We stood in the dark house, Antonio and I, and disaster hovered everywhere, so tangible we could have reached out and felt its clammy hand. Into the silence came the sound of something falling from above. Our eyes met and we ran up the stairs.
Danielle’s door was locked. Frantically I ran back down and snatched up the spare key from a dish on the landing, and with fumbling fingers we turned the key, only to find that the door was on the chain.
I called, ‘Elle, please let us in, darling. Whatever’s happened, it will be all right. Elle…’
There was no answer. Antonio started back down the stairs. ‘I am going to have to try to kick in the door. I need my shoes.’
I kept calling to Danielle through the gap in the door, but the silence inside was absolute.
Antonio rushed back with his shoes on. I stood out of the way as he levered himself against the top of the banister rail and kicked at the hefty door. It hardly gave. Sweating, he kicked again and again until the frame splintered and we could reach in and unlock the chain.
I flew into the bedroom. Danielle was not there. I heard Antonio cry out. I ran through the sitting room. Danielle was hanging in the passage between the bathroom and kitchen where we had put in a skylight and new wooden beams when we converted the flat. A small stepladder lay upturned on the floor underneath her. So did the phone.
Frantically, Antonio got the stepladder, and climbed up and held Danielle’s body slack while I got a knife. It was hard for us to hold her and to cut her down. We all fell on the floor and we laid her down, loosening the flex round her neck with shaking fingers. She was warm and there was still a faint flutter of a pulse. Antonio breathed into her mouth. We rubbed her chest as if we could prevent her heart from stopping, then Antonio ran and phoned for an ambulance.
I held Danielle’s head on my lap, stroked her lovely blueblack hair and murmured words of love I hoped she could hear. We sat each side of her talking and holding her for ten minutes until the medics arrived. We stood away, then, while they worked on her. I clutched Antonio and we prayed, although we both knew in our hearts that Danielle had gone.
I saw the brown envelope on the table with one photograph on top of it. I saw my name on an envelope and Inspector Wren’s on another. I stood looking down on it, my heart icy with dread. I stared and it came back out of nowhere: the man’s shoes. The man wore strange shoes with a paler piece of leather in the middle like a golfing shoe. I had seen them before: the man with Danielle in our flat in the dark, the night Tom heard them in our kitchen. In the half-light I had caught the odd flash of white leather on his brown shoes.
‘I’m sorry,’ the paramedic said. ‘I’m afraid we’re too late. There is nothing we can do. The lady’s dead.’
‘Jenny,’ Antonio said, ‘you must stop crying. You must try to stop now. You will be ill.’ He handed me a brandy. We were sitting in the dark sitting room.
‘What was Danielle saying to you in French on the phone?’
Antonio’s voice shook. ‘She said, “Forgive me. I am frightened of dying alone.”’
I got up and went to the window. The last police car was turning in the road and leaving. A carpet of lights spread in front of me, shimmering into the distance: people in their houses safe and asleep.
‘Did we get there in time? Would she have known we were with her?’
‘I hope so, cara.’
I used to look out at this view at night when Tom was somewhere in London doing something covert he could not tell me about. I used to look out from the top of the house as I stitched clothes together and I wondered how many people gazed back out of faceless windows of tower blocks and houses, feeling alone but comforted by the knowledge that other lives were going on out there, side by side with theirs. Within that shimmering mass of flickering lights, little births and deaths and tragedies and celebrations were being enacted.
‘I lied,’ I said without looking round. ‘I lied. I felt I was betraying Tom. I was afraid of loving again, of being hurt. But I do love you. I do. I don’t want to be in this rotten, shitty world without you, Antonio. I don’t.’
I turned and saw that Antonio was crying again too. He held out his arms to me and I went into them.
Damien says, ‘Northern Ireland was my first posting with Tom. I was a corporal. We were both pretty young and green. Despite the ongoing peace process it was still a violent and lawless place. We did three tours out there back to back. We were fed up to the teeth of being there. Weary to death of constantly being spat at and stoned for picking up thugs with no political ideal except murder and mutilation; sick of the drug running and bomb planting; of young soldiers losing eyes and limbs and life; sick of it all.
