The Memory of Midnight

by Pamela Hartshorne

  At the expression on her face, Luke put up his hands and took a hasty step back. Ignoring him, Tess swept an arm along the counter and pushed. Tea bags, cereal packets, a jar of coffee and some biscuits went tumbling to the floor, but that wasn’t enough. The contents of the fruit bowl went next. Flour and sugar exploded onto the tiles. She was grabbing at anything that was to hand, venting the muddled rage and frustration and fear in her head. Her jaw was clenched, the tendons in her neck rigid, her eyes stark.

  It wasn’t until she reached for a plate and smashed it on the floor that Luke intervened.

  ‘Okay,’ he said calmly, stepping through the debris to where she stood panting and wild-eyed. ‘That’s enough now.’

  Tess didn’t resist as he took her by the elbow and steered her into the front room, and down onto the sofa. Her expression was utterly blank. She heard him say, ‘Stay there,’ but her limbs were locked in place and she couldn’t have moved even if she had wanted to.

  With a strange detached part of her brain she watched him rootle around in Richard’s sideboard, muttering to himself. ‘Aha!’ he said, pulling out a bottle of Courvoisier. ‘I thought a bloke like Richard would have some booze lying around.’

  Sloshing some of the brandy into a glass, Luke put it in Tess’s hand and folded her fingers around it. His were firm and warm against her cold flesh.

  ‘Drink that,’ he said, standing over her until Tess had obediently raised the glass to her mouth and taken a sip that had her coughing as the brandy burned her throat.

  Luke waited until she had drunk half of it before he dropped into the chair opposite and rubbed a hand over his face. ‘What in Christ’s name was all that about?’

  Tess looked down into the glass. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she muttered, embarrassed at how utterly she had lost control. ‘I don’t usually give in to hysterics.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said Luke. He leant back and studied her speculatively. ‘It can’t be good to keep all that bottled up inside you. I’ve done a lot of travelling over the last few years and seen a lot of crazy people, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone lose it as completely as you just did.’ To Tess’s surprise, he sounded interested rather than judgemental. ‘You were a woman possessed.’

  If only he knew. Tess wanted to laugh but she was afraid it would sound as if she were succumbing to hysteria again. She took another slug of brandy instead. Perhaps it was the Courvoisier, or perhaps it was the cathartic effects of her tantrum, but she was feeling rather strange, emptied out but oddly calm.

  ‘I’ve been under a bit of strain,’ she started to excuse herself, only to stop and glare when she caught the disconcerting smile that hovered around Luke’s mouth.

  ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘Do you want me to explain or not?’

  His smile glimmered stronger. ‘It’s good to hear you sounding tart again, Tess,’ he said, but then his expression sobered. ‘Yes, tell me.’

  Tess tipped her head back against the sofa. It was a relief to be able to talk about this at least. ‘My husband’s been ringing me for two weeks,’ she said, keeping her eyes on the ceiling. ‘He’ll ring repeatedly, but say nothing if I answer, and as soon as I switch off, he rings again. Or he’ll leave it, and then call at odd hours of the night.

  ‘I can’t prove it’s him,’ she said, nodding as if Luke had objected. ‘I just know that it is. It’s driving me crazy.’ She smiled crookedly at the ceiling. ‘Wrong: it drove me crazy just now. I was hoping he’d get tired of the game and give up,’ she added with a sigh. She slid both her hands behind her head and stretched her neck with a grimace. ‘I should have known better,’ she said. Martin doesn’t give up. Ever.’

  She felt rather than saw Luke stiffen. Felt his eyes on her face as she tilted her head from side to side to try and loosen the knots in her neck.

  ‘I didn’t realize,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Why should you?’

  ‘No, I thought . . . I assumed your husband had left you and that you’d come back to York with your tail between your legs,’ said Luke. ‘I thought that’s why you were so uptight and snotty.’

  Ruffled, Tess let her hands drop and straightened her back. ‘I wasn’t snotty!’ she objected. Luke was a fine one to talk about being snotty!

