by Tina Seskis
‘No, no, it’s fine. I only wanted to make sure Dad was OK. I need to go now, Maria. Tell him I’ll call him later.’
As Christie hung up and rushed to open the front door, she had no time to be nervous any more. She pulled it back, an eager smile on her face, and then, like the inevitable coming of nightfall, it faded.
76
ELEANOR
‘No,’ Eleanor said. ‘No. No. No.’
She was standing on their little terrace, her back to the Mediterranean, and all she could see was her husband illuminated against the patio doors, looking conflicted. The hotel room beyond him was freshly whitewashed, with tasteful dark-wood furniture and pretty blue and terracotta furnishings, and she should have been thrilled that it was so lovely, but none of that mattered any more. The sea was still sparkling in the sunshine, and yet it didn’t feel like it should be when a few days previously a lorry had run over and killed scores of people just a few miles along the coast from them. The whole world felt bleak. Again, she thought that maybe this trip was fated. That perhaps they shouldn’t have come at all.
‘But Eleanor, I need to go back,’ Alex was saying now. The desperation in his voice was pathetic.
‘Alex, it’s not on. We’re meant to be on vacation, with our children. And, aside from that, I don’t want to be stranded here after what’s just happened. Surely they can manage without you for once.’
‘Well, apparently not. They’re calling everyone in, in case of copycat attacks in London.’
Eleanor thought of home, the old railway line, the eclectic café where she’d once met her ex-lover for a coffee. It didn’t have to be like this. She didn’t have to accept being put last the whole time by her husband. Something was pulling at her, making her crack, creating a chink for something else to creep into. What would it be? Rufus – or the route to oblivion? Why was the urge threatening to consume her all over again? Was it stress? Or was it him? But whenever Alex pissed her off, like now, she thought about both options afresh. Either way, it seemed she needed to know the truth about Rufus at last. She was bemused by him, and she had no idea whether to believe his claims that he’d never actually meant her to leave that bright spring day in Hampstead, that he’d just been confused by the fact that his old girlfriend had wanted him back – and that Eleanor had taken two plus two and made five hundred. But was it really true that he’d tried to track her down for months after she’d left? He’d failed though, of course, as no one had known where she was. Her vanishing trick had been slick, and entirely effective . . . and seemingly devastating for the young Rufus.
Eleanor felt dazed for a moment, and she leant against the balcony for support. Who knew exactly what had been the proverbial straw for her, but it seemed she’d had enough. She summoned all of her energy, marched across the terrace to her husband, took a hold of his polo shirt by the lapels, forced him to look straight at her. She almost felt sorry for him, at the anguish she saw in his eyes, the battle between family and duty. But not quite.
‘Alex,’ she said, and her voice was eerily calm, as if caught bang in the eye of the storm that was brewing inside of her. ‘Let me be very clear. This wasn’t what I signed up for. You were meant to have been my saviour – why d’you have to be the whole goddamn country’s now? Why can’t you just look out for your family, like other people’s husbands do?’
‘I have to, Eleanor,’ Alex said. His voice had that wheedle to it, as though he were begging her.
‘Alex,’ she repeated. She took a step closer to him, twisted his shirt just that little bit tighter, almost enjoyed the pain it caused in her fingers. ‘You are on holiday with your family. It’s been booked for months.’ She took a deep intake of air, and when she spoke she meant it with every last breath in her body. ‘So, if you leave now, then that is it. Our marriage is over.’
77
CHRISTIE
‘Alice!’ Christie said, as she opened the front door to her sister, instead of to the son she’d been expecting. ‘What on earth is the matter? Come on in.’ She leaned forward and took Alice’s arm, and drew her gently towards her, and then she ushered her through the hallway into the warmth of the kitchen, pulled out a seat and sat Alice down. Alice looked awful. Her hair was awry and she had mascara smudged under her eyes, as if she’d been crying.