‘One night Tom and I are called out of the garrison late. A routine patrol have found a young lad thrown in a ditch. He has been kneecapped and so badly beaten up his body looks like an open wound. He is sixteen. His crime? His grandfather is a retired Garda officer who had gone to the security forces to give the name of a member of the IRA who was controlling and terrorising a whole neighbourhood, extracting his own form of revenge for anyone he deemed was fraternising with the security forces. The man’s name was O’Sullivan.
‘Tom and I call for back up and go and pick him up in a bar. He is well away and cocky with it. He swears he has been there all night and a hundred people swear he has too. We haul him out none too gently. In the interrogation room he laughs at us, says we can’t touch him, he has hundreds of witnesses. And anyway, why are we getting worked up about one skinny Catholic youth who is probably drug running and deserves broken knees?
‘Tom is called out and told the boy just died. We tell O’Sullivan. He shrugs. No skin off my nose, he says, but it might teach his grandpa a lesson. He grins. You scum can’t pin his murder on me and you know it. I’ll walk out of here and you can’t do a thing. Not a fucking thing.’
Damien pauses. ‘I’m not excusing what Tom and I did. After twenty-four hours we had to let him go. We followed him in an unmarked car and picked him up again before he got to the pub. We drove him near to where he’d beaten the boy to a pulp and we beat the living shit out of him. Then we left him in the middle of nowhere. “We’ve got a whole police station that says we never left the premises,” we tell him. “You can’t prove a thing. Not a fucking thing.”’
Damien and I stare at each other. ‘Did O’Sullivan pick Danielle up because he found out where Tom was living? Or was it chance that Tom jumped him in our kitchen and he recognised Tom or his voice?’ I ask.
Damien hesitates. ‘The pub where Danielle met O’Sullivan is a pub where Irish construction workers go to drink. It’s possible it was chance, Jen, but Danielle would have only to mention the name Holland in relation to you or Tom for it to ring bells for O’Sullivan. Danielle was a gift. He waited a long time, but he got his revenge.’
‘It could have been you too,’ I whisper.
Damien stands up. ‘I wish it had been,’ he says. ‘I don’t have a wife and child.’
EIGHTY-TWO
I walked over the cliffs, round past the island towards Porthmeor beach. It was early and no one was about. The tide was out and seaweed, smelling of fish and ozone, covered the flat rocks at the end of the beach and dried in the morning sun. Seagulls wheeled and screamed over my head, guarding their young.
I sat on the rocks looking out to sea. Disembodied engine noises and voices came out of the mist from the fishing boats heading home. I wrapped my arms round my curving stomach as if to protect it. I thought of all the times I had played here in the rock pools with Ben and my sisters. Bea and James had seemed omnipotent. I had a charmed and protected childhood. Nothing terrible had ever happened until Tom died.
I was about to take a huge leap into the unknown. There were no guarantees. I could never be sure that those I loved would not be grabbed from me in a moment.
Flo was going to buy my house on the Saltings. Her hip had healed but her heart never would. Ruth had left for Israel to be with Peter, then the
y were both coming back to England together. Adam was going to be a weekly boarder and go to Bea and James for the weekends. It would be easier to work for his exams in school, he said. He asked if he could sleep in my old room.
The house in London was up for sale. We had closed down. The business was transferring to Italy. Two of the girls were coming with me; the rest had to find work elsewhere.
Danielle told me so little about her life: tiny snippets, wounded places she shared with her dry wit, which forbade pity, in the early hours of the morning as we completed a commission; a stepfather who, I suspected, violated her as a child; a mother who never listened.
Despite her talent and looks, Danielle never felt her body was sacred. She wanted to leave her French life behind her. Flo, and Rosie and I in the London house were her life, her family.
I was going to design under a new Danielle label. My things had been shipped to Italy, where Antonio waited for me. We would marry there in a month or so.
The tide had turned and it began to come in fast towards the rocks. Soon I would feel my child moving inside me.
