She arrived at the Brasco Lounge with ten minutes to spare. Once through the doors, the contrast with the outside world was stark. The shabby-chic decor with its bare-wood tables and mismatched chairs was warm and welcoming, although not quite relaxing enough to quell Elle’s nerves. She checked the scattering of windswept customers who were holding onto steaming cups and chatting to their companions. No one appeared to be anxiously awaiting her arrival.
Elle stood at the bar and stared at the wine list. A glass of pinot was tempting but she would be driving later. Besides, she didn’t want to leave any lingering smell of alcohol for Rick to pick up on. She ordered a latte and, like her fellow refugees from the storm, hugged it to her as she settled into a worn leather sofa in a far corner of the glass-fronted restaurant.
She had the perfect vantage point to people-watch and spent her time second guessing who would stumble on by and who would be drawn into the warmth of the restaurant. She pitied the trail of schoolchildren in bright-red blazers who were being shepherded towards the waterfront and she hoped for their sake that they were heading for the nearby Museum of Liverpool and not a brisk walk along the promenade. She was so preoccupied that she almost missed the elegant woman in a dark blue woollen coat with matching hat that she kept in place with a leather gloved hand. She seemed sophisticated and Elle guessed her to be about sixty. She was about to dismiss her as a possible candidate when the woman stepped through the door, took a deep breath and then looked straight towards her. A flicker of recognition crossed her face.
‘Elaine?’ she asked as she drew nearer.
‘I haven’t been called that for years,’ Elle said. It had been Rick’s idea to reinvent his wife. He would have loved her to complete the transformation by being as well-spoken as Corinne, but although her accent had softened over the years, she clung to her roots out of loyalty and a good measure of obstinacy.
There was polite argument about getting drinks, which Elle won. By the time she returned with two coffees and a couple of slices of cake, Corinne had slipped out of her woollen camouflage. She looked more elegant than ever, with silky, straight white hair pinned back neatly in a French twist and a simple shift dress with matching midnight blue jacket. Elle felt decidedly underdressed in her jeans and oversized shirt.
They had spoken only briefly to arrange the meeting. Elle had merely explained who she was and had told Corinne that she had something that belonged to her. Now, five minutes into the showdown, the conversation seemed to be stalled on polite pleasantries. Elle had lost her nerve and one look at the chocolate cake she had mistakenly ordered made her fight back a wave of nausea.
‘So, what is it you want to know?’ Corinne asked.
The directness of the question jolted Elle out of her mental paralysis, but rather than answer immediately she placed the prepared stack of envelopes on the table in front of her. ‘You loved my dad once, didn’t you?’
The twinkle in Corinne’s eye was one of surprise. ‘I thought these were lost for ever. May I?’ She picked up the letters and began leafing through them as she spoke. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in denying it, is there?’
‘I’d like to think the time for keeping secrets is over,’ Elle replied. ‘Please, I need to know.’
Before answering, Corinne wrapped her hands around her letters as if she could absorb each and every word she had written. ‘Your dad and I were in love, yes. I’d even go so far as to say to that we were star-crossed lovers – or so we thought at the time. I came from a very middle-class family. My father was an MP who had great expectations for his only child. I was about to head off to Cambridge to study languages when I met Harry. The sixties may sound like a liberating time to grow up in, but this was very early on, practically still the fifties in many respects, and the old class distinctions were as strong as ever. Your dad saw the division even if I refused to acknowledge it.’
‘You put a lot of effort into reassuring my dad that he was good enough for you.’
‘And I failed miserably,’ she added. ‘It drove a wedge between us in the end. I did well at university and one of my father’s contacts offered me a one-year placement overseas as an interpreter. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to finish my education and return home to Harry and become a teacher, but he thought I would be making a huge sacrifice. I didn’t see it that way. We could have been happy, but he wouldn’t listen. Out of the blue he decided to join the navy. He promised that when he became a naval officer he would finally be able to take his place by my side. Later, when he realized that wasn’t going to happen, he ended our relationship.’
