‘Looks like the shit’s about to hit the fan,’ she said. ‘Those pictures are all over the place and Mrs Churchill was on the radio this morning talking about a reward.’
‘Oh no.’
‘And Midge told me there’d already been a newspaper reporter in the shop asking about Genevieve and what she was like and what people thought might have happened to her.’
I swallowed and looked past Roseanne up the road. I half-expected to see a pack of paparazzi hurtling towards me, but there was only a tractor trundling along.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. Her breath smelled of peppermint chewing gum.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Actually, I think I will go back to Avalon.’ I looked at Roseanne. I was going to ask her to come with me, but I realized it wouldn’t be fair.
‘I’ll see you later,’ I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
AUTUMN WAS DYING around us, pulling in its reds and golds, its berries and its dampness. On the moors, the bracken browned and collapsed. Seedheads were everywhere, tiny silver parachutes like fairies swarming over the walls and clinging to our clothes.
The posters were outside the house, in the village, even on the lamp posts outside the school gates. There was no avoiding them, so as much as possible, I stayed inside, where I was not obliged to look at the image of Genevieve’s smiling face, and where people could not look at me with mistrust and fear in their eyes.
For Jamie it was a game. He counted the pictures of Mummy in the village. Some days he counted twenty; some days he told me he’d counted to more than a thousand. The other children talked about the posters for a few days, but they soon became part of the landscape of the village, and were no longer remarkable. Even Jamie stopped looking.
It must have been terrible for Alexander, but he would not talk about his feelings. He went to work as usual, and came back and said nothing. Once, he was door-stepped at the yard by a photographer and a journalist; they tried to get him to talk, to ‘put the record straight’ by giving his side of the story, but he wouldn’t. He didn’t even mention it to me. I only knew because Betsy, whose sister worked in Castle Cary, told me at school the next day.
The prank calls increased in number and regularity. Sometimes the phone would ring thirty times in succession and, each time I answered, there was nobody there. Sometimes I didn’t say anything when I picked up the receiver, I just held it to my ear and held my breath, trying to hear the breathing of the person at the other end, but there was nothing. I tried dialling 1471 to retrieve the caller’s number, but always it had been withheld. When I told Alexander, he said it was obviously an automated cold-call system trying to connect. This was the only sensible explanation, but it never happened if Alexander or Jamie answered the phone. When they picked up the receiver there was always a perfectly normal human being on the other end of the line.
At first I suspected the silent calls were part of a campaign of disapproval by the villagers. Maybe somebody was watching the house to see who picked up the telephone and muting the call if it was me. Then, one evening, when all the curtains were drawn, the phone rang again. Nobody looking at the house from outside would know who was going to answer. I held my breath, picked up the receiver and held it to the side of my face.
Again, there was nothing. Only, it felt like more than nothing; there were whispers in the low-level static buzz down the line. A chill went through me. The fingers on the hand that was holding the phone began to tingle. I dropped it and the handset swung stupidly on its cord, to and fro, between the legs of the dining-room table. I jabbed at the button on the base to cut off the call, but it didn’t cut off; I could still hear the buzz that hid the silence. Only the caller could terminate the call. I picked up the handset and banged it back into its cradle.
‘Stop it!’ I told the telephone. ‘Please stop it!’
I steadied myself against the table and told myself not to be stupid. It was an inanimate object, that was all. It didn’t have feelings, it was incapable of malice.
Still, I didn’t dare pick up the handset again, because I knew perfectly well that, if I did, that ghostly static would still be there.
When the telephone rang the next time, I disconnected the cable at the wall socket.
A few evenings later, I was standing at the kitchen sink peeling carrots. The potatoes were already cooking in a big pan of boiling water on the hob, and the room was warm and steamy. I put the carrots into the colander and crossed to the window, to open the skylight to let out the steam. The panes were hazy. I reached up to the skylight latch and, clear as anything, saw two words written in the condensation on the window, as if someone had spelled them out with a hasty, shaky finger. HELP ME.
I dropped the colander. Alex came in to see what had happened and made me sit down.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked, and I nodded.
‘I just came over a bit faint,’ I said. He put the kettle on and, when I dared to look, the window had steamed over again and the words were gone. I must have imagined them.
Eventually, I casually suggested to Alex that Genevieve might possibly be behind the silent phone calls. They were coming so often now, usually when I was alone, that I felt as if I could not stand them any longer. It had reached the point where I was becoming afraid to pick up the phone even to call May.
‘Of course it’s not Genevieve,’ Alexander said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because it isn’t! It can’t be!’
I gazed at Alexander.
‘Because,’ he repeated, ‘if Genevieve had something to say, she would come out and say it. She wouldn’t do some freakish heavy-breathing act down the line. That wasn’t her style.’
‘There isn’t any breathing,’ I said miserably.
Alexander took my hands in his and squeezed.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘if the calls are bothering you that much, just keep the line unplugged.’