  ‘Okay, maybe snotty is too strong a word, but you were very stiff.’

  ‘So were you!’

  ‘Only because you were.’ Luke stopped as he caught her eye, and his mouth twisted down in a rueful grin. ‘Well, okay, maybe I wasn’t very mature,’ he conceded. ‘I bumped into your mother soon after I came back to York last year,’ he told Tess. ‘You can imagine what a pleasure that was for both of us.’

  A little mollified, Tess settled back into the cushions once more. ‘Not the cosiest of chats, I gather?’

  ‘No.’ Luke leant forward and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘She was at pains to impress on me what a wonderful life you had in London. How rich and successful your husband was. What a big house you lived in. How deliriously happy you were and so on.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tess buried her face in her glass once more, cringing inwardly as she pictured the scene all too easily. She could just hear her mother boasting, and see Luke sneering in response. The two of them had always rubbed each other up the wrong way. Her mother was a snob, Luke prickly and defensive.

  And very quick to think the worst of her, she realized with a stupid stab of hurt.

  ‘You thought I had turned into my mother, in fact?’ she said as lightly as she could.

  Luke hunched a shoulder. ‘I might have made a few assumptions about you having turned into a yummy mummy,’ he admitted grudgingly.

  ‘Thanks a lot!’

  ‘When Richard told me you were going to live in his flat, I thought your husband had kicked you out or something.’ He paused, rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. ‘I guess when your mum told me about your wealthy husband and perfect life, it made me feel . . . well, jealous. Or inadequate. Or something. It was like you’d moved on, left me and York behind, and I was just a second-rate photographer making ends meet with a bit of joinery.’

  Jealous? Inadequate? Luke? Tess blinked, uncertain of how to react.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said after an awkward moment, ‘that’s why I was so quick to jump to conclusions. The honest truth is that there was a bit of me that was pleased when I heard your oh-so-wonderful marriage had broken up, and I’m not proud of it.’ He met her gaze straightly. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you, Tess.’

  She looked back at him, conscious of a warmth stealing through her veins. How long was it since someone had looked at her directly and said that they were sorry?

  ‘I’m sorry if I seemed snotty,’ she offered.

  They smiled at each other, tentatively at first, and then more easily, but the smile lingered a little too long until neither of them knew what to do with it any more. Tess felt the warmth spreading, tingling up her throat and into her cheeks, and she made herself look away just as Luke jerked his own gaze down to his hands and cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m sure I was a dick too.’

  ‘Let’s just say you were very intimidating.’

  Luke lifted his head. ‘Come on, Tess, I never intimidated you! It was one of the reasons I always liked you.’

  ‘Of course I was intimidated.’ It was good to be able to tease him, to feel the stiffness between them evaporate. ‘I was petrified, in fact. You were always so fierce, all snarling and surly.’

  ‘Not with you,’ said Luke. ‘Don’t rewrite history! We used to talk and laugh all the time, do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tess smiled a little sadly, thinking about how little she had been able to talk to Martin about anything. Her job had been to listen to her husband and to agree. She had never laughed with him the way she had with Luke. Even now, it was amazingly comfortable to sit across from Luke and talk. Almost as if they had never been apart.

  He seemed to read her mind. ‘
Did you ever think about what it would have been like if we’d stayed together?’

  She thought about lying, decided against it. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Then I’d remember how hurt I was when you left,’ she added with a look.

  ‘Hey, you were the one who went to London,’ he said mildly.

  ‘You went off to Ouagadougou or Timbuktu or wherever you were so determined to go!’

  ‘Only after you’d made it clear that all you wanted to do was settle down. A good job. Marriage. Kids. You had it all worked out.’

  Tess folded her lips in frustration. How could Luke remember things so differently? He had made it clear that his plans to travel the world taking photographs didn’t include her, so of course she had pretended that she didn’t want to go anyway. And she had wanted a career and a family. Was that so wrong?

