The Bed I Made

by Lucie Whitehouse

  Chapter Seventeen

  I didn’t have a shift on Wednesday so I got in the car and took the military road to Ventnor, wanting the perspective of a wide sky and a view of the sea. The email from Richard was still weighing on me. Helen had seen my missed call and rung back in the early evening but she’d been in a cab on her way to a client dinner, her conversation punctuated with directions to the driver. It hadn’t seemed fair to burden her with my worry when she was away and I didn’t want to get into it all until we could talk properly. Stoppered up inside, though, without the neutralisation of talking about it, Richard’s threat – for I was sure that was what it was – seemed to be strengthening, becoming not less potent with time but more so.

  It was too wet to get out and walk so I threaded the car down the steep roads through the town centre and parked on the esplanade where I sat and watched the sea foam up on to the beach, its edge airy as beaten egg white. Ventnor was massed on the hillside above me, pressing down, but the only places open in the row of businesses lining the other side of the road were a greasy spoon with a full English for four pounds and the amusement arcade, whose one-armed bandits flashed garish invitations at odds with the morning’s muted palette. The rain fell in fat drops, making a tinny music on the roof of the car. I listened to it and watched as the mist cloaked the headlands beyond the Spyglass inn, then revealed them again, shifting like the sea itself. Nothing in the view would have changed in two hundred years, I thought, when pirates must have made a handsome living along this coast.

  I was brought out of my reverie by the sound of my mobile. The number was a landline in central London but I didn’t recognise it. I hesitated and the phone went on ringing, insistent. Richard wouldn’t call me now, though; he’d know I’d hang up on him. It could be someone offering me translating work: an agency. I answered, catching it just before it stopped.

  ‘Is this Kate?’ a woman asked slowly. Her voice was thick, smudged-sounding, as if she’d been drinking.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hesitant.

  ‘This is Sarah Brookwood.’

  It was a second or two before I put the parts of her name together.

  ‘Are you there?’

  I deserved this; it was fair. ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was my husband – did you ever think about that?’ She was speaking carefully, enunciating but slurring anyway. ‘We were married.’

  I was trembling all of a sudden. It was shock, shock at getting the call now, not a year ago, when I’d almost expected it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘It’s too late for that. And I’d save your pity for yourself.’

  Cold went over my skin, down my arms like a pair of freezing hands.

  ‘Do you know what you’re dealing with? Do you? Two nights ago he . . . My collarbone’s broken and three of my ribs. I’ve lost my front teeth.’ She was crying now but trying not to. ‘It was never like this before – this bad. Normally he can stop. I’ve been in hospital two days. If I’d punctured a lung . . .’

  I shuddered, a sudden spasm, and one of Helen’s expressions came into my head: ‘Someone walk over your grave?’

  She swallowed again, as if she were drooling and wanted to empty her mouth. Her breathing was coming in sobs. ‘I hate you for what you’ve done to me,’ she said. ‘But I pity you, too. I mean it. He won’t let you go – not until he wants to.’

  I felt a wave of nausea, the contents of my stomach rising up my throat, and quickly opened the car door. I took deep breaths of the air, smelling the salt, the stale cooking oil from the café. Sweat had broken out on my forehead.

  ‘You’re not the first – he’s always had women. There have been others even while he’s been with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pleased to have shocked me. Or hurt me – could it be hurt, that note in my voice? ‘Last year he got one of them pregnant. He dumped her straight away, like he always does.’

  I swallowed down the acid that scorched my throat. Pregnant? Last year? I felt myself rock forward in the seat, my head suddenly too heavy. The world seemed to have pulled away from me.

  ‘But you,’ she said, her voice reaching me from the other end of a long tunnel. ‘You are different. You’ve lasted longer than any of them. It’s not love – don’t make that mistake – but it’s something.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’ I said weakly. ‘If you knew.’

  She’d given up trying to hide her crying now. ‘We’re married. He’s my husband. He’s my son’s father. I didn’t want a divorce and – it starts to break you, you don’t even realise. And I always thought I could make it better; I thought that if I could just be enough for him . . .’

