The Secrets Between Us (6 page)

We crossed the River Avon via an ugly road bridge at a spectacularly beautiful spot, and Jamie pointed to the suspension bridge to the right of us high above the wide, brown river that curled away between the sheer cliff-faces of the gorge, the forest to the left blooming with colour; a thousand different shades of green dropped into their mirror images in the water. I’d had no idea that Bristol was so breathtakingly dramatic, so lovely.

‘People jump off that bridge,’ Jamie said.

I glanced over my shoulder at him. He was playing with a toy action figure. He held it upside down by its feet and dropped it as a demonstration.

‘They used to,’ Alexander corrected. ‘They used to bungee. We saw it on telly, didn’t we?’

‘It’s a terribly long way up.’

‘Or down,’ said Alexander. He turned his head towards me, but I couldn’t see his eyes, only myself reflected in the windows of his sunglasses. ‘Are you afraid of heights?’ he asked.

I nodded. I couldn’t tell him that it was only since my pregnancy. Before that, hardly anything scared me. Since my baby was stillborn, I had realized how frightening and
unpredictable life could be. I saw danger where previously I had only seen possibility.

It wasn’t the pain of childbirth. I had expected that. When the persistent ache that had been squeezing me deep inside for a few days developed into a definite pain I was thrilled. I phoned Laurie to call him home from work and fortunately he was in the office and not out with clients. Then I ran upstairs to check I had everything in my hospital bag: newborn nappies, cotton mittens, vests, talcum powder, sleep-suits, toothbrush, toothpaste, flannel. It was an unnecessary exercise. I knew everything was where it should be. I’d been checking for days.

I put one hand in the small of my back – it was a pose I thought I should adopt – and with the other I stroked my hardening belly while I gazed out of the window in my best coat and shoes, waiting for Laurie to come home.

I had never been so excited in my entire life. I had never looked forward to anything as much as I looked forward to the coming few hours.

In the hospital delivery suite I threw myself into the rhythm of childbirth with enthusiasm. I had been warned how much labour hurts but nothing had prepared me for the physical violence of it or the way my body would take over. I was shocked but I knew it was what women had to endure if they were to be mothers. I was too busy breathing to listen when the medical staff explained they were changing the monitor strapped around me because it wasn’t picking up a heartbeat and they thought there might be a problem with the machine. A different midwife came in and then a doctor. The atmosphere in the room changed, but I ignored it. Laurie tried to talk to me, to prepare me, but I shook him away. I had a job to do. I carried on delivering. Laurie, the midwife, the doctors and the nurses were following the wrong script and I wouldn’t listen to them. I wouldn’t look at their faces, I wouldn’t believe what was happening
because if I didn’t believe it then it couldn’t be true.

Bristol ended suddenly, just the other side of the river, and almost at once we were driving through countryside that was lush and green. Cattle grazed, heads down in fields; little villages went by. The hedgerows were drooping with the weight of an abundance of late summer flowers and leaves. Ahead I could see the looming silhouettes of the Mendip hills and they were glorious, purple in the light. We drove up a busy section of road and on past pubs and farm shops and fruit stalls. There were fewer and fewer villages, more farm tracks, the occasional all-night garage. As the sun began to set to our right, we turned off the main road and went uphill along a narrow, winding lane. Hills rose out of the gloaming green and shadowed landscape below us. Alexander pointed out Glastonbury Tor in the distance as a low Somerset mist settled over the valley. Scrubby blackberries weighed down the brambles that wove through the hedgerows, and the bracken was already dying. A huge flock of rooks, two hundred or more, cawed overhead, disturbing the calm of the wide, pale sky. For the first time that year I felt the promise of autumn in the air.

‘Here we are,’ said Alexander, turning sharply into a gap between the trees. We rattled over a cattle-grid and went up the track that led to Avalon. The Land Rover bounced and bumped over pot holes as we wove through a tunnel of trees, until the trees gave way to fields and up ahead I saw the house.

