The Secrets Between Us

by Louise Douglas

  I ate slowly and watched Jamie. He had forgotten his previous surliness and wriggled excitably in his chair. His delighted responses to Alexander’s constant, gentle teasing made me relax and feel happier. The blue teddy sat on the table beside Jamie’s plate. I was relieved to see the boy animated and cheeky, like a child his age should be.

  Alexander had lit waxy yellow candles on the big old mantelpiece that ran almost the length of the room above a cavernous fireplace, and there were candles on the table too, flat paraffin tea-lights, and one stuck into the neck of a wine bottle that reminded me of our first dinner together, that night in Sicily. I watched the father and son, and listened to them, and after a while I almost forgot about the squirrel. I almost forgot about Genevieve too. Almost. But she was there, in the flickering shadows; she was in the pattern of the curtains and the weave of the rug, crouching behind the pile of books that cast strange shadows in the candlelight. I felt a draught on my face, and was convinced, for a moment, that it was Genevieve returned, but of course it wasn’t; it was just the door gently closing itself.

  The candles burned down and, outside, the night dimmed and darkened. Alexander drew the curtains. Shadows flickered cosily on the walls. Jamie’s chatter slowed. Alexander wiped his plate with a piece of bread and put the bread in his mouth. He took a drink of his beer. I tried to relax, but my uneasiness was pervasive. I was aware of eyes in the walls; I heard whispers. The whispers were telling me that I did not belong at Avalon, that Alexander was right: I was not a country girl; it would be for the best if I left and went back to where I belonged.

  I told myself not to be silly; I was homesick, that was all. It was bound to take a while for me to settle in. I wished I knew where I stood with Alexander. I had felt uneasy lying to Claudia, but maybe it hadn’t been a lie. Maybe there was nothing between Alexander and me.

  The best thing, I thought, would be if Genevieve sent a postcard, preferably from somewhere far away, saying she was blissfully happy. Then people wouldn’t mind if Alexander and I ended up together; they might even be pleased for us. They’d say: It turned out all right in the end.

  I stacked the plates and took them into the kitchen. The cherry cheesecake I’d made earlier was in the fridge, its jelly and soft-fruit topping glistening. I tried not to notice the colour or the consistency. In the poor light it reminded me of congealing blood.

  I took it out and was slicing it free of its tin with the blade of a knife when I saw, through the kitchen window, headlights drawing up on the drive. The white-yellow beams swept through the darkness and picked out the rambling stalks of unchecked brambles and failing nettles in the borders. The tyres made a soothing, crunching noise on the gravel and stone. I thought, at first, that it was Claudia returned – maybe she’d left something behind – but when the passenger door opened I distinctly heard the disembodied voices of people speaking over a radio. I’d heard that sound before. It was the police.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I HAD TIME to call a warning to Alexander and to rinse my hands under the hot tap. I checked my reflection in the window and opened the door with a tea towel in my hand.

  There were two police officers – a man and a woman – and they were friendly enough, brisk and apologetic. They came inside wrapped in a cloud of colder air that was blanketed with moisture. I shivered. The man was in plain clothes; the woman held her black, banded hat in her hands like a schoolgirl. She had dark shiny hair and a round, pretty face. She must have seen the worry on mine because she was kindly and assured me that nothing was wrong; they hadn’t come with bad news, they just needed a quiet word with Alexander.

  Jamie was fascinated by the police. He stood barefoot in front of them and gazed at them, awestruck.

  ‘Have you got a gun?’ he asked the woman.

  She laughed. ‘No! But I have handcuffs.’

  ‘Handcuffs!’ he whispered. ‘Can I hold them?’

  ‘I can do better than that. If you’re a good chap and let us have a few words with your dad in private, I’ll let you put the lights on in the car.’

  ‘The police lights?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This was good enough for Jamie. He stayed in the kitchen with me like a lamb while Alexander, ashen-faced and with a new bottle of beer in his hand, took the police into the living room and shut the door. I stacked the dishwasher, cleared the table, wiped everything down, only half-listening to Jamie, who was rabbiting on and on about the police he’d seen on television. I should have been glad that, at last, he was talking to me, but I wished he’d be quiet so I could hear what was being said behind the closed door. It had to be something to do with Genevieve. It had to be.

  When I’d finished tidying up, I poured myself a glass of wine and Jamie and I went to sit in the garden, to look at the stars.

  It was country dark outside, but already I knew the physiology of the garden: I knew which tree was where and how the walls went and where the overgrown kitchen garden was bursting out of its boundaries, the sage, mint and rosemary gone wild and thuggish. The lawn was overgrown, its ruggedness interrupted with fallen apples that I had meant to collect. I sipped my wine and pointed out the few constellations I recognized to Jamie. His mother had told him that stars were wishes. I could tell, from his voice, that he knew that wasn’t exactly true, but we didn’t know one another well enough to argue the point.

