get on a plane. If you like, it’s a sort of gilded prison.’

  ‘It’s true. I never wanted the kind of fame you’ve got,’ Marcus agreed, spraying a fleck of half-chewed deer on to the table.