The Memory of Midnight (20 page)

‘Yes, I did.’ All these years later and the thought of her father could still make her eyes sting with tears. ‘He was so . . .’ Tess couldn’t finish. There were no
words to describe her father, or how safe and loved he had always made her feel.

Swallowing past the constriction in her throat, she made herself think about what Luke had said. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she told him. ‘Maybe at some level I was looking
for someone to look after me.’

Martin had made her feel cherished at first. He took her to restaurants with discreet lighting and chose wines she had never heard of. He helped her on and off with her coat, walked on her right
to protect her from the traffic, and summoned taxis so that he could take her home. Tess had never been with anyone who knew how to attract a waiter’s attention with just the lift of an
eyebrow. He was assured and sophisticated and caring – everything Luke hadn’t been.

I just want to look after you, darling
, he would say whenever Tess offered to pay or to arrange an outing herself, and she had been charmed.

At first.

‘I was lonely when I met him,’ she said. She’d been missing Luke too, but she didn’t tell him that. ‘Wondering if I’d made the right decision going to London
after all. I had a fantastic job working as a historical researcher for a film company, but working in libraries and archives all day meant that I never got to meet anybody. So when one of the
producers tossed me an unwanted invitation to a gallery opening, I thought I would make the effort and go along on my own. Of course, it was awful. Nobody spoke to me. Except Martin.’

The gallery was full of tight little groups engaged in vivacious conversations. Tess was clutching a glass of warm white wine and staring desperately at a vast canvas covered in splodges of
colour when a warm voice spoke in her ear.

‘I can’t make head nor tail of it, can you?’

Startled, she turned to see Martin smiling at her. He was wearing a dark suit and his nearly blonde hair caught the gallery lights. The edges of his blue eyes crinkled engagingly, and Tess
felt her heart stumble.

‘He was so . . .
perfect
,’ she remembered bleakly. ‘Attractive, intelligent, charming, articulate, funny . . . I was bowled over. Martin was so
interested
in
me. We had dinner that night, and I was sensible enough not to give him my address, but I’d told him enough about what I did for him to track down my work address and send me two dozen red
roses the next day. It should have been a warning, but I thought it was so romantic.’

‘Red roses?’ Luke shook his head. ‘Jesus!’

‘So of course I agreed to dinner the next night, and the next. Martin told me he’d never met anyone like me, and I was overwhelmed by being adored. I fell madly in love with him.
Head over heels, upside down. He swept me off my feet. Pick your cliché.’

Now that she had started, she wanted to get it all out. Letting out a long sigh, she picked up her glass once more, only to find that it was empty, and without speaking Luke leant over and
topped her up.

‘If I’d had more friends in London, I might have been more cautious,’ she said, watching the golden liquid sloshing into the glass, ‘but I let him bowl me over. I was
thrilled that he couldn’t bear to be apart from me, that he was jealous if I spent any time with anyone else. I was a fool,’ she said bitterly.

‘You were young,’ Luke offered, pouring brandy into his own glass, but Tess wasn’t going to let herself off the hook that lightly.

‘I was twenty-three. I’d done a degree and an MA. I had a good job. I should have known better, but it all happened so fast. It was like tumbling down a hill. I couldn’t seem
to stop and get my bearings.

‘And then his mother died. Martin was distraught, and he couldn’t bear for me to leave him. He needed me, he said, and when he asked me to marry him, of course I agreed. His grief
for his mother seemed a reasonable excuse to keep our wedding just between the two of us. There was no York wedding, no hen party, no involving my old friends.’

‘How did your mum take that?’

‘She was nearly as bowled over by Martin as I was. She came to London once and as soon as she met him and saw what a beautiful house he had, she was sold. You know what a social climber
Mum is. Martin went to public school, speaks in a cut-glass accent and had a trust fund to fall back on whenever he needed it.’ Tess’s smile was twisted. ‘She’s still
lobbying for me to go back to him. She doesn’t understand how I could possibly have left him.’

Luke picked up his glass and swirled the brandy absently. ‘Sounds like your Martin is a classic narcissist.’