  The police talked to Alexander for nearly an hour. When we heard the living-room door open and their voices, Jamie and I went back into the kitchen. He huddled next to the Rayburn, I switched on the kettle, but nobody wanted tea or coffee. The policeman shook Alexander’s hand and thanked him for his time and cooperation. He called him ‘Mr Westwood’. Alexander looked pale and dreadful. The woman police officer smiled at me and fiddled with the radio at her shoulder. She kept her word and took Jamie outside to let him work the lights on the police car. They turned the garden into a fairground. I thought there was something obscene about them. Jamie liked the lights though. He was truly impressed. I jollied him along but Alexander did not even come out into the garden to watch.

  When the police left and we went back inside Jamie became withdrawn and subdued again. He put his thumb in his mouth and sidled up to his father. Alexander’s face was stony-cold. He hardly seemed to notice the child was there.

  ‘Did they come to talk about Mummy?’ Jamie asked around his thumb.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she in trouble?’

  ‘No, Jamie,’ Alexander said. ‘Nobody’s in any kind of trouble. Not yet.’

  After Alexander had put Jamie to bed he came into the living room barefoot, his shirt hanging over his too-loose jeans and with a bloodstain in the region of his kidney, where he’d been picking at his scar again. His beard was like pencil strokes drawn on the skin of his cheeks.

  ‘Jamie wouldn’t settle,’ he said. ‘He’s all wound up.’

  ‘It was an exciting evening.’

  ‘We read The Gruffalo four times.’

  ‘Is that a record?”

  ‘Oh no. No, some nights we got into double figures after …’

  ‘Genevieve left?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I uncurled myself from the settee and followed him into the kitchen.

  He took a bottle of vodka from one of the cupboards, half-filled two small glasses and topped them up with ice.

  He sat on a chair at the table. I sat back on the settee and pulled the throw around my shoulders. I took a sip of my drink and enjoyed the alcohol rush in my bloodstream.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Ask.’

  ‘It’s not my business.’

  ‘It is now; it’s very much your business.’

  ‘Then tell me why they came. What did they want?’

  Through the open door that led into the living room, I could see the portrait of Genevieve on the bookcase. I could feel her eyes watching me, smiling at me. I shivered and tucked my legs up underneath myself.

  Alexander rattled the ice in his gl
ass.

  ‘Virginia has reported Genny missing. As in “missing person”.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘She’s been threatening to do it for a while.’

  ‘But why now? Why has she done it now?’

  He looked at me and raised his glass.

  ‘Because I’m here?’

  ‘She suspects you are my mistress!’ He gave a splutter of laughter. ‘“Mistress”! That’s what the police said. I bet that wasn’t the word she used.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Alexander put his glass on the table and hung his head.

  ‘Virginia’s come up with this story about me wanting Genevieve out of the way so we could be together, you and I. She knows I can’t afford to pay a qualified nanny’s wages and doesn’t believe you’d have agreed to come unless there was already something between us.’

  I stared into my glass.

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘They asked questions mainly. I told them the truth: that you wanted to get away from Manchester and I needed someone to live here to look after Jamie in return for board and lodging and the paltry sum I could afford to pay you. They asked if we were sleeping in separate bedrooms.’

  I shuddered.

  ‘Did you have to give them a tour of upstairs?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Do they want to talk to me?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  I took a sip of my drink. ‘Did you show them the letter Genevieve left for you saying she was going?’

  ‘No.’

  I waited for him to tell me why he hadn’t produced this irrefutable evidence that Genevieve had left of her own accord, but he said nothing more. Something moved at the periphery of my vision – the cat returned maybe, or a curtain in the draught. I wrapped my arms around myself.

  ‘Why didn’t you show them the letter?’

  ‘I don’t have it any more.’

  Again a movement caught my eye. It was distracting me.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I burned it.’

  ‘You burned it?’

  I struggled, for a few moments, to come to terms with the fact that Alexander might have disposed of the only evidence he had to support his story. Then I told myself not to be stupid. Why would he need evidence anyway? It wasn’t as if he’d done anything wrong.

  ‘I was drunk,’ Alexander said. ‘It was a few days after … I couldn’t get hold of Genny. I kept calling her, begging her just to let me know she was OK, but her phone was always switched off and I …’ He trailed away into his memories. ‘Every time I heard her voice on the answerphone … it was driving me mad. I was out of my head for a while.’

  I stood up and went to check the door was closed. Perhaps the draught was coming through the cat-flap.

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ I said gently, struggling to maintain my stream of thought. ‘She wrote to her parents too, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yep. And apparently in that letter she went on about how unhappy she was with me and what a heartless bully I was.’

  We were quiet for a moment or two. Then I asked: ‘Are they going to look for her? The police?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Something about his voice bothered me. I took another sip of my drink.

  ‘Are you worried about her, Alexander?’

  ‘No,’ he said, in the same quiet, stony voice I’d used the last time I spoke to Laurie. ‘No, I don’t give a toss about that woman now. I’d be glad if she was dead. She can go to Hell for all I care.’

  I looked at him, and he looked so distressed I had to look away again.

  ‘Fuck her,’ said Alexander. He wiped his nose with his wrist, put down his glass and walked out of the room into the garden.

