by Unknown
“Come on, Robin. Nobody’s going to swallow it, least of all me. Neither of us thought Rowena would be so . . . drastic. So . . . extreme. It wasn’t our fault.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No. So let’s stop pretending we were set up by Seymour. Even the papers seem to have given up portraying him as the villain of the piece. We both knew exactly what we were doing. And why.”
“Maybe. But I doubt our reasons were the same.”
“Really? I’d have said they were identical. You’ve never believed the official account of Louise’s death. And you were hoping Seymour might be able to cast enough doubt on it to make others share your disbelief. So you decided to give him a little help. That’s all.”
“Are you saying . . . that’s why you . . .”
“Of course. If I’d known you thought the same way—”
“But I don’t. I don’t think the same way at all.”
“Yes you do. You must do. Otherwise you wouldn’t have given Seymour an interview.”
“No. You’re wrong. That’s not why I did it.”
She leant close to me across the arm of the sofa, lowering her voice as if to whisper a secret. “I’m glad we’re on the same side, Robin. I reckon we both need an ally. A friend we can turn to. I was very much afraid you were in on it. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to know you weren’t.”
“In on what?”
“I can see now I made too much of your . . . economy with the facts. But there was always a simpler explanation for that, wasn’t there? Some girlfriend you wanted to protect. Some fiancée, perhaps. Has she fallen by the wayside since? Is that why you’ve risked putting your head above the parapet?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. But have it your own way. I don’t want to force you to admit anything.” She reached slowly out and traced a circle with her index finger on the back of my hand where it rested on the arm of the chair. “Or to do anything. Unless you want to. Unless we both want to.”
I looked into her eyes and realized with a shock of sudden desire that we both wanted what was still—but only just—avertible. The reasons were sick and wrong. There’d be a third party to anything that happened. A rival. A substitute. A silent observer. And yet—
“Louise is gone, Robin. But you don’t need to let go of her completely. People always said how alike we were.” I believed her. Even more than I wanted to believe her. The ghost I was chasing made flesh. Warm and close. The hem of the dress sliding up her thigh as she leant forward. The white lace bra glimpsed through its buttons. As once before. Pursuit, denial and temptation. Joined. “In so many ways.”
She kissed me slowly and deliberately, giving me ample time to recoil, but sensing I wouldn’t. Her eyes were closed at first. When they opened, I looked into them and knew we both meant to play this game to the end. From cool formality to burning intimacy. From lust to consummation.
And so we did. With eager abandon as she stretched like a cat beneath me across the hearthrug. And later, in the bed she led me to, again and again, with measured delight, as the sunlight mellowed and lengthened and passion curdled towards excess. As the afternoon faded towards evening and her urgings became my desires. I found her out in all her ways and wiles; her pains and her pleasures. What she wanted and how she wanted it, explored and refined with the heightened sense only long denial can breed. Mine and hers. From brutality to tenderness. And back again. Some of the way. But not quite all.
_______
“What are you thinking, Robin?” she asked when the frenzy was finally spent and we lay motionless together, drained by what we’d done. “Are you shocked? That a middle-aged married woman should be capable of such depravity?”
“No,” I murmured in reply. And it was true. Sophie hadn’t shocked me. Nor had the things she’d let me do to her. Our shared and savoured spasms meant nothing. Compared with the dangerous fantasies that had coiled themselves around every moment of release—and all the moments after.
“My husband is my husband in name only, you know,” she went on, heedless of the ambiguity of my denial. “We haven’t made love in years. And even when we did . . .”
“Is there somebody else?”
“No. Nobody else. Not any more, anyway. Just as there isn’t for you, is there? Nobody. Not a single person who can replace her.”
“I don’t understand you.” It wasn’t quite true, of course. I seemed to understand her only too well. As she did me. And there was the rub. She shouldn’t have been able to. She shouldn’t have been capable of prying so deeply and accurately into my thoughts. And yet she was. “What do you mean, Sophie? What do you think you know about me and Louise?”