‘He’s a sociopath.’ Tess nodded, kept her voice carefully neutral. ‘I read up on it in the end. The only person who matters in Martin’s world is Martin, but of
course I didn’t want to believe that at first. I loved him, and I wanted to believe that he loved me too. And he said he did. Why wouldn’t I believe him?’

‘No reason,’ Luke said warily when she glared at him as if he had accused her of being the fool she knew she had been.

Realizing, Tess made a helpless gesture of apology and blew out a breath. ‘Sorry. It’s not your fault. I just hate remembering what an idiot I was. But Martin’s got this way of
making everything he wants seem utterly reasonable. Of course I told myself that he was only possessive because he adored me. The last thing I wanted was to accept that he didn’t want a wife
at all, he just wanted someone to control.’

She stared down at the brandy, not drinking, just turning the glass round and round between her fingers, remembering.

‘I was like one of those frogs put in a pan and brought slowly to the boil. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to jump out.’

‘At first it was just little things,’ she said. ‘Martin didn’t like coming back to the house and finding me not there. We were just married and he was
still in such a state about his mother that I didn’t feel as if I could insist on keeping my job. How hard-hearted would that have been when he needed me so much? I wanted to be there for
him. So I gave up my job. I gave up suggesting that we come to York for a weekend. I should have taken a stand, but it didn’t seem worth upsetting him.’

She had been so passive. The memory sent a flush of humiliation creeping up Tess’s throat and she took another slug of the brandy.

‘And, of course, I kept thinking that I had nothing to complain about, not really. It’s not as if Martin
hit
me. I used to tell myself that I was lucky, that it wasn’t
really abuse if a husband flies into rage or punishes you with silence if you don’t hang the towels up with the edges properly aligned or if you don’t close the flap on a box of cereal.
I was middle class, educated . . . how could I be abused? I was just doing what I could to save my marriage. I was just being a good wife. And if I ever felt unhappy, I would convince myself I was
stupid and selfish, just like Martin said. He worked hard all day to keep me in luxury. Was it too much to ask for him to come home to a tidy house? I had nothing else to do all day, after
all.’

Tess’s lips curled with self-loathing as she mimicked herself.

She had tried to be normal, to go out and make friends, but Martin hadn’t liked that either. Wasn’t he enough for her? He would ring every few minutes, or come home unexpectedly, and
if she wasn’t there, he would find a way to punish her. Sometimes he would be furiously angry, sometimes she would be subjected to an icy silence, or he would take out his displeasure on
someone else – her mother if she rang, or some unfortunate person who happened to call at the door.

‘The thing was, Martin could be lovely,’ she tried to explain, risking a glance at Luke, wondering why she was blurting out her whole sorry story to him of all people. His brows were
drawn together and his mouth was bracketed by two grim lines. Did he think she had been pathetic? Pitiful? Or just sad? Was he shaking his head inwardly at how easily the girl she had been had let
herself be vanquished?

It shouldn’t matter to her now, but it did.

Tess had never told anyone all this before. The words had been dammed up inside her, firmly under control. She had known that the slightest breach would let the whole humiliating story burst out
in an unstoppable torrent, and so it had proved. Now that she’d started, she had to tell it all.

‘Sometimes he’d come home with flowers, or insist on taking me out to dinner so that I didn’t have to cook. He’d be charming and affectionate. He’d buy me presents
and tell me how much he loved me, how much he needed me. Just when I’d decided I couldn’t bear it any more, he would disarm me. It was as if he knew just how far he could push me before
I’d break.

‘I never had any idea what kind of mood he would be in when he came through the door, and he could switch so suddenly . . .’

She faltered, remembering how eggshell thin the atmosphere had been. The slightest lapse of attention was liable to fracture it. It had been exhausting having to concentrate so hard on not
making a mistake. A careless word, a thoughtless gesture, could crush the surface calm like a boot crunching through a rime of ice on a winter puddle. Tess had learnt to move slowly, carefully.

‘It sounds crap,’ said Luke bluntly. ‘Why didn’t you leave him?’

How could someone like Luke understand? Tess took another sip and felt the alcohol burn her throat before it settled, warm and steadying, in her stomach.

‘I told myself we just needed time to get used to being married. I thought it would be different when we had a family. I had a miscarriage quite early on and it took me a long time to get
over that. I couldn’t think about anything, let alone getting to grips with my marriage.

