A Summer Fling (33 page)

‘Her kids must be in bits,’ said Anna. ‘I mean, what do you feel when your father does something like that to your mother? Then again, why does it surprise me after all you hear on the news?’

‘I have to agree, sadly,’ said Christie. ‘Who knows what goes on behind closed doors?’

‘The bastard,’ said Raychel, which made the others stare at her. They’d never heard her swear before, nor envisaged there could be such a hard edge to her soft voice.

‘Well, obviously, let’s keep it quiet,’ said Christie. ‘I know I don’t need to say that. Grace isn’t someone who would want anyone knowing her business. God knows what she’ll feel if it hits the newspapers. Officially, Grace is off with a cold.’

The figure of Malcolm and his perma-tan crept into her peripheral vision. Christie turned her full stare onto him.

‘What’s up?’ asked Anna. ‘Why are you staring at the walking Caramac like that? If looks could kill!’

‘I’m sure he had something to do with what happened,’ snarled Christie. ‘Someone – a man – apparently told Grace’s husband that she had twice turned down early retirement. I very much believe that triggered him off.’

‘And you think that man was Malcolm?’ said Raychel.

‘Oh yes, I’d put money on it, Raychel,’ said Christie.

‘If it is him, then that’s so evil,’ said Dawn, staring at him also with eyes narrowed to slits.

‘What is his problem with us?’ said Anna. She felt so fiercely protective over Grace at that moment. She thought that if she caught anyone gossiping about her, she was capable of bashing their face in.

‘You don’t think Grace will go back to her husband, do you?’ asked Raychel.

‘How could she?’ said Anna, her face creased up in disgust. ‘How could you go back to someone who treated you like that?’ However, her voice toned out at the end as she remembered her own situation. How ironic: this show of strength from a woman who was waiting pathetically in the wings for an adulterous fiancé to return to her.

At lunchtime, Christie rang home to see how Grace was. Paul and Laura were with her. Christie had told them that they were welcome any time. Grace was remarkably calm considering her ordeal. Christie suspected she was still in shock though.

Niki came home to find Grace asleep in the chair. She woke up with a start when he tried to sneak past her into the kitchen and the door stirred up a whisper of cool air.

‘Oh, Grace, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, adjusting her aching bones.

‘Sorry? What are
you
sorry for?’ said Niki. ‘You’re a guest in our house and must treat it like home. If you wanted to drop off in the chair, the garden or the fridge, you’d be very welcome.’ He smiled at her. He had such a calming way about him, which was strange because his voice was low and deep and made for booming. He was a natural at putting nervous patients at their ease.

‘How do you take your coffee? Let me guess – you’re a milk, no sugar girl.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Grace, not used to having anyone run around after her.

‘No you won’t,’ said Niki. ‘Now give me the formula and don’t make me force you back in that chair.’

‘Then yes, milk, no sugar,’ said Grace, surrendering her will. She felt so tired and numb. Much more so now than she had done this morning when her mobile had rung and awoken her. It had been Paul and Laura, desperate to know how she was and to see her. They had been round within the hour and sat with her all day. She could barely remember what they had discussed over many pots of tea. There hadn’t been much talking about what had really happened, that much she did remember. How could she tell her children those details? Grace didn’t want to think about it, nor did she want to plan where she went from now. She was happy to sit with her children and talk about Charles and Rose Manor and little Joe.

Niki delivered a frothy coffee to her in a china mug.

‘Grace, I’m cooking pasta. You aren’t a vegetarian, are you? Please tell me you’re a die-hard carnivore like my sister and me.’

Grace opened her mouth to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ but she knew that she would be an awkward guest for protesting against their every kindness.

‘I’m a die-hard carnivore,’ she confirmed.

‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind me then. I unwind by cooking. Please forgive the singing.’

Grace sipped her coffee and listened to Niki clattering about in the kitchen, singing opera. She rather thought it was his usual routine, not one staged for her benefit.

Dawn was also cooking pasta. She had set the table with candles and made a prawn cocktail starter and had a cake defrosting from the freezer. She opened a bottle of wine and was just pouring out two glasses when Calum came in from work.

‘What’s all this then?’ he said.

‘I just thought I’d treat you,’ she said.

