by Louise Voss
‘Was it a sailing accident?’ I whispered tearfully, noticing through the open living room door that my suitcase was still in the hallway. Luckily I’d removed the luggage tags.
‘Apparently his dementia had returned, or perhaps the trial had showed incorrect results. But he allegedly said he didn’t want to live with the illness, and jumped off a cliff.’
For once, Martine was not smiling.
‘Oh my God.’ I rocked and keened and wailed. Ed would’ve been proud. ‘I thought April was in Australia! How could she do this to me?’
We were all good actors it seemed, when push came to shove.
April and I never did speak again. She didn’t pitch up at Ed’s funeral, as I’d feared she might, which was a relief because I’d only have had to throw her out. My friends turned out in force to support Ben and me, though: Maddie and Geoff, Suzan, Naveeta, a load of people from MADS and Ed’s former GP practice and – to my surprise and gratitude – Alvin and his wife, Sheryl, who I’d never met before. She was lovely, as pretty as her photograph in Alvin’s office, but about four foot eleven. She only came up to his chest and must have had a permanent crick in her neck from gazing adoringly up at him. They were both really kind to me, and Alvin begged me to come back to work as soon as I was ready.
‘I can’t stand the temp,’ he said to me mournfully, at the post-service reception back in my house. ‘She just doesn’t stop talking! It’s driving me insane. She and Margaret get on like a house on fire. There is no work whatsoever getting done in that office.’
I couldn’t help thinking of the lengthy pub lunches we’d enjoyed when I was in the job before.
‘I’ll come back on Monday,’ I announced. ‘I need to keep busy … well, busyish…’
He grinned at me. ‘Attagirl. If you’re sure. The Big Band tour to Germany is looming early next semester, and you can’t miss that.’
When Sheryl turned round to get a sausage roll from the buffet he leaned in and whispered in my ear, ‘And I’ve got no one to have lunch with! The landlord at The Feathers thinks I’ve been dumped!’
Everyone – apart from Alvin, who kept judiciously quiet – reminisced about Ed for several hours, until eventually they all trickled home again, red-eyed and tipsy. Ben and I slumped on the sofa while Jeanine cleared up around us. My smart black shoes were killing me, so I propped my feet on the coffee table.
‘Leave it, darling, I’ll do it,’ I said wearily.
‘It’s no problem.’
‘Thank you.’ I smiled at her. All day I’d been feeling hollow, dry-eyed and businesslike, holding it all together as I played the part of the grieving widow who’d lost her beloved husband to infidelity and suicide, when inside I was full of rage and sorrow. I wanted to stand up during Ben’s eulogy and shout that our entire marriage had been a sham. It was only out of affection for Ben – and fear of the consequences – that I didn’t.
Only a few of my friends knew that April had been with him on Mustique – the fewer the better, as far as I was concerned. At the wake, a couple of people asked where she was and I just said that as far as I knew she was still in Australia.
But then, after it was all over and there was only me, Ben and Jeanine left, the anger began to seep away for the first time in the couple of weeks since my return from Mustique.
Ed’s armchair was empty, its seat cushion still pushed into a hollow by the shape of his bum. His books were still on the shelf, many with pages dog-eared by his fingers. When I took one down and flicked through it, I found what looked like one of his nose hairs stuck to the flyleaf. Ben was there, looking just like him. It was as if Ed was just in the kitchen chopping onions, or over at the lock studio doing whatever it was he used to do over there, and I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t come in at any minute.
Then it occurred to me that mostly what he would have been doing over at the studio was planning this elaborate charade to get Mike off his back, to stop the blackmail…
I wish he could have told me. But of course he couldn’t, for to do that would have meant confessing that he really did kill Shelagh – or at least opening up that particular Pandora’s Box again, and he’d known all along I’d been in the police. I wondered how – and what – Mike had found out. I agonised for ages about whether to tell Metcalfe, to make amends for the hopeless job I’d done first time around. The boys were all adults. They’d just have to cope with it.