‘What’s happened, Alice?’ Christie said over her shoulder, as she put the kettle on. She crossed the kitchen and sat down next to her sister and took her hand. It felt solid and cold, corpselike. ‘Is it Hugh?’
‘No . . .’ Alice took a long, dramatic breath. ‘We’re fine – or as fine as anyone who’s been married for twenty-odd years can be. It’s not that.’
‘The girls?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what is it then?’ As Alice continued to gape wordlessly at her, Christie was suddenly worried for her sister. Perhaps she was ill.
‘It’s something bad,’ Alice said.
‘Oh, love,’ Christie said, instinctively. At that Alice started to cry, and even when they were children, Christie couldn’t recall seeing Alice so utterly abject. It was discombobulating. Alice was the lucky one, the one whose stars were always aligned. Bad stuff wasn’t meant to happen to Alice.
‘What, Alice?’
‘I’ve been to a medium.’
Oh, here we go, Christie thought.
‘And?’
‘But it’s not just that, Christie. Honestly, I’ve thought it for a while, and I’ve spoken to Hugh, and he thinks so too.’ Alice’s shoulders started to shudder, and deep heaving sobs racked through her chest, until she was weeping so hard she could barely speak. Her words were almost impossible to decipher, but still they got through, shot a poison dart into the very centre of Christie’s being. She found herself gazing out of the window, into the garden, watching the trees sway with the breeze – and the breeze would continue to blow, and the trees would continue to sway, long after any of this ever mattered to anyone.
‘I think Piers is up to no good,’ Alice said.
Time gets filled somehow. It gets filled with snatches of memory from when I was little, and my father was always disappointed in me. It’s odd how much it still hurts. But maybe that’s why I became who I am, and why I did what I did, and why I lost the person, aside from my children, who I loved the most in the world. Perhaps it was always inevitable that hate would prove more powerful than love. And so now here I am, a prisoner in body as well as in soul. Being in prison is like being nowhere, being nothing. Oh my.
Of course, one day I’ll get out. But will I ever be free again? Will I look people up, ask their forgiveness? Is there any point? My children have disowned me, and in truth, although I deserve it, that’s almost what hurts the most. I write them long letters, trying to explain it, but I know I’ll never send them. I gaze at the scuffs and the marks in the walls, and the careless blobs and blots of my pen, and I think about how things used to be, when our children were little, so little, and we were a family still. I turn those gorgeous faces around in my head, longing to touch them, caress them, like I did when they were babies . . . and then reality hits once more, and I remember where I am, and how there is no escape in any meaningful sense from what I have done, and so I prefer to stay here, alone and ensnared – and where I’m shielded from the truth of it.
PART FOUR
THE END
2016 TO 2018
78
CHRISTIE
It was only after her father had died that Christie had first acknowledged that her sister might have been at least partly right about Piers. At the time she’d convinced herself that Alice really was turning into a crackpot, her obsession with what was written in the stars clouding her judgement of real life. Christie had known that Alice had meant well, but really! Turning up on her doorstep in a hysterical state and spouting all that poisonous rubbish about her husband. It hadn’t been on.
But now things were different. Christie had come in to London specially today, and she was determined to find ou
t the truth. Right now she was sitting in the window of a café, watching buses crash by, and pizza-delivery boys on rickshaws get up out of their saddles to make it up the hill, and Lycra-clad women rushing between gym classes and coffee dates. The café was crowded and Christie had been forced to share a table with a young girl who was concave-chested, with wrists and ankles the thickness of Mars bars, and the girl had had a smoothie sitting on the table between them for the past half an hour, and every now and again she would take the straw out of the blood-red liquid and suck it. Her eyes, over-large in her tight, shiny face, were sinkholes into hell.
