by Caro Fraser
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rachel stared out unseeingly at the dark streets, the people, the lights, her head leaning heavily against the seat. The sobs fell away from her and gradually ceased, but still tears flowed, sliding down her cheeks. She wondered that anyone could have so many tears inside them, thinking of last night in Felicity’s flat. She turned her head away from the window and watched, through the dancing blur of her tears, Leo’s hands upon the steering wheel, changing gear, his elbow leaning on the door and his chin resting on one hand as they drew up to some traffic lights. She lifted her eyes to his face; he was staring straight ahead, his face a blank.
Rachel’s body felt inert, and the dizzying patterns which had swum in her brain in the Guildhall had now subsided. There was a slackness in her mind which would scarcely admit sensible thought. She knew dimly that she should feel wretched and embarrassed at what had happened, her hysteria, but nothing in her was capable of proper feeling. She realised now that whatever Felicity had given her in the office had not been aspirin, but she could not even feel angry about that. She just wanted time to wash it away, for normality to return – but above all, she did not want to be alone.
She looked at Leo’s face again, closed her eyes and then opened them. He must think that I am a nuisance and an embarrassment, she thought – but it did not trouble her. He had rescued her, and he would stay with her. That was all that mattered, until this thing inside her went away.
In fact, Leo was thinking about his case the following day, an application to set aside the arrest of a ship in Falmouth. He had ceased to think about Rachel, whom he intended to send home in a taxi after a couple of cups of black coffee and a brief lecture on the folly of drinking on top of drugs.
When they reached Mayfair, it took Leo some time and trouble to find a parking place near to the mews.
‘You can’t drive home tonight,’ he remarked. ‘If I leave it here you can get a taxi later and pick it up tomorrow.’ He turned off the engine.
They got out and she followed him up the cobbled mews to the door of his house. He went in ahead of her, switching on lights, and she followed him up into a long, low room, sparsely furnished, with deep leather sofas and pale, muted lighting. Rachel stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, near to a low square table. Leo switched on a lamp that stood on the table, tugged off his tie and threw it with his jacket onto one of the sofas.
‘Sit down,’ he said to Rachel, as he walked past her to the kitchen. ‘Or lie down,’ he added. ‘You probably need to.’
She was struck by the casual chill of his voice. I’m just being a bore, a nuisance, she thought. I should have let him take me home, or find me a taxi. But she felt so odd, so alienated, that the idea of returning home alone was impossible.
She edged towards the kitchen door, watching him spoon coffee into a cafetiere, his movements brisk, as though he wanted to give her coffee and get rid of her. ‘May I wash my face, please?’ she asked. ‘I feel a bit of a mess.’
‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Second door on the left.’
She went into the bathroom, as clinical and impersonal as the living room, and splashed water onto her face and rubbed it dry. She glanced up into the mirror. Her face looked very pale, but her eyes were hardly red at all; instead they looked dark and luminous. She wondered what it was that wretched girl had given her. Whatever it had been, it was still working within her, not with the heightened euphoria of an hour ago, but as a soporific, fuzzing her consciousness. She took a comb from her bag and combed her hair over and over again, the sensation clearing her brain slightly, then lifted her hair back from her face with both hands, letting it fall over her shoulders.
When she went back through, Leo had laid two cups and the pot of coffee on the little table. ‘Sugar?’ he asked.
‘No. No, thank you,’ she murmured, and stared vacantly at the steam rising from the pot into the dimly lit air of the room.
‘You still have your coat on,’ remarked Leo, bending to fetch something from a cupboard.
She glanced down, then slowly unbuttoned her coat and laid it on top of his jacket. She sat down stiffly next to it, her limbs feeling heavy and chilled. Leo came back over with a bottle of brandy and a glass.
‘Not for you,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of the sofa opposite. ‘You’ve had more than enough interesting things for one evening, I’d say.’
She watched as he poured coffee into each cup, then slopped some brandy into his glass. The light from the lamp cut his face into angles, throwing shadows beneath his brow and cheekbones and in the hollow of his neck where he had unbuttoned his shirt. Rachel felt quite tranquil now, mesmerised, happy just to let each moment follow the next in a steady, neat progression.