“We were each other’s oldest friend, Robin. We were bound to share our secrets, even if we didn’t intend to. Call it intuition if you like, though it was far more than that. She as good as told me who you were.”
“Told you? About me? You’re crazy. How could she? She was dead within hours of our only meeting.”
Sophie chuckled. “You can drop the pretence with me. After what we’ve done, I think you should, don’t you? Louise meant to leave Keith. I know she did. I heard it from her own lips a few weeks before she died. She was going to leave him that summer. Quite possibly that very day. She was going to meet you in Kington, wasn’t she? And you were going to carry her off.” She must have seen the stupefaction in my face. But what she read it as I can’t imagine. “What went wrong? Did you argue? Did you have second thoughts? You may as well tell me. Why didn’t she leave with you?”
“Because we’d never met before. Because we were strangers.”
“Come on. She confessed to me. She talked to me about the man in her life. The one she’d met on Hergest Ridge that spring. Mid-March, wasn’t it? Just after Oscar’s exhibition in Cambridge. So she said, anyway. And perhaps you know what else she said. Is that why you said you were strangers? Did she call you that to your face?”
“Call me what?” The grotesque fallacy at the heart of Sophie’s reasoning no longer mattered as much as the need to hear it through to the end.
“‘My perfect stranger.’ Her exact words. Her description. Of you.”
A long moment of silence followed in which time and my own thoughts seemed to stand still. It wasn’t possible. It made no sense. It was pure madness to leave the idea unrefuted even for a second. Yet I did. And, for as long as that, I almost believed it myself.
“Don’t worry. Nobody else knows. Only me.”
“Sophie—”
“Don’t deny it. Don’t underestimate me to the extent of thinking you can deny it.”
“But I have to. It isn’t true.”
“She couldn’t have made it up. The coincidence would have been too great. The man she met on Hergest Ridge and fell in love with was you. She never named you, of course. I wouldn’t have expected her to. But what she did tell me was enough for me to suspect you the very first time we met. And after your interview with Seymour . . . I was certain.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No. Why else should you still be trying to avenge her? Why—unless you loved her?”
“I didn’t love her. I never had the chance.”
“That’s not what Louise said.”
“What did she say, then? Tell me. Precisely.”
“All right. If that’s what it’ll take to convince you. I’ve nothing to hide. Louise and I went to a health farm near Malvern for a few days in the middle of June that year. It was a place we’d often used before. Somewhere we could relax and get into shape. Sarah’s graduation ceremony was coming up and Louise wanted to look her best for it. Well, that was her story. But there was a glint in her eye I knew had nothing to do with her daughter’s academic achievements. The last night we were there, she admitted she had a lover. A man she’d met by chance on Hergest Ridge. She’d gone to Kington to return some of Oscar’s pictures after the exhibition in Cambridge. Oscar wasn’t in. So she left the
pictures in his studio and drove up to Hergest Ridge for a walk. The weather was unusually warm for March. She wanted a breath of fresh air. You were there for the same reason. I suppose.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Whoever. She met him on the ridge. They fell into conversation. They left together. He took her to a hotel near Hereford. They stayed overnight. She told Keith she was staying with me. The same story she used in July. But a lie on both occasions. Instead . . . Well, you know what happened instead far better than I do. A one-night stand that turned into a passionate love affair. So passionate she was already determined to leave Keith when she told me about it. I’d never seen her that way before. So . . . overwhelmed. So . . . carried away. She was losing control. And control was what she’d always had in abundance. But not in those last weeks. Thanks to you.”
“Not me. Somebody else. If what you’re saying is true.”
“You know it’s true. And you know it’s not somebody else. You can’t forget her, can you? That’s why you’ve stayed in touch with her family. Why you helped Seymour stir up interest in the case. Why you came here this afternoon. Why what we did was so . . .” We stared at each other, her belief and mine meeting but never joining. She wasn’t lying. Louise had told her what she’d just told me. In every particular. “I’ve worked it out, Robin. I’ve lain in wait and now I’ve found you. It has to be you. There’s nobody else it can be. She was the love of your life. Wasn’t she?”