That could have been a solution, but I didn’t like keeping the line unconnected when I was at Avalon on my own, because it was the only sure means of communicating with the outside world. As a compromise, Alexander and I worked out a system. When he called he did a two-ring code first, and I asked Betsy and May to do the same. I told May it was because we were being bothered by salespeople. We stopped subscribing to the answerphone service and, if I didn’t hear the code, I didn’t pick up the phone.
Neil left a message on my mobile asking what was going on. He called from work, obviously not wanting May to hear what he had to say. He said he’d seen a background feature about Genevieve’s childhood that was being touted round the papers by a south-west news agency ‘ready for when the big story broke’, together with photographs. The news desk at NWM was collating information about the Churchills. He asked me to call him urgently. I didn’t. In my increasing paranoia I was worried that he might betray me, or that I would somehow betray Alexander.
I watched Alexander, and he moved around me, sometimes warming me with his smile and his touch, sometimes, more frequently now, even when Jamie was in Avalon, coming into my bed secretively like a night-creature hard and sinewy and masculine; a wolf. He possessed me silently and I allowed it because our love-making overrode all other thoughts, all anxieties. I knew he was thinking, as I was, that we had nothing left to lose.
At other times, he was oblivious to me. I may as well not have existed. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he ignored Jamie too. Then I made an extra effort with the child, to compensate. The two of us established a rapport that was independent of Alexander, and it was something that we both fell back on when he was in one of his uncommunicative moods. I was terrified Jamie would pick up some cruel insinuation in the playground and that he would come home one day full of renewed mistrust of me, but so far that had not happened. He was young enough, and his friends were young and innocent enough, to be largely oblivious to the gossip and the rumours
and the suspicions.
Jamie was the only person in my life with whom I could relax completely. He did not judge me, or doubt my motives; he accepted me as I was. I loved sitting on the settee beside him as he, forgetting himself, cuddled into me, putting his hot feet on to my lap, leaning his head against my chest to be soothed by my heartbeat. I knew him so well by then: I knew every tiny part of his body, I worried over every bruise and scab, I delighted in his strong bones, his perfect skin, his eyelashes. He came home one day with a note about head lice and, sure enough, when I combed his hair I found a tiny creature caught in the tines of the comb. He sat patiently in the bath while I washed his hair and doused it with medicated shampoo, and I told him a made-up story about a family of dinosaurs who lived in a cave in the quarry while I went over his scalp with a metal nit-comb and wiped the resultant debris on a pad of toilet tissue.
‘That was a good story,’ Jamie said sleepily, over the thumb that was in his mouth, as I rinsed his deloused hair with warm water. ‘Can we do that again tomorrow?’
I tried not to let thoughts of Genevieve spoil my time with Jamie. I tried not to let her come between us. I told myself that it wasn’t my fault I was growing so close to her son. She was the one who had chosen to go away and leave him. She was the one who had created the hole in his life and, if somebody had to fill it, then why not me?
I wondered if Genevieve had any idea what was going on in the village. She must, surely, be in contact with somebody. There must be a spy, somewhere, who was letting her know that Jamie was OK. Or did she trust Alexander enough to know that he would never let the boy suffer?
The next time the phone rang, I counted one, two, three rings and then I picked it up. All I could hear was the faint static rustle.
‘Genevieve,’ I said, but my voice caught on the word and it came out faint and strange. ‘Genevieve, if that’s you, please would you let your family know you’re all right because everyone’s so worried; nobody knows where you are. Please, Genevieve …’
I heard something down the line. Something changed: the static became more high-pitched, so high and frantic that it hurt the inside of my head, like fingernails on a blackboard.
‘Genevieve?’ I asked, and the handset leapt out of my hand, wrenching back my wrist, and threw itself against the dining-room wall. The casing shattered and shards of plastic flew everywhere. I was too shocked to scream. I ran in my socks out into the garden and I huddled in the hay in the old horse trailer until it was time to meet Jamie from school.
Everyone stared at me. I had no coat, even though it was cold and the nights were drawing in, and I was wearing a pair of filthy old wellingtons that I’d found in the trailer.
‘Are you all right?’ Betsy asked.
‘Yes, fine.’
‘Only’ – she took my elbow and moved me away from the other women – ‘no offence, Sarah, but you look a bit freaked out.’
I sat with Jamie in the library, counting the minutes until I knew Alexander would be back at Avalon.
We bought fish and chips for supper because I had nothing else prepared, and I warmed them up in the oven and waited for Alexander to find the broken telephone.
‘What happened?’ he asked, coming into the kitchen and carrying the shattered appliance in both hands as if it were an injured bird. Bits of wire and metal stuck out of the casing and the wire trailed behind him. ‘Somebody must have really upset you.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the mushy peas I was heating in a pan on the hob.
Alexander laughed. ‘Who was it then?’
I looked up at him. His expression was a combination of amusement and confusion.
I opened my mouth, and then I closed it again.
‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘It must have been an electrical surge.’
Alexander looked at me, trying to work out if I was joking or not. When I didn’t respond, he sighed, and threw the whole telephone into the kitchen bin.
