by Connie Monk
She had almost come to a crossroads, or more accurately across-lanes, and was brought out of her reverie by the sound of a car slowing down so that the driver could check there was nothing approaching. She didn’t look up, but heard it cross the junction before it stopped, reversed and turned towards where she was.
‘Do you want a lift or are you walking for the good of your health?’
Without turning she recognized Louisa’s voice and her troubles fell away.
‘My health would do much better in a car,’ she answered, determined to make her forced laugh sound natural as she crossed the grassy verge to where Louisa had pulled up. ‘You know the worst thing about walking is that it’s so good it makes you forget you have to walk all the way home again. See my heel. I’ve rubbed a blister.’
Louisa knew her too well to be fooled by the bright voice.
‘Next time you’ll have to come prepared with a packet of plasters,’ she replied in the same vein as she reached to open the car door. ‘In you hop.’
They set off in silence, both conscious of so much that was under the surface, so much that neither of them was ready to face. It was Bella who spoke first, her voice harsh with pent-up emotion.
‘I can’t do it, Lou. I can’t look after him. Every few minutes he’s asking the same thing, “Where’s Ali? I’ll take her for a game.” Then, when I tell him – and I’ve said it over and over, I can’t keep on. I have to pussyfoot around him and all I can think about is her. It’s my fault, I should never have let him get used to playing with her and we would never have lost her. Leo thinks it’s my fault.’ By this time her self-control was lost and she spoke through her tears. ‘I was upstairs doing the bedrooms and I left them playing in the garden.’ She’d said it before so many times. The horror of it haunted her, and with each telling her guilt became more certain in her mind. ‘I should have watched; I knew Dad did silly things. I should have checked they were still out there. It was my fault. When I said that to Leo he just looked at me, didn’t argue or even say anything, just looked. My Ali, I would rather …’ The rest of her words were swallowed, drowned in her tears.
Louisa drew to the side of the road and stopped the car, then drew Bella to her.
‘It was not your fault nor Mr Carter’s either. You could say it was Leo’s for swanning off with me, or mine for encouraging him. You know what I believe?’
‘I don’t know anything,’ Bella sniffed, her spate of crying giving way to utter dejection. ‘I don’t even care about anything anymore. Don’t even want to live.’
‘Ali was only a baby still, but if she were old enough to understand surely it would make her miserable to hear you talk like that. She loved you more than all the rest put together; you were her whole life. Remember the day she was born. Such a tiny scrap of humanity, and every week she grew, she did something new.’
‘Shut up. Don’t talk about it.’ Bella sounded like a cornered animal, her reddened eyes wide with fear.
‘Yes, we will talk about her. She was the most precious gift—’
‘She wasn’t a gift; she was on loan. She was never really mine. If there’s a God, why did he take her away? Why did he make me think she was mine and then take her back?’
Louisa dug deep to try to think of something that might help, but it wasn’t easy.
‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know any more than you do. But I like to think that what you said is the truth. He sent her to you so that you learnt what it must be like to be the most important person in someone’s life. I envy you that. Surely there can’t be any love as pure and innocent as a baby’s.’
‘So what did this wonderful god let it happen for? She was always happy. She made everyone happy. She didn’t deserve to die. I could stand the hurt, the wretchedness of losing her if she had wanted to be somewhere else and I knew she was happy. It’s not just for me that I’m miserable, it’s for her.’
‘I know. But I can’t believe that she is snuffed out like a candle. Bodies die. Yours will, Leo’s will, mine will. But our souls? While we are remembered – and if we are lucky enough during our lifetime to be truly loved as she was – then surely her soul will still be close to you. Remember every little thing, Bella. I know you do, and you will continue to. You won’t lose her.’
‘Are you just being kind? Or is that what you truly believe, God’s honour believe?’
‘I truly believe that if you always think of her, don’t let yourself be frightened to remember, then she will never be far away from you.’
