The Cruellest Game (9 page)

‘Well, I can tell you your brother is no longer on Jocelyn, Mrs Jackson. He was transported back to the mainland last night.’

‘But is he all right? What’s happened?’

‘Look, Mrs Jackson, we’re not supposed to give out information like that over the phone. I know you’re a relative but—’

I interrupted. ‘Please help me if you can. I’m about to get in my car and drive to Rob’s home. It’s all I can think of. But neither he nor his wife are answering their
phones and I don’t even know if he’s back there. I mean, has Rob been taken to a hospital? Is he still in Scotland?’

There was another pause.

‘I can tell you that your brother is fine,’ said the voice, sounding, I felt, more than a little awkward and uneasy.

‘Then it’s his son, Robbie. I thought that could be it. Only my sister-in-law didn’t actually say what had happened. Is Robbie hurt? Is he . . . he’s not, not dead? Is
that it?’

I tried to make myself sound as hysterical as possible, which wasn’t difficult.

The voice on the other end was being very calm.

‘Mrs Jackson, it’s your family that you should be speaking to, not me.’

‘But, I’ve told you. I can’t get through to them. Look, please help me. It is Robbie, isn’t it? Something terrible has happened to Robbie. Hasn’t it?’

There was an even longer pause.

‘Well, yes,’ said the voice eventually. ‘Something has happened to Robbie, I’m afraid. But you must get the details from your family, I can’t
possibly—’

I hung up, cutting her off in mid-sentence.

She had told me all I needed to know.

In spite of everything I could not wait for Robert to return. I hadn’t quite worked out what I was going to do or say. I just wanted him with me. I needed him more than
ever and I loved him to bits. And I knew he loved me. Surely he did. There had to be some simple explanation for what I had discovered. There had to be.

However, that was my heart speaking. My head reminded me that, following the death of our beautiful boy, I had uncovered a dreadful secret about my husband. I still didn’t know quite what
it was, but I knew I was already afraid of it.

And yet I had to find out.

I sat in the sitting room for a few minutes trying to make some sense, any kind of sense, of the telephone conversation I’d just had. Then I went upstairs, showered as best I could after
wrapping my burned feet in plastic bags sealed around my ankles with Sellotape, and dressed in jeans and a warm cashmere sweater. The big old house felt cold again. The oil-fired central heating
never really did the job, not when it was cold and wet anyway, without being supplemented by the Aga which somehow radiated heat throughout the place. And that day, that terrible day, I had been
responsible for allowing the range to go right out. More wood needed to be brought in from the shed outside and I’d had neither energy nor inclination to do so. That day it had not been
Robbie’s fault. It would never be his fault again. How I longed to be able to chastise him for it. Just one more time.

My head was full of desperate questions. I couldn’t believe that Robert had left me alone to face this first day without our boy. It just wasn’t like him. Not like the man I had
thought I’d known anyway.

My imagination ran riot as I considered what he might be doing. Whatever could it be that was important enough for him to have left me alone? Even when he had behaved so aggressively towards me
that morning, and perhaps half because of that, I’d realized that he had not wanted to leave me. But for some reason he had been unable to stay.

Therefore, in spite of myself, I still longed for him to return.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching out for his return, sitting, with Florrie at my feet, on the wide sill of the landing window which provided a more or less uninterrupted view
of our lane. The weather cleared after a bit, the change as swiftly dramatic as it so often is on Dartmoor. I watched the warm orange glow form over the yard as the sun began to sink in the sky
behind Highrise. This was not the finest vista the old house provided, offering only a glimpse of moorland over the roofs of the little cluster of outbuildings across the yard, but I was struck
possibly more than ever before by the beauty of the place. It brought a lump to my throat, and made the memories all the more poignant.

I waited in an almost trance-like state, barely aware of the passage of time. Darkness had fallen before I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching down the lane. I was jolted into some sort of
awareness. I checked my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock.