But I didn’t. It was too risky. I was relieved that Gavin Garvey had taken his own life, because I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing that an innocent man was in jail. I wondered what Ed had done to Garvey to make him confess … perhaps that was what Mike had discovered. I would probably never know.
‘Lynn? Are you OK?’
Ben crossed the room and knelt down in front of me, looking into my face and touching my knee. The unexpected affection from him finished me off and I crumpled. I couldn’t tell the police.
‘I miss him!’ I wailed, burying my head in my hands and sobbing properly, for the first time since Ed’s death.
‘So do I,’ said Ben, crying again, too. ‘I can’t believe he was cheating on you. I’m so sorry, Lynn.’ He came and sat on one side of me and Jeanine squeezed onto the sofa on my other side. All three of us stayed there for a long time, holding on to one another.
‘It must have been his illness. At least we won’t have to watch him suffer,’ I said eventually.
Ironically, the autopsy had concluded that he did have signs of early dementia after all. I wasn’t sure if this made me feel better or worse.
That night, after Ben and Jeanine finally left and I was alone, I took a big roll of black bin liners and started getting rid of Ed’s stuff. All the books, designer jeans and cashmere jumpers in the garage in one pile for charity – I’d let Ben have a sift through them first in case he wanted anything – photographs and toiletries in another to be dumped, and then lastly, the box folder from under the floorboards in the loft. The one that he’d apparently known about since before I even put it up there. I took it out into the garden and burned it on the bonfire that Ed had started building just a few weeks earlier.
I went back to work the following week, immediately knowing I’d done the right thing, even though Fairhurst House was very quiet and the place seemed dead without the students. The academic year had finished a month ago and there was very little to do, apart from administering a few commercial bookings in the recording studio next door, and finalising the plans for the Big Band concert tour. Alvin was around a fair bit, as he was composing a new symphony up in his office, and a few of the lecturers and support staff were in and out, but Margaret and I mostly had the place to ourselves.
Then she went on holiday for a week – hiring a narrowboat in France with her partner, she informed me – at the same time that Alvin and Sheryl went away for a couple of days, and I found myself completely alone in Fairhurst. Both Alvin and Margaret had fussed over me, worried about leaving me on my own, but I brushed it off:
‘I’ve got loads to do. I’m going to reorganise the music library, it’ll take me all week.’
‘Well, call me if you need me,’ said Alvin. ‘I’m only at the in-laws. Probably be glad of an excuse to attend to an emergency at work.’
‘Want me to flood one of the bathrooms for you?’
He laughed. ‘No need to go that far, although it’s a tempting offer. Look after yourself, OK?’ He paused. ‘And it doesn’t have to be an emergency, Lynn – even if you just need to chat to someone, I’m at the end of a phone.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, giving his knobbly, angular torso a brief hug.
The next day, four hours spent alphabetising dusty sheet music in a cupboard focussed my mind enough to make a decision: it was time to make the call I’d been thinking about since I got home.
I was going to get in touch with Adrian. I needed to see him – and now I was single again, there was no reason not to.
I washed my grubby hands and called his number
, leaving him a voicemail whilst wondering if he was screening my call, or really not available.
‘Hi. It’s me. I know I said I wouldn’t contact you again – but things have changed. Drastically. Give me a ring, I’ll fill you in. I’d love to see you again.’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve really missed you, Adrian.’
I winced, remembering howling the same words to Ben after the funeral, about Ed. Although hadn’t Ed’s own actions proved it was possible to love more than one person? April had insisted he loved us both.
I decided not to feel guilty about Adrian any more.
He rang me back later that evening as I was sitting in the studio across at the lock, Ed’s yellow oilskin coat still hanging behind the door, a huge glass of red wine in my hand. We talked for a few minutes, but I refused to tell him on the phone what had happened. ‘Can I tell you in person?’ I asked, turning my back to the oilskin and watching the evening light on the river as it flowed steadily past, wishing the water could take all my bad memories away with it. I found myself doing the same thing most evenings.
