by Clare Boyd
Lucas shook his head at her. ‘You have no idea what you’ve done.’
It felt as though his thumb was pressing on her windpipe. She staggered back and pressed Agata’s number again.
As the ringtone repeated in her ear, penetrating deep into her brain, she heard Lucas on the phone.
‘Meet me in the study. Now,’ he said, rubbing his forehead.
Two minutes later, Gordon came into the house. He looked at Elizabeth with disdain, as though she were an impostor in her own kitchen, as though her status as his boss was null and void.
Everyone was against her. Except for Agata, who would call her back soon, armed with a cactus plant and a cuddly toy from the gift shop. Agata believed in her, unlike Lucas, who needed facts and figures to validate people. This time Elizabeth would trust her instincts. If only she had done so earlier.
She would not let Lucas keep those documents. She would not let him get into her head. Not this time. Never again. But she wasn’t certain that Heather would hold out. She didn’t know whether she had scared her enough to keep her quiet about the whereabouts of the paintings.
Twenty-Nine
My mother was making porridge like any normal Sunday morning. My father was using fresh tea bags to make three cups of tea. I wanted to tell Mum that she was stirring it the wrong way. I wanted to tell Dad that I had developed a taste for old tea bags, microwaved.
Left and right, right and left. The devil was hovering above the pan. Auntie Maggie would be horrified. There was no way to stop it. I sensed that if I questioned anything, they would come down hard on me. Yesterday the questioning had been endless and repetitive: Do you know anything about the paintings? Did you see Elizabeth leave with anything? Did you see Jude in the grounds? Was there a van parked outside the house at any point? Endless questions that I had dodged and laughed at, pretending to be incredulous at their insinuations. But this morning, the atmosphere was different.
‘Honey or sugar?’ my mother asked.
‘Honey’s good.’
She poured too much. The sticky flow was like the saliva thickening down my throat.
The three of us settled at the table.
‘Lucas called again,’ my mother said.
‘Any news?’
‘Agata and Piotr and the kids have turned up.’
‘Uh huh,’ I said. I had always known they were safe. Not for a second had I doubted Agata, assuming that Elizabeth had blamed her for the theft of the paintings in order to wriggle out of owning up herself.
‘Is that all you can say?’
I laughed, in spite of the seriousness of my parents’ faces. ‘They just wouldn’t have taken those kids or the paintings.’
I thought about the Rolex flopping out of Agata’s jeans pocket, and how it had made its way back onto Lucas’s wrist. If Agata’s conscience wouldn’t sanction the theft of a watch, there was no way she was capable of a heist involving three paintings worth ten times the value of the Rolex.
‘People aren’t always what they seem,’ my father said.
‘Heather, if you know anything, you must tell us,’ my mother added. ‘We’ll decide what to do together. We can help you. We won’t be cross.’ She smoothed her hand down my back. Her motherly voice was like the waves lapping at my toes, soothing and cooling and inviting, and I felt tearful.
‘Elizabeth is the problem here,’ I said, close to giving up what I knew, wanting to end this, desperate to understand why Elizabeth needed those paintings and whether it was worth it.
‘What has she said to you?’ my mother asked, cajoling me.
I stared at my porridge. The consistency was right. I didn’t want to eat it. The address of the lock-up was dancing on my tongue and I wanted rid of it. But they didn’t realise I was holding steady for their own good. I was defying them to protect them. If Elizabeth was capable of blaming Agata and Piotr for stealing her children, she would certainly be capable of pinning the theft of the paintings on me and my parents. Not only would we lose our jobs, I might go to prison. I could not divulge the details.
‘She’s said nothing to me. She’s mad. I don’t know why she’s telling you I’m involved.’
My father and mother glanced at each other, and my mother sighed and said, ‘I believe you.’
But my father dropped his spoon into his bowl and left the room.