The automatic security lights flashed on in the yard, and I recognized the approaching vehicle to be the rental car Robert had arrived in during the night. It was him then. And he still had the
rental car. He had not even managed to return it in spite of having insisted that he must do so. I wondered yet again exactly what he had been doing all day. It was almost as important for me to
know that as to learn the truth about the Rob Anderton scenario. This had been a crazy, muddling day, and remained so.

I stood up and stepped back from the window. I didn’t want Robert to know I had been watching there, waiting for him. I turned and ran, as fast as my injured feet would allow, downstairs
to the kitchen, with Florrie at my heel, and closed the door behind me. I would wait for him there in silence. I wanted him to wonder if I was in the house, or what might have happened to me, just
as I had wondered about Robbie, with so little apparent cause, when I’d returned from school yesterday.

Was it really only yesterday? My throat was tight and I felt as if I had to fight to get air into my body.

I sat down at the table and tried to control my breathing which had taken the form of short sharp gasps. And my thinking. Again I told myself how important it was that I kept a clear head.

I had deliberately placed myself with my back to the door from the hall, and I hadn’t switched on the lights. I did not want Robert to be able to see my face. Not at first anyway.

I’d been so angry when he left me that morning. Even angrier when I had made my revelatory call to Amaco. Since then I’d descended into a state of sheer misery. I was distraught, and
I was totally confused.

This would not do. It would not do at all. But I could feel the world Robert and I had so meticulously built for our little family, the world that now seemed to have always been so fragile,
disintegrating around me. Indeed, with the death of our son it had more or less disintegrated already.

I slumped in my chair, still fighting to contain my emotions.

I heard Robert open the front door, then close it again after he had stepped inside. I knew the house would seem cold and empty to him. Just as it had to me the previous day.

He called my name. Once. Twice. ‘Marion, Marion, are you there? Are you all right? I’m sorry, Marion.’

And so you should be, you bastard
, I thought. Enormously, unimaginably sorry. Not, I feared, that any amount of remorse could ever help now.

Florrie trotted to the door and began to whimper. She also loved Robert and, unlike me, had no reason to have begun to question not only that love but the entire basis from which it had
evolved.

I could hear Robert’s footsteps in the hall. Florrie barked a couple of times. Then I heard them right outside the kitchen. He called out again. I still did not respond.

I heard the kitchen door open behind me, and light from the hall flooded the room. Florrie’s whimpering turned into doggy cries of joy. I didn’t need to look round to know that she
would have become just a wriggling, whimpering furry mass wrapping herself around her master’s legs.

I remained slumped, motionless, in my chair. My back to Robert.

He cried out in anguish. ‘Oh, my darling,’ he said.

I sat up at once, very straight.

‘Thank God, my darling,’ he said, his voice heavy with relief.

‘Am I?’ I asked, turning in my chair so that I was looking directly at him over one shoulder. ‘Am I really your darling?’

He didn’t seem able to take in what I was saying, and indeed appeared only barely able to speak.

‘My darling,’ he repeated. ‘I thought . . . I was afraid. When I saw you like you were, just s-so afraid . . .’

He stumbled over the words.

‘Were you, Robert? Afraid of what exactly? And what exactly did you think?’

‘I-I don’t know. I just don’t know anything any more. It was just the way you were slumped there . . . so still, I—’

I interrupted him. ‘You thought I’d taken my own life too, didn’t you, Robert? Like our son?’

‘No. No. Well, maybe. I can’t think, Marion . . . But I was afraid. I was certainly afraid. When I came into the kitchen and saw you—’

‘And why did you think I might do that, Robert?’ I interrupted again. ‘Because our only son is dead? Or because of what I could have found out about you today?’

He switched on the kitchen light, making me blink at the brightness, and walked around to the far side of the table so that he was facing me. His eyes were red and swollen, as I am sure mine
were. His face was ashen. He looked a broken man.

‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked.

His body language suggested that he was about to say something more. I wouldn’t let him do so. I rose to my feet and held out my hand, palm vertical, obliquely aware that I probably looked
like a policeman stopping traffic.

