Out of Sight (34 page)

‘Oh,' he said. ‘Don't worry about me. I'll get along.'

‘Will you be happy here in London?' she persisted, striving to keep the quaver of disappointment out of her voice.

‘Yes,' he smiled. ‘Thanks to you.' He raised his glass to hers, his gaze seeking reassurance.

Leonie held tightly to her glass, feeling the lethal chill of contempt. She knew this was the best she could expect, that Patrick's habits of guardedness and misdirection were too ingrained, but she suddenly felt she owed it to herself to rebel, to rip to shreds his carefully constructed web of untruthful silences. ‘Only me?' she demanded scornfully. ‘No one else?'

Patrick, surprised, shook his head, as if trying to shake some tinnitus irritation from his ears. ‘It was you who saved me,' he answered, giving her a wounded look. ‘No one else.'

‘You're such a liar!' Leonie pushed her wine glass away, swung her feet around, free of the narrow seat of the picnic bench, and, relieved now that she was unlikely ever to see him again, walked away.

Rob reclined on the settee, looking out of place against the boldly patterned cushions. His plastered leg was stretched out ahead of him and he tucked enthusiastically into Patrick's vegetable lasagne. Patrick watched, amused: enforced inactivity made the boy restless but had done nothing to diminish his appetite.

‘So when are you planning to move back in?' Rob asked between mouthfuls.

Vicki, sitting with Patrick at the table, glanced across at him. Caught up in Rob's surgery, and the logistics of bringing him home from Brighton, neither of them had yet re-visited Patrick's promise of commitment. Struck by the poignancy of Vicki's expression, Patrick grinned at them both.

‘Still sure you want me?' he asked.

Vicki looked to her son, who waved his fork in the air. ‘Your call, Mum. Nothing to do with me!'

‘What about your flat?' she appealed to Patrick.

‘The lease still has a few more months to run, but I don't suppose that matters.' Patrick reached for her hand. ‘Whenever suits you.'

‘If you wait till I'm out of plaster, then I can give you a hand with your stuff,' offered Rob.

‘Great.'

Patrick was rewarded with a smile from Rob that lightened some of the flatness he'd felt since his leave-taking drink with Leonie. Her final anger had been well deserved, but what lingered in his mind was speaking about Daniel. Apart from his parents and a couple of work colleagues, it had been years since he had even been in the company of anyone who knew what had happened. Although a part of him felt absolved by her knowledge, for a day or so it had made his present life seem unreal, made the guy-ropes that attached him to it feel dangerously frail. Rob's easy hold on life renewed his confidence.

‘We could throw a party,' suggested Rob. ‘A kind of house-warming.'

Vicki looked to see Patrick's reaction. ‘Easy, tiger!' she rebuked her son. ‘One thing at a time.'

‘No, why not?' asked Patrick. ‘Be good to meet your friends.'

‘I'd like you to meet my brother,' said Vicki shyly. ‘He lives in Northumberland, but he's all the family there is left now.'

‘And I'll take you to visit my mother, if you like,' offered Patrick. ‘Not sure I can face socialising with my dad and
his lady friend. We haven't seen eye to eye for a long time.'

‘That's a shame,' Vicki observed. ‘But you must do exactly as you please.'

Patrick felt comfortably encircled by her determination to make everything easy for him. While it made defection impossible, it also relieved him of responsibility. ‘Let's have a party! Invite as many people as you want,' he promised her gaily. ‘I want you to be happy.'

Hearing the slightly too-high note in his voice, Patrick realised he was attempting to skirt his sense that his gesture that evening in the guesthouse now seemed to him faintly ridiculous. He wasn't sure what he wanted – wasn't even sure whether it mattered what he wanted. His mind flashed back to his younger self, moving in with Belinda, going along quite naturally with plans to get married once she became pregnant. He remembered how, waking up and finding her beside him, he had felt for the first time in his life as if he had not a care in the world. Perhaps that's how he would feel again if he allowed himself once more to go with the flow of other people's wishes.

‘Is there anyone you want to invite over from France?' asked Vicki, her mild tone nonetheless betraying a twinge of anxiety.