* * *
On Monday morning, I skulked around the grounds of Copper Lodge, desperate to avoid seeing anyone, and climbed up the ladder to prune the side shoots of the apple trees that flanked the tall laurel hedges next to the pool. It was a hidden spot, away from everyone.
It had been swelteringly hot since the theft of the paintings. Yesterday my parents had been out for most of the day, walking with their ramblers and then helping at the Salvation Army soup kitchen. We had communicated very little. Now I was dehydrated and jaded from another night of bad sleep, having tossed and turned until the early hours. At four this morning I had woken up feeling hung-over, even though I hadn’t had a drop to drink. The enormity of what I had done preoccupied me.
The heat intensified the throb of a headache. The work on the apple trees was methodical and it calmed me. The birdsong was loud and uplifting. After the third tree in the row, I was getting hungry. My lunch of crackers and cottage cheese was waiting for me in a Tupperware box in the van. But I couldn’t face eating it with my father; not while he doubted me, while he suspected I was lying. Part of me felt that he had doubted me all my life, even before there was anything to doubt.
I heard footsteps.
When I spotted a head of blond curls bobbing along the path, I lost my footing on the ladder and had to steady myself by grabbing onto a branch.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ Lucas said.
His voice was a cool rush of pleasure up my spine.
‘I’ve got lunch. Want some?’ he shouted up from the bottom of the tree.
Tucked under one of his arms was a rolled tartan rug. Jutting out from the hessian bag that he carried was a French loaf.
‘I can’t.’
‘You can,’ he replied simply.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I held my breath for as long as it took him to reply.
‘He’s dealing with the mess that Elizabeth has caused. You know all about it, I guess?’
‘Where is she?’ I asked, looking out across the garden to the house.
‘Elizabeth? She’s taken the kids out. And Agata’s at the supermarket.’
I glanced down. He had unrolled the tartan rug and thrown it on the ground next to the tree.
‘I’ll eat it all by myself then,’ he said.
I made my way down the ladder to the grass and hovered at the corner of the rug, uncertain that this was a wise idea, watching him unpack a feast: hunks of cheese wrapped in waxed paper, red grapes, salami, olives, a bottle of lemonade and two plastic cups. I was ravenous.
‘Sit!’ he insisted.
It was irresistible. He was irresistible. Tumbling through my mind came scenes of that summer; how close we had been and how much we had shared. I sat down on the edge of the rug with my knees tucked up to my chest, as far away from him as possible, self-conscious in my sticky workman’s clothes. I wished for a breeze to cool me off. My T-shirt clung to me. My hair was wet under my cap.
‘I can’t be long. I’ve got loads to do.’
‘You’re allowed a lunch break,’ he said.
I looked behind me, wondering if I should face the direction of the house, giving me time to whizz up the ladder before anyone saw us together. I stayed where I was and reached to pluck a grape from the bunch.
‘I’m sorry she accused you of being involved,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I replied, feeling justified in my anger about Elizabeth’s coercion, and then, in turn, guilty about deceiving him. ‘I’ve had a roasting from my parents. It was like being a teenager again.’
‘She does this. Accuses people left, right and centre to get herself out of trouble, but she
doesn’t think – or care – about how it might affect anyone else.’
I glanced over my shoulder again. Half of me was looking for my father; the other half wondered if Elizabeth was about to appear through the hedge.
Lucas lay back. The silence that followed reminded me of how we had once lain next to each other on the grass, easy in each other’s company. How the conversation had picked up naturally, in and out of silences. Out of habit, I almost lay down by his side.
‘Do you ever wonder what would have happened if I’d not taken that job in London?’ he said, staring up into the sky, one forearm draped over his eyes.
There was a tug inside me, a tug towards him. ‘No,’ I said.
‘I’ve always felt linked to that summer, as though everything in between, with Elizabeth, with my job, was a fill-in until I was with you again.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I said, squeezing my knees to my chest.
