Hector smiles. ‘I’m all right with these.’ He hesitates, narrowing his eyes at me. ‘Are you sure you’re okay, Fran?’
I summon a laugh. ‘Of course! Shall I make you some sandwiches to have on the way? Have you got George’s door key? It’ll be late by the time you get there. He might be in bed. You won’t drive too fast, will you?’
‘No, I’ll stop off on the road, grab something to eat. Yes, I’ve got his key. And no, I won’t drive like a bat out of hell. Stop worrying.’ He grins. ‘But thank you for worrying, all the same.’
He sweeps me into his arms for a kiss. It takes superhuman effort to calm my racing heart as Hector presses me to him.
So, I am granted a reprieve, ironically by the very man whose life I am about to wreck. As I lie in bed alone, I consider the wildly ridiculous possibility that Fate – whoever or whatever that is – has intervened, a radical change will take place in the time Hector is absent, and the action I dread won’t be necessary after all.
Little hope of that.
My mind switches to Ben and I wonder if I should make him aware of the latest development, show him he was wrong about Tessa, and that she was – is – totally serious in her quest to destroy me. But what purpose would it serve? Even if he was being kind to me when we met in the village, and that kindness was genuine, he’s hardly likely to confront Tessa and ask her to back down, is he? He will stick to his view that I should call her bluff and wait for the whole thing to blow itself out; I know him well enough to predict that.
No, I can’t tell Ben nor enlist his help. It’s his marriage, too, that’s at stake, however unfair it is that the punishment should fall squarely on me and my family. But life isn’t fair, is it?
Thirty-Four
FRAN
Hector has been home for just over a week now. He stayed in Somerset with George for four days, and during that time managed to persuade the old man to let the doctor check him out. He hasn’t, as Hector had feared, succumbed to any form of dementia, but a few physical problems including high blood pressure have contributed to his weakening condition and made him a little confused.
Hector is setting up a care package, somebody to call in once a day to add professional backup to the kind neighbourliness George already has.
He makes phone calls and sends emails to the various people involved in the care package, as well as increasing the frequency of his phone calls to George. And I can’t help feeling a little thankful this has happened, even though it’s very wrong of me because it seems as if I’m glad my father-in-law is not in such good form as he was. I’m not, of course I’m not, but while my husband is busy with the important business of making arrangements for his dad, I know it’s right to hold onto my secret a little longer.
But not much longer. I have just ten days left until the 31st. The clock ticks louder as it counts down the hours.
Meanwhile, my energy is focussed on being one step ahead all the time in order to avoid running into Tessa. When Hazel says she plans to see Zoe, I get in first and tell her to invite her friend to our house. More often than not, the café in the park is their eventual destination to which there is a shortcut from Woodside Villas, so it’s not unreasonable for them to set out from here. I can’t prevent Hazel from spending time with Zoe, much as I would like to, but at least I can try to keep her away from Rose Cottage.
I don’t have to pass the house on my way to and from the surgery, but the high street makes me nervous, and I use the footpath through the woods instead. When I need to go to the shops, I take Caitlin and sometimes Hazel with me as a barrier. I can be shameless in my use of my daughters if I have to be.
My heart performs a drum-roll every time Hector’s mobile rings or beeps, and then, as he accepts a perfectly innocuous call or text, my legs almost buckle beneath me with relief until the whole will-she? won’t-she? cycle starts up again.
It’s an exhausting way to live, being on the alert every waking moment. I course through the days in a miasma of guilt, regret, and terror. All this for an ego trip; the potent, addictive sensation of feeling desired, and desiring. All this for a string of cheap thrills.
All this.
Then, with four days to go before the deadline, something happens which should throw my mind into even deeper chaos. Except it doesn’t because, subconsciously, I have never lost hope that there will be a way out.
We need to talk, reads Tessa’s text message. Meet me at High Heaven. Tonight, 8pm. Do not under any circumstances reply to this message. I shall expect you there.
