The Memory of Midnight

by Pamela Hartshorne

  Tess’s head whirled in panic. What did her mother know? What had she been telling Martin? She held onto the table to keep herself calm. ‘I’m not having a breakdown,’ she said clearly.

  ‘I know you believe that, darling, but you’ve got to admit that you’re behaving irrationally. You’re losing the train of the conversation, you’re spacing out . . . I’ve spoken to the builders doing up the bar next door to you, and they say you’re always in there complaining about noises that no one else can hear. I don’t want to accept it either, darling, but I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer to come. You can’t look after yourself when you’re like this, let alone the boy.’

  The boy. He couldn’t have said anything better designed to clear Tess’s head and give her strength. She wasn’t going to put up with Martin’s manipulation and bullying any more. ‘The boy’s name is Oscar,’ she said very distinctly, ‘and I can look after him fine.’ She pushed back her chair and looked him straight in the eye. ‘We’re finished here, Martin. I want you to leave me, and Oscar, alone. My solicitor will be in touch with yours about a divorce.’

  She had never stood up to him before. Never turned her back on him or walked out, and she didn’t look back. Martin would have to find some money to throw on the table and it gave her a head start. A mixture of adrenalin, fury and frustration took her almost back to her flat before Martin caught up with her.

  She had known he would but she didn’t care. The boy. The boy! He didn’t even care enough to call his own son by his name.

  So when Martin grabbed her arm and swung her round to face him in the middle of Stonegate, she didn’t even flinch.

  ‘Let me go!’

  Martin was so taken aback by the blaze of anger in her eyes that he dropped his hand. ‘Theresa!’ he said in astonishment.

  ‘Tess,’ she said clearly. ‘My name is Tess.’

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ Bewildered, he took a step back. ‘You never used to be this hard. You’re treating me as if I’m some kind of monster. All I want is my family back. Is that so wrong?’

  She nearly relented. ‘No, it’s not wrong, but it’s not going to happen, Martin. It’s over. I don’t want to be married to you any more. Please accept that. It’s over.’

  ‘No.’ Martin pulled her back as she made to turn away. ‘No, you can’t do this to me, Theresa,’ he said, very white about the mouth.

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘I said no!’ Careless of the curious looks they were starting to attract, he dragged her closer, his fingers digging viciously into her flesh. ‘You can’t walk away from me. I won’t let you!’

  Tess winced and tried to pull her arm away. ‘Leave me alone, Martin!’

  ‘Is there a problem here?’

  Luke’s easy voice broke in and Tess turned to him, dizzy with relief as the world miraculously steadied.

  ‘Oh, Luke, thank God!’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ snarled Martin.

  ‘I’m a friend of Tess’s,’ said Luke calmly. ‘Let her go. You’re hurting her.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Martin said precisely. ‘This is between me and my wife.’

  ‘Tess, do you want me to fuck off, or do you want me to stay with you?’

  ‘I want you to stay,’ she whispered, dry-mouthed, and then sucked in a breath as Martin’s grip tightened furiously.

  ‘Then I will,’ said Luke. He stepped up to Martin, until they were almost nose to nose.

  ‘Let. Her. Go.’ He spoke very quietly. He wasn’t as tall as Martin, or as broad. Martin was proud of his physique, and liked to hint at his military training, while Luke was casual in his jeans and leather jacket, but there was something in his eyes that made Martin loosen his grip on Tess’s arm.

  Tess wrenched it free and scuttled gratefully behind Luke.

  ‘Now you fuck off,’ said Luke. ‘Since we’re keeping the tenor of the conversation so high.’

  White-faced, Martin stared at him for a moment until something inside him collapsed, a balloon bursting, in the face of defeat. All at once he seemed smaller, pathetic, and when he peered round Luke to plead directly with Tess, his expression was beaten. ‘Theresa,’ he said brokenly. ‘You can’t mean this. You’re my wife.’

  ‘I do mean it,’ said Tess, still braced for a backlash. She knew how quickly Martin’s moods could change, but she had never seen him look like that before. ‘I don’t want to see you again.’

