Betrayal (17 page)

Mary studied her drink. ‘But you had to get away,’ she reminded me.

Defending Ginny was something of a reflex with me, but for once I let it pass. ‘Yes, I had to get away.’

‘We all need space from time to time.’

‘Yes.’

But my response was too half-hearted for Mary. ‘Nothing wrong in that,’ she argued.

‘No. You’re right.’

She nodded firmly.

‘So . . . There was poor David,’ I said, finding my way back into the story. ‘He made the mistake of asking me what the matter was – and got the lot. All my angst, yards of it. The business, Howard, Pa’s death. And of course, me and Ginny . . . It just poured out, I’m afraid.’

‘I hope he was sympathetic.’

‘Well, you know how he is. Not his strongest suit. But on the whole – yes. Apart from the one subject that he really should have learnt to leave well alone by now. He kept on about fertility treatment and whether Ginny’d tried the latest method, whatever its name is. He’d sent us some information about it. He was convinced that not having children was at the root of our problems, and however much I told him that it wasn’t an issue he just listened with that maddening all-knowing expression on his face. Sometimes I think he sees absolutely everything in medical terms, even relationships.’

Mary raised her eyebrows slightly at this, but made no comment. She never voiced any grumbles about her marriage, although among the family it had long been acknowledged that my brother wasn’t the easiest of people to live with.

‘Anyway, at the end of it all he declared that I was just depressed, and gave me some tablets. Typical David! Nothing that can’t be fixed by getting dosed up! Oh, don’t get me wrong – I didn’t really expect any more. I mean, David has quite enough on his plate, doesn’t he? People’s troubles all day long. No, it was enough to have someone to talk to – that was all I needed really.’

I looked into the fire. ‘But then, Mary, the strangest thing, the strangest thing . . .’ I hunched forward as the memory gripped me. ‘We went down to the river – David wanted to look at the river wall or whatever it was that needed repairing – and I was rambling on about the past, about the summers we used to have, the golden times – I was still in a bit of a state, I can tell you – and, talking about those years, the best years, I thought of Sylvie. Nothing too surprising about that – we’d spent that long summer together, do you remember? The one when it was really scorching?’

‘I remember.’

‘But the thing was – just as she came into my mind, at the very instant I thought of her, I looked across the river and there she was! I thought I was dreaming. Well, I thought I was seeing things, actually. Then I thought it must be someone else who looked just like her. She was in a dinghy with a whole lot of other people, going up river. But that hair, the way she sat, her profile . . . David couldn’t see the likeness, but for me it was blinding. I felt a great bolt of recognition and – well, I’m not sure what. Hope? Something like that. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I was overwhelmed . . . bewitched. I had the strangest feeling – this sounds mad – that everything would be all right if I could get to see her again, that she would be able to
save
me in some way. Crazy!
Crazy!
But you have to remember I wasn’t thinking straight. I still hadn’t had much sleep – what time did David come over that morning? Seven? Eight? So, four hours at the most. I wasn’t sure what was real any more. I told myself my mind was playing tricks. But somewhere deep down there was this tiny irrational ray of hope that it
was
her. Part of me was desperate for some sort of escape, I suppose, and Sylvie represented something precious and beautiful. She was my Avalon; or the
idea
of her . . . I’d been so happy with her, you see. I’d felt so full of –
possibilities
. It was the only time in my life that I’d felt free.’ The wind roared outside, the house creaked like an old ship. I looked up. ‘I don’t know – is this making any sense?’

She gave a slight nod, though her eyes seemed to have taken on a harsher, more judgmental light.

‘By the time I went out to
Ellie Miller
that afternoon, I’d persuaded myself it was a hallucination. I’d slept a bit by then, I’d come down to earth with a bang, I was feeling bloody awful, in fact—’

‘What were you doing on
Ellie
?’

‘Oh, checking her over, pumping the bilges. David asked me to go out, to save him a trip. I was glad, actually. It gave me a reason to stay down. I couldn’t have gone back to Melton. I couldn’t have faced anybody just then.’

‘No.’