  I waited for a while, but he did not come back inside so I finished my drink and went quietly to my bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I SHOULD HAVE left then. I should have returned to Manchester, but I didn’t, even though it was obvious that Alexander and I were careering towards a disaster. Nothing was as I had imagined it. My romantic and, in retrospect, ridiculously naïve dream of setting up home in the country with a beautiful but damaged man and caring for his charismatic, tragic child seemed a million miles from the reality I now faced.

  For days after the police came Alexander retreated right back into himself. I felt sorry for him and my instincts were to reach out and coax him out of whatever dark place he was in, but the truth was I hardly knew him at all. I was afraid of making things worse, of adding to his distress or making him angry. I couldn’t think of any words of reassurance or comfort because, whichever way I looked at the situation, it looked the same. Genevieve was gone and nobody knew where she was, and until she returned, or at least let her family know she was safe, we would continue to live under the huge shadow cast by the cloud of her absence.

  Part of me wished she would return.

  Part of me hoped she would not.

  If such thoughts were going through my head, they must have been haunting Alexander too.

  When he was in the garden and I was inside, I watched him, searching his body language for clues. He moved like a man with a burden, always; when he was alone his fingers moved to the scarred place on his side and worried at it like a dog with a sore. Sometimes he would stand for ages simply staring out across the fields; maybe he was watching the birds or the clouds but I believed he was lost in thoughts of Genevieve and interminable ‘what if’ scenarios. It seemed to me that his sense of foreboding was worse than mine.

  At dinner I studied his face while he ate, or when he was listening to Jamie’s chatter and, although I searched, I found no trace of deceit. Alexander was evasive – often he refused to answer questions, even Jamie’s questions – but he did not lie. He would rather say nothing than tell a lie. I was sure of that. I was as sure as I could be.

  One day I asked him why he did not move away from Burrington Stoke if he was certain Genevieve was never coming back. Why not up sticks and start again somewhere else where nobody knew him or his history or what had happened? He told me he owed a debt to Genevieve’s father and that he could not leave until it had been repaid.

  ‘What kind of debt?’ I asked.

  ‘The money kind,’ he replied.

  And that was that. I already knew that, if I pushed, he would simply withdraw. So I was quiet, and I waited.

  I told May about Alexander’s debt during one of our regular telephone conversations while I was waiting outside the school for Jamie. It was one of the few places where I had a signal for my phone. I was looking for reassurances; I didn’t get them.

  May recounted several horror stories about people she had heard of who had been in debt and then rounded off with the statement: ‘Owing money is not a sign of good character.’ She said it in a manner that implied that was a gospel fact.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I said. ‘What about people who have money problems because they’re ill? Or because they’ve lost their jobs?’

  ‘Does either of those reasons apply to Alexander?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then stop being so defensive.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘Alexander’s working all hours to pay it back.’

  ‘It’s just one more thing, though, isn’t it? One more thing that’s wrong. Something else to add to the growing list of reasons why you shouldn’t stay in Somerset.’

  ‘I like it here,’ I said brightly, reverting to my preferred script. ‘It’s doing me good being away from Manchester.’

  ‘You don’t have to be there, though, do you? You could be in London or Edinburgh or Dublin or Leeds. You could be anywhere. You’re just infatuated with that man. He’s got some kind of hold over you. What’s it going to take to convince you to come home?’

  Then we went into a conversation we had already had many times. May tried, for the hundredth time, to persuade me to return to Manchester and, for the hundredth time, I refus
ed to budge. She told me that Laurie had called her to ask how I was; he’d been trying to contact me directly but the phone was always switched off.

  ‘It’s not switched off,’ I said. ‘I just don’t get any signal at Avalon. And, anyway, I don’t want to talk to him. Why would I?’

  ‘He just wants to know you’re OK. And also, Mum said the doctor’s written and …’

  ‘May, I have to go,’ I said. ‘The children are coming out of school. I’ll speak to you soon.’

  After that I made a vow not to tell May anything else about Alexander that could possibly be construed as a sign of bad character, and hurried through the afternoon to reach a point where I could relate the conversation to Alexander and reassure him that Genevieve had probably not been ignoring his phone calls but was simply in a place where there was no network coverage. When I told him he looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  ‘Don’t you think I thought of that?’ he asked. ‘I must have left a hundred messages.’

  ‘But you can’t retrieve messages without a signal!’

  ‘She’s not using her phone any more,’ he said. ‘The bills still come here but no calls are listed. She hasn’t used it in weeks.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Then I said: ‘Alexander, if Genevieve’s calls used to be listed …’

  ‘I’ve done that. I called every number on the bill I didn’t recognize, and asking Genny’s vet and hairdresser if they knew anything about the whereabouts of my wife didn’t get me anywhere apart from convincing people who were already suspicious that I was paranoid.’

  He scratched his head with both hands, furiously.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Look’ – he sighed and took hold of my hands, and he held them tight in his hands, his thumbs squeezing down – ‘I know you’re trying to help, Sarah, but please stop. It’s not your job to find Genevieve. It’s nothing to do with you. Let it be.’