‘Just be imagination – must be.’ And yet there was a hint of pleading in her words.
‘You can think that if you like, but I truly believe I must be on the right track.’ Somehow Louisa had to find the right words. ‘If she fell and grazed her knee, then even though she would cry it wouldn’t alter the person she was. That’s just a hurt on her body. Now imagine yourself walking into the room and finding her playing on the floor with that toy dog she so loved. She would look up and see you, her eyes would shine with happiness and she would give you a smile that came from her very soul. Now tell me the body is all there is.’
‘I want to believe. I’d give anything, anything, if I could be sure she wasn’t lost and lonely. So I suppose I must believe something even if I don’t know what.’
‘When you get to bed tonight, lying there in the dark, try to remember what I said. Picture her face when she sees you, remember her with your heart and Bella I do honestly, God’s honour, believe she will be with you.’ She switched on the engine and they started forward. After a minute or two she said, ‘Leo has lost her too. You say he blames you, but don’t you think that’s the hurt in him, and the guilt, speaking? About him and me …’ But what was she trying to say?
‘He was never in love with me, but we have got along well. I didn’t expect him to change his ways just because we were married. I was sure he’d had lots of lady friends and I would rather it was you than anyone else. I’d heard whispers in the village about how often he was at your place.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘On the evenings he came home late and I was in bed, I was thankful that he wouldn’t wake me up when I pretended to be asleep.’
‘If you were a stranger I would feel no guilt. But you are my friend. And for months the most important thing in my life has been making love with your husband. I feel ashamed and wretched.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ Despite her words there was an unfamiliar hardness in her tone. ‘Here we are, his wife and his mistress, and it all seems trivial and unimportant.’
‘To me it’s neither of those things. It’s as if your Leo and the man I know are two different people. But I’ve told you before – he said that anything between him and me would never make any difference to you. His marriage wasn’t touched by it. If I’d had any pride I ought to have refused to be just his plaything, but I had no pride.’
‘Home already.’ Bella seemed eager to change the subject. ‘Put me down at the end of the track. I’ll walk the last bit.’
‘What about your blister? You can get out at the end of the track when I turn the car.’
When they reached Ridgeway there was no sign of either Leo or Harold.
‘Dad kept saying he wanted to take Ali to see the men in the fields. It looks as if that’s what Leo has done with him. Thanks for the lift.’
Her voice sounded dull, and even her smile didn’t come spontaneously.
‘I have some work to clear up when I get home, but it won’t take much above an hour. Why not come over this evening?’ Louisa suggested, ashamed of how often she had been irritated by the girl’s constant bright good humour. Now she seemed to be lost in a fog of despondency and Louisa was touched to see how such a simple suggestion could visibly lift her, even if only temporarily, from the misery that surrounded her.
‘May I? Thanks Lou, I’d really love to. We always eat early and I’ll get cleared up as quickly as I can.’
‘Surely two able-bodied men are capable of washing a few dishe
s. Tell them you’re coming to me so they’ll have to clear up for once.’
For a moment, Bella hesitated. After all, who was she to give orders? Then she gave a smile that showed the girl she used to be wasn’t far beneath the surface.
‘I’ll do that.’ And so she believed.
Earlier that same afternoon, after Bella left Leo in his workroom, he went back to his drawing board for a few minutes. He, who had done nothing all afternoon except gaze out of the window, had a sudden desire to work. Perhaps he could persuade Eva Johnson to keep his father company, he thought. But when he looked down at the grassy patch they called the garden he saw Harold asleep in a deckchair. So back to his drawing he went. A quarter of an hour later – in fact, before Bella was even aware of her blister – he checked again. The chair was empty. With a sigh he threw down his pencil and went downstairs.
‘Dad, how about we go and see how they’re getting on harvesting the sweetcorn? Dad?’