On this occasion, she hasn’t added her initials, which is always pointless anyway. I take a moment to wonder why I am instructed not to reply and can only imagine it’s because she refuses to enter into a conversational dance with me. Tessa’s control must be absolute, and uncompromised.
The time, 8pm, could not be more inconvenient. The place – well, the same really. Why she couldn’t have made it daytime, in the hidden square with the ivy-draped walls where we met before, I have no idea. Nobody disturbed us there, and I didn’t have to make up an excuse to be out of the house.
I set the logistics aside in a flash as one word flames up in my mind: rescue. Tessa has not exactly come to her senses, but realised the price she’s asking me to pay is way too high. She has something else in mind, something I can perhaps comply with. I’m not in such a dreamworld as to believe she will let me off completely, and truthfully I don’t care. If I don’t have to spill all to my husband, that’s enough for me.
Thirty-Five
TESSA
I wish I hadn’t re-read the newspaper report on Maria Capelli’s death – I don’t even know why I kept it now. She’s been on my mind ever since, and that is not a pleasant experience.
Looking backwards is not something I do readily, and yet I find myself constantly drawn back to my discovery of Ben’s infidelity with Maria, recalling with agonising clarity the eruption of rage, spewing white-hot lava to fill every cell of my body while on the surface I exhibited a tranquillity that seems impossible now. In that moment of recognition, I could easily have taken the cord of the vacuum cleaner, wrapped it round her dainty neck, and tightened and tightened, until… A lesser woman might have done just that. A crime of passion, they’d have said. If such a thing exists these days.
I don’t want to think about that day, but I can’t seem to stop. Neither do I want to think about the day I saw Maria in Oakheart and knew she had followed Ben, much as he denied it. Much as my husband denies anything that spoils the illusion, anything which detracts from Ben the charismatic charmer, the carer, provider, and lover.
Lover.
Ben doesn’t love me; has never loved me, except maybe at the beginning of our relationship. He needs me, which is not the same thing at all. Scarred by his tragic home life – the suicide of his mother, his father’s coldness and eventual death in a car accident – he saw something in me that signalled safety and stability. The fact that he chose to ignore my own troubled background, has never once alluded to it in all the time we have been together, points to a self-centredness as glittering and hard as a diamond chip.
Yet, for all his faults, I love him. Unconditionally, the way a mother loves a child. Is this how it’s meant to be? I don’t know. I’m not sure I know anything any more, apart from this: I have lost my mother, my father, my sister. I almost lost myself in the process. I cannot lose anyone else.
I sit among yellow cushions on the turquoise sofa in my beautiful living room. Beyond the window, a song-thrush gives its final, bittersweet performance of the day. Otherwise, all is silent. Zoe is at a sleepover at Tayler’s house; I dropped her off there earlier and when I came back, I was surprised to find Ben’s car missing and no sign of the man himself. There was no note or message.
It took me a while to establish that he hadn’t texted or called, because I couldn’t immediately locate my mobile phone. I knew I didn’t have it with me when I took Zoe to Tayler’s, and I hadn’t used it all day. When I did rous
e myself to go in search, I found it on the windowsill of the upstairs landing, somewhere I never leave it. I expect either Zoe or Ben found it in the bathroom or somewhere, and put it on the sill in passing.
Where Ben is now, I haven’t a clue. I’m not surprised he forgot to mention where he was going – he’s had an air of distraction about him these past few days – and I’m not worried either. I don’t suppose he’s gone anywhere in particular, just for a drive about, probably, as he does occasionally. As I do myself, when I want some thinking time.
Maria once more invades my thoughts. I sit a while longer, mulling this over, wondering why I’m caught up in the past. Maria has gone; I have no need to think about her any more, and yet I do. I try to stop the train of thought from taking over completely and ruining the rest of my evening, but it leads me on, unrelenting, until High Heaven comes into my mind’s eye view, and my mental meanderings set me on a different path.
The antique long-case clock in the hall ticks on. Where is Ben?