‘Lunch tomorrow?’ he asked. Hearing his voice gave me a pang of comfort and I wished I’d told him more, earlier. Perhaps there was something he could have done.
‘I’ll be at work – but it’s dead up there at the moment. You could come and meet me and we’ll go to the pub.’
‘Sure. Text me the address then, and I’ll see you at one. Oh, and Waitsey?’
He wasn’t supposed to call me that. Not that it mattered anymore. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve missed you, too.’
I spent the next morning at Fairhurst in a lather of anticipation, occupying myself by tidying up the instrument store. I moved various discarded parts of the gamelan, put guitar cases into neatly stacked rows and dusted the ancient old double bass that leaned against the wall by the door, looking at my watch every five minutes.
At 12.30 I washed my hands and face, combed my hair and put on some bright red lipstick, wondering as I gazed in the mirror if Adrian would think I’d aged, after all this stress. I felt like I had.
At 12.50, the buzzer on the front door sounded and I jumped. Through the security camera I saw Adrian’s tall, stooped figure looming in grainy monochrome. Wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans, I went out and opened the door myself, rather than buzzing him in.
Then we were face to face. For a moment we just stood there and then he beamed, spreading his arms wide. ‘Waitsey – sorry, Lynn. Good to see you, girl.’
‘Hi,’ I said, as coolly as I could, grinning back at him. ‘Come on in.’
I kissed him on both cheeks and ushered him inside. Strangely, I didn’t get the frisson of lust I usually did, not straightaway. If I was honest, he looked a bit … seedy. He had far too much aftershave on, clearly an expensive one, but ridiculously overpowering, and a brown leather jacket I disliked.
‘Cool place to work,’ he commented, taking in the honeycomb-panelled ceiling of the hallway, the wooden bishop on the newel post and the elaborately carved door of the admin office.
‘It’s been like the Marie Celeste today – literally, we are the only people in the entire building. Coffee? Or do you want to go straight out for lunch?’
‘Lunch, I think! I’m starving. We can do coffee after.’
We drove in my car to The Feathers, the same pub that Alvin and I frequented for our lunches. I installed Adrian at a table under a large faded green parasol in the small walled garden, while I went in to order sandwiches and a bottle of wine.
I was fizzing with the unfamiliar sensation of anticipation as I carried the tray back out, warm sun beating down on the crown of my head.
He watched me approach, his gaze appraising and appreciative as he lit up a cigarette, turning his head away to exhale two streams of smoke through his nostrils.
‘You’ve started smoking proper fags again?’
The garden was filling up around us, office workers mostly, plus a rowdy table full of builders drinking Cokes and playing a game to see who could flip the most beermats off the edge of the table. I poured us both a glass of wine.
‘It’s the stress. Been worried about you, Waitsey,’ he said, making a silly face. ‘So, come on, spit it out – where had your other half gone, and did he come back?’
It was still hard to say out loud. I took a gulp of wine and looked away, at a sparrow fluffing its feathers on the pub’s wall.
‘He’s dead. He took all our savings and ran off with one of my best friends. April, not Maddie,’ I clarified. I’d talked about both of them to him.
‘Shit. I’m so sorry, Lynn. What happened?’
‘He took her on a swanky holiday to Mustique, they had a row, he jumped over a cliff. They found his body a couple of days later. I’d sort of suspected it but it was still a shock.’
‘So did he really have Pick’s?’
Adrian squeezed my leg. I let him.
‘Yeah. Perhaps that was why he jumped; couldn’t handle the fact that he wasn’t really cured. Or maybe he felt guilty. Or maybe he was just pissed and fell. I’ll never know.’
We sat drinking in silence for a few minutes. I took off my thin cardigan and tied it round my waist.
