The Lantern (31 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
D
om held me against him, roughly. My heels were off the ground.
It was just as they say. At such moments, there is an element of dreadful clarity. All that I was and had been was compressed. All meaning was compounded into this one act of straining to understand what had happened to us, what Dom would say next.
The French have exactly the right phrase for the perfect word or expression, which we lack in English:
le mot juste
. I work within the parameters of other people’s words, faithfully reproducing what they are trying to say, not how I would have phrased it more felicitously. It is a balancing act, an attempt at understanding their intentions, alive to nuance, shades of irony, occasionally showing compassion for their mistakes. Yet all that was easier than understanding real, live people.
Slowly, shakily, he released me. He seemed to read my thoughts: he kept it simple. In a small, broken voice, he said, “You’re right. I am guilty. I killed her.”
I held my breath, hardly moving as he whispered, over and over, his face pressed into my neck, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
O
n pitted, wind-polished rocks high in the air, he began to tell me.
D
om and Rachel were married for five years, together for eight. They met in London, where they were both working, he with his geo-tech company, she as a journalist. They were both in their early thirties.
Rachel was everything Sabine told me she was: attractive and vivacious, hardworking and determined. But the longer Dom lived with her, the more he realized that there was another facet to her. She would delight in telling him of her many professional triumphs, and he was happy for her, but she would rage at the slightest downturn in her good fortune. Anyone who stood in her way or crossed her would be subjected to vindictive character assassination. Often this was extremely funny, and her renditions of events that led her to take revenge would make her the center of attention at the pub or party where she was surrounded by admiring acquaintances. She had a wide circle of friends, who forgave her faults for the amusement and glamour she brought with her.
But as Dom discovered, little by little, there was another side to these performances. Rachel would lie, easily and often. She would lie about minor incidents, and big issues such as whether she was faithful to him. It was hard to deal with, ever more so as her habitual infidelity became more daring. These episodes were not affairs but one-night stands with strangers, from which the marriage always seemed to recover. She managed each time to persuade Dom that they meant nothing. Perhaps they both used them to inject some extra thrill into their relationship. When they were together, she was exciting; part of him enjoyed the drama of uncertainty, being kept on the edge.
Yet they argued a great deal. Any confrontation could make her extremely difficult and unpleasant for days to come, and was often followed by more lies. What was real in Rachel’s universe and what was invented? She set herself up as a journalist, a seeker after truth, yet she continuously spun tales that had only the thinnest thread of reality in them. And she was worryingly persuasive. Other people believed her stories, and she came alive in that belief.
Eventually, he went alone to a psychotherapist specializing in marital problems, who confirmed he was suffering from severe stress and suggested that while no diagnosis was possible without seeing a patient, Dom himself might benefit from doing some research into narcissistic personality disorder. Even then, as Dom reluctantly followed this advice and recognized in the papers he pulled off the Internet not his own but his wife’s familiar patterns and traits, he wondered: Was Rachel really as bad as this? Could it be a question of enough love? If he had shown her the love she craved, the acceptance of who she was without embellishment, could he have brought her back into normality?
But then again, was it the psychological issue that was responsible for the serial infidelities, the broken promises and schemes, the arguments—or was that simply her true nature?
The difficulty was that Rachel was so plausible, and so slippery. She might have paid lip service to the idea that she needed help, but she had no intention of accepting any. Why should she, when she had no problem? Plenty of other people accepted her as she was—indeed, were full of the admiration she craved.
Take Sabine. Sabine clearly believed Rachel was an admirable person and that she always told the truth. I remembered the story Sabine related, in all seriousness, of how Rachel supposedly met the interesting couple on a train. The way she had lunch with them in a town that did not seem to exist afterward, the apparent connection to the couple whose death was reported in the papers. I had not known what to think about that until now. At last it made some kind of sense.
W
hen Dom told Rachel he was leaving her, he half-anticipated disaster. He knew what the effect would be, but by then all he wanted was to extricate himself. But to his amazement, she took it well. She offered to be the one to move out, and he was more than generous to her, agreeing to pay the rent on her new apartment and allowing her to take what she wanted from their house in North London.
He and Rachel had been separated for six weeks when he arrived home to find her waiting for him, having let herself in and started on his vodka. He had not thought to change the locks, so amicable had been the split.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said.
And, by the way, she was pregnant.
Stunned, he tried to explain to her that they would still be better off apart. That he would support the child. That nothing could be gained from trying again. The marriage was over.
She pleaded. She could and would change. What had happened in the past was all just that—the past. She played on his guilt, the reaction of his family if he were to abandon her.
In the teeth of Dom’s resistance, she moved back in. He knew it was a mistake.
D
om withdrew into himself. He swam for hours every day to avoid going home.