My phone sits on the arm of the sofa. I bring it to life and scroll the messages again, this time for Fran’s name, and find a new message, sent to her today. But not by me.
And I know where Ben has gone.
Thirty-Six
FRAN
I have no choice but to line up Grace as my alibi, and pray she won’t be called upon to corroborate it. Picking up on my tone, she asks me if everything is okay. With fingers crossed, I assure her everything’s fine and promise I will explain later. Reluctantly, she lets me go, and the question hangs in the air long after the call ends.
My second problem is the car. I’ve said I’m going to Grace’s house because she wants to talk to me about something – I couldn’t go full out and say it was a girls’ night as I don’t expect I’ll be gone for long. But Grace’s house is near enough to walk to, and Hector knows – or thinks he does – that there’ll be a glass or two of wine involved. It’s said that if you must lie, keep it as close to the truth as you can. I’m thinking about this as I pull on a grey hoodie over my jeans and t-shirt.
Should I have said I was meeting Grace at High Heaven? But then I’d hear Hector’s concerned warning about going there in failing light and the danger of the unfenced drop, and I haven’t got the strength, nor the time, to counter this and assure him I’ll be perfectly safe; it’s already twenty-to-eight. Besides, it’s too late to change my story now.
I’m held up further when I’m called upon to referee – the only accurate word – an argument between Kitty and Hazel over the ownership of a pair of earrings, and then Caitlin demands to be told exactly where I am going, why, and what time I will be back.
‘To see Grace. I won’t be long,’ is all she gets, before I bolt out of the front door.
My nerve-endings are already ripped to shreds by the time I jump into my car and dash off, past caring whether Hector has noticed I’m driving. The only thing now, I tell myself as I make it out of Woodside Villas, is to focus on Tessa and what could be the most important meeting of my life.
By the time I bump the car up the uneven track towards the car park, I’m almost calm. My mind projects forwards, past this meeting, to the future: a future in which my secret remains under lock and key, Hector still loves and believes in me, and I have nothing to fear from Tessa Grammaticus. I even go so far as to imagine my guilt over the affair assuaged – if not totally, then diminished to a tolerable level. Whether I deserve that luxury is not an issue, not at the moment.
On the way up the track, I pass a man with two dogs walking down. He yanks on the dogs’ leads and stands to the side to let me pass safely, and we wave and smile politely at one another. No-one else seems to be about, and there are no cars in the car park. If this is another of Tessa’s little tricks, I’ll be furious. I hadn’t considered that possibility, but at six minutes past eight, it seems all too real. I park neatly in one corner of the cinder patch, even though there’s plenty of space. I sit and wait, but at ten past eight, there’s still no sign of my adversary.
I decide to give her until twenty past, and then leave. It’ll be a nuisance having to drive around until it’s a reasonable time to reappear at home. Even more of a nuisance – no, a disaster – to end the evening with nothing resolved, and the sword above my head swinging even closer.
I take a deep breath, snap down the mirror above the windscreen, and fiddle pointlessly with my hair. And that’s when I see it – the car I hadn’t heard approach, its tyres crunching as it turns off the track into the parking area.
It isn’t Tessa’s car. Hers is white; this one is metallic grey, like Ben’s. I push back rising panic. Perhaps Tessa is using Ben’s car; I expect she does sometimes, as I use Hector’s. I’m still staring into the mirror at this point. Now I take courage, snap it back into position and turn round in my seat.
The car is definitely Ben’s. The driver is not Tessa, but Ben himself.
Our gazes meet midway; mine, I’m sure, confused, Ben’s inscrutable. He stops his car behind mine and gets out. I’m tempted to drive off, but for one thing he’s parked in such a way that it would take me a few minutes to negotiate my exit, and for another, I want to know what he’s doing here, and what the hell is going on. So I get out of my own car as he walks towards me.
‘Fran, you came.’ He smiles. ‘Thank you.’
