by Laura Elliot
Joel, in the next room, is awake. His cry is the only sound Elena hears. The only sound that matters. Her head feels light when she sits up. She allows Nicholas to help her to her feet. His touch is repellent but necessary. She sinks onto the side of the bed and pulls on her jeans, hides her face in the sweater. She must concentrate on becoming strong again if she is to escape from a relationship that has become intolerable. She is familiar with the pathways of this thought, which always ends in a cul-de-sac. The impossibility of managing on her own with two babies and no income is exacerbated by the knowledge that their children are his possessions. He will not give them up without a fight to the death.
Nineteen
She dreams about ice and awakens shivering. Nicholas has turned in his sleep and pulled the duvet from her. Six in the morning. Unable to listen to his steady breathing, she leaves his side and goes downstairs.
Dew soaks the thin soles of her slippers as she walks towards the ice house. Spiders have silvered the bushes with cobwebs, lamé strands suspended on fragile stems. Her torch sweeps across the empty shelves and upwards towards the arched roof. No one else is here, yet the air seems alive with a shivering presence.
‘Amelia.’ The name escapes on an exhalation. ‘Amelia… Amelia…’ She repeats it like a mantra until a gust of wind slams the door closed and shocks her into silence. She reaches into the shelf and pulls out the folder. This time she does not bother replacing the documents in their right order. Nor does she pick up the ones that slip to the floor.
Her disappointment grows as she unearths utility bills, the stubs of chequebooks and Christmas cards from a man named Leo Byrne.
She has examined the entire contents and has learned nothing new about Nicholas. Bending down, she gathers up the fallen pages. Some are stapled together and belong to a file marked ‘Tax Returns’. As she is replacing them, she notices a sealed envelope. The postmark is Irish and shows that the letter came from Kerry. Amelia’s name is on the envelope but it is addressed to her interior design studio in Dublin. She draws out a page with the number 3 written on top. The handwriting is flamboyant, exaggerated flourishes that jolt her memory. Where has she seen that handwriting before? She flicks through the stapled tax returns to check if the other pages of the letter have been caught between them. Unable to find them, she begins to read.
…a charade. Each time you write my fear grows for your safety. Nicholas’s excuses ring increasingly hollow. It’s time you stopped pretending you can force him to leave. You can’t. Stop trying. I want to help. I’m not crazy, as you suggest. I’ve never been more clear-headed about anything. All I ask is that you listen to me. Think beyond yourself. Is Woodbine worth it? No! His violence is inexcusable… please… please listen. The chronology of your letters outlines a pattern that is becoming even more destructive and I can only hope that you have the courage to make that final decision. Only then…
Elena’s lips tremble as she rereads the letter. Her ribs hurt. She touches her neck. It feels stiff but the skin where he placed his hands will be unmarked. She is staggered by the force of his deceit. No trigger. No post-traumatic stress. Random violence and carefully constructed cruelty disguised by a veneer of grief.
The door of the ice house opens. Dressed for work, Nicholas stands at the entrance, his tall frame silhouetted darkly against the streaming light. She shrivels into herself, as if she can already feel his fists. She knows, instinctively, that this is the first time he has stood inside the ice house. He strides towards her without speaking and stares at the open folder. His concentration is on the documents but any sudden movement would direct his attention back to her. The contours of his face stand out in stark relief as he plucks the letter from her hand. After reading it, he tears the paper in two, then four, his movements growing faster as he shreds it. A scattering of breadcrumbs, Elena thinks when he walks to the open door and flings the pieces into the air. They swirl briefly before they fall, catching on the briers or lying among the mulching leaves.
‘You prying whore.’ He speaks to her at last. ‘How dare you sneak around my property without my permission?’
‘Billy Tobin’s property, you mean,’ she retorts. ‘And I know that you never owned a brick of Woodbine. Amelia’s father made sure of that. What a convenience her death must have been for you.’
‘Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.’
‘You never grieved for her. Not for one single minute. Post-traumatic stress. Don’t make me laugh.’ Every word she utters brings her closer to danger. She doesn’t care. The caution that has imprisoned her for so long has fallen away. Chains snapping. She is convinced she can hear them. ‘You inflicted the same brutality on your own wife as you’ve done on me. Did you kill her? Sabotage the brakes on her car? Drown her so that you could inherit her property? Murderer… yes, that’s what you are – murderer.’
One blow to her stomach brings her to the ground. He waits until she stands up again, then moves towards her, his hand raised high. He is upon her when her fingers run along the dusty stone shelf and close around the ice pick. She lifts her arm, unthinking, uncaring, and is filled with a pulsating sureness as she plunges the ice pick into his stomach. As he staggers backwards, she wrenches it out, sickened by the slick feel of flesh separating. His knees buckle like a foal just born, that same trembling need to stand upright before collapsing to the ground.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ he cries. The sound splinters like glass. Is he praying for divine help or cursing her? Blood stains his trousers and spills over his impeccable brogues. His lips stretch around her name as he pleads with her to help him. His pallor reminds her of dead ash. There is an instant when she hesitates. She considers closing the ice house door and leaving him on the floor to bleed to death. Then the mist clears and, chilled to the bone, she comes to her senses. She eases his tie from his neck and ties it round the wound, lays her dressing gown over him. The sky is marbled with red as she runs across the grass. The dew is melting and the footsteps that betrayed her are already disappearing.