I hardly remember now how I left the flat. Everything is clear in my mind. What we did. What we said. Except at the end. I was too confused by then to concentrate, too taken aback by Sophie’s misapprehension to construct a response to it, let alone a rebuttal. She must have expected me to tell her everything. She must have hoped I’d share my secrets with her as I’d shared my desires. But her reasoning was as sound as her conclusion was false. There was nothing I could tell her. Beyond what she’d already refused to believe. And there was nothing I could tell myself. To stop the indefinable fears she’d planted in my mind growing and taking shape. Sophie was wrong. But in so many ways—too many to shake off or disregard—she was right. They’d met—as we’d met—on Hergest Ridge. By pure chance. As perfect strangers. Louise—and somebody else. Who was he? Who could he be? If not me?
“You can stay . . . if you like.”
“No. I must go.”
“When will we meet again?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m not . . . sure of anything.”
I fell asleep on the train and relived the afternoon in my dreams. Closing my eyes to forget, I only saw more clearly. Sophie and me. Every action. Every detail. Seen again, as if by an invisible observer.
It was dark when I reached Petersfield. A cool still night after the breathless day. I walked round to the factory, where I’d left my car. I was tired now, too weary to think it through any more. The answer would have to wait. At least until tomorrow.
My car was the only one left in the yard. It was on the far side, near the drying shed, an open-sided structure where the newly delivered clefts of willow were stacked and left to sweat out the last of their sap before they were moulded into blades. A security light came on as I approached, dazzling me for a moment. I shielded my eyes and went on to the car, fumbling in my pocket for the keys. As I rounded the boot and my vision adjusted to the glare, I looked up. To see a man standing a few yards ahead of me, silhouetted against the light. He stood quite still, his arms folded in front of him. He seemed to be waiting for something. Or for someone. Only when he spoke did I realize who he was.
“You’ve been a long time.”
“Paul?”
“But it doesn’t matter. I’d have stayed as long as I had to.”
“What . . . what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to speak to you.”
“But . . . we could have . . .”
“Worked something out? I don’t think so. Maybe before. But not now. I had some news today, you see. About Rowena.”
“Rowena?”
“She was pregnant.”
“What?”
“Two months pregnant. She’d known for some time. Her doctor seemed surprised she hadn’t told me. Well, maybe she was planning to make a special announcement. It’s the anniversary of our engagement later this week. Maybe she was leaving it until then. We’ll never know now, will we?”
“Paul, I—”
“We’ll never know because of what you and that bitch Sophie Marsden did for her between you with your poisoned words and your evil little insinuations. Didn’t you?”
“Look, I’m sorry for what happened. Sorrier than I can say. But I never—”
“I don’t want your sorrow!” He was shouting now, his voice rising in a cracked crescendo, his arms swinging free. I suddenly saw he was holding a bat cleft in his hands, raising it like a club as he advanced towards me. “I don’t want anything from you!”
Before I could even turn to run he was on me, the cleft slamming into my midriff. I doubled up and fell back against the car door. He aimed a blow at my head which I managed to parry with my forearm, then another I barely beat off. I tried to rise, knowing I had to get past him if I was to stand a chance. But he saw me coming and shoulder-barged me to the ground. I sprawled across the tarmac and scrambled onto all fours. I remember trying to push myself upright as the first of the pain lanced through the shock. I remember seeing him out of the corner of my eyes, behind and above me. I even remember the whistle of the cleft through the air as it sliced down towards me. Then nothing. The night swallowed me whole. As if I’d never been.
