A Hidden Life (6 page)

The thin shrilling of her mobile sounded very loud in the empty flat. Lou reached for her handbag and found the phone. She glanced at the number displayed on the little screen. It was Nessa, who scarcely ever rang her. What on earth could she want now, only hours after they'd been together in Milthorpe House?

‘Hi, Nessa,' she said.' What's up?'

Matt was driving to Brighton to meet Ellie. He'd been surprised to get a phone call from her in the office a couple of days after the funeral, asking whether she might discuss something with him. He could guess what that was, of course. Nessa had probably got to her and asked her about the will and whether there was any prospect of challenging it. It saddened him that Ellie's daughter hadn't wanted to come straight to him. He'd always felt like a real father to her, and whenever it suited her, Nessa took advantage of his devotion. He liked to think he'd helped her and Michaela a great deal when they set up their business, and Nessa was grateful for that, he knew. But there was something she always held in reserve, feelings that she would have lavished on a real father and which she kept from him. Still, for most of their childhood, hers and Justin's, he'd been the Good Cop to Phyl's Bad Cop. She had been the one to see to all the day-to-day things that seemed to cause an enormous amount of friction and argument. Phyl had stood firm while Nessa's rage at her own mother's defection crashed against her.

Phyl, poor thing, had also been second-best to Constance. Ellie's children adored their step-grandmother, and whenever things were difficult Nessa had even articulated this by saying: I
don't see why we can't he adopted by Granny Constance. She'd love to be our mother. Why can't she?
Phyl had explained that Granny Constance was too old to take care of children at her age. This story didn't cut much ice with Nessa and was contradicted by the fact that his mother so often had Nessa and Justin to stay at Milthorpe and devoted so much time and
attention to them. She loved them both but Justin was always her pet.

Poor old Phyl. As he parked the car, the image of his wife, standing at the front window of their house and staring after him, came into his mind. She was so good, so kind, so eager to take care of anyone who needed taking care of that she'd never once complained about the burden of being a mother to Ellie's offspring. Maybe she resented it inwardly, but she'd never said a word to him and he'd tried hard to share the weight of responsibility even though she'd done most of the day-to-day work. I'm lucky to have Phyl, he thought, and feeling suddenly happier than he had for a while, he found himself looking forward to his meeting with Ellie.

There she was, standing by the iron railings on the Front, and waving to him as he approached. She'd suggested Brighton. She'd always liked the place, with its overtones of dirty weekends and assignations. He kissed her cheek and smelled the perfume he'd not smelled since the days when she was his wife: Oscar de la Renta. How strange memory was! He would have sworn that he'd totally forgotten that name.

‘It's good of you to see me, Matt.'

‘A pleasure, I promise you,' he answered, and discovered that he meant it.

They began to walk along together. The sea, on his right, was flat and grey, areflecting a sky like gun-metal. It wasn't cold for March, but not really seaside weather either. Matt preferred seaside resorts out of season and winds, low temperatures and cloud masses that looked like mountains in the sky suited him better than heat. He glanced sideways at Ellie. She was wearing trousers today, and a jacket the colour of raspberry fool in some velvety fabric. Her hair, still dark, was twisted up on top of her head and held in place with a kind of metal pin thing that he supposed was ornamental, though to him it looked more like a twisted outsize paperclip. There was a silk scarf wound round her neck.

Perhaps they made an odd couple. Matt Barrington had never deluded himself. He prided himself on his honesty. He was aware that many people thought him, if not dull exactly, then unexciting. He could understand what had led them to such a conclusion and,
while the fact that they were wrong about him could have annoyed him, it actually quite amused him. When people look at me, he thought, they see a provincial solicitor, tall, dark and greying at the temples. The very picture of respectability. The sort of person who blends into his surroundings; the very opposite of Ellie who stood out in bright colours against every background. He, for his part, regarded himself as a bit of a dreamer in some ways, the opposite of practical. Romantic, perhaps, wouldn't be too strong a word.