  ‘It would have been hard,’ I said, tentative. ‘When you were ill.’ The nausea ebbed a little and I pulled the door shut again and snapped down the button to lock it, wanting to feel the shell of the car closed around me.

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘He told me.’ There was silence on the other end of the phone and I ploughed on. ‘I wouldn’t have carried on seeing him, unless . . . He told me that you were going to get a divorce but then you got ill. You were waiting until you were better.’

  There was the start of bitter laughter and then she choked. ‘He’s a liar – didn’t you know? He lies and lies and lies. I did try to leave once, last year, but he wouldn’t let me; he harassed me till I gave in. No one leaves Richard; he leaves them. He decides.’

  I closed my eyes, and said nothing.

  ‘You’re starting to get it, aren’t you? I’ve seen the emails he writes you – it isn’t over. I hate you for what you did but I couldn’t just stand by. If anything happened and I hadn’t said something, I couldn’t live with it.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘I don’t have any choice now – I have to leave him. He’s broken me, everything I wanted, and I can’t take another beating: he’d kill me next time. He’ll let me go now because he knows that. But you – run, and just pray he doesn’t find you.’

  When she hung up, I put my head on the steering wheel and let them come, the images which I had fled here across the Solent to escape. They crowded down on me now like gulls in the wake of a trawler, screeching and triumphant: images of the last time I’d seen him, that final morning in the flat when I’d walked through the open door and heard him on the phone, so obviously talking to a child. Had I made a sound, let the breath catch in my throat? I didn’t know but suddenly he had been aware of me in the doorway, had told the little voice that he would call back. ‘Katie,’ he’d said, standing, seeing the look on my face, taking steps towards me which I’d matched with steps backwards. ‘I can explain.’

  I can explain. It wasn’t that the floor moved beneath my feet; it was more that the floor had ceased to exist and I was there, three storeys above the pavement, without anything to keep me from crashing to the ground. I was unanchored, waiting to fall. I heard my voice telling him to get out. It seemed to come from somewhere outside me, from yards away, perhaps even from the other side of the communal garden whose trees I could see dappling with the autumn light that had matched my spirits and warmed me through my coat only minutes before. I had the post in one hand, the bag of breakfast things in the other, and I gripped them. ‘Get out,’ I said.

  He took another step towards me but now I was backed up against the table in the hall. His hands were on my coat collar, pulling me towards him. I dropped the bag, heard it hit the floor. His breath was sour, his teeth not yet brushed. His eyes seemed huge, the pupils black and enormous, ringed with that strange toffee colour. I looked at them, mesmerised. They were expressionless – utterly blank.

  ‘What did you say?’ His voice was almost conversational.

  ‘Get out of my flat.’ I twisted, trying to jerk free of him. ‘Leave me alone.’

  He changed his grip and suddenly there was pressure on my windpipe. I took a quick breath, tried again to pull back. Then without warning, he yanked me up from the table and thrust me away fr
om him. I fell backwards, my head cracking against the wall beneath the coat rack, my back jarring as I hit the floor. Pain jolted up my spine. I stayed there, momentarily stunned. He reached down and grabbed me up by the shoulder, lifting all my weight, then pushing me backwards into the coats and shoving himself against me, his tongue forcing itself into my mouth. I moved my head to one side but found his arm already there, blocking it. His fingers held my jaw, pressing it open. I clamped my teeth down and bit his tongue.

  He pulled back and looked at me a moment, as if he was amused. ‘You always think you can beat me, don’t you, sweetheart?’ He kicked my legs out from under me and then I was on the floor and he was on top of me, pinning me as he had so many times before. One hand tore at my jumper, pulling it up, exposing my breasts, and the other fumbled with my fly, shoving to get inside my knickers. I squirmed and fought. He brought his face down to mine again, his teeth banging against mine so hard that there was a rush of blood into my mouth. He was undoing his own trousers, yanking down the fly, pulling himself free. The fingers of his other hand were inside my knickers now, jabbing at me, hurting me. He was out of his boxer shorts and he brought his spare arm up and pressed it hard over my throat. I gagged, from the pressure, from fear. Richard was gone, replaced by this furious, vicious man who didn’t even seem to recognise me.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ I croaked, and the arm came down harder. ‘Please.’