  Look where it had got her, hallucinating about a life in the past and having hysterics in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, what does it matter anyway?’ she said, draining the last of the brandy. The warmth and ease she’d felt only a few moments ago had frayed on the jagged shards of memory. Perhaps it was just as well. ‘It’s all a long time ago.’ She put down the glass. ‘I’d better go and clear up that mess in the kitchen.’

  ‘Tess,’ Luke said quietly as she made to push herself up from the sofa.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was it very bad, your marriage? I know it must have been,’ he said as she sank back down. ‘I know you’d never have left if it wasn’t. And if I hadn’t been so choked with my own sense of inadequacy, I’d have realized that it was more than wounded pride making you so brittle.’

  Tess didn’t answer at first. ‘It was pretty bad,’ she said at last. ‘Oh, Martin wasn’t violent,’ she added quickly as she saw Luke’s face change. ‘I wasn’t deprived. I was living in a beautiful house with no financial worries, just like Mum told you. I kept telling myself that I didn’t really have anything to complain about.’

  She picked at the piping on the sofa arm, needing to explain to Luke, but at the same time reluctant to spoil the fragile trust they seemed to have built up. She was ashamed, humiliated by what she had to tell him. For a few moments there she had let herself feel like the Tess Luke remembered, the girl who had loved and laughed and trusted, the girl who had defied her mother’s snobbery and her friend’s disapproval to climb on the back of his bike and believe in the restless, passionate boy she glimpsed beneath his brusque exterior.

  She didn’t want to tell Luke that that girl had vanished, but there would be relief, too, in telling the truth.

  ‘It’s hard to explain what Martin’s like,’ she began again after a while.

  ‘He’s older than you, I bet.’

  Tess looked at Luke, surprised. ‘How did you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘I always figured you were looking for someone to replace your father.’

  The idea caught Tess on the raw. ‘Martin’s nothing like Dad,’ she said sharply.

  ‘I just meant . . .’ Luke looked as if he was searching for the right words. ‘I know how much you missed your dad after he died, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ All these years later and the thought of her father could still make her eyes sting with tears. ‘He was so . . .’ Tess couldn’t finish. There were no words to describe her father, or how safe and loved he had always made her feel.

  Swallowing past the constriction in her throat, she made herself think about what Luke had said. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she told him. ‘Maybe at some level I was looking for someone to look after me.’

  Martin had made her feel cherished at first. He took her to restaurants with discreet lighting and chose wines she had never heard of. He helped her on and off with her coat, walked on her right to protect her from the traffic, and summoned taxis so that he could take her home. Tess had never been with anyone who knew how to attract a waiter’s attention with just the lift of an eyebrow. He was assured and sophisticated and caring – everything Luke hadn’t been.

  I just want to look after you, darling, he would say whenever Tess offered to pay or to arrange an outing herself, and she had been charmed.

  At first.

  ‘I was lonely when I met him,’ she said. She’d been missing Luke too, but she didn’t tell him that. ‘Wondering if I’d made the right decision going to London after all. I had a fantastic job working as a historical researcher for a film company, but working in libraries and archives all day meant that I never got to meet anybody. So when one of the producers tossed me an unwanted invitation to a gallery opening, I thought I would make the effort and go along on my own. Of course, it was awful. Nobody spoke to me. Except Martin.’

  The gallery was full of tight little groups engaged in vivacious conversations. Tess was clutching a glass of warm white wine and staring desperately at a vast canvas covered in splodges of colour when a warm voice spoke in her ear.

  ‘I can’t make head nor tail of it, can you?’

  Startled, she turned to see Martin smiling at her. He was wearing a dark suit and his nearly blonde hair caught the gallery lights. The edges of his blue eyes crinkled engagingly, and Tess felt her heart stumble.

  ‘He was so . . . perfect,’ she remembered bleakly. ‘Attractive, intelligent, charming, articulate, funny . . . I was bowled over. Martin was so interested in me. We had dinner that night, and I was sensible enough not to give him my address, but I’d told him enough about what I did for him to track down my work address and send me two dozen red roses the next day. It should have been a warning, but I thought it was so romantic.’