Joel is crying, his strident screams ringing in her ears, while she calls an ambulance. She breathes in the scent of her son’s hunger as she lifts him to her breast and he suckles from her for the last time.
Part Two
Twenty
The Past
The same nightmare. No matter how often it was repeated, Amelia could never succeed in escaping the horror that came with it. Sometimes she was an adult, sometimes a teenager, but, more often, she was five years old again. Dressed in white shorts, a blue T-shirt with an anchor on the front, white sandals and a pink plastic hairband, she was disobeying orders by running along the pier. A forbidden place but her mother was fixing the red beach umbrella that had been blown inside out by the wind and her father was queuing for ice cream cones on the road above. A 99, Amelia had said, with sprinkles of hundreds and thousands. Her mother wanted raspberry ripple, a nice, big, juicy dollop. Amelia’s beach ball had blown into the sea and there it was, hurtling like a rocking horse alongside the pier. So easy to stretch out her hand and catch it. But then the wave came pounding over the pier, deafening her,
blinding her. She sank and rose – not that she was aware of movement, just the struggle to breathe as her mouth filled with water. All those years later, so real, so utterly real. In sleep, memory had no borderline to stop her roaming through her subconscious.
Her father always knew when the dream came. She used to believe he had heard her screaming, that awful sound she made before the waves silenced her; but the scream, Amelia would discover, had been a whimper, practically inaudible. He too, though, was locked into their tragedy and intuition, as well as his love for her, brought him into her room on those stricken nights to soothe her as if she was a baby, even when she was ten and eleven and older.
‘How do you always know?’ she asked him once. Her voice rasped, as if those imaginary screams had leached it dry.
* * *
‘How could I not know?’ His exp
ression was bleak in the filtering dawn light. ‘I feel it here.’ He touched his chest, then his head, and said, ‘This is where I hear her voice telling me to go and comfort you.’
‘She still talks to you?’
‘Of course.’
‘You loved her so much.’
‘Yes.’
‘I feel the same way about Nicholas.’
‘He’s a very lucky man, Amelia.’ He bent to kiss her cheek, then padded softly from her bedroom.
Love at first sight, she had told him soon after she met Nicholas Madison. ‘Was that how it was with you and Jennifer?’ She never called her dead mother by any other name. Perhaps, once, she had called her ‘Mama’ or just ‘Mum’, but she had no memory of doing so, nor of calling her father anything but John. Compared to her early childhood, Nicholas’s upbringing had been uneventful and happy, yet he was still able to appreciate what it was like to walk in darkness. The headiness of being with him and knowing that he shared her feelings still had the power to dazzle her. His hand on hers was strong when she spoke about the guilt she felt over her mother’s untimely death. All that talking, a floodgate opening, in those early months.
She told him about Leanne, so far away from her now, yet in touch all the time from New York. Mark, who would later come out as gay to his parents after talking it over with Amelia’s father. And then there was Jay, her first love, though they were both only sixteen at the time. The young men she had dated in her early twenties were no different from the boys she had known in her teens. All they had to offer was the added sheen of experience and, apart from Jay, she had never been in love until Nicholas came along.
They met when she was contracted to refurbish the offices of Keogh & Harris Investments. This was Amelia’s first major commission. She would never have dared set her sights so high if Leanne had not encouraged – Amelia would say ‘bullied’ – her into applying for it. The staff had been moved to temporary accommodation while work on the redesign was ongoing, but Nicholas had called often to see the progress she was making. As he was a fund manager, she suspected these calls were not in an official capacity. Looking up from a table laid with sample fabrics and tiles, she would find his eyes resting on her and she was increasingly aware of a crackling excitement when he stood too close to her. The real deal, she told her father when the project was complete and Nicholas had asked her out on their first real date. Two months later, John invited him to Woodbine.
* * *
The russet Virginia creeper had set the walls ablaze and the old house, bathed in a lilac twilight, had never looked more beautiful, Amelia thought, as she waited on the steps to welcome him. John had prepared coq au vin for dinner. Conversation flowed easily around the table and politics, her father’s favourite subject, was discussed at length. After the meal ended, they walked through the garden at the back of the house. Leaves were crinkling into autumn and the first fall crunched under their feet. John was a keen gardener and Nicholas proved to be as knowledgeable on soil types and compost as he was on the machinations of government. Amelia was amused as she listened to him, knowing he was making an effort to impress her father and that the potted plants on the balcony of his apartment on Custom House Quay had long withered through his neglect. She watched the soft bow of his mouth as he listened to her father explaining how roses should be pruned and wondered how long it would take before John excused himself and headed off to his local pub with Billy Tobin. Billy was also a widower and the men, friends since they were boys and both now retired, walked to and from the Kilfarran Inn together three nights a week.