C H A P T E R
TWELVE
Apparently I was conscious when the ambulance reached the scene. I don’t remember it myself. Nor much else that night beyond a succession of blurred faces staring down at me and the unique disinfected smell of a hospital ward. I pieced together what had happened the following morning from the jumble of my own recollections and the puzzled questions of a staff nurse. The shock of seeing me lying stunned on the ground with blood oozing from my mouth and cheek must have stopped Paul in his tracks. Frightened by what he’d done, he rushed round to his car in Frenchman’s Road and called an ambulance. He waited with me until it arrived, saw me aboard and promised to follow me to the hospital. But he didn’t turn up. He hadn’t been seen since. And nobody knew who he was.
I decided from the outset to play dumb. The tragedy I’d helped create would only be worsened and prolonged by Paul being charged with assault and battery. I didn’t feel as if I was being a hero or a martyr. I didn’t even feel I was doing Paul a favour. It just seemed the least painful way out for all of us. Shielded from the police on medical orders until the middle of the following day, I rehearsed a suitable story, then trotted it out to a gullible detective constable. I’d returned late from London, surprised somebody I took to be a burglar skulking around the factory and been beaten up for my pains. Since it had been pitch dark, I couldn’t begin to describe my assailant. Nor, come to that, the Good Samaritan who’d found me and dialled 999. I was a victim of the rising crime rate who warranted nothing more than an obscure place in constabulary statistics.
Physically, I wasn’t in bad shape. A broken rib, a fractured cheek-bone, two loose teeth, sundry cuts and bruises; and what the doctor called a “straightforward” case of concussion. But that alone necessitated twenty-four hours of rest and observation. Which, in the end, turned out to be nearer forty-eight. Rushed in on Tuesday night, I wasn’t released until Friday morning.
Jennifer, Simon, Adrian and Uncle Larry all trooped in to see me, plying me with fruit, magazines and sympathy. Adrian was full of plans to improve security at the factory and left me with the brochures of a couple of guard-dog patrol companies to leaf through. He even suggested I might like to convalesce at his house. Thankfully, he interpreted my refusal as a reflection of my independent spirit. This spared me the need to explain why a few days spent under the same roof as Wendy and the children—not to me
ntion the dogs—would probably see me re-admitted to hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion.
I heard nothing from Bella and assumed she didn’t know of the incident. There was really no reason why she should, unless Paul had decided to come clean. And even if he had, who was going to blame him for what he’d done? He had a child now as well as a wife to mourn. Just as Sir Keith had lost a grandchild along with a daughter. The grief had spread like a stain across three generations. And I couldn’t redeem or reduce it with a few broken bones.
I knew I’d hear from Bella eventually, of course. She’d be expecting me to report the outcome of my meeting with Sophie. But the longer that could be postponed the better. I felt as if I genuinely needed a spell of rest and recuperation before confronting her with whatever lies I decided to substitute for a truth even she would have found shocking. As for Sophie herself, each hour that passed made what we’d done seem not merely more remote but more unimaginable.
My dilemma hadn’t diminished by Friday morning, when Jennifer came to collect me and drive me home. Indeed, it was because of it that I jumped to a false conclusion when, halfway up the A3 towards Petersfield, she suddenly said: “Guess who was asking after you yesterday.”
“Bella?”
“No. Her stepdaughter. Sarah Paxton. She’d heard you were in hospital and—”
“How did she hear?”
“She didn’t say. Does it matter?”
It mattered a good deal. But for reasons I was in no position to explain. “Er . . . I suppose not.”
“Well, she seemed genuinely concerned about you. Quite touching really, in view of her recent bereavement and . . . well . . . how easy it would be for her to hold you at least partly to blame for her sister’s suicide.”
“As I’m sure she does.”
“You could be wrong. She’s going to look in on you at Greenhayes over the weekend, apparently. Check you’re all right. She said she was going to be in Hindhead anyway and it’d be no trouble, but, you know, it sounded to me as if she might be making a special trip. Just to see you. Very solicitous, I’d say. There isn’t something you want to tell me about the two of you, is there?”