Before now, the need for secrecy had compartmentalised him, put him in the background, while real life had trundled on. What we had shared was too dangerous to think about. My memories of us had become like vapours shut away in a sealed chamber of my mind, relegated there after the heartache of losing him, of realising that he would not come back to me. But he was drawing them out now, making them solid again.
He sat up and moved to sit in front of me, cross-legged, one hand on each knee. The flowers in the meadow behind him swayed in the breeze.
‘Heather. It’s not too late.’
‘You were the one who legged it to London and never came back.’
‘I needed more time and then it was too late.’
‘Why was it too late? Because you met Elizabeth and forgot about me?’
‘No! Not at all! Because your dad told me you were engaged!’
‘What?’
‘He told me you were getting married to some surfer in Hossegor.’
‘He told you I was marrying Frank?’
‘That’s it. Frank. I wanted to get on a plane and find him and drown him.’
‘I can’t believe he told you that. It’s a total lie.’
‘He doesn’t want you to have a good life, Heather. Can’t you see that? He doesn’t want you to get ideas above your station.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you ever call me?’
He rubbed his cheek. ‘You know what I’m like. I’m a stubborn idiot.’
‘It was male pride?’ I laughed.
‘Does it matter now?’ he asked me, urgently. ‘Maybe it wasn’t our time. Maybe now is our time.’
However much I wanted to give in to him, I couldn’t. There were too many unanswered questions.
‘Why does Elizabeth want those paintings?’ I asked.
He tore off a piece of bread and began pulling at the soft inside. ‘They’re worth quite a bit of money.’
I mentally scanned the grounds and the house, guessing, not for the first time, that the place was worth a fortune.
‘Surely what’s yours is hers and vice versa. Isn’t that how marriage works?’
‘Not ours.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. If we decided to separate, I wouldn’t want it to turn nasty. For the kids’ sake.’
‘Why the paintings, then? She’d get a good settlement in a divorce, wouldn’t she?’
‘Of course. It would be fifty-fifty all the way. But she’s paranoid. She thinks everyone is out to get her. She thinks the lawyers will trick her and leave her with nothing.’
‘Even so, if they’re her brother’s paintings, why not let her have them?’ This was one of the questions that had revisited me regularly over the last few days. Her brother had painted them and, I assumed, given them to Elizabeth at some point, which surely meant that she had every right to do as she pleased with them.
‘Those bloody paintings have sat for five years in a lock-up because she said they were too big to hang in the house, and then Bo Seacart, who is the wife of—’
‘Yes, I’ve heard all about them,’ I interjected.
‘Okay. So those three paintings were worked into the contract – which is going ahead next week, by the way,’ he said, swatting a fly away from the olives before he replaced the lid. ‘Bo is an art nut and fell in love with them. And what Bo wants, Bo gets.’
‘Can’t you just un-work them?’
He spoke through a mouthful with his hand covering his mouth, as if he couldn’t wait until he had swallowed to say what he wanted to say. ‘How would I explain it to the Seacarts? Sorry, I know you wanted those paintings, but no can do, my wife is insane and she’s stolen them. I mean, how would that look?’
‘Pretty bad,’ I said, biting a small corner from a piece of salami, less hungry now, eating unconsciously as the knowledge I held about the lock-up swelled inside my brain, pushing every other thought out. Telling him where they were stored would end this torment for him.
He put the bread knife down and hung his head, pressing two fingers into the centre of his forehead. ‘I’ve worked seven years for this deal. Seven long years. I swear, it’s made me ill with stress. If it doesn’t go ahead, we’re ruined. My company could go bankrupt if we don’t acquire new funds, and she knows it.’