  He pulled back as his jabbing fingers found their mark and I looked at him and saw triumph in his eyes. Hatred coursed through me, and he saw it. ‘Fuck you,’ I whispered.

  His fist connected with my brow. The pain was exquisite, a firework explosion of agony in the bone and the socket of my eye. The shock of rage that followed gave me a burst of strength far beyond myself and I got my leg free from between his and brought my knee up sharp into his groin. He groaned, closing his eyes for just a second, and I took the advantage and shoved him off me. I scrambled up but he grabbed at my ankle and I stumbled. I kicked back at him, meeting flesh, and then I ran, out of the flat and down the stairs, tearing my jumper down to cover myself, not caring until I was almost in the lobby, steps from the street, that my jeans were still undone. I could hear his feet coming down the top stairs now and he was running but I was too far ahead and I burst out of the building and on to the street, still running when I reached the square at the back. An old lady was opening the gate to the private garden and, without thinking, I dived past her and ran until I reached the rhododendrons which were large enough to hide me.

  I stayed in the bushes for almost an hour. Twice Richard circled the garden but he didn’t have keys and no one else came in so that he could push in after them. Instead he stalked the pavement around the perimeter, walking as casually as if nothing had happened to disrupt the morning. Through the leaves of the rhododendrons and the cast-iron railings I saw him, the slow, comfortable stride, the pale November sun playing over the shoulders of his suit jacket, and I was afraid that my shaking would set the leaves trembling and betray me. My heartbeat was too loud.

  None of the sun reached down to me. The dew was still on the leaves and it transferred to my jumper and chilled me even further. My feet grew numb from standing on the cold soil. I was shivering and shivering, couldn’t stop. Blood ran from the split on my brow and I pressed the tissue from my pocket gently against it, wincing silently. The minutes stretched. I looked at my watch. Half past nine. I knew he had a meeting at half ten; he wouldn’t miss that. And he was going to New York in the afternoon. He must have gone, surely. I scanned what I could see of the pavement and the garden, then stepped out on to the gravel path. My head was pounding, the pain in my forehead intensifying. A blackbird looked up from pecking at the lawn and cocked its head to one side. There was no sign of Richard.

  More than anything now, I wanted my flat. I wanted to lock the door and put the chain across it. I let myself out of the garden and went to the corner of the square. Richard had driven last night, told Sarah he had a meeting in Henley and was staying over. His car was still there, parked two doors down from mine, and I could see him in the driver’s seat, the outline of his head and shoulder. My pulse accelerated again. If I stepped into my street now, he’d see me for sure.

  I doubled back and used the access on the other side of the square to get on to Earls Court Road. I still had to pass the end of my street but I had distance on my side and I walked behind a pair of women to disguise myself in case he happened to look in his rear-view mirror. Lowering my head to hide my face, I ducked into the library on the Old Brompton Road and found a chair in a far corner, out of sight. I sat there until noon, trying in vain to process what had happened. The man I loved had attacked me, tried to have sex with me against my will – to rape me. It seemed so outlandish; could I have imagined it, or read it in a book and absorbed it into an especially vivid dream? Without the pain, I might have believed it. And yet, I had to acknowledge, I couldn’t claim that I had never seen hints of this side of him before.

  The library began to get busier and several people came into my corner, where I let my hair fall across my face and looked down, pretending to be preoccupied with the illustrated guide to India that was open on my lap. The tissue against the cut on my eyebrow was soaked.