Corinne had already picked out the envelope that held the very last letter she had sent him. She took it out and stared at it.
‘And was it the end?’
When Corinne looked up, her eyes were glistening but she staunched her tears as she watched Elle place another smaller set of exhibits on the table in front of her. Corinne had the good grace to blush.
‘I went on to become a teacher – that part of my life at least went according to plan. And as you know, your dad became a teacher too. It was inevitable I suppose that our paths would cross again.’
‘Had he always wanted to teach?’ Elle asked. It was a question she had never before considered. She had grown up knowing that he had once been in the navy and she had simply assumed his training had given him the skills and discipline to take up physical education.
From the look on Elle’s face it was obvious she’d already started making the connections for herself. So Corinne answered, ‘No. He deliberately chose teaching so there was a chance we would bump into each other again.’
‘He told you that?’
Corinne nodded.
‘But he met Mum before he left the navy. Which means that while he was deciding to settle down with her, he still picked out a career that would lead him back to you,’ Elle said, thinking out loud.
Corinne nodded again but less confidently this time, even though it was a statement of fact.
‘And when your paths crossed again, you resumed your affair.’
Corinne had taken a sip of coffee and took her time placing it back on the saucer. She dabbed her lips with a serviette. ‘We resumed our friendship,’ she said carefully. ‘And yes, it was a friendship that was secret from our respective spouses, but a friendship nonetheless. We both had families and your dad took his responsibilities seriously.’
‘So he stayed with Mum, the woman who wasn’t too good for him, out of duty?’ Elle asked, the words catching at the back of her throat.
‘Isn’t it possible that he loved us both?’
Elle shook her head. As someone who struggled to love just one person, it was beyond her comprehension that someone could truly love two people at the same time. Not honourably, at least.
‘The point is, he stayed. That was the path he chose. I, on the other hand, didn’t have quite the same sense of duty or honour. It was ironic, frustrating even that your dad always believed I was his better but I was the one who walked out on my marriage. I had married for all the wrong reasons. I was expected to fill the mould my parents had prepared for me and, at the time, I was happy to go along with their plans because I wanted to punish Harry for rejecting me. But I ended up wasting too much of my life with the wrong man. Even though it became clear that I couldn’t be with the one I loved, I couldn’t continue to live a lie.’
‘But my dad could,’ Elle said flatly. ‘Did he get in touch after you sent him the sympathy card?’
Corinne was busy tidying up the pile of envelopes, seemingly preoccupied. ‘I met your dad briefly a few months after your mum died.’ She was shaking her head. ‘He was inconsolable. He felt so guilty.’
‘But you were both free, weren’t you?’ Elle challenged. ‘Why didn’t you make up for lost time?’
Corinne seemed not to be listening. ‘He thought she’d burnt them all. Where did you find them?’
‘My son found them buried in a box in the garden. Hold on a m
inute … She burnt them? Mum?’ Elle asked, not quite ready to let her mind process the information. Slowly the truth revealed itself like a slow-motion train wreck. ‘Oh my God. Mum found the box and she came to the same conclusion that I came to. Even if she had been aware of Dad’s earlier relationship with you, she would have seen the tickets. She would have known.’
Ellie was desperate for Corinne to jump in and correct her assumptions, but her response was an almost imperceptible nod. ‘He tried to convince her that he had remained faithful but …’
‘But you don’t have to have sex to break your marriage vows,’ Elle finished for her.
In the silence that followed, she scrutinized the old lady’s face. There was something Corinne wasn’t telling her.
‘I don’t remember them falling out. When was this?’ Elle asked, but then didn’t wait for the answer. She had worked it out for herself. ‘If my dad thought the letters had been burned then it could only have been mum who buried them in the garden. Despite everything, she still loved him. She couldn’t destroy something that he cared so deeply about. Charlie was just four years old when she died. If he can remember her burying the box then it must have been shortly before she had the stroke …’ She pushed herself back hard against the sofa, as far away from the letters as she could possibly manage. ‘That was why she died. Those bits of paper are what killed her.’