The light was fading but was still strong enough to illuminate the front face of the building. It was larger, older and more substantial than I’d imagined. It had been there for so long that it seemed to be part of the landscape that surrounded it, an organic thing of stone, red-clay roofing tiles, wood and plaster. Alexander parked the car at the end of the track, next to a semi-derelict barn overrun with bramble and ivy, a couple of empty stables and a double
horse-trailer, tilted forward to rest on its towing bar. Bales of hay were stacked at the back of a big old shed. Swallows darted in and out of the bucolic clutter of buildings and into the orchard beyond, swooping fast as arrows close to the top of the long grass. Black and white cows grazed beneath the tree. The orchard boundaries were defined by nettles, tall as my shoulder, that leaned over with their own weight.

The house sat in its own gardens, separated from the orchard by walls at the front and a barbed-wire fence at the back. A substantial wooden porch, overwound with honeysuckle so old that its main stems were as thick as my wrists, stood slightly lopsided before the front door. There were windows on either side of the porch and above it. It looked as if the original house had been extended to the side and backwards, or maybe it had just been built in a ramshackle way, with extra rooms added on as afterthoughts. A couple of tiles had slipped from the roof and the dun-coloured plaster that rendered the old stone walls was peeling in huge, papery flakes. The flower beds in the garden were untidy and overgrown but it was clear from the faded blooms on the stems of the roses and the colours and shapes of the shrubs, now jostling for light and space, that at one time the garden had been beautiful.

‘It’s a mess,’ Alexander said, following my eyes. ‘Genevieve was too busy with her horses to bother with the garden and I haven’t had the time.’

‘She’s a rider?’

‘Yep.’

‘She might be in the Olympics,’ Jamie said.

I laughed. I thought he was joking, then I remembered that Jamie was not a frivolous child. He looked at me crossly and immediately I tried to make up for my reaction by saying: ‘You mean she’s a really good rider?’

‘One of the best,’ said Alexander.

‘Oh. Does she do show-jumping?’

‘Eventing,’ Alexander said. ‘Dressage, show-jumping and cross-country. A lot of people are into it round here.’

‘You don’t get much of that in Manchester,’ I said.

Alexander smiled at me.

‘Where are the horses?’

‘Genevieve’s mother’s looking after them for the time being. She … well, I’ll tell you later. This way,’ he said.

I followed him through a wooden gate and up a small, flagstoned path to a side door that opened into a whitewashed room full of boots, stacks of newspapers, empty wine and vodka bottles and other things waiting to be recycled, unwashed laundry and cobwebs. One whole wall was covered with shiny rosettes, mostly red, and a couple of rope horse-collars hung from a metal hook beneath the window. Grooming equipment and a rusty tin of hoof oil were packed into a blue plastic pail. Riding coats and boots were heaped in one corner together with an assortment of heavy-duty rope, metal and leather kit that must have been something to do with horses. A misshapen cardboard carton of washing powder lurched on top of a washing machine in the far corner of the room and an old dog bed lay beside it.

A second door led into the kitchen, which was large, warm and untidy. Soiled crockery was stacked in the sink, and a cat stood on the counter eating the remains of a chicken carcass. The floor looked as if it had not been washed in weeks and the windows were grimy.

Alexander put my bag down, shooed the cat from the chicken and turned the dish round. There was little meat left.

‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘I was going to make us a sandwich for dinner.’

The cat had a self-satisfied look on its face. It jumped on to the kitchen table and cleaned its paws, licking its fur with its tiny pink tongue.

Alexander sighed. ‘It doesn’t even belong to us. It just comes in and steals our food.’

Jamie went over to the cat and stroked it. The cat ignored him.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alexander. ‘This isn’t much of a welcome. We were going to have a tidy round, weren’t we, Jamie?’

Jamie scowled and put his head on the table. He watched the cat.

‘Only I had to work late so Jamie had tea round at his cousins’ house and between us we got nothing done.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To help sort things out.’

Alexander looked bone tired. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

CHAPTER NINE

ALEXANDER MADE A
pot of tea. I was touched that he went to the trouble of the teapot rather than simply putting teabags in mugs, and I drank my tea while he made toast for Jamie. When the boy was settled at the table, he took hold of my bag.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This way. I’ll take you to your room.’