‘But Mary, I’d forgotten how utterly glorious the river could be. It was a perfect day, quiet, warm, no one about. It was so peaceful! So I stayed on board for a while, sitting there on the mooring, drinking Pa’s whisky, thinking things through. Mentally, it was rather a toss-up between shooting myself and dying of sheer love of life. I was a bit emotional, to say the least.’

Sitting there on the boat I had remembered all the good times I’d had when I was young, the trips with Pa on
Ellie Miller
, the passages up the coast, the expeditions ashore; the excitement of the night watches, the running jokes we’d enjoyed, the long companionable silences.

It was on one of these trips in my late teens that my father had confided in me about his early life, about his strained relationship with his own father, the lack of communication and affection, and how he had strived to succeed because he’d felt it was the only way to win his father’s approval. He wanted it to be different for me. He wanted me to succeed for my own sake, and because I loved the business.

There had been a time when I’d resented his blithe assumption that I would follow him into the business. At seventeen I’d made up my mind to become a designer, which was the closest I could get to being an artist and still get paid. My father hadn’t tried to talk me out of it exactly, but he’d got various family friends and godparents to point out some of the disadvantages. I hadn’t improved my chances by failing to get in to the first two art colleges I’d tried. And when I was offered a place at Oxford to read languages, I began to recognise the inevitability of what lay ahead. My father was characteristically generous, sending me round the world in my gap year, funding all my travel in the vacations. After that I felt it would have been ungrateful not to give the business a try.

I hadn’t regretted my choice, only my failure to make a success of it.

I missed my father. No one tells you how to grieve properly, how much pain to expect, how much guilt and anger, and whether it’s normal to have long periods when you feel nothing at all. In the months since his death, my grief had seemed both inadequate and incomplete.

Going to the chart table, I lifted the lid and found his job list lying on the top of the charts where he had always kept it. I picked it up with gentle hands and laid it on the table. Seeing the elegant handwriting made shaky by age, the neat columns of jobs with all but three systematically crossed off, I wept for him at last.

‘And then . . .’ The picture burned brightly in my mind. ‘Sylvie appeared. I heard this knocking on the hull and I went up on deck but I couldn’t see anything. No boat, nothing. Then the knocking came again and I went to the stern and there she was in the water. Well, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I just stared at her. Then she laughed at me, and, Mary, it was like a dream only
more
so. You see, she hadn’t changed. She was just the same. It was as though . . . as though
nothing
had changed.’

My throat was dry, I coughed, and Mary passed me the last of her whisky.

Gulping it, I echoed, ‘She was just the same.’ I saw her standing in the cabin, with that dramatic colouring she had inherited from her French mother, the long black hair sticking wetly to her shoulders, and the white translucent skin touched with faint freckles; and I could only wonder again at the smoothness of her skin, the way it was completely untouched by time, as if she’d skipped all the intervening years and lived no other life.

‘I pulled her out of the water and she scolded me for letting her stand there and shiver. I just laughed because she was talking to me as if we’d last seen each other a few hours ago. That was her gift . . .’ I reached for a thought I had never fully identified before. ‘Her gift was for
intimacy
. She could make you feel you were the only person in the world, or at least the only person she really cared about. She made you feel that being with her was everything, that there couldn’t be anything more important or more exciting. That suddenly everything was possible. And I needed that, Mary! I needed to feel . . . well, that I could have some sort of life away from all the pressure, the endless succession of disasters. That I could forget – for a while anyway – and be . . .’ I gave an ironic gasp. ‘Be
free
.’

I heard Sylvie’s voice again, that extraordinary rich voice of hers that could communicate so many different, often contradictory, messages. She was sitting in the saloon, wrapped in the only towel I could find and an old waterproof jacket of Pa’s, a whisky in her hand, with her head tilted to one side, chin tucked in or suddenly thrown up in that French way of hers. Only her gaze was unwavering, her almond eyes fixed on mine with a glittering absorption, as if no time had intervened and we had never stopped being soul-mates. She told me about her new life, the pottery shop in Dartmouth where she was working, the cottage she was renting just outside Dittisham. She loved it here, she told me. Her return was a spiritual thing, she needed to be in touch with elemental things, with water and wind and creativity. She was going to start sculpting. Near water she felt empowered, she could draw on wells of creativity, she felt supremely in touch with her body and her spiritual energies.