‘When Oscar was born, I hoped things would get better, and for a while they did. But the baby took up too much of my attention, and toddlers and immaculate houses don’t mix well. As
soon as Martin realized Oscar wasn’t one of those beautiful, smiley,
clean
babies you see on the ads, he lost interest. He expected me to have put Oscar to bed and be waiting for him
when he came home, looking perfectly groomed with a perfectly cooked meal simmering on the stove.’

Luke coughed in the middle of swallowing brandy. ‘You’re kidding?’

Flushing, Tess shook her head. ‘No. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. No one could. You can’t just put a baby away when it’s not convenient.’

‘So how did Martin deal with that?’ Luke said Martin’s name as if it tasted unpleasant.

‘He hired a nanny to take care of Oscar. He didn’t even consult me.’ Tess’s lips thinned with remembered outrage. ‘The woman just turned up on the doorstep one
morning.

‘It’s the only time I ever stood up to Martin,’ she said. ‘I sent her away and I told him that I was going to look after my baby myself.’

‘I don’t suppose he liked
that
very much.’

‘He was never closer to striking me. I could see in his face how much he wanted to, but then he did the kind of volte-face he specialized in. One moment his eyes were blank with rage; the
next he was all smiles and telling me what a good mother I was, how he had only wanted me to have some help as he hated seeing me so tired and how much he loved me.’

Luke snorted, unimpressed.

‘The worst thing is how
reasonable
he made everything sound. It was so easy to think that I was the one being selfish and silly for rejecting help when he was so understanding and
generous.’

There was a pause. Tess rested the glass on the arm of the sofa and watched as she turned it slowly between her fingers. Afraid that she might read contempt in his face, she didn’t look at
Luke, but when he broke the silence she couldn’t hear any judgement in his voice.

‘So what made you leave in the end?’

‘Oscar.’ Her throat constricted again at the thought of her son. ‘He was such a quiet little boy, so good. It was all wrong, but I kept letting it go. And then one day we were
in the kitchen baking those little cakes with rice krispies and chocolate. Oscar liked to help me cook. He was standing on a chair, covered in chocolate, and we were laughing at something when we
heard Martin’s car in the drive. He’d said he was going to Birmingham for the day, but he used to try and catch me out like that. He’d come home at unexpected times, just to check
that I was where I said I was.’

‘Did he object to the mess?’ asked Luke when she paused, and Tess shook her head.

‘There was no mess. As soon as he heard the car, Oscar’s face just went blank. He scrambled down from the chair, went over to the sink and rubbed a cloth over his face and hands
without being told, and then he ran up to his room. And I . . .’ Tess faltered, swallowed. ‘I didn’t follow him,’ she said. ‘I hid the bowl and wiped the table and by
the time Martin got in, the kitchen was immaculate.’

Her face burned, and she couldn’t raise her eyes from the glass. ‘I was so ashamed that I let that happen,’ she said, her voice low and bitter. ‘Ashamed that I’d
let my little boy grow up afraid to laugh and be messy. And that’s when I decided to leave.’

There. He’d heard the worst. Tess risked a glance at Luke, who was still sitting with a set, stern face. She half-expected him to rise and point at her in disgust, to accuse her of being
the worst of mothers, but he didn’t. He just looked back at her with eyes that were warm with sympathy and concern.

‘I’m sorry, Tess.’

Sorry
? Was that it? Twisting her fingers in her lap, Tess stared at him in disbelief. Hadn’t he been listening? Why wasn’t he telling her how pathetic she had been, how
useless? What a failure she was?

‘It was my own fault,’ she insisted in case he had misunderstood. ‘I put Oscar through that because I was too much of a coward to stand up to Martin.’

‘And you found the courage to leave.’ Luke leant forward and covered her tangled fingers with one warm palm. ‘You did your best in a difficult situation, and now you’re
doing better. None of us can do more than that.’

Tess swallowed hard. She had been so sure that he would despise her as much as she despised herself. But when she tested her feelings, cautiously at first, she realized that she didn’t
feel as bad as she usually did remembering that time. It was like the aftermath of a bad bout of food poisoning: she felt weak and a bit wobbly, but relieved to have got the turmoil and humiliation
out of her system.