‘No, Ben. I didn’t come to meet you. I came to—’
‘Meet Tessa. I know.’ He drops his gaze. ‘I had to make you think you were meeting her. If you’d known it was me, you might not have come.’ He stands, hands in pockets, looking pensive for a moment. Pensive but not uncertain. Not Ben. I can’t speak. My head is all over the place. He smiles. ‘You would have come anyway, though, wouldn’t you, Fran.’
It’s not a question. But I have plenty of my own.
‘Why have you tricked me into coming here? Ben, what’s this all about?’
‘I had to see you,’ he says, as if it’s obvious. He turns and walks the short way to the car park exit, then stops and holds out a hand towards me. ‘Let’s go up on top. We can watch the sunset.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Ben! I’m not here for the view! I thought I was coming here to talk, to sort things out with Tessa.’ Even as I say this, my treacherous feet carry me forward, following Ben.
He waits for me to catch up, then goes ahead, up the path and across the turf where he stands and waits again. I march forwards, facing him, adrenaline pumping. ‘Where is Tessa? Does she know you’re here, with me?’
‘I sincerely hope not. Although…’ he shrugs. ‘No, she doesn’t. I saw the text she sent you, though. Four days until she drops her bombshell on Hector? So she says.’
‘Ben, you might be in denial over this but I’m not. Yes, the 31st is the deadline. I told you she was serious, and you did nothing to help. You just let me get on with it. Okay, maybe I deserve that, but this is not fair. Tricking me into meeting you, manipulating me. It just isn’t fair, not on me, and as it goes, not on Tessa either. Much as I dislike her for what she’s doing to me, it wasn’t her fault what we did, and she shouldn’t have had to suffer. Have you got no shame at all?’
‘Fran, my lovely, I thought we were okay, you and me? When we met in the village and had that little chat, I thought we’d reached an understanding.’
Understanding? What planet is he on? But this is Ben. He hears what he wants to hear. Puts his own spin on everything. He speaks again before I can form my next sentence.
‘This is our special place, remember?’ He smiles into my eyes. ‘Of course you remember. You are all I think about whenever I come here.’
I step backwards, away from him, shaking my head. ‘High Heaven was never our special place, Ben. Okay, we met here the first time, and a couple of times afterwards. We never had a “special” place, just hideouts, shameful places where we thought we were safe. You’re romanticising the whole thing – fantasising. In fact, if you remember, this is where it ended. Where I told you we had to stop.’
�
�And we did stop,’ Ben says. ‘Except I came back here, many times, to think about you, feel close to you.’ He gives a self-deprecating smile.
I can’t believe he hasn’t let this go, after all this time. The comments he made on Worthing Pier, the pointed looks, floral offerings, notwithstanding, this is different. I want to tell him to grow up, get over what was a massive mistake in the first place, think about his wife and child, if not about me and my family. I want to take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. I don’t; arguing will only delay things, and I can’t wait to leave. But there’s one thing I need to know.
‘Ben, what did you hope to achieve by getting me up here on false pretences? You must have known I’d be angry about it.’
He flinches, just perceptibly, and I realise he can’t tolerate anger directed at him. He quickly recovers.
‘I want you back, Fran. That’s why we’re here. Remember how good it was between us? How we couldn’t wait to be together, couldn’t keep our hands off each other?’ My turn to flinch. ‘It’s still there, Fran, what we had. I will leave Tessa, if that’s what it takes.’
The hope in his eyes is painful to see. He’s delusional. He really believes this nonsense.
I soften my voice, moving nearer to him, although I’d rather run a mile in the opposite direction. ‘Ben, there is no going back, not to how we were before, or anything else. I thought you understood that. We can’t be together. I never wanted that, and neither did you. I don’t love you; I love Hector. Besides, it was so long ago, more than two years now since we… started that foolish affair.’
He smiles sadly. ‘As if it was yesterday.’
The light is fading now. There are clouds overhead, but there is enough clear sky to show colour above the horizon where the sun dips low. Gold, pink, apricot, cobalt, melt into one another. Shadow-shapes form and reform, smoke-like, across the darkening landscape.
The Wife's Revenge Page 21