With no sign of his father around the house he went on his own to the field of corn. Knowing Harold liked to be with the men, he expected to find him there. But just as had happened on the day he had taken Ali on the walk that had led to her death, so again the men said they’d seen nothing of him. Leo returned to the house before setting out to find where he had wandered, his first thought being that he would have walked down to see Louisa just as he often had with Bella and Ali. For a moment he dropped to sit in the deckchair where Harold had been feigning sleep. Thoughts of Ali filled his mind. Ali, the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. He envied Bella her tears – surely tears would release this strange and painful weight of desolation that seemed to bear down on him. Louisa had awakened an emotion in him that he had truly believed was love. Yet, faced with the loss of Ali, it faded into insignificance. And Bella? There had been many times when she had irritated him with what he looked on as her childlike innocence, and yet her love for Ali had been as strong as that of a lioness for her young. In an inexplicable way he felt that in being close to her he stayed nearer to the little girl who had shown him the meaning of pure, unconditional love. Harold was forgotten as he lay back in the deckchair, while in his imagination he felt the soft skin of her face against his and heard the sound of her baby voice. ‘Come on, Daddy, up on shoulders, let’s see fields.’ He couldn’t find the release he craved in tears, so the charade must go on. He didn’t want the sympathy the ladies of the village gave to Bella, but it hurt that no one considered the loss was his, too.
He heard a car pull up at the head of the track, then a door slam and the car drive off again. The sound brought him to his feet as he remembered his mission to find his father. Perhaps someone had seen him and brought him back home. He started towards the front of the house, and that’s when he saw Bella.
‘I was glad of a lift home,’ she told him, her voice perfectly friendly and yet with no warmth. ‘I’d walked a long way and then I met Louisa with the car.’
‘So she’s gone home now?’ he asked urgently.
Bella didn’t try to disguise her contempt as she looked at him, although he didn’t seem aware of it.
‘Dad’s gone off somewhere,’ he told her.
‘Surely you could have looked after him for one afternoon, taken him out for a drive or something. How long has he been missing?’
‘How the hell do I know? If I’d seen him go I would have stopped him. Every time I looked out he was asleep in the chair over there.’ He saw no reason to tell her that ‘every time’ was, in fact, just once and that must have been more than an hour ago.
‘He can’t have gone far. He won’t be at Louisa’s. If that’s where he thought he was going he will have seen that she wasn’t at home. When she went out she left the side gate and the garage door open so that she could drive straight in when she got back.’
‘Well, he’s not with the chaps in the fields. I’ve asked them and no one has seen him this afternoon. I’d better go down to the lane and see if he’s in the village. Everyone knows him; he might have found someone to talk to.’ To hear Leo’s bright, confident tone, no one would have had the slightest suspicion of the depth of his despair only a few minutes previously.
‘If he’d been chattering in the village we should have seen him. Louisa drove up the High Street to get petrol before we came in.’
‘Where else could he have got to? The woods, do you think? I can’t believe it. Dad. Dad, of all people. Nothing ever threw him off balance, he was – oh, hell, it’s not fair. You can’t understand – you never knew him before he started to go downhill.’ He knew he ought not to have let himself talk about his father; the only way to accept the change in him was to take each day as it came, not look forward and not look back. So without another word he left Bella and instead of going down the track to the road, turned left at their gate and made to follow where it continued towards the wood. Then, after two or three steps he turned and called to Bella, ‘Are you coming with me? It might be a good idea.’
Bella closed her eyes as she shook her head and called, ‘No, I have to get some food going,’ but closing her eyes didn’t shut out the image of Harold wanting them to help look for the ball and Ali lying dead. She turned away and went into the house.
Harold hadn’t been aware that Leo had looked down on him sitting with his eyes closed in the deckchair. In fact, he had been aware of only one thing, his plans clear cut in his muddled mind. Fate had played into his hands and with Bella out and Leo shut away in his workroom, he was a free man.
