Caught in the Light (18 page)

"Perhaps so."

"You have been a poor kind of wife to me, Marian. You defy me in everything."

"I cannot imagine what you mean."

"Oh, I think you can." There was a tap at the door. It was Jane. Jose looked round at her. "What is it, girl?"

"Mr. Byfield has ... left, sir."

"Good. You may go now. Close the door behind you. We shall not wish to be disturbed."

"Yes, sir. Cook wonders if '

"Go, damn you." And go she did, in a fluster of meek obedience.

"There is no need to '

He punched me in the midriff with a sudden savage swing of his fist. I groaned and fell forward, quite winded for the moment, then leaned slowly against the bench. "I have been negligent in my management of you, Marian," he rasped. "But be assured I shall mend my ways. And yours with them. You have the key to this room, I'm told. Where is it?"

"The ... the drawer .. . there." Nausea had swept over me. I signalled desperately along the bench.

"Thank you." He fetched the key. "No doubt you can guess why I did not strike you in the face, as I was tempted to. A visible bruise might provoke Byfield into challenging me. And I do not wish to kill him, though you may be sure I will if I have to." He walked to the door and locked it, then slipped the key into his pocket and turned to look at me. "I heard no crack. I think you have escaped without a broken rib." He stepped closer. "On this occasion."

"Jose .. . For pity's ..."

"Turn round."

"What?"

"You heard me. Turn round."

"Why?"

"Obey me without question." He grabbed me by the jaw, crushing my cheeks against my teeth, and stared at me, his eyes daggering into mine. "Or it will be the worse for you. Now." He released me. "Turn round."

Trembling, and wincing from the blow to my midriff, I turned and faced the bench.

"I shall be paying you close attention while I'm here, Marian. And when I return to London you will be accompanying me. There will be an end of "amateur chemistry" and of all the latitude I have mistakenly allowed you. It is time, I think, to remind you ..." His arms suddenly encircled me. He grasped my breasts in his hands and squeezed them painfully. I felt his breath on the back of my neck. "Of your obligations to me as my wife."

"Jose. Stop this. Please."

He let go and stepped back. "Bend over, madam. If you please."

"Not here. Not like this."

"Do as I say or there will be worse than a bruise to remember this day by. Bend over."

I did as I'd been told, leaning forward over the bench until my forehead touched its rough wooden surface, my hands supporting me on either side. As Jose hoisted up my dress and shift, I prayed he would stop. But I knew with a certainty born of our long and loveless acquaintance that he would not.

"If you will play the whore, madam, you must expect to be served as such."

I heard him fumble with his clothing. In that moment I wanted only to run and hide, to flee far and for ever from this brutish man who neither loved me nor understood me, and evidently did not want to. What he meant to do was not driven by lust, nor even by loathing. It was his reassertion of his ownership of me. The knowledge of that would make the experience of it even worse. I braced myself, clenching my teeth as he grasped my hips and raised me to meet his thrust. I clamped my eyes shut, trying to remember my walk back across the park from Charlton Down a few short hours before, struggling to plant a picture of it in my mind as a defence against

I was running fast across the field, back towards the car, dusk turning the sheep to spectral blurs around me. There was the fence ahead, only the posts visible in the twilight. If I looked back now I wouldn't see the chimneys of Gaunt's Chase standing stark and black against the deepening grey of the sky. The house had vanished. But the things done in it remained. I remembered them and they remembered me.

I scrambled through the fence, cutting my hands on the barbs and tearing a hole in my trousers. Only when I was inside the car, encased in twentieth-century steel and man-made fibre, did I feel safe. I turned the radio on and tuned in to Radio One, loud and blaring and aggressively modern. If I could somehow jam the signal, maybe it would stop. Maybe it would just go away. I felt so drained by it, so bewildered and yet so weary. I reclined the seat and lay back, letting the beat of the music dull my senses. I closed my eyes, praying I'd see nothing but the velvety blackness of sleep. And my prayer was answered.