‘You look quite well, Matt,' Ellie said, turning her head to look at him. ‘I was just thinking at the funeral, you've hardly changed since the last time I was in England.'

‘Five years ago. Well, a great deal's happened since then.'

‘Tell me about it.'

‘Really?' His father's death just over two years ago, and now his mother's, and all his fears for Lou. Her history with that ghastly Ray … no, Matt had no intention of going into any of that. ‘You don't want to know about my life.'

‘Why not? I'm very fond of you, you know. We were married once, even if it was only for about five minutes.'

‘Indeed.' He was still shocked by the brevity of their marriage. From meeting Ellie at a cocktail party hosted by his mother to her leaving the country with that frightful Italian couldn't have been more than a couple of years. If he thought about it, he could transport himself to the night he'd met her. He'd never seen anyone like her before. If she was exotic now, in those days, more than twenty years ago, she'd lit up the room. She was twenty-nine then and he twenty-five, and the age difference had always been something that – well, there was no doubt it heightened the desire between them. Ellie liked younger men, and Matt wasn't too disgustingly youthful. Eyebrows would have been raised if she'd latched on to an eighteen-year-old, but those four years! They allowed her to be the teacher, the one who instructed, the one who took the lead in sexual matters, even though Matt had already had several lovers by the time they met. It suited her to think of him as almost virginal. It suited them both for
her
to be the one who seduced, who demanded, who set the tempo. And he'd never wanted anything in his life as much as he wanted to be wrapped around and swept away by her, absorbed into her.

The wind whipped Ellie's scarf into her eyes, and Matt had a sudden vision of the first time he'd seen her naked. He heard her voice in his head:
Come here, my sweet boy, come to me
 … and he had to stop for a moment and pretend that his shoelaces needed retying as a memory as sharp as a photograph came into his mind: Ellie holding out her arms to him, sighing as he came to her, opening her lips under his. He stood up, trying to collect himself. This was not the sort of thought he was supposed to be having. If Phyl knew … She'd looked a bit askance when he mentioned that he was going into Brighton to meet Ellie and had asked why she couldn't come to the house.

‘It makes it obvious, doesn't it, that it's you she really wants to see,' she said just before he left the house this morning. She couldn't help an aggrieved note creeping into her voice, he noticed, even after so long.

‘She might want to talk to me about some legal matter,' he'd told Phyl. ‘In fact I'm sure she does, but there's nothing sinister about it, I promise. It's Nessa, more than likely. Getting at me through her mother. She'll be wanting to discuss the will.'

‘She could have come into the office, couldn't she? If she didn't want to see me, particularly. Or you might have mentioned that I'd asked everyone here to discuss things … She could even have come to dinner on Saturday, at a pinch.'

Matt sighed. ‘I've got to go. I had the impression she didn't want to come to Haywards Heath.'

He'd left before Phyl could say another word, but now he wondered whether there might be something – well – something more personal in Ellie's invitation. He let his mind return to the past.

In those days, he seemed older than he was. Constance used to tease him about never having been a proper rebellious teenager. Born middle-aged, she'd say, laughing, to her friends. He knew she thought of him as a stick-in-the-mud and hadn't realized that this was a disguise, a protective colouration adopted at an early age to avoid trouble. Or maybe she had known. Maybe she'd
always
known that he was capable of passion. Maybe that was why she'd practically thrown him together with Ellie. Made the match …

He answered, a little belatedly and as casually as he could, the last remark his ex-wife had made.

‘I didn't leave the marriage, you know,' he said. ‘It was you, Ellie. Who knows – we might still be together, if it had been up to me.'

‘Oh, Mattie darling, I was bored to sobs – not with you but with the life. I wanted to travel, and Paolo promised me so much. He wasn't a patch on you in bed, of course.'

She smiled and stopped, then turned to him. They were standing very close together. She took his face between both her hands and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

‘Don't do that, Ellie. It makes me feel …'

‘Still? You surprise me. Aren't you a happily married man?'