Christie too felt uneasy, and it was as if she were waking up slowly, from a rainbow-coloured dream, to find the reality a shitstorm. She kept trying to work out when it was that she’d first had doubts about Piers, buried or not. Was it the morning after they’d got married, when she’d felt regretful rather than happy? Or when Piers had acted so weirdly after finding out about the terror attack in London, although to her knowledge no one close to him had even been involved? Or had her unease been due to the fact that Piers had been working away more than ever? Or even what Alice had said about him being up to no good, deranged as it may have sounded? Or was it that Piers seemed to be making her life a misery now, telling her what to do, who to see? Chipping away at her.
Or was it all of those things, plus the fact that he was spending her money?
Christie had first spotted it a while ago, perhaps even before Alice had said anything, but, as she realised now, she’d denied it to herself. It seemed it was far easier to pretend not to see things than have your reality come crashing down on you all over again. Maybe it had been weak, but it was all she’d felt able to do at the time. She’d married him, she’d told herself. She needed to give it a chance.
But now she’d changed her mind. The money was the least of it. Piers had crossed a line, and it was unforgiveable.
Christie felt wrathful tears forming, and she pretended to lean down and rummage in her handbag so the girl opposite wouldn’t see. To give him his due, Piers had been all right with her father, had put up with being constantly called Paul, but he hadn’t been there at key times during the old man’s slow, painful decline. That was fair enough, she’d told herself at the time. Piers had had work commitments. But to have not come straight back from his conference when her father had died? How could Piers have let her down like that? It wasn’t only how it had felt. It was how it had looked, which was disgraceful. There was no other word for it.
Christie took a nervy sip of her coffee. She was still wondering how to play it. Piers didn’t know that she knew he’d taken £50,000 from one of her accounts, and the knowledge was sitting there, quietly. She was a fool.
Never trust never trust never trust.
Christie had worked so hard to reboot her brain after the early crises in her marriage to Paul. Failing to trust him had got them nowhere. In fact, she’d been so successful in wiping the gypsy woman’s mantra from her brain that as the years had passed she’d pretty much forgotten all about it. Perhaps that was why she’d gone and fallen in love with a man who even now it appeared she didn’t remotely know, and it seemed that what the old woman had said hadn’t been rubbish after all. Christie could see it now – maybe Piers was the unknown husband Madame Magdalena had been warning her about all along. Perhaps Alice was right, and there was more to this fortune-telling lark after all.
And so now, regardless of the exact reason, Christie had made up her mind. She had to deal with this. Face it. She needed to find out what Piers was spending her money on. Or, more to the point, who. She was convinced now that her husband was having an affair. There was only one way to find out.
Christie paid her bill, downed the last of her coffee and stood up. She proffered a sympathetic smile goodbye to her table companion, whose bleak half-nod in return made Christie’s eyes smart. She needed to get going. Her meeting with a private detective was in fifteen minutes.
79
ALEX
For years Alex had been so used to the rhythm of his marriage to Eleanor being punctuated by shift patterns, or else long and frequent absences, or being taken up with their children, that it had been odd in a way, just hanging out for a week at home with her. But after the near-ruinous debacle of their trip to the South of France, Eleanor had insisted. He couldn’t keep working under such strain for so long, she’d said. It was bad for his health, she’d said. In the end he’d had no choice but to capitulate. And yet his enforced time at home had worked out fine, had been more enjoyable than Alex had anticipated. He and Eleanor had pottered in the garden together, and gone out for walks and dinner and the cinema; had enjoyed long, lazy lie-ins. It almost felt as if they’d been new lovers, and he was surprised at how much he enjoyed being around her again. She looked better than she had in years too. Her latest fad diet seemed to have really paid off, and it almost reminded him of how she’d looked when they’d first met. Perhaps the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder was nothing but a big fat lie. With him and Eleanor, it had made strangers of them. Until now. The irony, he thought.