But when I woke, suddenly, to complete alertness, I wasn't in the car. I was in the bedroom at Gaunt's Chase, morning sunlight stretching across the coverlet towards me. Memories of the night before pounced and sank in their claws. I flinched and closed my eyes, then opened them again and turned my head. Jose lay on his back beside me, snoring heavily. The smell of him stale brandy, cigar smoke and horseflesh hit me like a blow to the face. I felt sick and the sensation instantly sharpened the recollections of what he'd done to me. I had been sick before he'd finished with me. I could still taste it in my mouth. I hated him more than I thought it possible for one human to hate another. If a knife had lain on the table beside me, I would have taken it and cut his throat and watched the blood spurt out of him with pleasure.

But there was no knife. And there was nothing to be done but deal with the world as Jose had remade it for me. I slid out of the bed, washed myself as best I could from the ewer and dressed hurriedly, watching him all the time for fear he might wake. But he slept on, as if with an untroubled conscience.

I found his waistcoat, stained with port, where he'd flung it down. I took the key to the laboratory from the pocket he'd left it in and slipped out of the room, opening and closing the door with exaggerated care. Then I hastened down to the basement, using the back stairs. I was relieved to meet none of the servants on the way; I did not want to see anyone. Nor did I want anyone to see me. How much they knew or had guessed I did not care to contemplate. But I had to see my laboratory. I had to be sure it was as bad as I remembered.

It was, if anything, worse. There wasn't an unbroken chemical bottle to be found. The cameras were smashed beyond repair. The pedestals and printing frames were so much matchwood. My work lay in ruins. I gathered up a few scattered heliogenic pictures, put them back in their portfolio and wondered how best to keep them safe. In the end, I decided to put them at the back of a cupboard beneath the bench. The laboratory was probably the last place Jose would look, if look he did, now that he had done his best to lay it waste. Then I went back out, fastened the lock, placed the key beneath the door and flicked it into the room. I heard it slide some distance across the floor and contented myself with the thought that Jose would have to use a battering ram next time he wanted to enter. As for the key, he would search me in vain for it. I would suggest he had simply mislaid it, a possibility he would be poorly placed to deny.

I met Briggs on my way out of the house and bade him as calm a good morning as I could summon. Then I struck out across the park, trying to draw some comfort from the sweet summer air. But there was no comfort to be had that day, only the bleak satisfaction that is to be derived from not adding to a pile of sorrows.

Legion Cottage lay in a dale beyond the beech hanger, a plain but homely little house where I had often, of late, dreamed of leading a happier and simpler existence than the one fate had allotted me. I hesitated before knocking at the door and did not, in the event, need to screw up the courage to do so, because Mr. Byfield opened it of his own accord. He looked haggard and hollow-eyed and I prayed my face did not reveal my thoughts as clearly as his did.

"I saw you approaching," he said. "Will you come in?"

"Thank you," I said, stepping into the hall. "I'm sorry ... to call so early."

"Do not be. I am relieved to see you. It is a weight lifted from my mind. You are ... well?"

"I am."

"I own I was fearful what Jose might do when I left."

"He did nothing. He only said that he would act if you were not gone by noon today."

"How can I go? Do you not understand, Marian? I love you."

"If you do, then you must go. If you stay, Jose will kill you."

Mr. Byfield almost smiled at that. "He may try."

"I know him, Lawrence. All too well. He would find a way. And it would not necessarily be gentlemanly. He puts on honour and takes it off like a glove, according to the weather."

"I'm not afraid of him, whatever the weather."

"Then I must do your fearing for you. Do as he told you. Leave this place."

He took my hand and held it to his chest. "Do you want me to leave?"

I nodded. "Yes. Most certainly."

"Come with me, Marian. We could go abroad, beyond scandal's reach as well as Jose's." He bent towards me, intending, I think, to kiss me. But I pulled away. "I will not abandon you to such a man, wife though you are to him, and friend though he is or was to me."

"You must."

"It cannot be endured."

"Yet it cannot be cured. I am his wife."

"You should not be. He does not deserve someone as fine as you."

"But life does not always treat us as we deserve. You must go and I must stay. That is the way of it."