I thought of leaving Adam with a strange disbelief. When I had told him about Antonio he had gone white. ‘Oh, no! I’ll never see you, Jenny.’
‘Yes, you will,’ Ruth had said quickly. ‘Italy is a hop. You can go and visit Jenny whenever you are welcome.’
‘That is always,’ I said, smiling at Ruth. We had never regained our former intimacy, but she seemed relaxed over Adam now. A future with Peter had changed her completely. And, of course, I’m leaving; Adam would be in the care of Bea and James. It hurt, the thought of moving on without him. It cut like a knife.
I closed my eyes. There was a little whispery butterfly movement inside me, a suggestion of life, of hope and a future. When I looked up, Adam was threading his way surely towards me. I smiled. He always knew where I would be.
EIGHTY-THREE
Antonio, standing on the veranda of the house, watches Jenny and Adam make their way down to the beach. The two small boys, Paolo and James, walk between them, and Adam carries baby Danielle. It is a late afternoon in August and they have all just got up from their siesta to swim. Antonio is trying to work, but it is difficult to concentrate. He is restless and reluctant to admit the cause.
They have not seen Adam for some time. Not since he passed out of Sandhurst and was posted to the north of England with his regiment. He and Jenny have been taken aback by his confidence and maturity, and his increasingly more marked resemblance to Tom. He is becoming the mirror image of the man she fell in love with.
To Antonio’s shame, it is this that undermines him. Each time Jenny looks at Adam now, he can see how it must have been with Tom. He sees her revelling in this tall, blond Englishman and he feels a seeping jealousy, a growing resistance to Adam’s presence here, in a way he’d never done when Adam was younger.
He cannot pin down his exact unease but he sees in Jenny’s unqualified pride in Adam the boy’s power to hurt her in his single-minded intent to expose himself to the same sort of danger as his father. Antonio knows Adam cannot have told Jenny yet where he is being posted or she would not look so happy.
He sighs, puts his work away and walks down the steep path to join them. Laughter drifts up from the beach and Antonio smiles cynically to himself. Maybe it is just a case of old stag, young stag. Adam is brimming with youth and excitement, and beautiful still. Antonio is not a man used to feeling jealousy. It is unlike him. It is the long hot summer, he thinks, and this coming fashion show. He must not let any youth spoil his happiness.
Ellie runs to him. She is the light of his life. At two she is just like Jenny, with masses of dark curly hair. He lifts her, throws her into the air and catches her as she squeals.
Jenny calls, ‘Hi, darling. Are you finished?’
‘I have given up for today. It is too hot.’
The boys call out to him to come and swim. They are fooling about in the shallows.
Adam looks up from his book and grins. ‘Hi, Antonio. Glad you’ve given up trying to work.’
‘Would you like to water-ski when I’ve had a swim?’ Antonio asks, feeling guilty about his unworthy thoughts.
‘That’d be great. Shall I go and get the gear from the boathouse?’
‘Good idea.’ He pulls Jenny up. ‘Come, little whale of mine, and wallow in the shallows with me.’
Jenny makes a face at him. ‘Cruel. Cruel, but true.’
She lowers herself into the sea and splashes water all over herself. Antonio watches her looking down at her protruding stomach with something like surprise. This really should be their last child, but how Jenny loves being pregnant.
Jenny checks Ellie’s armbands before she moves deeper into the water to swim. ‘It’s the only time I feel light at the moment, when I’m in water,’ she calls out to him.
Antonio throws the boys up and lets them plop down into the water with a yell, coming up coughing and spluttering. He smiles at Jenny’s dreamy pregnant wonder at the lightness of herself in water as she swims back into the shallows. He sits down next to her while the two boys run off to find Adam.
‘You know what?’ Jenny says, floating nearer so their feet touch.
He smiles. ‘What do I know?’
‘I am so, so happy, Antonio.’ She laughs and looks up at the blue sky. ‘Blissfully happy.’
‘If you are trying to get round me for more children the answer is Basta! Basta! No more.’