I followed Alexander as he hefted my bag through a small door built into the wall of the dining room, up some narrow stairs.

Mine was a smallish room at the back of the house, in the eaves. The ceiling sloped so steeply that I could only stand up straight by the bed-head wall. There was room for the bed and a rickety old chest of drawers with a dusty Tiffany-shaded lamp perched on top. I had to stoop to open the drawers. The window on the far side of the bed was small and square, divided into four equal panes. A cobweb stretched across the top left-hand pane and dead insects dusted the ledge. Still, somebody had made an effort. A small glass vase stood on the sill and in the vase were three roses, their petals the yellow and pink of ripe pomegranates and their scent faint, but sweet.

‘Will this do?’ Alexander asked, setting down my case.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. Then a little more enthusiastically: ‘It’s lovely.’

It wasn’t lovely though. It felt like a servant’s room. I was certain it had never been used by the family because it had a lonely, unloved feel to it and there was a faint smell of damp and must, as if the door and windows were rarely opened. I’d been hoping for something different. I didn’t know what exactly, but something better than this, something more welcoming.

Alexander and I had spoken on the telephone several times since we’d returned to England. We had been careful with one another, avoiding awkward topics such as his wife and where she’d gone and Laurie and what he’d done, instead making practical arrangements – agreeing my wage and so on, and exploring one another’s tastes in books, music and films. I knew that he came from the West Midlands but was not close to his family; he would not talk about them at all. I also knew that his father- and mother-in-law, Genevieve’s parents, were well off and lived in a big house on a hill close by. The family fortune had come from the rock that was quarried from the heart of the hill. Alexander said the family had dug into it like a child would dig into a favourite pudding. The original Victorian quarry had been exhausted years ago, and a new, enormous, state-of-the-art one had been opened closer to the main road. I knew that it was Alexander’s job and Genevieve’s father’s fortune that had brought and kept them together, in ways I did not yet understand. We both liked Merlot but Chardonnay gave us a headache. Neither of us had a sweet tooth. We were both better at listening than talking. As such, our conversations tended to go for some time with neither of us actually saying very much. Despite this we had, I believed, achieved an acceptable level of intimacy.

Now I was thrown into a well of insecurity and anxiety. I’d learned not to assume how life would turn out, but it
scared me, this small, dark room with its sloping ceiling and its tiny window.

Alexander scratched his forehead. The situation was horribly uncomfortable. Coming here, so many miles from Manchester, and escaping that awful, all-encompassing emotional intensity, all those people walking on eggshells trying to avoid talking about the myriad subjects they thought might upset me, had seemed such a good idea, it had looked like the easy option. I’d never been to Somerset before, nobody knew me or Laurie or what had happened and I thought that would make it much easier for me to put it all behind me. Also, I’d been looking forward to helping Alexander and caring for Jamie.

Instead I felt as if I didn’t belong there. Nothing felt right. It felt as if it might never be right.

Alexander and I both looked at the bed that was to be mine. I realized that, just as I was wondering if I had made a mistake by coming, he was wondering if he’d made a worse one in inviting me. I sat down on the edge of the mattress, bouncing as if to test the springs.

‘It’s really comfy,’ I said.

Alexander sat beside me and the mattress tipped me towards him. I had to clench my stomach muscles to avoid rolling into him.

‘Sarah,’ he said gently, ‘there are things I need to tell you. This situation … it’s more complicated than you realize. Genevieve … she …’

I pushed my hair out of my eyes and hooked it over my ear.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘But I have to tell you. The thing is, you’ve come from Manchester, where I guess you could pretty much be who you wanted to be. People don’t judge one another so much in cities because there are so many different kinds of people there.’

I nodded.

‘Now you’re in Burrington Stoke, population less than a thousand people. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone thinks they have the right to know everyone else’s business. It’s like being part of a big family and I know that sounds cosy but it’s not always a good thing.’

‘You mean they’ll speculate about why I’m here?’

‘Just a bit!’

I smiled shyly.