‘Smells lovely,’ he said. ‘But don’t bother with that wine for me, I’ll have a beer.’

She pushed herself into his arms and kissed him though he laughingly told her to ‘Give over, you soppy cow.’ This was the man she was marrying. She couldn’t get Al Holly and the kiss that never was out of her head and she had to. She needed to concentrate hard on being the future Mrs Crooke.

‘The girls all send their love,’ said Christie across the dinner table. ‘And don’t worry, no one outside our department seems to know anything. There’s been no gossip that I’ve heard of. I told HR you’d rung in and were off with a cold.’

‘There will be gossip,’ said Grace, shaking her head at the thought of it. ‘The local newspaper will get wind of it.’ She thought of all those curtains twitching at the arrival of the police and the ambulance, and the quiet end of the crescent suddenly heavy with cars and lots of people.

‘Well, if they do, sod them,’ said Christie. ‘Today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s cat litter tray-liner. James McAskill said to take off as much time as you like.’

‘Does he know?’ gasped Grace.

‘Not the full story. He trusts my judgement on things.’

‘I shall be in work tomorrow,’ said Grace.

‘You will not!’ said Niki. Not in the same dictating way as Gordon. Her interests, not his, were paramount.

‘The sooner I get back to normal the better. Foundation will cover this bruising if I put it on thickly enough.’

‘Whatever you think best,’ said Christie, shushing her brother as he opened his mouth again. ‘I’ll drive you in if you decide to go. And, I’ll say this now, if you feel it’s too much – you come straight back here.’

Grace nodded but stayed silent. The warmth around the table brought a surge of tears to her eyes. She felt protected and safe in West House and was clinging to that feeling of security for her life. She also knew that if she didn’t step out of its big front door soon, she might never do so again.

When Grace walked into work, she was immediately surrounded by her work-mates asking, ‘What the hell are you doing in?’ But it was a rhetorical question. They didn’t need an answer. Instead, they sat her down with a coffee and a big plate of biscuits and the office box of tissues, because their caring concern brought the tears racing up to Grace’s eyes.

‘How are you feeling, or is that a totally daft thing to say?’ said Dawn, when she came around with the elevenses. ‘Not that I say many daft things, of course,’ she added with a self-deprecatory chuckle.

‘I feel OK,’ said Grace calmly. And strangely enough, she did. She felt remarkably detached from the events of the past few days. She wasn’t even panicked by the inclusion of a paragraph in the
Evening Star
about a local woman in Penistone who had been falsely imprisoned by her husband and was then rescued by police. ‘An unnamed man has been held in connection with the incident,’ it was reported. It did not say that the unnamed man had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, as the police had informed the family.

Grace knew that it was just all too big to sink in and her brain was protecting her, keeping the horror at arm’s length until she was strong enough to deal with it. This composure was a temporary benefit. But the night was a different matter entirely. She needed the sleeping pills the hospital had sent her home with to knock her into the sort of deep sleep which dreams didn’t enter.

‘Coming to the pub with us tomorrow?’ asked Anna, giving Grace a matey nudge. Close up, the bruising was visible through Grace’s make-up, though Anna didn’t mention it. ‘Totally understand if you don’t want to, but it wouldn’t be the same without you.’

‘I’d like to,’ replied Grace.

‘Great,’ said Dawn. To her inner shame, Friday nights could not come fast enough for her.

To Dawn’s horror, the stage was empty when the five of them walked into the Rising Sun the next evening.

‘Aren’t the band playing tonight?’ she asked a passing waitress as she stood at the bar.

‘I think they’ve finished,’ she said, whizzing past with a basket of condiments for some diners.

Dawn felt hot and faint. She ordered the wine for them all, feeling adrift. Was that why Al Holly wanted to spend the day with her last weekend? Was that his way of saying goodbye without mentioning the actual word? Was that ‘the surprise’ he said he had for her tonight?

‘My mistake,’ said the waitress, appearing at her shoulder. ‘They’ve been held up on the motorway apparently. They’ll be here in a bit.’

Dawn’s mood lifted instantly. Actually it didn’t just lift, it shot up to orbit with G-force. God knows what she’d be like when she saw him. Since Sunday, the days had crawled towards this weekend like a tortoise with arthritic knees.