‘Oh, shame!’ Jenny says.
As Antonio swims out to the mooring for the boat, he sees Adam sit down beside Jenny in the water. He hears her suddenly cry, ‘Oh, no, Adam!’ So Adam has told her and cast a shadow on their peaceful afternoon.
Ruth pushed the double pushchair along the creek path from the cottage. There was a swollen flood tide and she could see Peter fishing on the bend by the wooden bench. Rachel and Leah were clutching bread to feed the swans. Two old herons were perched high in a small scrubby tree. They looked ridiculous, like partridges in a pear tree. The twins covered their mouths with their small hands and shrieked with laughter. Ruth felt a flash, a second, of joy so complete it made her dizzy.
Swans sailed silently and majestically down on the incoming tide, skimming the water like gondolas. Under their wings the water sparkled. Behind them was the backdrop of ancient woodland and here, on the path, no one.
She had come here as a child to escape her parents. She had come as a moody, troubled teenager. She had come as a young restless parent. Now she was here again with a second chance. She had swapped a soaring career for late motherhood and she was loving every single moment of it.
Jenny had rung last night and Ruth had understood why. It was a reaching out, a call for solidarity. In a way, it was worse for Jenny than it was for her, having to watch Adam eagerly following in Tom’s footsteps.
Jenny had invited them to stay, once the new baby had been born, and Ruth had accepted. She knew that Jenny was always going to be part of Adam’s life. Ruth had not relinquished Adam because she had the twins. She had learnt to let him go, choose his own way, because she must zealously guard the life she now had. She and the twins waved at Peter, and he waved back.
That night, as we lie side by side, I say to Antonio, ‘Adam told me this afternoon that he is being posted with a rapid response team to the Pakistan border in Afghanistan next month. The papers say it’s becoming one of the most dangerous places on earth. He couldn’t bring himself to tell me or Ruth until now.’
‘It is his life. We cannot go through this again. Adam did a degree because you and Ruth thought he would grow out of the army. Well, he did not. He has chosen his career.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know, Antonio, but I’ll always feel responsible. I’ll always feel…’
‘That it is to emulate his unknown father that drives Adam forward to danger?’
‘Yes.’ My voice sounds small, Antonio’s sounds weary. I should keep my fears to myself.
Faraway we can he
ar the sea and a new moon lights up the room.
‘Jenny,’ he says. ‘There is something I must say to you. I do not think you will like it.’
I turn, surprised. ‘What is it?’
‘You told me earlier how happy you are.’
‘I am. I am, but Antonio, it is not something to say out loud too often.’
‘Then please, I ask you, do not resurrect this thing you have with Adam. I say to you, once long ago, let go of the boy. I ask you again. I ask you now, let go of him or you threaten our happiness together.’
I search his face. ‘How do you feel threatened?’
He hesitates. ‘Adam is Tom’s child and special to you. I understand this. I have always understood. But once he took over your life, he became an obsession. I am afraid this might happen again.’
I open my mouth, but he lifts up his hand. ‘Let me finish, cara. Now that Adam is trained and out in the world, are you going to follow his career with close scrutiny? Are you going to scan the English papers avidly, jittery over some trouble spot he might be sent to? Are you going to imagine the poor boy’s death every time he is posted? Life has no pattern, my darling. History does not always repeat itself. You are right to guard your happiness, we all are. It cannot be taken for granted, but because you lost all that you loved once does not mean that tragedy strikes every time you are happy. You do not have to have a child every year as an insurance against loss.’
He places his hand on my stomach. ‘Hundreds of soldiers go to dangerous places. Some die. Most do not. Who are you to decide that Adam may get hurt or killed? Who are you to pre-empt his fate? Why do you not decide instead that he will live happily, marry, have children and come out to visit us all his life? Is this not the better way to live, my darling?’
I am silent. I meet Antonio’s eyes. He is extraordinarily perceptive. I trace his mouth with my finger. ‘Don’t feel threatened by my past, Antonio. You know how I feel about you and our children. I love my work, my life, but most of all, I love you.’
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