He thought I was acting oddly, I knew he did, but I wasn’t the cause of our troubles. It wasn’t me, it was Genevieve or, more precisely, Genevieve gone away.
Her absence was at the centre of everything.
Alexander came home the next day with two shiny new cordless telephone handsets in a box, one for upstairs, one for downstairs. He spent a while charging their batteries and making them work. They smelled fresh, of chemicals and polythene.
I made more of an effort to stay in touch with my family back home. I recognized the pattern between Genevieve and me, how both of us had fled a situation for our various reasons, and how difficult that was for the people who loved us, and who we’d left behind. It was easy for me to keep the lines of communication open, and I made sure I did.
‘Do people ask about me?’ I asked May the next time we spoke.
‘Of course they do,’ she said. ‘They wonder if you’re all right and when you’re coming home.’
‘What do you tell them?’
‘I tell them you’re no more screwed up than usual and that we expect to see you when you run out of money.’
‘Thanks for your support.’
‘That’s OK. Sarah …’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Laurie called round the other day. He wanted to know … God, this is difficult …’
‘Just tell me.’
‘He wanted to know if it would be all right to give your pushchair to his sister. She’s pregnant again.’
I looked up at the ceiling. Suddenly I felt furious. I was angry with Laurie for even asking. Why couldn’t he just make a decision by himself? And also I was angry with May for passing on the message and reminding me that my son was dead and that life was moving on, and most of all I was angry with myself for feeling so upset. Now I wanted to smash the phone against the wall.
‘Tell him to do whatever he wants,’ I said coldly. ‘Like he normally does.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
BY MID-NOVEMBER I began to feel as if I were a prisoner in Avalon. The nights were closing right in, and the weather was cold and wet. I only normally left the house to fetch Jamie from school. Once a week Alexander drove me to the supermarket on the outskirts of Glastonbury to shop for the week’s groceries so there was no need to keep going to and from the Spar. I didn’t like being in the village any more. If I was compelled to go on some urgent errand, I wrapped myself up and huddled along, with my chin tucked into my collar and the hair blowing across my face, hoping nobody would notice me.
There didn’t seem to be a problem with the new telephones. They rang infrequently, but when they did ring, there was always somebody there. I convinced myself that there must have been a fault with the old one. That would explain the silent calls and its violent self-destruction.
Because I spent so much time in the house, I had a lot of time for drawing. I’d always enjoyed it and it was one of the few activities that demanded my full concentration and stopped me thinking about Genevieve.
Alexander was not a man for compliments, but he said my pictures were good. He said I should take them into Wells and tout them around the art shops. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would pay money for anything I’d drawn but he said I should give it a go, because otherwise I’d never know. He said it would get me out of the house and give me something to take my mind off things.
So I picked out the best drawings and caught the bus into Wells with my portfolio under my arm.
There were several small art shops in the city. It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to go in, and the lady in the first shop was polite but unenthusiastic about my pictures. The owner of the very next shop, a willowy woman who wore a long cardigan and spectacles on a chain around her neck, could not have been kinder. She wasn’t so interested in the sketches of Jamie but liked the pencil drawings of flowers. She said they were intimate and sensual. Even more than the flowers, she liked my coloured drawings of apples, not beautiful, perfect apples but the damaged, misshapen ones, the windfalls that
looked so ugly but whose flesh tasted so divine.
We drank ginger tea sweetened with honey and ate the thinnest cinnamon biscuits, and then the gallery owner chose four pictures to frame. Two were apple studies and two were drawings of fading roses. The woman said they were subtly erotic, but honestly I don’t know how she came to that conclusion. We agreed to share the framing costs and she would do her best to sell them. I felt so happy I practically skipped out of the gallery. I longed to call Alexander to tell him the good news, but I knew he didn’t like being disturbed at work.
The art shop was huddled cosily amongst a number of very nice upmarket chi-chi little shops that were already preparing for Christmas. I spent a while wandering up and down the street looking in the windows, and bought a few bits and pieces.
It was only Wells, the smallest city in England if you don’t count the City of London, but it had traffic and shoppers and people talking into their mobile phones. It had a pub that used to be the town gaol, pretty almshouses, a moated bishop’s palace and a cosy archway leading into the cathedral gardens. It did not have suspicious glances and posters of Genevieve and women who looked me up and down. That day, Wells could have been a million miles from Burrington Stoke. It felt deliciously cosmopolitan. I had a few errands to run. I went to the post office and to the bank, and dropped an envelope full of invoices off at the office of Alexander’s accountant.
After that, feeling more cheerful and normal than I had for a while, I went into a coffee shop and treated myself to a proper coffee, a panini and a magazine. I found a seat by a sunny window that overlooked the quaint cobbled streets and was eating my lunch while reading a magazine about celebrities that Laurie would have thoroughly disapproved of when a voice at my shoulder said: ‘Hello, it’s Sarah, isn’t it?’
I turned and looked into the face of a smiling man who was attractive in that rugged, confident way some older men are. He was holding out a hand in greeting and balancing a mug of coffee and a pastry in the other.
The Secrets Between Us Page 17