In the year leading up to the sale of his company, he volunteered for the lion’s share of the traveling. He traveled a great deal, across Europe and to the Far East. The more she tried to stop him from going, the longer he stayed away. In London, his friends placed their spare rooms at his disposal.
He ignored her. By that stage, it was clear there was no baby. Even when she had admitted to Dom she was not pregnant, she still told other people that she was. When he refused to react, the lies became more and more hurtful, more outrageous. She told friends and family that he had alcohol and drug addictions, that he gambled recklessly, that he was turned on by seedy clubs and underage girls. Then he was questioned by the police after she claimed he had broken down and confessed to her that he was the man who attacked and raped a woman in a horrific case that had been widely reported in the newspapers. Luckily, he was able to establish beyond a doubt that he was out of the country at the time.
Then she claimed she was seriously unwell. He knew that; by then, he was certain that she was mentally unbalanced. If she would only accept professional help, all might not be lost. But Rachel laughed at the suggestion. She was sick, she said, physically, terminally sick.
He didn’t believe her, of course, certain it was yet another one of her attention-seeking stunts. Their arguments escalated. She played on his ingrained sense of loyalty, the power of the marriage vows, and his conscience. Effectively, he had left her anyway, even if he had not formally made the break.
She begged him to come back; he had to, she needed him desperately. He ignored her ridiculous pleas and extended his visit to Hong Kong and Japan. But, against all odds, all the stories and fabrications, this time she was telling the truth.
By the time he did return, it was almost too late.
I
t wouldn’t be long now, I could feel it.
More and more of the others, the strangers, were coming. For nearly a week, I lived in trepidation, worrying about who would turn up next. By now, they were being announced by neon flashes. Light would flare on the ceiling and the walls when wind brushed the leaves back and forth outside. Even with the shutters half-closed, I found this an uncomfortable sensation, like a quick, silent explosion. Flashes followed: white rushes of rapid movement with streaks of green and yellow and red. I was reminded of the bird André gave me, or rather, more accurately, that the old lady gave to him; there’s quite a difference.
Then I’d see another of them arrive. And so many were children. Not just Pierre, but a whole raggle-taggle gang of them, none of them familiar. Staring at me, waiting for me to say something.
T
hen, on the sixth or seventh day, it was the turn of the kitchen wall to behave oddly. The kitchen is painted white, has always been white, but suddenly, when I opened my eyes after a mid-afternoon doze in the chair by the hearth, the walls were covered in a profusion of flowers, garish, scarlet poppies wide as dinner plates, with creeping stems like bindweed.
As I watched in amazement, the flowers seemed to open and close, and tendrils grew in sweeping curls. The wall was alive with color and movement. There was no sound but the beating of my heart. Within moments, red blooms were pulsing in time to my chest. I looked up in horror at the ceiling, and saw the inexplicable display had begun to take hold there, too, the tendrils would soon have the lamp in their grasp.
I ran. Fumbling at the door catch, my vision blurring with fear, I tilted down the stone steps into the courtyard and made for the open ground. But the disturbance had followed me.
The land was rotating. Round and round it went, all around me. Alternating blackness and light that made the world flicker like the first moving pictures.
I was off-balance, standing in the middle of a fairground ride. But these were live horses, and a full-size black steam engine pulling train carriages by, at speed, on the dusty path to the fields. I raised my eyes to the sky, and a great eagle hovering overhead transformed into a carnival clown.
It will soon be over, I remember thinking. I closed my eyes.
I
n London, even then still unsure whether he was being played for a fool, Dom drove her to the private hospital for another scan and a second opinion.
A large part of him held back from her. Yet he was there with her in the consultant’s room when the news was broken. This was no lie. When Rachel first turned to Dom, she wanted him to tell her that everything would be all right. They were going to fight this, he told her, and she would pull through. So that’s what he did. That’s what anyone would have done.
Then she got angry with him. “It’s not you who’s got this, who’s going to have to do the winning. It’s me, that’s the bottom line.”
She was wrong, though. It was happening to both of them, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. She was coming to terms with her mortality, but so was he.
Outside the hospital, the world seemed cruelly normal. For once, Rachel was scared. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “For putting you through this. For everything I’ve done.”
And he did believe her.
Yet, as the months went by, they had to accept that the cancer was spreading, that she was not going to get better, no matter how hard she fought.
In their bedroom, she would turn her face to the wall. She was having hideous dreams, she said. Her voice was barely recognizable. Gone were the confrontations and provocations. The only comfort Dom could give was to agree to two requests.
T
he first was that he would support her in her wish to refuse more chemotherapy and live as normally as possible while she still could. She wanted to go to Provence and to work. Dom protested that he could only spare a couple of long weekends and a few days here and there away from his business; it was just at this time that the negotiations for the sale of the company were getting complicated. Why choose to go there, why not stay in London?