Logs crackled on the hearth as she and Nicholas slowly undressed in front of the fire. His skin on hers, playing his fingers over her body, and she, impatient, wanting him hard inside her, both of them reaching towards the wheeling relief that would leave them spent and sated. He cradled her in his arms afterwards, his long, lithe frame relaxed against her yet, she knew, capable of spilling her into the wildness of his desire once more.
Nicholas had left by the time John returned and Amelia, showered, was waiting in her dressing gown when her father entered the living room.
‘What do you think of Nicholas?’ she asked.
‘He can certainly talk.’ John’s speech was slightly slurred, his face flushed from the cold and the drink.
‘That’s not an answer. Do you like him?’
‘I hardly know him, Amelia.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘That’s not what I said. He’s a handsome lad and entertaining company.’ He paused and wrinkled his forehead.
‘And?’ she prompted. ‘Be honest with me.’
He still hesitated, uncertain of his ground, a mild man by nature and incapable of lying. ‘I’m sorry to say this, Amelia, but I can’t help feeling he came here tonight with a script that was well-prepared.’
‘That’s not true.’ She was stung by his attitude and, also, surprised. Was he suggesting that Nicholas was conniving when he had made such a determined effort to talk about subjects that were of interest to her father?
‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with him trying to create a good impression,’ John hastened to reassure her. She suspected that the few pints of Guinness he had consumed had loosened his tongue. ‘But you know me. I don’t think there’s any man out there who’s good enough for my daughter. I’m such a contrary old sod, I had to find some fault with him.’
Amelia, knowing he was trying not to hurt her feelings, had to be satisfied with that. She forced her disappointment to the back of her mind as she undressed for bed and fell asleep with Nicholas’s name on her lips.
Twenty-One
The nightmares became more frequent. Each time Amelia thrust herself awake, John was sitting on the edge of her bed, his hand cool on her forehead.
‘The screams awaken me,’ she confided to Nicholas. ‘At least, that’s what I think, but my father insists I’m just whimpering. He says it reminds him of kittens. I used to think he had a sixth sense because he’s always there when I open my eyes, but he believes it’s my mother telling him to go and comfort me.’
‘And does he comfort you?’
‘Always. When I was younger, he’d stay with me until I drifted off again. Sometimes, he’d still be there when I awoke in the morning.’
‘In bed with you?’ He drew back slightly, his eyes opening wide in shock.
‘Not in bed.’ She was startled by his assumption. ‘Sleeping on top of the bed.’
‘He nodded, his expression grave, concerned. ‘He must have missed your mother very much.’
‘I used to wish he’d meet someone else who would make him happy again,’ she admitted. ‘But he never made any effort to do so.’
‘He had you to love.’
‘Loving a child is not the same as loving a wife. His loneliness…’ Amelia paused, remembering the effect his aloneness had had on her childhood and teenage years. The impossibility of repairing a fracture that had been caused by her carelessness.
‘That loneliness must have been very acute,’ said Nicholas. ‘And frustrating for a young man to lose his wife so suddenly.’
‘I never thought of that when I was a child.’ She smiled, self-consciously. ‘To me, being in your thirties was old. Obviously, when I got to being a teenager I’d a better sense of what he’d lost when Jennifer died.’
‘You’re very precious to him, Amelia. You’ve carried a heavy responsibility all those years.’
‘He never made me feel like that,’ she protested.
‘Your mother’s death obviously created a special bond between the two of you.’ Nicholas held her protectively in his arms. ‘And you’re still trying to compensate for his loss. You can share anything with me, Amelia. Anything.’
What had she left to share? At times, she felt as if Nicholas had burrowed down to her bones, his attention never wavering when she described the sense of loss that she had blocked from her memory for so many years.
Amelia’s uneasine
ss after such conversations grew as the animosity between the two men she loved became more obvious. No matter how carefully John tried to disguise his hostility, Nicholas had an uncanny ability to recognise what was hidden in the discretion of silence.
One evening, when she returned from work to Woodbine with him, the tension round the table at dinner became impossible to ignore. John rejected the efforts they both made to include him in conversation, his face set sternly when Nicholas mentioned the banking crisis that had plunged the country into recession after the reckless years of the Celtic Tiger. As a fund manager, he was not in favour of burning the bondholders. He believed the media and politicians would fan the flames of a bigger financial crisis if they kept demanding so-called ‘retribution.’ The argument that followed startled Amelia. Her father accused Nicholas of being another ‘smug, fat-cat banker’ along with other insults, which Nicholas took on the chin without once losing his temper.
‘He’s jealous,’ he said when John left for the pub. ‘He sees me as a threat to the control he’s always had over you.’
Amelia was startled that that was how he viewed her father; yet, when she thought about it, she decided Nicholas was right. John’s sense of aloneness had never allowed her a reprieve. Guilt was her caul and Amelia had accepted its tyranny as the natural order of her life. All those dreams, the same theme: guilt… guilt… guilt.