  When at last I left the library and walked back round the corner into my road, Richard’s car was gone. My keys were still in my pocket from the trip to buy breakfast and, heart in my mouth, I opened the door to my building. I walked slowly upstairs, light-headed. On the landing I hesitated, listening at my own front door, but there were no sounds from inside. I let myself in, pulse pounding, sending pain shooting through my eye. The orange juice and crumpets I’d bought for our breakfast were still lying on the carpet. I checked the rooms quickly, looking behind the doors, even throwing open the wardrobe, but he wasn’t there. It was only when I sat heavily down on the sofa that I saw the note on the coffee table. Whatever it takes, Katie.

  In all the time that I saw Richard, I had never let myself think about Sarah – not properly, as a person who might be much like me, who had friends and a family, favourite books and films, who might have loved Richard like I did. I hadn’t denied she existed; I couldn’t: she had been a fact. But I had learnt to turn my thoughts away from her, to convince myself that the force of my feelings for him justified what I was doing. When I did think about her, it was in the abstract. If I needed to mention her to Richard, I did so as ‘your wife’. On one hand, I’d felt it would have been patronising to use her name, the sort of instant familiarity assumed towards someone weaker or pitiable, nurse to patient. On the other, it was self-protection. If I kept her as an idea, a circumstance which held us apart, like a missed aeroplane or a sudden unscheduled meeting, then I could cope. If I called her by name, I was forced to face the truth of what I was doing. ‘Your wife’ was a shade; Sarah was a person.

  Now I asked myself how I could have done it, put up the mental smokescreen that allowed me to behave like that. What sort of monster was I? However much I’d thought I loved him, I should never have been able to do it. I was disgusted with myself – sick to my stomach with guilt.

  I imagined her terror when he lunged at her, shoving her, dragging her, hitting her. I imagined her smashed mouth, the missing teeth, the broken bones. She’d had every reason to despise me and yet she had thought to warn me, as soon as she’d got out of hospital. The contrast in our behaviour towards each other shamed me.

  Just as when it had been me Richard had hurt, my instinct was to go home and lock the door, shut out the world. This time, though, there was something I needed to do first. Instead of heading straight back to Yarmouth, I drove to Newport again. On my birthday, I had seen a branch of Carphone Warehouse and now I went in and asked to change my number. Sarah had taken it from Richard’s mobile; I needed to make sure that he could never call me again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I lay awake all that night, my stomach clenching with fear. I tried all my tricks for finding s
leep but it wouldn’t come. The noises in the house – the judder of the fridge, the clicking of the old radiators – had reclaimed their strangeness and each one had me lying rigid now, straining my ears in the darkness for the crank of the front door handle, the sound of breaking glass. My mind was roiling, the memory of that morning replaying itself over and over again – him lunging for me, tearing at my clothes; the deadness of his eyes. Normally he can stop, I heard Sarah’s thick voice say again. I’d thought when he attacked me that it had been extraordinary, the result of him being out beyond his limits, but it wasn’t; it wasn’t even unusual.

  Towards dawn, I stopped trying to sleep and made a cup of tea. I sat on the edge of the bed watching the first of the daylight infuse the sky, lifting it from a heavy navy to an intense royal blue. A shape, black and scarcely visible, flickered past the window and was gone: a bat, whirling through the last of the darkness. I thought about what it would be like to be so free. The air in the room seemed to thicken, the ceiling to come lower, and suddenly my fear mutated into a furious anger.

  I was dressed in two minutes and out of the door in three. On the path I stood and took in great breaths of air, as if I had just broken the surface after a deep-water dive. The air was cold and felt like medicine as it came in across my tongue; exhaled, it made clouds like empty speech-bubbles.

  Without thinking, I found myself heading for the path around the estuary. I crossed Tennyson Road and passed Sally’s house, the curtains drawn against the first signs of the morning. The stillness of the air heightened every sound: my breathing, the scratch of the loose chips of tarmac under my feet. In the bushes there was the light music of the dawn chorus, but over the estuary I could hear the sharp cry of a seabird. That cry was not music; it was a single sustained sound, a screech more than a note, which echoed in the sky and left a desolate silence when it died away.