She was determined.
“One last good story,” she said. “Maybe more than one, who knows?”
It energized her, she told Dom, to have goals. She wanted to get away, to go somewhere she could immerse herself in other stories and forget her own. He began to think that maybe she really had miraculously turned a corner, that she could get better if he supported her. Deep in his subconscious, he knew it could never be that simple, but there she was, in front of him: she glowed, she was the woman he had first met. And she wanted to be somewhere she knew he would want to be, too.
Rachel’s will prevailed: she rented the Mauger house for six weeks. Dom visited her there as often as he could, and was heartened by what he saw. She looked healthy enough, though she battled terrible exhaustion. He had no reason to doubt the veracity of the stories she told him of her experiences here. Perhaps there was no need to invent them, they were rich enough. She was researching Marthe Lincel, and began making her own inquiries about the girl who went missing from Goult.
The rental agent dropped around a couple of times to check that all was well. Rachel had made a friend for life, it seemed, by agreeing to investigate Marthe Lincel’s story. That was the way Rachel operated: she won people over by giving more than they could ever have expected. The agent seemed pleasant enough but she hardly registered with Dom, so intent was he on keeping an eye on Rachel. It was a short but peaceful interlude, during which he scrutinized her behavior and agonized over making the right decision when the time came to fulfill his second promise.
R
achel was the one who found the clinic, made the appointment, booked the travel tickets and the hotel in Geneva. They went to see it, took in the impersonal, cream-painted walls and beige carpets, and she deftly interviewed the soft-spoken, middle-aged Swiss couple in charge.
They did not see anyone else there, which was a relief. She was asking questions, as she always did. The man seemed suspicious at one point, as if he could tell she was a journalist and suspected her motives. She was very quiet after they left.
“If I have to, I will,” was all she said. “I want to die on my terms.”
Dom, still profoundly disturbed by her decision, said nothing.
T
hey found a small apartment to rent nearby. During the following weeks, they sought a third and then a fourth opinion. The doctors’ brutal confirmations were the same.
They were running out of time.
As the pain increased, Rachel scripted her final lie: her family was to be told that she died at the flat they were renting near the hospital where she was being treated, that the end was sudden, that no one had suspected she would go so soon. It was what she wanted. What difference could one more lie make? For once, it was a lie intended to spare others from hurt.
Even when they returned to the clinic for the last time, they saw no one except for the quiet, middle-aged couple and a nurse who provided the morphine that would make her as comfortable as she could be. The room was functional, completely sealed off from the outside world. Dom dreaded what would happen there, not daring to think ahead. But Rachel smiled, and squeezed his hand.
Was she as numb as he was? Doubts churned ceaselessly. Of everything that she had put him through, this was the worst. Was he truly trying to do the best for her, what she wanted? Or was he acting for himself? Could they have tried any harder for a cure? No. Would he do what she asked, when she called time?
They were shown how to operate the morphine line, then left alone.
I
will not write down exactly what Dom did. It was enough. He did what she had demanded of him. It was brutal and ugly, as she raved and cursed and needled him. It was not a good death. Nothing could have been further from the peace she craved. Then, when the unbearable worst of it was almost over, came the words that made the difference.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said.
Such an innocuous phrase. A brief string of ordinary words. Words she had used before.
He heard the familiar mockery in her voice. Saw, behind her half-closed eyes, the lizard watching, waiting for him to react in those seconds of poisoned calm. Had all this been a setup? Would she go that far, could she be that twisted? Even now, with the last of her strength, was she tormenting him, or could she not stop herself from leaving him with one more terrible uncertainty?
Dom did not stop. He heard her speak and his body reacted instinctively, viscerally, to her voice and he could not stop. He kept right on with what they’d started, with what she’d claimed she wanted. What the practical and compassionate Swiss couple had heard her say she wanted. What her signature on the consent forms indicated. And part of him wanted to do it, was fired by so much anger that he had never wanted to do anything more. Sensing a trap, furious with himself for walking into it, needing it all to be over—he crossed the line only he knew was there.
Suicide? Or murder?
Afterward, when the staff at the clinic had moved in, discreetly and swiftly, Dom was left agonized and isolated. In the weeks following Rachel’s death, he was physically ill, shaking and nauseous, as if his own body had turned on him in punishment when no one else would. When his guilt almost broke him after silent months on his own, he confided in his sister, a doctor, and found himself a pariah in his own family, more alone than he had ever thought possible. And when he had looked to his churchgoing parents for support, he found none. Only a tacit understanding that he was no longer the son they had brought up to know right from wrong. If forgiveness was possible, it would be a long time coming.