  ‘Theresa . . .’ His voice actually cracked.

  Gathering her courage, she stepped out from behind Luke. ‘I’m sorry, Martin,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

  ‘But you need me!’

  ‘No,’ she said, and felt herself swell with the knowledge that it was true. ‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry,’ she said again, ‘but I’m not coming back.’

  She was ready for him to lash out, to snap into a rage, but he surprised her. ‘All right,’ he said, shaking his head as if he wasn’t quite sure what was happening. ‘All right. I see.’ His eyes flickered to Luke and he stepped back. ‘Well, if that’s how it is . . .’

  In disbelief, Tess watched him turn and walk away, and the calmness and adrenalin that had kept her strong evaporated in a rush of reaction.

  ‘Oh God . . . Oh God, Luke . . .’ Without thinking, she turned and buried her face in his chest. She latched her hands around his waist and held on for dear life while the panic and fear she had been battling eddied around her.

  ‘Hey.’ Luke pulled her close, wrapped his arms about her. It was amazingly comforting. ‘You’re okay.’

  How long had it been since she had felt as safe? Tess wanted to stay pressed tightly against him forever. Her racing heart slowed, and she let herself notice the smell of his freshly washed T-shirt, of worn leather, of clean, male skin.

  She fitted so naturally into his solid body. If she lifted her face just a little, she would be able to press it against his throat. Tess thought about what that would feel like, and something shifted in her chest. The searing pain had vanished from her fingers and they itched instead with the temptation to sneak beneath his T-shirt and spread over his warm, smooth back.

  What was she thinking? She caught herself up guiltily and made herself pull back out of his arms. She should be thinking about Martin, about Oscar, not how good it would feel to touch Luke again.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said with a smile that wavered just a little. ‘Sorry about the hug. I couldn’t help myself.’

  ‘Any time,’ said Luke lightly. He looked at her searchingly. ‘All right now?’

  She wasn’t, not really, but she nodded and concentrated on letting them into the flat. ‘I’m glad you were there,’ she said as she double locked the door behind them. She told him what Martin had said, about the second honeymoon.

  Luke prowled the front room, his fierce face even fiercer than usual. ‘I don’t like the sound of this. I think it’s time you went to the police.’

  Tess hesitated. ‘Martin looked so . . . defeated . . . when he left. Maybe there’s no need to go to the police now. Maybe it just needed you to stand up to him,’ she said hopefully.

  ‘Do you really believe that or do you just want to believe it?’

  She rubbed her arm where her husband had dug his fingers into her flesh. Martin’s moods were mercurial. He might be hurt and humiliated now, but she knew from bitter experience that he could change without warning. It was wishful thinking to imagine that he had given up completely.

  She wasn’t safe yet. ‘I’d like to believe it, but no . . . I think he’ll try again. He might go back to London and regroup, but he won’t give up. I’m afraid he’ll remember what he said about me having a nervous breakdown,’ she said, still rubbing her arms, hugging them together to keep at bay the panic that threatened anew. ‘I think he might try to get me sectioned and take Oscar from me.’

  It was her worst fear.

  ‘Martin’s a bully,’ said Luke. ‘He can’t get you sectioned just like that.’

  ‘But what if he goes back t
o the builders, or finds out about Ambrose?’

  ‘He’s got no proof.’ Luke cut across her voice as it started to rise, his own so level that the uncoiling panic began to subside. ‘While you, on the other hand, have bruises on your arm and me as a witness that he held you against your will. I’m serious about this, Tess,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you should trust Martin. He might seem crushed, but a guy like that is going to be humiliated, and it won’t be long before he starts blaming you for it. You need to tell the police that he’s threatened you, and see how you go about getting a restraining order.’

  Tess nodded reluctantly. ‘What about Oscar?’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘With Vanessa. He’ll be safe with her.’ Martin had looked so pathetic as he walked away, Tess wished that she could believe he would accept that she had left, but she knew Luke was right. She didn’t want to take Oscar to a police station to report his own father. ‘I’ll ring and ask her to keep him a bit longer. Let’s go to the police now,’ she said and it was only afterwards that she realized how she had taken it for granted that Luke would go with her.