‘What’s happened to your husband since?’ Anna tentatively asked Grace. ‘Don’t talk about it, if you don’t want.’

‘He’s in hospital,’ said Grace, with no emotion in her voice.

‘He’s under psychiatric observation.’ She could imagine Gordon being furious about that. He wouldn’t want to be judged mentally ill and not in control of his faculties.

‘You’re not going . . . I mean, will you go back to him?’ said Raychel softly.

‘No,’ said Grace with not a hint of a waver. She would never forgive him for his obsessive and dangerous selfishness. Being away from him for even these few days had given her a lot of perspective. She saw the big picture now, how things she had lived with for so many years and accepted as the norm were, in fact, far from it. Every lungful of breath she had taken since leaving Powderham Crescent was sweeter than the last.

Dawn arrived with a tray of glasses and a bottle of Merlot and slipped into the stream of conversation.

‘Has he been violent towards you before?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Grace said with a long outward breath. ‘He always had a ready temper but I never thought he’d be capable of anything like that.’

‘That’s scary, isn’t it?’ Dawn shivered. ‘Remember that bloke who flipped and shot all those kids up in Scotland? What leads someone to meltdown like that?’

‘I suspect in a lot of cases it’s a very long, slow-burning fuse to the dynamite,’ Christie sighed. She wondered what sort of marriage Grace had that her husband came into work to enquire about her retirement prospects. Even from that snippet alone, he sounded a very controlling man. That type usually broke rather than bent under pressure.

Grace took a sip of wine; it felt warm at the back of her throat. Nearly as warm as the thought that she would be going home to West House that evening and not to her marital home. Although she would have to go there soon enough.

‘Knowing Gordon, he is now probably saying to himself, “What a load of fuss over a simple domestic argument”. I wouldn’t be surprised if he expected me to have his tea on the table when he gets home and say no more about it.’

‘You’re joking!’ Raychel said, but straight afterwards she remembered how quickly Nathan Lunn recovered from his rages and carried on from the point just before he lost it. It was as if the beatings existed in a loop of time that wasn’t ever to be acknowledged after they had happened.

Grace knew she wouldn’t be far off the mark. She wasn’t a seasoned psychologist like Christie, but she did know her husband, who would be her
ex
-husband as soon as was humanly possible. Gordon would fight her all the way, she knew that. He would think she was overreacting and being ‘a silly woman’ and that ‘she should stop all that nonsense’. His brain had no chamber for accepting blame, it never had. He would not see he had done anything to apologize for, he was ‘merely keeping order’ in accordance with his role as head of a respectable household. She thought of Gordon walking away from Paul, railing at little Joe, throwing Laura out of the house and then of all he had done to her. She had been lucky to get out. Yet she also knew that, in Gordon’s head, his behaviour would be completely rationalized. Grace took a deep breath and prepared to share a secret she had told no one yet.

‘I was going to leave him.’

‘Did he know?’ Anna said.

‘No, but I think he suspected and hadn’t a clue what to do about it. He more or less accused me of having an affair at work.’

‘What? Who with?’ snorted Dawn.

‘No one in particular. He made the evidence fit to excuse his behaviour.’

Christie nodded. ‘Rejection can be a huge trigger for violence.’ She watched Grace’s brain whirring and she nudged her. ‘You’re safe now,’ she whispered. ‘And amongst friends.’

‘Yes,’ said Grace. ‘And I want to say that I do regard you
all
as my friends. I can’t . . . can’t put into words how much you’ve all come to mean to me in such a short time.’ She took a deep breath to steady her rising emotion.

‘Sounds like he did you a favour,’ grinned Dawn, then seeing the jaws drop around her, she gasped. ‘Oh hell, that came out all wrong. I meant that . . . that . . .’

Grace rescued her with a tinkly laugh.

‘Dawn, you’re a tonic.’

‘How far ahead have you thought?’ enquired Anna softly. ‘Must be terrible, I wouldn’t know where to start planning.’

‘One day at a time,’ interrupted Christie. ‘I don’t think you plan longer than one day at a time when you’re in the middle of something like this.’

‘I’m going to have to start planning soon,’ said Grace. ‘I can’t stay with you for ever.’