Alex was in the garden, sweeping up after having cut the hedge, and he knew he needed to come in soon. Eleanor had just gone inside to get ready, as they were walking into Crouch End for dinner, and he found he was looking forward to it. The evening was balmy, and the birds were boisterous, despite the lateness of the hour. The walk would be leisurely, the brutal hills precluding them from going too fast in the hazy, over-heated air. The tapas restaurant was excellent, and the meal would be delicious, and they’d share a bottle of wine, and he’d leave a handsome tip for the waiter, and he’d be the big man, treating his beautiful American wife.
Alex paused, blinked his eyes for a second. There was an empty feeling behind them, but he knew it was superficial, and that soon the familiar ache of his jaw clenching would invade, rearrange his pain sensors, send the headache he’d have, for the next twenty-four hours at least, booming in, permeating down into his neck and shoulders, freezing them into a type of mute bodily fury. The garden felt too small for him now, as if it were shrinking, folding in on him, and he had a sudden deep longing to bust out of the life he had made for himself and start all over again. Maybe he should jack it all in, change police force and move to the country, like Eleanor had suggested recently. It wasn’t too late. He knew he’d have to be careful though, that he mustn’t make any more mistakes. He couldn’t risk losing her.
When Alex heard the doorbell he wondered who it might be. Instinctively he glanced at his reflection in the window, smoothed down his hair, checked how handsome he was still. He heard the bathroom window open. His wife’s voice drifted down into the garden and it sounded soft and sultry, and he found in that moment that he loved her all over again. Loved her more than ever.
‘Alex. Will you get that, honey?’
And then he heard another voice, calling him too, and the realisation was wretched, and surely too much to bear.
Worlds collide, and time stands still. And then it fast-forwards again, and the prospects are dim and dismal, and lives will be ripped apart, and it was all, every last bit of it, a fuck-up. What should he do? He could cower here in the garden, or he could face it. Be a man for once. Jesus Christ. This wasn’t what was meant to have happened. It was never meant to involve Eleanor.
The doorbell rang again, the finger pressed on the button, the dinging relentless, the voice increasingly shrill. It was no good. The game was up.
‘Alex!’ he heard Eleanor yell, and she didn’t sound sultry any more. She sounded furious. ‘Get the door! I’m in the bathtub.’
Alex slammed himself back into the now, forced himself to think quickly. Maybe there was still a chance after all. He flung down the broom so hard it clattered against the paving stones, and then he raced through the house from the back to the front. When he opened the creaking front door he made sure to speak as quietly as he could.
‘It’s not what you think, Christie,’ he sa
id.
80
ELEANOR
Eleanor was perched, wrapped in a towel, on the edge of the bath, in a state of shock. She had no idea what had just happened, and her face was clammy, and it felt like she was looking at one of those pictures where you thought the image was of a beautiful girl and then suddenly you realised it was an old crone. All was quiet downstairs, and it seemed the house was empty, and she had no idea where Alex had gone, but somehow she could tell that he wasn’t coming back any time soon. She wanted to ask someone’s advice, but whose? Perhaps it was better to work it out on her own for now, try to assess what was going on, before she involved anyone else. Her head felt like it was exploding and imploding at the same time, leaving it intact, but delicate, liable to shatter. It all seemed so obvious now – had she really been that much of an idiot? For Christ’s sake, for the past few months she’d even known that Alex travelled on two passports, although she’d never dared let on. He’d come home from a training course one afternoon, but had gone back outside to take a call the minute he’d stepped through the door, and she’d been putting on a whites wash, and so she’d gone into his bag, and had accidentally found it, in a pouch at the bottom of his dirty clothes bag. At first she’d assumed it was someone else’s passport, his lover’s perhaps, and so she’d been relieved when she’d realised that it was an alias – and ‘Piers Romaine’ had sounded rather glamorous, had certainly had more of a ring to it than ‘Alex Moffatt’. It had made her wonder just what he did in his job, what danger he faced. Secretly she’d even been impressed, her anger at not having known soon transmuting into a fierce swelling of pride in her husband, at what he did for a living. After all, she’d often joked that Alex was like James Bond.