As Patrick hesitated, Rob blithely interrupted. ‘I'll have some more, if there is any.' He held out his empty plate. ‘And don't forget Elizabeth,' he reminded his mother before
turning to Patrick. ‘She's my godmother. Lives in Ipswich. You'll like her.'

Vicki jumped up to take Rob's plate, laughing at him. ‘You just want as many people around as possible to wait on you hand and foot!'

‘Sounds good to me.' Rob lay back, smiling at them like a well-fed cat.

The following week, as Patrick left the Angel Sanctuary at lunchtime, intending to grab something to eat between patients, he remembered to stop and tell the receptionist to block out his appointments for the dates when he and Vicki had booked a week's holiday together.

‘Oh, lovely!' exclaimed the girl when she heard the reason, then drew a sharp breath. ‘By the way, did that woman ever get hold of you?' She flicked back through the large appointments diary. ‘Stella Deacon. She came in asking for you. Sorry, I completely forgot. It was while you were down in Brighton.'

‘Stella Deacon?' It took Patrick a few moments to place her as Leonie's friend, whom he had met in Riberac. His spine tensed.

‘I told her we weren't sure when you'd be back,' the receptionist continued. ‘She wouldn't say what she wanted, but she seemed rather agitated.'

He became aware that the young woman's radar for gossip was on high alert. ‘Oh, yes. She did find me, thanks.'

Patrick went out, pausing on the pavement as the
lunchtime crowds surged impatiently around him. His appetite forgotten, he made for Islington Green where he managed to find space on a bench. He sat down, thinking hard. He had seen Leonie after his return from Brighton. Was this why she'd called him a liar? It hurt him that Leonie might feel betrayed. By denying her such a mundane, simple truth – that he was seeing someone – he had repaid her generosity with a meanness of spirit that she would rightly despise. At least she was now back in France, safely away from him. He wondered how long his inability to speak would go on inflicting damage on others?

A new thought stabbed him: did Vicki know about Leonie? Might Stella, or Leonie, have felt it her duty to track Vicki down and warn her? He could not bear that Vicki and Rob might also be hurt by his dereliction. Josette's voice echoed in his ears, and he felt pursued again by the monstrous
Doppelgänger
that was his worst self. Vicki had shown little curiosity about his marriage or past relationships. It was one aspect of what he found so restful about her. So why had he not simply been open with her about his past, about Daniel, about seeing Leonie again? He had wanted to live with Vicki because of the self he saw reflected in her eyes. A self he wanted to be. He didn't want that reflection to be spoiled. He was tired of being this monster who upset everyone, who left his own son to die in a hot car.

Patrick slowly became aware that people around him were scrunching up their sandwich bags and heading back
to their jobs. He had a patient due at two o'clock, but he sat on, exhausted. A filthy pigeon with a dismembered claw pecked about the ground beside an over-flowing rubbish bin. He could not bear it if his life were to be reduced again to the simple act of heaving himself to his feet and putting one foot in front of another. Where would he go this time? Josette's house was sold. If he were in Brighton he might consider walking into the sea.

The thought of his two o'clock appointment tugged at him. He struggled to focus his attention, to remember who he was due to see. Yes, Rebecca, a ‘yummy mummy' with two small children, a borderline anorexic who ricocheted from one type of therapy to another. But he had seen her twice and believed his remedies had already made a difference. He might help her yet. He should go. It was all he could do. It was unfair to keep her waiting.

That evening, although due to see Vicki, he called to say that he wasn't doing very well, that maybe he was going down with something. He went back to his own flat where he occupied himself catching up with domestic chores.

The following day he called her as he left work, said he was going to get an early night, then, instead of taking his usual route home, he crossed the road and made his way down to the canal, heading east. On this high summer evening there was an attractive desolation about the unfolding vista of crumbling Victorian brick, ramshackle industrial units and cheap-jack new-build flats. Every so
often a cyclist coming up behind him would ring their bell, which, even in his distraught mood, Patrick couldn't help experiencing as a particularly merry sound. For the canal was not a lonely place: he passed moorhens, ducks, runners, young office workers in business suits carrying backpacks, lovers, gossiping friends. He slowed his own pace, determined to fight the compulsion to enter the trance-like state that his walking so often induced. Something in him recognised that if he disappeared from himself, this time there would be no return.