With the car safely put away Louisa automatically closed and locked the garage door then shut the double gate. She heard the clock from the church at the far end of the village chime and strike six, and wondered whether Leo, not Bella, would come after supper. What an odd situation it was that she and Bella, two people so different, should really care about each other even though Bella knew Leo was unfaithful to her and Louisa herself stole the love that he should have given his wife. Or did Bella reject him? She had adored him in the beginning, so how was it he turned to another woman to satisfy him? No one seeing Louisa as she walked towards the house, opening her handbag to take out the key, would have suspected her thoughts were anywhere except on what she did. But the truth was she had a mental picture of how the evening would be if he came. Please make him come, make him need me as much as I need him. She turned the key in the lock of the front door and stepped into the hall. The house felt still and empty and, for a moment, she was certain that this was how it would remain, with her waiting alone in the silence. Giving herself a mental shake, she told herself that she would use the evening wisely; she would start on the work she had collected the previous day from an engineering firm. As if to back up her determination, she went into her workroom, not because she meant to start on it straight away but simply to bring her mind back from where it wanted to stray. That’s when she heard a movement behind her that stopped her in her tracks, shock and instant terror driving everything else from her mind.
‘Didn’t know I was waiting for you, did you? Now I’ve got you.’
She knew the voice, but there was something about it that made her more frightened that she would have believed possible. Harold Carter was mentally deranged and, more than that, he was strong. But he was a poor, broken man, not an evil one; that’s what she had to keep in mind as she faced him. She must keep calm and talk to him in a friendly manner. She even imagined herself lying to him that she was just going to walk up to the farm, so they could go together. All that flashed through her mind in seconds for, although he often came to The Retreat with Bella, she knew from his tone that this was no friendly visit. Something must have happened to trigger memories that upset him. As she turned round to face him he was coming towards her, his mouth open as he gasped for breath as if he’d been running which, of course, she knew he hadn’t. Somehow he had got into the house and been lying in wait. She made a supreme effort to bring him back from wherever his troubled mind had taken him.
‘No, you usually ju
st come with Bella, but it’s nice to see you. Would you like a cup of tea?’
In answer to her effort to give him a friendly welcome the muscles in his right cheek twitched out of control, the expression on his good-looking face being changed into an ugly and angry grimace. With clenched fists he beat the air, while even his feet wouldn’t keep still as he seemed to be marching on one spot. Every part of him had lost control as he lurched towards her. She was strong and had seen what was coming, so she held him off with her hands on his shoulders.
‘You’ve got no place here. This is her house, hers and mine. How can I find her here if you’re here? You drive her car; you pretend you’re her. Well, I know you’re not.’ Try as she might to keep him away from her, he loomed closer until his face was only inches from hers. ‘You tempt Leo. Get him into your bed, do you? Was that where he was when Ali was lost? Gone, she has, gone.’
‘Stop it! Shut up, can’t you. Get away from me!’
‘You get him here pleasuring you, pretending to be Bella’s friend. Glad to get it from any man who’ll give it to you, frightened you’ll end up a dried-up old maid. We don’t want you here, pretending to be my Violet.’ As he shouted he dribbled, saliva running down his chin. ‘Well, it’s too late now. You can burn in hell. You wore her clothes – I’ve seen you in them. You won’t wear them any more.’
‘Get out!’ Catching him off his guard, she pushed with all her might and he stumbled backwards across the room, hitting the door and just saving himself from falling to the ground. Giving a manic laugh he left her, closing the door behind him. She heard the key turn in the lock, but her feeling was relief and thankfulness that he’d gone. Next time Leo came she would tell him what had happened and surely then he would speak to the doctor about getting the crazy old man put in a home. She heard the front door slam and breathed a sigh of relief. He had gone. The fact that he’d locked the door didn’t worry her; she was on the ground floor and could easily get out of the window. So she decided to work for an hour or so, for work must be the best way to silence the echo of his words. He was crazy; he wanted to accuse her simply because he hated to see her here in the house her aunt had left to her. Well, damn him, he needn’t think he could frighten her away.