He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled them back, then drank some brandy and looked up at her. ‘Drink your coffee,’ he said. ‘You need it. Then tell me what all that was about.’ He paused, and added, ‘You’re not the first person Roger’s made a pass at, you know. He wasn’t exactly trying to rape you. Or maybe it was whatever you’d been taking earlier in the evening.’ His voice was caustic, impatient.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, lifting her cup to her lips and staring straight at him.
‘I have been around long enough to know the signs,’ he replied. ‘You’re as high as a kite. Not very sensible to go drinking champagne on top of it. No wonder you overreacted to Roger.’
She set down her cup. ‘It was …’ she began. Then she suddenly felt very tired; was it even worth the bother of explaining to him? ‘It was something my secretary gave me before she went home. I thought it was aspirin.’
‘Your secretary?’ exclaimed Leo.
‘I think she did it with good intentions. I think she thought it would help me …’ And the tears began again; she could not help them, but simply sat, watching the outline of her coffee cup swim. ‘I know I was stupid to react to Roger like that,’ she whispered, feeling something brimming up inside her, the feeling that if she did not speak, if she did not let it all spill out to someone’s ears, then she would suffocate or choke on it. ‘But you know, people use words so carelessly. When you’ve been raped once, you keep – you keep thinking—’ She stopped and cupped her hands over her mouth, stifling her sobs.
Leo stared at her in alarm. Oh, God, this was that girl Anthony had told him about. He hadn’t made the connection. The one who couldn’t let anyone near her. He thought of what he’d said a moment ago, and cursed himself.
He stood up and came round the table and stood over her. Then he reached down, bundled his jacket and her coat together and gently made her lie back on the sofa, pillowing them beneath her head, stroking her hair softly with one hand as she wept. Then he knelt down next to her and looked at her thoughtfully. Eventually the crying stopped and she lay there, her face wet, staring up at the ceiling, her eyes deep and dark from whatever drug it was she had taken.
I can’t send her home like this, he thought. Not in this state. He remembered what Anthony had told him that day in El Vino’s, and his curiosity was aroused. There was something going on here that was well beyond Anthony’s handling.
‘Tell me,’ he said softly after a moment. ‘Come on. You’re safe here, and you’ve got things inside you that you want to get out.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Haven’t you?’ She said nothing. ‘So start at the beginning and tell me. I promise it will make you feel better. I promise.’
She looked trustingly into his face, then a faint frown of anxiety touched her features. ‘Has Anthony told you anything about me?’ she asked, her voice very soft. ‘I know you’re quite close to one another,’ she added. Leo gave a wry smile. ‘He talks a lot about you …’
He hesitated, and then nodded, stroking the line of his jaw with one finger. ‘He’s told me a little. That you seem – afraid of him, perhaps. That’s all.’
She sighed and looked away. ‘I think you’re right,’ she said. ‘I think I do have to tell someone.’ She glanced back at him.
‘I thought that telling psychiatrists and all those people I used to see …’ Her voice trailed away. There was a pause. ‘I was going to talk to Felicity about it last night. That’s my secretary,’ she added.
‘The one with the line in useful pills.’
Rachel smiled in spite of herself. ‘Yes. I think she’s a great believer in drugs.’ Her fingers fiddled with the buttons on the front of her dress. She felt foolish lying down with Leo kneeling next to her, listening to her, but somehow she had neither the desire nor the strength to move. Just to talk. ‘We smoked some stuff she had last night, and it made me sort of want to talk about it …’
‘My, you do get around,’ murmured Leo, pulling a cushion from the end of the sofa and making himself more comfortable. He felt it important that he should stay near to her. Sexuality in all its forms fascinated him, and here was some well-repressed experience that he thought might be very interesting.
‘… but I couldn’t. Maybe I should have.’
‘Tell me now,’ said Leo quietly. ‘Tell me what makes you so afraid.’
There was a long, deep silence, and then Rachel, her blurred black eyes searching the farthest shadows of the room, began to talk.