‘Of course I am. But let's change the subject, shall we?'

‘Fine. I just wanted to ask you what might be done about the will.'

‘There aren't any grounds for contesting it, but I do feel so bad for Lou—'

‘I know, but I don't mean Lou, Matt. You must know that. It's Nessa. What about her? She's been done out of her share of the property, you know.'

‘She's got her business, and a lovely house and Gareth is doing very well too, I believe. They're … she's not short of anything as far as I can see.'

‘She thinks Constance ought to have allowed Milthorpe to be sold and the proceeds divided …'

Matt was impatient. ‘She's not the only one who thought that. Those were the original provisions, that the property be sold and the proceeds divided equally between me and the children. You don't see me moaning on about being done out of my inheritance, do you? Nessa can't really complain, Ellie. She's in exactly the same position as I am and she's not even a blood relation, though of course that sort of thing never worried Mother. But just look what she's done to Lou. She's gone and cut her out of the bloody will altogether. Everyone knows what she thought of Dad's novels. I feel dreadful. Lou had such an awful time with that man she took up with. My only consolation is she didn't marry him.'

‘D'you want to tell me about it? About him?'

Matt shook his head. Where would he begin? Even thinking about Lou's time with Ray made him shiver.

‘No, you tell me about yourself, Ellie. How long will you be staying? There's not much we're going to be able to do about the will, you know.'

‘I'm buying a flat in town. A lovely conversion, two bedrooms, in Portland Place. Brighton Portland Place isn't like the London one, of course, but I couldn't resist the address. There, now you look more surprised than I've seen you look in your whole life. Why's that, d'you suppose?'

‘Well, because. I don't know, Ellie. I thought you were committed to never living in England.'

‘I've changed my mind. Abroad has come to be a bit …' She paused, searching for the right word. ‘A bit
tiresome.
Wearing, even. I feel – well, I've got a grandchild now, you know.'

Matt smiled. ‘That wouldn't cut any ice with the Ellie I remember.'

‘I've mellowed, perhaps. Is that out of the question?'

Yes,
Matt wanted to say.
Quite out of the question. As likely as a tiger turning vegetarian.
He said instead, ‘If there's anything I can do to help the sale along, just let me know, Ellie. It'll be nice to have you as a sort of neighbour.'

‘Lovely, I know.' She touched his hand briefly. ‘We'll see one another
so
much more, won't we?'

‘Of course we will.' He was working out what he'd tell Phyl when Ellie spoke her name.

‘How's Phyl?'

‘She's fine. She likes being a granny. I like being a grandfather.'

Ellie smiled and Matt wondered what they could talk about now that they'd dealt with the will and also with Ellie's plans. They'd arrived at a Starbucks. There was no one much about at this time of day on a Wednesday and they took a table in the window. Matt went to get two cappuccinos and, while they were being prepared, he watched Ellie settling down and arranging her scarf and jacket over the back of the chair.

‘I've got the hard part, you know,' he said, when he returned. ‘After everyone's made noises about Lou and the disinheritancel – God, if Constance were here, I'd strangle her – there are boxes and boxes of papers to go through. Mother hung on to everything,
you know. Dad's stuff too. I did ask her to give those boxes to me when he died, but she wanted them at Milthorpe for some reason. Don't ask me why. Anyway, it's my job to go through the lot now, but I'm so short of time. I thought I might ask Lou to help me. What do you think?'

‘Darling, why ask me? How do I know what's best? Does Lou like sorting through old bumph? It would kill me, I think. I can't imagine why anyone would keep ancient papers.'

Matt stirred the foam in his cup. ‘I never knew Dad had hoarded so much. Things from his childhood, all brown and falling to bits.'

‘Did he ever speak about his childhood?'

‘Well, no. He didn't talk about anything much, to me. By the time I was born, he'd pretty much closed in on himself. What I remember is his black moods. The failure of his novels hit him hard, I think. Lou was the one he softened up for. Became a different man when she was born. Loved her more than anything.'