‘Did you think maybe I’d decided to do away with myself because I’d found out you’d deceived me throughout our married life? Is that it, Robert? Is that what you were
afraid of? That I’d discovered the truth about you?’

Robert stared at me for a moment as if unsure what to do or say. Then he seemed to make a decision. Blinking furiously, he thrust back his shoulders, pulled himself upright, and did his best to
deflect my onslaught.

‘Is this what our wonderful, magical marriage has come to?’ he demanded. ‘My wife, the woman I adore, no longer trusts me. What exactly is it that you have found out? Or, what
you think you have found out, more likely.’

Fleetingly, I admired his devastating cheek. But then, if I was right, and surely I had to be, then he had been lying to me for sixteen years. And I supposed that old habits die hard.

‘You know, Robert, you know what I’ve found out,’ I said. ‘Please don’t treat me like an idiot.’

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he replied.

I stood up and took a step towards him. Suddenly I found myself overtaken by a strange sense of composure, a sort of icy calm.

‘You’re a lying bastard, Robert Anderson,’ I said in a cool, level voice. ‘Or should I say Rob Anderton?’

I tried to display no emotion. Nothing to give away what I was really thinking. Except that I found to my annoyance I could not quite control just the merest flicker of my eyelids and an
involuntary twitch to one side of my mouth. The mouth he knew so well and had kissed so often. Would I ever feel able to allow him to do so again? I wondered.

Robert remained silent, a desperate look in his eyes. It was easy to recognize. It was the look of a trapped animal.

‘Just don’t deny it any more,’ I said, trying to keep my voice low and forceful. ‘Do not deny anything. Do not lie to me any more. Tell me the truth. Tell me what has
been going on all these years. If you don’t, I shall walk out of this house and you will never see me again. I didn’t think there could be anything worse than finding our son dead. But
then to learn that our whole marriage has been some kind of sham . . .’

I paused, interrupting myself.

‘No, nothing could be worse than finding Robbie like that. But this, this is some new impossibly mad nightmare. Just tell me the truth, Robert. Now.’

‘Our marriage has never been a sham, Marion,’ he began. ‘I love you more than—’

‘Please, Robert. Stop it. This is your final chance.’

I felt his eyes bore into me. Finally the trapped look turned into one of resignation. He nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are quite right. I have to tell you everything and just hope you can understand. But first, let me take my coat off and make us a cup of tea.’

I studied him. He was extraordinary. He was still prevaricating, still seemed to be playing for time. Though what he thought he could gain now, I had no idea. He shivered, and glanced around,
aware as I had been the previous evening of how cold the kitchen was.

‘The Aga must have gone out,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps we could light the fire in the sitting room and sit by it, it’s a long story and—’

‘No, Robert. No!’ This time my voice was not calm. I shouted at him with full volume. ‘We will not have a nice cup of tea by the fire. Those days are fucking over. Just tell me
what’s been going on. Fucking tell me.’

I don’t think I had ever sworn at him before. Indeed, I don’t think I’d sworn at all really, not out loud anyway, since my days at teachers’ training college when
everybody did. As a matter of rite of passage. During my life with Robert and Robbie it would not have been expected for me to use bad language, and neither did I ever seem to have cause.

I saw him flinch. Then he sat down at the table opposite me, still wearing his waterproof, and began to speak. Everything about him indicated that he really had finally accepted that he had no
choice.

‘You’re right, of course,’ he confessed. ‘Rob Anderton and Robert Anderson are one and the same.’

I sat down again too. With a bit of a bump. It was almost involuntary. I more or less lost the use of my legs.

I had not thought it was possible for me to feel any worse than I already felt. But I did. I realized how much I hadn’t wanted Robert to admit what he just had, even though I had, of
course, already known it, really, beyond any reasonable doubt. I’d still hoped, however foolishly, that he might have some other plausible explanation. That he might have been able to tell me
he hadn’t kept a bloody great secret from me throughout our marriage, that the pair of us had not been living a lie for sixteen years.

‘Why, Robert, why?’ I asked. ‘What has been going on all this time?’ I felt absolutely defeated. My heart ached.