  ‘Red roses?’ Luke shook his head. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘So of course I agreed to dinner the next night, and the next. Martin told me he’d never met anyone like me, and I was overwhelmed by being adored. I fell madly in love with him. Head over heels, upside down. He swept me off my feet. Pick your cliché.’

  Now that she had started, she wanted to get it all out. Letting out a long sigh, she picked up her glass once more, only to find that it was empty, and without speaking Luke leant over and topped her up.

  ‘If I’d had more friends in London, I might have been more cautious,’ she said, watching the golden liquid sloshing into the glass, ‘but I let him bowl me over. I was thrilled that he couldn’t bear to be apart from me, that he was jealous if I spent any time with anyone else. I was a fool,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘You were young,’ Luke offered, pouring brandy into his own glass, but Tess wasn’t going to let herself off the hook that lightly.

  ‘I was twenty-three. I’d done a degree and an MA. I had a good job. I should have known better, but it all happened so fast. It was like tumbling down a hill. I couldn’t seem to stop and get my bearings.

  ‘And then his mother died. Martin was distraught, and he couldn’t bear for me to leave him. He needed me, he said, and when he asked me to marry him, of course I agreed. His grief for his mother seemed a reasonable excuse to keep our wedding just between the two of us. There was no York wedding, no hen party, no involving my old friends.’

  ‘How did your mum take that?’

  ‘She was nearly as bowled over by Martin as I was. She came to London once and as soon as she met him and saw what a beautiful house he had, she was sold. You know what a social climber Mum is. Martin went to public school, speaks in a cut-glass accent and had a trust fund to fall back on whenever he needed it.’ Tess’s smile was twisted. ‘She’s still lobbying for me to go back to him. She doesn’t understand how I could possibly have left him.’

  Luke picked up his glass and swirled the brandy absently. ‘Sounds like your Martin is a classic narcissist.’

  ‘He’s a sociopath.’ Tess nodded, kept her voice carefully neutral. ‘I read up on it in the end. The only person who matters in Martin’s world is Martin, but of course I didn’t want to believe that at first. I loved him, and I wanted to believe that he loved me too. And he said he did. Why wouldn’t I believe him?’

  ‘No reason,’ Luke
said warily when she glared at him as if he had accused her of being the fool she knew she had been.

  Realizing, Tess made a helpless gesture of apology and blew out a breath. ‘Sorry. It’s not your fault. I just hate remembering what an idiot I was. But Martin’s got this way of making everything he wants seem utterly reasonable. Of course I told myself that he was only possessive because he adored me. The last thing I wanted was to accept that he didn’t want a wife at all, he just wanted someone to control.’

  She stared down at the brandy, not drinking, just turning the glass round and round between her fingers, remembering.

  ‘I was like one of those frogs put in a pan and brought slowly to the boil. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to jump out.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘At first it was just little things,’ she said. ‘Martin didn’t like coming back to the house and finding me not there. We were just married and he was still in such a state about his mother that I didn’t feel as if I could insist on keeping my job. How hard-hearted would that have been when he needed me so much? I wanted to be there for him. So I gave up my job. I gave up suggesting that we come to York for a weekend. I should have taken a stand, but it didn’t seem worth upsetting him.’

  She had been so passive. The memory sent a flush of humiliation creeping up Tess’s throat and she took another slug of the brandy.

  ‘And, of course, I kept thinking that I had nothing to complain about, not really. It’s not as if Martin hit me. I used to tell myself that I was lucky, that it wasn’t really abuse if a husband flies into rage or punishes you with silence if you don’t hang the towels up with the edges properly aligned or if you don’t close the flap on a box of cereal. I was middle class, educated . . . how could I be abused? I was just doing what I could to save my marriage. I was just being a good wife. And if I ever felt unhappy, I would convince myself I was stupid and selfish, just like Martin said. He worked hard all day to keep me in luxury. Was it too much to ask for him to come home to a tidy house? I had nothing else to do all day, after all.’