‘Harry was wracked with guilt, Elle. He blamed himself and it destroyed him. He could barely face me.’
Elle stood up so quickly she jarred her shin against the table. ‘I have to go.’
Without a backward glance she made her way through the restaurant and was still buttoning up her coat as she stepped out into the storm. She walked towards the river and carried on walking. Elle was two miles away before she found what she had been looking for: a section of the promenade that was completed deserted. She leaned over the railings and looked down into the raging waters below. Her frozen hands wrapped tightly around the cold metal. She wasn’t thinking, her mind as numb as her fingers. All she could see was the thread of her life unravelling year by year, zigzagging at a furious rate. She put her booted foot on the lower bar of the railings, which lifted her a few inches higher. She didn’t want to think, she didn’t want to be shocked out of the trance. Denial was a state of mind that had served her well for years. Elle had only enough strength to keep one thought and one person in her mind’s eye. Charlie. His face acted like a dam but the pressure kept building until she couldn’t hold it back any more. She stared down into the grey depths of the Mersey and then without warning the first emotions were ripped from her body and her screams were whipped away by a pitiless arctic gale.
9
The distant clatter of a spaceship crashing to earth was swiftly followed by a small boy’s mournful cries. Next came a frustrated sigh closer to home. ‘What the hell is wrong with that child?’ Rick asked.
‘I’ll go and check.’
‘No, leave him!’ he barked. ‘He’s got to learn that you’re not at his beck and call.’
Elle didn’t respond. She had done very little talking in the last few days. She had screamed herself hoarse as she stood at the edge of the river and if she wasn’t talking to Charlie, she found she had barely any energy or inclination to speak at all.
‘Do you have to skulk around with that miserable look on your face?’
There wasn’t even a flicker of a reaction from Elle. She was staring intently at the magazine on her lap where impossibly happy faces smiled up at her.
‘It’s your own fault. I told you not to go to your dad’s house, you haven’t got the mettle for it. Thank God it’s been cleared now. I’m telling you, Elle, you’re not to go back there again. That part of your life is over. It’s time to move on. Elle? Are you even listening to me?’
Elle had been listening. In fact it was fair to say she was seeing and hearing things far more clearly than she had in a very long time. She closed the magazine. ‘I’m going up to him,’ she said, pushing herself off the sofa and turning her back on Rick. She heard his spluttering demand that she stay where she was with crystal clarity but she went anyway.
‘What is it, Charlie?’ she asked when he was safely wrapped up in his duvet and his mother’s arms. It was a question she had asked every night for the last three weeks. She kissed the top of his sweaty head.
‘Nothing,’ he lied, as he always did.
‘If I read you another story will you promise to go to sleep?’
Charlie nodded and sniffed back his drying tears. Recent experience told her that he wouldn’t, but she didn’t mind. She’d have been only too happy to spend the whole night lying next to him, reading stories that would whisk them both off to magical worlds where it was easy to tell who were the heroes and who were the villains.
But there would be no escape tonight for Elle. She heard the creak of a floorboard as Rick crept upstairs to invade their sanctuary. The flutter of a shadow danced on the wall as he hovered near the door.
She finished a chapter and turned the page, as eager as Charlie for the next instalment. ‘Enough for one night,’ Rick said.
Charlie’s groan was punctuated by a note of panic.
‘I won’t be far,’ she promised.
It broke her heart to leave him but she knew she had to, not because Rick had told her to but because she accepted that she needed to be firm with Charlie. She didn’t want him regressing into babyhood. She needed him to be stronger so she could be strong too.
‘I’m worried about you,’ Rick said once they were back in the living room. He had adopted a softer tone. Elle’s behaviour was confusing him and he hadn’t yet worked out how to deal with it.