‘It goes back a long way, I suppose. To my father. I think it must have begun when I was about eight or so. Just coming to my room at night, touching me, telling me things. And then, as I got older, I began to realise that he shouldn’t be doing those things. That it was wrong. But it went on, and the things he did got worse. I couldn’t tell my mother – how could I? Then eventually – I don’t think I really meant to – I told a teacher at school. I was fourteen. And then – then the very worst part of it began.’ She took a deep breath. ‘They took my father away – I really did love him, you know, in a way, even though he did those things to me – and the days just began to get awful. My mother screaming, the most awful, hateful things at me, that I was a liar, that I’d destroyed our family and my father—’ Rachel put her hands over her eyes, tears trickling between her fingers. ‘I didn’t know what they would do to my father. And this woman – I don’t know what she was, a social worker, or a policewoman, or something …’ She stopped, sniffing back her tears. Leo pulled the silk handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket beneath her head and handed it to her.
‘Here,’ he said. Then he picked up his brandy and sipped it, watching her.
She took the handkerchief and mopped her eyes, then went on. ‘This woman told me I would have to go to court, give evidence. And I couldn’t face the thought of that. I couldn’t.’ She shook her head and stared at Leo’s dark blue handkerchief, stained with her tears. ‘So I ran away. But they found me, and they – I suppose they took me into care for a little while. I don’t know. There was an assessment centre, and I used to have to talk to these child psychiatrists every day. Counsellors, they’re called now. My mother came to visit me, and she didn’t yell and shout any more. She was very withdrawn and quiet. I don’t think she really wanted to have to see me, to think about what my father had done …’
Leo regarded her gravely, saying nothing.
‘So then,’ she sighed, folding the handkerchief into a neat square and dabbing at her eyes, ‘they told me that my father was going to plead guilty, and that I wouldn’t have to go to court … And in the end my father went to prison, and I went home to my mother. I had to face everyone at school. They weren’t meant to know, but they all did, of course. I never went out. I was taboo. Tainted. The three years after that were a nightmare. I just wanted them to be over so I could get away from home. I knew there wasn’t any point in running away again. There wasn’t anywhere to go. The worst part was the constant feeling that my mother blamed me, that she thought I’d made him do those things, that I wanted them.’ She drew a shuddering breath. ‘It was as though she was thinking about it every time she looked at me. They got divorced, and I haven’t seen my father since. I don’t think my mother has, either. I don’t see her much. She moved to Bath, got a job there. She’s become very bright and extrovert, the way she used to be. I think she’s had a few boyfriends. But she doesn’t want me there. I remind her of – of all that.’ She sighed and unfolded the handkerchief. ‘I spoil the mood. Anyway, at the end of those three years I got away, went to university to study law.’ She stopped, and there was silence for a while.
Leo reached behind him and picked up his brandy again, and took a sip. ‘And?’
She put a hand up to her forehead and stared at the ceiling. Her pupils were still dilated, velvet-black centres to her blue eyes. Leo wondered whether she would be telling him this if she were completely in control.
‘And – I thought I had put it all behind me. I thought I could just be a normal human being. There wasn’t any damage, after all … none that you could see.’ Her voice was very quiet. ‘But I gradually discovered that there was something not right with me. Boys used to ask me out – they never did at school, only later – but when it came to – when they wanted to touch me, I would just freeze. I didn’t want them to. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want them anywhere near me. I hadn’t really hated my father until then – I’d just felt sorry for him. But I began to see what he’d done, how he’d ruined part of me …’ Rachel ran her tongue over her lips, her mouth dry.
‘Your coffee’s gone cold,’ said Leo. ‘Here, have a little of this.’ And he handed her the brandy glass. ‘I don’t think it can do much harm.’ If anything, he wanted to keep her suspended in this blank, talkative state, desiring more and more of the details of her past, scraps of her darkness.
Rachel took a swallow of the brandy and lay back again.