No one I knew talked in this way. Among my contemporaries this would have been dismissed as New Age psycho-babble, yet Sylvie imbued it with a sort of grandeur, and an earthiness too. There was an undercurrent of self-indulgence there, a strong hint of physicality and hedonism. But then even at fifteen Sylvie had exuded a powerful animal sensuality, a breathtaking sexual assurance, which, with her flamboyant defiance for convention, had produced an overwhelming effect on the rather staid young man I had been when we’d met.

The effect she had on me as we sat in the boat drinking whisky sixteen years later wasn’t terribly different. I laughed too much and too quickly, I heard myself trying to impress and amuse her, I felt a ridiculous effervescent pleasure. With a sense of the miraculous, I felt myself come alive again.

When she got up to leave she rested the back of her hand against my face, and gave that little cat-grin of hers, all enchantment and promise.

Mary clasped her hands under her chin. ‘Then?’ She was urging me forward, and I realised how late it must be.

‘Then?’ I sighed. ‘Well, I had to see her again. In fact, I couldn’t think of much else. It was a desperate thing – a sort of compulsion. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It was . . .’ But the memory caught at me, and stalled my thoughts.

After a while Mary said softly, ‘You had an affair?’

Distracted, I stared into the fire, I shook my head in lingering disbelief. ‘For a long time nothing happened. I thought she was just wary of involvement, I thought it was her conscience. That she was bothered by me being married. Quite funny, really, in retrospect.’ My smile emerged as a bleak grimace. ‘By the time I realised she had no conscience whatsoever, it was too late. I was completely hooked. I’d completely lost my judgment. And she used that, she used
me
.’ Saying it, I felt a fresh plunge of humiliation. ‘She led me a complete dance. That’s exactly what it was – a dance!’

Mary said something which I missed, and she had to repeat it. ‘Did you see her last weekend?’ Her voice had a sudden tension to it.

‘No.’ Then, as I absorbed the implications of what she had said, I stared at her. ‘
No
, Mary, I did not.’

Mary said rapidly, as if to get it over and done with, ‘You weren’t on the boat with her?’

‘No.’

She cast me an odd look, as though something about this disturbed her.

‘
Mary
.’

‘I only meant that it wouldn’t have looked too good if you had been,’ she explained in a rush. ‘That was all.’

‘I did not see her last weekend,’ I repeated forcefully.

She nodded but her eyes still held a spark of doubt.

‘I hadn’t seen her for two weeks!’

She held up a defensive hand. ‘Hugh, I believe you. Really.
Really
.’

The ringing of the phone cut into the unhappy pause that followed.

It was Tingwall. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to bother you so late, but I thought you’d better know that I’ve had a call from the press.’

‘Christ. What did they want?’

‘I think I’ve quashed any ideas they might have had. Told them you and your wife were just possible witnesses because you lived on the river. That sort of thing.’

‘Did they buy it?’

‘One can but hope.’

G
INNY APPEARED
on the landing above, a wraith against the sunlit window. ‘You’re back,’ she declared, sounding agitated. She touched an anxious hand to her uncombed hair, then to the fastening of her wrap. ‘What’s the time? I fell asleep.’

‘It’s about four. Are you all right?’ And asking this, I wasn’t sure what sort of response to expect. Even at the best of times I found it difficult to gauge Ginny’s mood.

‘It was flu after all,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘but I think I’m over the worst of it now. And you? No more from the police?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ she breathed, ‘that’s something. And me? Do I still have to . . .?’

‘Tingwall’s arranged for you to go to Chelsea police station on Monday, if that’s all right. They’ll only need a brief statement.’

She nodded solemnly.

Turning towards the bedroom, she paused for long enough to catch my eye and issue a silent but unequivocal plea. The moment of account was not to be delayed, I realised, and climbing the stairs I attempted to prepare myself for whatever was to come, wrath or recrimination.