‘Every time I see someone do that, it reminds me of you,’ he said, still caressing my leg. Part of me thought this was insensitive and rather inappropriate, given what I’d just told him, but another part of me disagreed and didn’t want him to stop. Even his aftershave was growing on me.
‘Really?’ I hadn’t been aware that I did it all that often. I looked at my watch. ‘Wow, it’s two o’clock already. I’d better get back.’
‘Thought you said that no one’s around?’
‘They aren’t. But I don’t want to take the piss.’ I leaned slightly toward him. ‘Want to come back for coffee?’
‘Great,’ he said, as I picked up the empty bottle and stuck it upside-down in the ice-bucket.
‘Come on then.’
I drove carefully back to Fairhurst, my heart pounding, the scent of Adrian’s aftershave filling my car.
I swiped us into the still-empty building and headed along the corridor to the kitchenette, outside the instrument store. He followed me and stood watching as I filled the kettle and took a teaspoon out of the drawer. Sexual energy crackled between us like static.
I made two coffees and handed him one, just as his phone rang.
Funny thing about Adrian and his phone. He never usually had it with him when we used to meet, to the point that the sound of its ring startled me. He never took any photos of us together, or showed me any of his. I’d never asked to see any, because I didn’t want to be reminded of his family, the little family that I might have been instrumental in splitting up. He always claimed that I was the only one he’d ever had an affair with – but he was very vague about the reasons he left the police, and my instinct told me it had something to do with another woman. I wished he had told me, if there had been other women. It would have made me feel less guilty about our liaisons in his dead mum’s cottage all those years ago. But all he would ever say about the reason he left in disgrace was that a colleague had ‘stitched him up’; he refused to go into details.
He put his coffee down next to mine on the draining board and delved into an inside pocket of his jacket. Extracting the phone, he squinted at the screen and killed the call. ‘Well, they can wait,’ he said, about to put it back in his pocket. I caught a glance of the phone’s wallpaper, a photo of a handsome, dark-haired young man leaning against a souped-up red sports car.
‘Hold on a sec, that’s never your Kit? How old is he now?’ I reached out to grab the phone, but to my surprise he snatched it away.
‘What? Let’s see.’
Adrian scowled at me. ‘You’ve never shown any interest in him before. Why are you so interested now?’
‘I – wow. Sorry. I didn’t realise it was an issue. It’s not that I’m not interested in him … I just … still feel guilty that you and I were sneaking around together when
he was just a little boy. Come on, let’s see? What does he do now?’
I knew that Adrian met up with him occasionally, that he was about Ben’s age, but little more than that. Shit, I thought. I’d obviously hit a nerve. But if he’d wanted me to show more interest, why hadn’t he talked about him more? I’d assumed he didn’t want to.
I supposed, looking back, that the conversations during our recent liaisons had been very dominated by Ed’s supposed illness and strange behaviour.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I repeated, grasping his wrist. ‘I’ve been so selfobsessed. Show me. I want to see.’
Something weird was going on. The sexual tension was gone and the silence in the empty house seemed heavy with resonance all of a sudden, perhaps it was the mulish expression on Adrian’s face, a kind of suppressed anxiety as he reluctantly lifted out his phone again. I’d never seen him look anxious before. Why did he not want me to see a photo of Kit?
The moment I saw the picture of the young man with a mole on his cheek, I realised why. In a revelation that made the floor blur and swirl, it all clicked into place. How had I not figured it out before, even when it had been right under my nose – or, more accurately, on Ellen’s mantelpiece in Alderney?
Shit.
Adrian’s son Kit and my stepson Ben had once surfed together on a British beach, pudgy in wetsuits. On holiday together.
Kit was the other little boy in the photograph. I’d subconsciously remembered him from another photograph, the one Adrian used to keep on his desk in his office, of him and his wife and Kit going down a log flume, screams ripping from their open mouths, the mole clearly visible on Kit’s cheek.
Kit and Ben knew each other – or had done, once, even if Ben didn’t remember it.