‘I’m not happy, Rick,’ she said.
She was surprised at how calm that statement was. Her life had been broken into pieces, her beliefs ground to dust and blown away by the same winds that had carried her screams across the Mersey. She couldn’t stop thinking of the pain her mum must have gone through and how she must have felt when she discovered that her marriage was a sham.
Elle was faced with a choice. She could let those thoughts weigh her down as she trudged from one day to the next, or she could learn from it. Rick had locked her in a gilded cage and taught her the songs to sing to make him happy. She felt herself pushing against the cage door, testing its resistance, testing her courage.
‘You’ve just lost your dad, I know that, but at least you’re not running yourself ragged looking after him any more. He’s at peace now and you can get back to concentrating on your own family.’
She shook her head in an effort to knock back the conflicting emotions. Her dad didn’t deserve to rest in peace. She wished he was still around so she could make him suffer more. He ought to be there so that the anger building up inside her could be directed at the person who deserved it most. But it was Rick she was looking at and she could almost feel sorry for him.
‘It’s the future we should be focusing on now, not the past,’ he was telling her as her heart filled with loathing. ‘I know we agreed no more kids, but maybe it’s time to start thinking about having another baby.’
Elle blinked away the shock. ‘We didn’t agree, Rick. It was you who didn’t want any more children. You can barely cope with one child in the house.’ She recalled how fraught those early days of parenthood had been. Rick hadn’t been comfortable sharing his wife and had stormed off on more than one occasion when she was too tired or preoccupied with the baby to pay him the attention he demanded. At the time she had seen it as a failing on her part and, determined as always to emulate her parents’ successful marriage, had tried to do better.
‘I was worried that you were taking on too much,’ he said, seemingly convinced that if he spoke the lie with conviction she would be inclined to believe it. ‘But you’re more organized now, even if I do have to remind you to pick up Charlie once in a while. It’ll be good for you, Elle, and it might help Charlie too, give him a bit of responsibility helping out. We�
�ve had two funerals in two years, we could do with something to celebrate.’
‘I’m not ready,’ Elle said. She was evading the issue and her weakness frustrated her. She jumped up for the second time that evening. ‘I’m making a coffee, do you want one?’
‘Erm, yes, but then I want to have a proper talk.’
She was standing at the door now, looking down on her husband. Her heart was pounding and her mouth dry as she willed herself to take back some control. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘And by the way, since you messed up my night out with Angie, I’ve arranged to go out this weekend instead.’
She didn’t wait for an answer but scurried out into the kitchen. She switched on the kettle and then held onto the work counter to steady herself. She hadn’t even spoken to Angie yet, the idea had just popped into her head. Elle wasn’t sure whether she was trying to assert some authority or was simply picking a fight. Either way, her exhilaration lasted only until Rick stormed into the kitchen.
‘I don’t know what the hell’s got into you, Elle, but I don’t like it. There’s no way you’re going out with Angie this weekend.’
‘Why? What is your problem with her all of a sudden? If Chris can remain on civil terms with her, then why can’t you? She’s the only friend I have left and if I can’t go out on my own once in a while I’m going to go mad.’
‘Look at you, you’re acting crazy now! I wouldn’t be surprised if Angie was behind all this. I don’t know what she’s playing at, but as far as I’m concerned she can do what she likes. She’s a free agent now and good luck to her. You, on the other hand, are not.’
‘And you don’t trust me?’ She had meant it to sound like a challenge but it was more of a plea.
‘You are not going out with her, Elle.’ Rick had lowered his voice only a fraction but it was no less intimidating. ‘Argument closed.’
Elle was holding onto her anger but as her husband stared her down into submission, she was too scared to release it. She could feel herself stepping away from the door of her cage and she hated herself for it. ‘You can’t tie me to the kitchen sink, barefoot and pregnant.’
The Keeper of Secrets Page 5