  The police station was out of town, on Fulford Road. Luke walked Tess to the car he’d managed to park behind the Minster – ‘Contacts,’ he said when Tess asked – and she rang Vanessa on her mobile as they ran into the usual queue on the inner ring road. She didn’t want to talk about Martin. She told her she needed to report an incident she’d witnessed.

  ‘I’m running out of battery, Vanessa,’ she said when Vanessa wanted to know what had happened. ‘I’m not sure how long it will take. Would you mind keeping Oscar until we come and pick him up?’

  The police were wearily efficient. Luke said he’d wait outside and Tess found herself being interviewed by a female officer in a small windowless room. The furnishings were spartan, and the neon light flickered in her eyes while the nagging headache grew to monstrous proportions. The officer listened patiently enough, but Tess found herself stumbling and getting lost in the middle of sentences. Her palms were sweating and she was feeling guilty just sitting there. She wished she’d asked if Luke could sit in with her, and then felt guilty about that too.

  It was hard trying to explain how much Martin had scared her. My cutlery drawer was rearranged. The cat flap was closed. I suddenly acquired a lot of fancy underwear. It didn’t sound menacing when she put it into words.

  The policewoman wore a badge with her name on it: Karen Davies. Her expression was carefully neutral but it flickered when Tess plunged into a stumbling account of how careful she had always been to keep the cat flap unlocked. Helplessly, she watched Karen make a note on the pad in front of her. Probably ‘hysterical’ or ‘neurotic’.

  Just the way Martin would want her to seem.

  Closing her eyes, Tess took a steadying breath. She had to be careful.

  She had to be careful. Nell longed to talk to Tom on his own, but marriage to Ralph had taught her patience. Ralph was waiting for her to betray herself. He was looking forward to punishing her for it. Nell could see the anticipation in his pebbly eyes; she saw him running his tongue over his lips with relish at the prospect.

  She had to be very careful. And patient.

  Ralph had insisted Tom stay for as long as he liked. He had calculated it would be more painful for Nell that way. He bedded his wife every night. Knowing that she would be thinking of Tom, so close but unable to help her, made it all the more exciting for him.

  Besides, it enabled him to keep eye on Tom, whom he trusted not a scrap.

  But business was business, and Nell knew that sooner or later Ralph would have to abandon his watch.

  So she kept her eyes downcast and played the perfect wife while she waited. And sure enough, Ralph swaggered into the hall one morning in his best furred gown. His beard was newly trimmed and his ruff stood up proud around his chin.

  While he drank his ale, his eyes stabbed around the room, looking for something to criticize, for a reason to hit her harder that night, but Nell kept house as profitably as any woman could. The cupboards were garnished with silver plate that gleamed in the meagre spring sunshine. The tapestries were beaten regularly, the floor swept every day. There was no dust on the overmantel and Nell made Eliza stand on a chair to clean the elaborate leaves and pendants that decorated the new plaster ceiling Ralph had had made. A spotless damask cloth covered the table where they were breaking their fast. Nell had soon learnt that her housekeeping must be beyond reproach.

  Thwarted, Ralph lowered his ale and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I am called to a council meeting this morning,’ he said importantly. ‘What will you do, brother? Do you grow tired of us yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom, who was lounging at the end of the table. He wore no ruff, and his shirt beneath the battered leather jerkin was open at his throat. ‘I am of a mind to revisit old haunts,’ he said. ‘I thought to see if the Foss flows as sluggishly as ever.’

  He smiled lazily at Ralph, but Nell knew that he was thinking of the first time they lay together. He didn’t need to say anything. He didn’t even need to look at her, but she knew, and her blood quickened and her face grew warm.

  Ralph put on his velvet hat and adjusted it in the looking glass that hung on the wall. ‘You should go with him, my dear,’ he said to Nell, smoothing down the fur trimming on his gown. ‘You two must have so many memories to share.’ His back was to her, but Nell was not such a fool as to believe that he wasn’t watching her in the glass.