‘You would have thought that that would be enough, that God would let it go at that …’ She closed her eyes, little sweet drifts of alcohol coursing through her limbs and her brain. She was glad to be talking, glad to let it empty out of her like liquid from a vessel, the past flowing into nowhere. ‘Actually, it seemed to be getting better after a while. I went to see a psychiatrist again, I began to come to terms with what had happened, to look at it, think about it.’ She paused. ‘A kind of exorcism, I suppose. And then I met this boy. He was in the year above me at university. He was very quiet, very much his own person. I met him at a Union debate. He was sitting next to me. I didn’t usually go to those things, but …’ Her gaze wandered round the room, lighting on pictures and pieces of sculpture. It was as though everything in the room was poised, listening. ‘Anyway, we began to go out together. Not as—just as friends, you know. We liked the same things, films, books. I think he was a bit shy of girls … I hadn’t really had a close friend, ever. Not since childhood … I had girlfriends at university, of course, but they must have—well, I suppose I kept at a distance, because I couldn’t do any of the things they did. So Alan was my friend, my closest friend, and I thought things were getting better for me, because I liked him being near me. I think I wanted something to happen. A love affair. Someone of my own. I know I did …’
Leo studied her face, the way the lamplight shone on the curve of her cheekbones and the dark depths of her eyes, the movement of her lips as she spoke. He watched with fascination as tears came shimmering, unspilt, to the surface of her eyes, then slid down across the fine skin of her cheeks. Her mouth trembled. He waited. She breathed deeply again, stroked away the tears with the backs of her fingers, lifted his handkerchief to her face.
‘There had been someone – there had been a man around the campus, attacking people. Girls. We were all told – oh, you know. We were all told not to go out alone, not to be on the campus after dark, to be on the look out.’ She turned her face to look at him, her dark eyes fastened on his. ‘But I wasn’t the kind who went around with other girls, in pairs. And I didn’t think it could happen to me. I didn’t think I could go on being hurt …’ Her voice was no more than a whisper. To his surprise her mouth tilted into something like a smile. ‘But, of course, who better to choose than someone who was already a victim? So, to add to it all, I was raped – and
there was this nightmare starting all over again, police and people talking at me, those soothing voices going on and on, prodding at me, uncovering everything …’ She put her hands over her eyes again and cried without speaking for a few moments. Then eventually she took her hands away. She turned to look at the brandy glass which Leo held. ‘Do you think I could have some more, please? Just a little.’ Leo handed her the glass and she finished it.
‘What happened to you?’ asked Leo, breaking the silence.
‘Afterwards? Oh, I suppose I went completely to pieces. Poor Alan tried to comfort me, to stay near, but it couldn’t go back to the way it had been. I drove him away. Couldn’t handle it – not even having him as a friend. And there I was. Just a wreck. The university were very good. They let me take time off, stay back a year.’ She sighed. ‘I think my studying, my work, was the only thing that helped me survive.’ She gave a shaky little laugh and glanced at the handkerchief, crushing it into a damp ball. ‘Not that I did, really. I just exist. That’s all I’ve ever done since. Which is why I was so stupid this evening, and why I’ve made such a mess of this thing with Anthony …’
Leo suddenly thought of Anthony, remembering a time when Anthony, too, had sat in this room. When Leo had sought to make him his lover. The memory was oddly disturbing.
‘How – how did this man rape you?’ asked Leo.
She stared at him. ‘You want me to tell you?’ Her voice was very soft, lightened by surprise. Her eyes were still very dark and far away.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ she wondered.
‘In case it helps,’ replied Leo, lying. ‘To get rid of everything, I mean.’
Rachel had never imagined she could recount to anyone what had happened. Even for the police she had dragged out only the barest facts. They had never caught him, anyway. She had only sketched the event for Dr Michaels, leaning instead on an account of her own subsequent feelings, making that the important thing. But now she told Leo, running back in her mind over every moment. It seemed to her as though she heard her own voice coming from a distance as she spoke. And Leo listened, scanning her face, saying nothing, his blue gaze mesmeric, a muscle in his cheek flickering. Why am I telling him this? she wondered suddenly. We don’t even know one another. Why does he want to hear? She stopped.