He forced himself to leave the tow-path at the next set of steps, and found himself on a busy main road. The noisy traffic confused him and for a moment he felt helpless and overcome. But he no longer wanted to feel like this, and it was his determination not to yield to the siren voices that whispered to him to surrender that propelled him to a bus stop and onto a crowded bus that took him close to Vicki's house.

She had returned to him the key he'd had previously as her lodger, yet he rang the bell before letting himself in. Rob craned forwards to look into the hallway from his position on the settee.

‘Oh, hi,' he greeted him. ‘Feeling better?'

‘Yes. Thanks.'

‘Mum's upstairs.' Rob returned his attention to the laptop balanced on his thighs.

Patrick climbed the stairs and found Vicki in her bedroom listening to the radio whilst ironing. He went
straight to her and, but for the hot iron, would have taken her in his arms.

‘There you are!' She kissed him, laughing as she suspended the iron awkwardly in the air away from them.

‘Wanted a bit of time to myself, that's all,' explained Patrick.

Vicki busied herself with unplugging the iron. ‘Of course.'

‘I was upset over some news about an old friend.' He steeled himself. ‘Someone who was close to me in France.'

‘But it's all right now?' Vicki's glance seemed to contain a warning not to trespass across some invisible boundary.

‘Yes.'

‘Good. Can you help me fold these duvet covers?'

Patrick took two corners of the fabric in his hands and, as he helped shake it flat, said into the billowing cotton, ‘We never seem to speak about the past.'

Vicki took his corners from him and folded the cover neatly. ‘Well, there's no rush, is there?' She patted it smooth and turned to scoop a second one from the pile of laundry.

‘There are things about me I want you to know,' he implored her, desperate now to tell her about Daniel.

Her concentration was absorbed in untangling the fabric, and she held out the corners to him again with a smile. ‘When the time is right.'

Patrick experienced a sudden rush of rage, not against Vicki but against a world that had conspired to shut him up and suffocate his need to speak, to be heard. He wanted to smash up every object in the room. Instead, he handed
back the cover and turned to the window, hoping somehow to discharge the sour metallic taste of his fury. As he did so, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror on Vicki's dressing table and glimpsed in his own face his father's thin mouth and high cheekbones, his father's aggrieved sideways glance. Patrick's sense of being thwarted became vicious and dangerous, threatened to overwhelm him. He turned back to Vicki.

‘We won't have secrets from one another, will we?' he pleaded. ‘We must be able to speak to one another.'

She paled slightly, but nodded seriously. ‘I promise. You can tell me anything you like.' Before he could say more, she came to him, lying her hands lightly against his chest. ‘All in good time.' She touched her lips to his, then turned to pick up a pile of folded linen from the bed. ‘Here,' she said, thrusting it at him. ‘These go in the airing cupboard.'

As Patrick put away the clean sheets his anger ebbed as swiftly as it had risen. Although forced to acknowledge that once he would have welcomed Vicki's reticence and found it endearing, now he felt utterly dejected by it.

Rob looked up as Patrick came back into the kitchen. ‘You making supper, then?' he asked.

‘Sure.' Patrick opened the fridge to see what was there. Little on the shelves appealed, and he shut it again, sighing, then saw Rob regarding him candidly.

‘Mum clams up when she's upset,' Rob informed him. ‘You'll get used to it.'

‘I've been fairly guilty of that myself,' Patrick admitted.

‘Can I ask you something?' asked Rob.

Surprised by the boy's serious expression, Patrick sat down at the table, facing him. ‘Of course.'

‘I never paid much attention to what Mum got up to when I was growing up,' Rob began. ‘She told me who my dad was, no big deal, and then, like you do as a kid, I assumed it never bothered her to be on her own because she had me.' He stared down at his hands. ‘She's stopped doing yoga on Friday night, right?'

Patrick was taken aback by this non-sequitur. ‘Right. She didn't like the teacher.'

‘She's
always
done some kind of regular class on a Friday. Always. Guess why.'