  ‘I fear Tom must do without me,’ she said, her smile cool, perfectly judged. ‘My stepmother is unwell. I must visit her and take some broth I have made. I am sure Tom can find his way without me.’

  But when she looked at Tom, her eyes carried a different message. They said: I will meet you there. Wait for me.

  And Tom understood. He was there, in their secret place, moodily throwing sticks into the river, when she pushed her way through the bushes later that morning. It was a fine day, with thin sunshine and air that smelt of damp earth and the promise of spring. There were tiny, tight buds on the hawthorns and green shoots poking tentatively out of the ground, but it was cool still and Nell had been glad of her cloak as she walked briskly along Monkgate with the basket that was her excuse should anyone wonder where she was going. There was always something to be gathered along the riverbank, even this early in the year.

  Tom leapt to his feet when he saw her, and there was an odd moment when the world seemed to pause before Nell dropped her basket and they walked slowly, wordlessly, towards each other. The years they had been apart gathered behind them and pushed them together, like pieces of a lock sliding into place. The space between them narrowed until Nell closed the last tiny gap and leant into him and the distance, the absence, the missing him was over at last.

  Tom’s arms folded around her and she pressed her face into his neck with a shuddering breath.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Tom kept saying against her cap. ‘I should have come back. I should have known what it would be like for you.’

  ‘What could you do?’ said Nell, clinging to him, caring only that he was there and she could hold him again. Their bodies remembered each other as if the years had dissolved, as if they had been made to fit together, from top to toe. ‘You were a boy, and they sent you away. I thought you must have hated me when you heard.’

  ‘Never,’ said Tom vehemently and his arms tightened around her. ‘I knew you would not have agreed unless you had been forced. I should have come back as I thought of doing to take you away, married or not.’

  ‘I would have had to refuse. Ralph held that debt over my father until the day he died, and though it matters not so much now, I am no freer. My stepmother and my brothers are still alive, and now there is Meg,’ she said simply. ‘I have my daughter. It is enough.’

  Tom held her away from him to look into her face, the vivid blue eyes serious. ‘He is my brother. I did not know what he was. I thought – I hoped – that he would
be good to you, but when I came back . . . I have seen the way he looks at you. I have seen the way Meg cringes when he is near.’ He shook his head, distressed. ‘He sits and he watches like a cat toying with a mouse. If I had known it was like that for you, Nell, I would have come back for you, I swear it.’

  ‘I know you would, Tom,’ she said. She couldn’t speak now of the long, lonely years when all hope of seeing him again had gone. ‘Do not lash yourself with guilt. Life is as it is.’ Digging in her purse, she drew out the garnet ring she had kept there since her marriage. ‘See, I have this still. I dared not wear it, but whenever I touched it, I was true to you in my heart. This I promise you.’

  ‘Ah, Nell, I have missed you so!’ Heedless of the dampness of the grass, Tom drew her down, down into the delight of his warm touch. ‘I could sail the world a thousand times and never find a woman who makes me feel the way you do.’

  ‘Is it really so for you too?’ she asked, breathless with pleasure already. She knew it was true, but she wanted to hear him say it. His words were balm on the tiny scars that criss-crossed her skin.

  ‘When I saw you again, it was like sailing into home port,’ said Tom, his hand searching for a way under her skirts, his palm burning through her stockings. ‘I won’t deny I fell into a railing frenzy when I first had word that you had married Ralph,’ he said. ‘That’s why I ran away. I couldn’t come home. I couldn’t bear the thought of York without you . . . but you came with me anyway,’ he said, bending over to press his mouth to the side of her neck so that she shivered and her mind went dark with longing.

  ‘I’d stand on the quayside and watch the spices being loaded onto the ship, and I’d remember how we dreamt of that as we lay here. I’d think how your eyes would have shone if you could have been standing in the prow with me, feeling the wind in our faces; how good it would have felt if I had been able to hold you against me. You were a ghost always at my shoulder, Nell,’ Tom told her, his voice so deep and so low and so close to her skin that it reverberated right through her. ‘Sometimes, I’d sense you so strongly that I’d turn quickly, sure that I would catch you, but I never did.’