‘Are you serious?’ Everything around me took on a picture-postcard quality, as though it were an image projected on a wall that could be switched off at the push of a button. It seemed we had more in common than I could ever have believed. Three months, they say, is how many pay cheques most of us are away from homelessness. Three months. Blink. Homeless and hungry. That was how it had always felt for me, but I had doubted very much that it felt quite as terrifying for Lucas. I had imagined that the safety cushion was there for him, always, if times were hard. They moved in a social milieu where the comfortable spare rooms in the big houses of their friends were readily available, where money arrived in envelopes, lent by those same friends. When one job came to an end, a dinner party host would provide a contact that led to an interview. But Lucas was in a different league, where the risk was giant. There were no cushions to fall back on; slipping up meant a landing of concrete and utter ruination: bankruptcy courts and public humiliation and a bottomless pit of debts for life. It would be hard to come back from. It seemed our money worries were relative, and I decided I preferred mine to his. I had been naïve to think it was simple for him.
‘She wants to walk away with those paintings and ruin me. Just because she’s full of hate and bitterness.’
The other night, Elizabeth’s nervy fingers had tapped in the code on the keypad at the lock-up incorrectly, several times, and I had asked her if she wanted me to do it for her. She had hesitated, and a feverish sweat had broken out across her forehead. Then she had read out the code to me. On the way home, her eyes had glinted, heightening how pretty she was. In this excitable state, she had been more likeable somehow, vulnerable but alive, as though she had woken from a sleep, but now I realised that these had been signs that she was unwell. A wash of pity for her came over me.
‘I’ll tell you where they are if you promise me you’ll protect my parents’ jobs,’ I said.
His tousled blond head snapped up. His look pierced me, as though the blue had shot from his eyes and entered into my soul. ‘You know where they are?’
‘She said she’d fire me and my parents if you ever found out,’ I confessed, a red bloom of shame across my cheeks.
‘Where are they, Heather?’ he said, tipping over the bottle of lemonade as he stood up. He reached for his phone.
I righted the bottle. ‘They’re at Jude’s lock-up in Clapham.’
His phone went to his ear. ‘Give me the address.’
Midway through me telling him, he spoke to someone on the other end of the phone. ‘Pick up your van and meet me outside the house.’
He hung up. ‘Sorry, what did you say the address was?’
I repeated it, adding the code, and he tapped it into his phone.
Letting go of the secret did not leave behi
nd a sense of relief. I had an empty feeling. Churlishly, I wanted him to sit down and honour his promise of a picnic. I began to pack away the food. But then he sank to his knees in front of me, pulled my face to his and kissed me on the lips, forcefully. ‘Thank you, Heather. Thank you.’
I tasted the sweetness from the grapes he had eaten and bit my lip to taste more of it. ‘I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you,’ I said.
‘You were scared. But your parents’ jobs are always safe here. For life, if you want.’
That was when the relief surged into my system.
With a light head, I smiled. ‘Go. Go get those paintings and that deal.’
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.
And he was gone. I fell back on the rug, lying flat on my back, wanting to scream into the blue sky above me, allowing my elation to fan out and spread through the universe, waiting for it to come down in sparkling droplets on everyone who needed nourishment.
Thirty
Elizabeth was hiding out at Sarah’s, away from Lucas’s haranguing. Sarah had no idea of the maelstrom they had left behind at Copper Lodge.
‘Put the saucer over the bowl,’ she instructed Hugo. ‘That’s right, just like that, and drain the egg white out. Good boy.’
He beamed a smile at the yolk that was left intact on the saucer. ‘Awesome!’ he cried.
‘That’s so cool!’ Isla said.
‘Now for the syrup,’ Sarah said. They fought over who would pour. Sarah decided they could each have a turn. Isla let the syrup drizzle onto the worktop.
‘Oops, look at that!’ Sarah said.
Isla hung her head and Elizabeth wondered why Sarah would be harsh about a minor spill in such a messy kitchen.
‘Aren’t you going to lick it up?’ Sarah asked mischievously, wiping some up with her finger and sucking on it. ‘Yum!’
Neither Isla nor Elizabeth had recognised her mock-scolding.