"Is there no hope for us, Marian?"

"There is always hope."

"May I write to you?"

"Under no circumstances. It is the very thing Jose will be on the watch for."

"Then you must write to me. They will hold post for me at my club in London Boodle's, in St. James's Street. Should your existence here become unbearable, you can call upon me to do as much to aid you as you require. As much, indeed, as you will allow. Say you will do so if he drives you too hard and I will go. Not gladly, it is true. Very far from that. But I will go."

"Very well. You have my word. And my thanks. To know there is someone I can turn to at direst need .. ."

"The offer is not lightly made."

"Nor would it be lightly taken up, I assure you."

"I could wish that it would be. But it is not in your character to yield easily. You should know, however, that it is not in mine either."

I looked at him for several silent seconds, and he looked at me. Our understanding was sealed in that interval, beyond the reach of words.

"I must go, Mr. Byfield."

"And so, it seems, must I, Mrs. Esguard."

"Goodbye, sir."

He reached out and laid the backs of his fingers gently against my cheek in as much of a farewell caress as he thought I was likely to permit. "Until we meet again," he murmured. Then his hand fell away and I opened the door and walked out into the fragrant, heedless morning.

There was no need to hurry back to Gaunt's Chase. Jose would sleep a while yet. It would probably be a good deal later than noon when he stormed into Legion Cottage and found it empty. I made my melancholy way up to the summit of Charlton Down and gazed out at the un consoling beauties of the Nadder valley, where the sunlight picked out the course of the river like some shimmering serpent coiled amidst the rolling woodland and the church steeples and the golden swathes of ripening wheat. I sat down and closed my eyes, and let the breeze stirring my hair be my only reminder of where I was and whither I was bound to return. I lay back on the turf, listening to a skylark chirping somewhere above me. On it went, singing for the simple joy of its precious life. On and blithely on.

Then it stopped, as suddenly and completely as if a hand had closed round its throat. The wind stopped, too. Its susurrant passage through the grass ceased in the same instant. There was a moment of utter silence. Then I opened my eyes.

And I could see the sky before me through the windscreen of the car. I was shut away from birdsong and breeze. It was morning. I'd slept there through the night, as the stiffness of my limbs and the low whisper of music from the radio confirmed. It had been on so long the battery must have run down. I sat up, shivering in the chill. Then I realized I was no longer afraid. I'd been through the worst of it. This was the other side.

I tried to start the car, but the engine couldn't raise more than a pitiful moan. I began looking for my mobile phone, then remembered I'd left it at home. Conrad would be beside himself with worry. The police might be looking for me by now. Everyone was going to be very angry when I explained that I'd driven to Dorset on a whim and spent the night in the car for no halfway credible reason. Draining the battery wasn't going to sound very clever either. In fact, my behaviour was going to seem at best irrational, at worst.. .

But I couldn't just stay there, worrying about the recriminations that were waiting for me. I got out, flagged down the first car that came along and begged a lift into Shaftesbury. I booked into a hotel there and phoned Conrad, cobbling together a story that jet lag had caught up with me after I'd driven into the countryside to blow away the cobwebs. He was too glad to hear from me to subject my account to much analysis. The police hadn't wanted to know, apparently. They'd annoyed him by suggesting I might have left him. He was going to be angry with me later. I could sense it. But for the moment he was just grateful I was all right. Pressure of work meant he couldn't come and fetch me, but he promised to contact a local garage and phone me back. By the time he did, I'd had a bath and some breakfast and was feeling more like my normal self. But it was only an act. Part of me was sure of that and still is. Marian and I are woven together. Look at me closely and all you see is a single thread. Step back and you see the pattern she and I can only glimpse. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it means. But it's there.

The garage picked the car up for me and delivered it to the hotel, complete with new battery, later that morning. I drove straight back to London, keeping my eyes on the road and my mind fixed on Conrad and our life in the here and now. It worked. Marian stayed out of sight. She followed me, of course, but at a safe distance. It was up to me whether I closed the gap between us. The when and the how were still in my control. But I couldn't escape her. And nor, I suppose, could she escape me.