Once Upon A Winter (18 page)

‘How did you get into the house?’ said Nell, as the heat from the whisky blazed through her.

Her mind felt sharp, honed by hostility and indignation. Now her flesh needed to catch up. She needed to feel strong and complete. Ready for battle. Although who exactly she might need to contend with, aside from her husband, was still nebulous.

Silas sat across from her, in her father’s favourite chair, all six-foot-and-more of him, like the guilty, invidious usurper of a throne. He said nothing.

‘You broke in?’ Nell took another sip of whisky, wishing she could knock it back, lik
e other people seemed able to.

‘There’s no damage,’ said Silas, at last. ‘The back door’s not as secure as it could be. I can take a look at it for you.’

‘I didn’t realise breaking and entering was one of your talents,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Along with masquerading as a locksmith.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t make a habit of it.’

‘But I’d put the alarm on.’

‘The code was the children’s birthday.’ Silas met h
er gaze. He seemed tired and jaded.

Nell looked away. ‘I still don’t understand why you’ve come here tonight . . .’ Her voice tailed off. She felt betrayed by her own senses, her own self, when it ought to be this man she felt most betrayed by. But she was projecting herself as weak and pathetic. The girl she had once been, unable to say boo to a goose. That wasn’t the person she needed Silas to face.

‘It was time.’ He shrugged. ‘I wanted to see the children.’

‘So you said.’

‘I’m sorry for frightening you . . . I only meant to leave the gifts and go. It wasn’t my intention to wake the household.’

‘Nana would have rung the bell by now if all the commotion had woken her. I suppose that’s one small mercy.’

‘Is Gwendolyn well?’

Nell didn’t immediately answer.

Silas and her grandmother had always shared an odd, yet touching affinity. He had been a guest at the evening reception at Emma and Gareth’s lavish wedding, some great nephew of an old family friend, invited at Nana Gwen’s insistence, along with other tenuous family connections. Emma - not paying for the wedding herself - had humoured Nana by inviting them, expecting most to decline, which they had, of course, being distant in many ways, including miles.

But not Silas Jones.

Nana Gwen, who had never mentioned him before - as far as Nell and Emma could recall - had greeted him as if he were her old, dear, long-dead friend himself, not just a great nephew. Nell had spied on them from across the dance floor, where she sheltered in the shadow of a suit of armour, self-conscious in her froufrou bridesmaid’s dress, and suddenly, to her distress, blushing all over. Overwhelmed with the sort of heat that might shame a nun. The sight of that man in his tailored suit, designed to fit every inch of him to perfection, had set off a reaction inside her she had never known the like of before or since.

‘Nana Gwen is as well as can be expected, considering her arthritis and her age.’ Nell spoke stiffly
now, trying not to stray from the point. ‘She’s upstairs, on the third floor. That’s probably why we haven’t woken her.’

‘Good.’ Silas inclined his head. ‘I’m glad to hear she’s well.’

Nell realised she hadn’t offered him a whisky. He was still clutching the mug of tea he had made for her. He hadn’t touched a drop himself.

‘You can put that
down,’ said Nell, indicating a side table. ‘It must be getting cold by now.’

Without a word, Silas complied. His hands free now, he ran them lightly over his head, as if it was a nervous compulsion. His black hair fell like feathers across his pale brow, and flicked up over his collar, longer than he had worn it before.

In his jeans, Aran jumper and faded leather jacket, his jaw shadowed with stubble, he seemed on the whole more crumpled and casual than the memory Nell had carried with her. 

She drew herself inwards, as if reining in every pointless, unwanted emotion, every thought pulsing through her head and heart.

How was it that his face had hardly changed, though?

How was it that he could look as chiselled and aquiline and so
The Same
in terms of age and charisma as the man who had wandered along the edge of that dance floor, champagne flute in hand, and then suddenly, to Nell’s alarm and disbelief, caught her eye and smiled, swamping her with a pleasure that could only be described as explosive; a mental and emotional climax.

‘So now you’ve seen the children,’ Nell told him uncompromisingly, ‘there’s nothing to stop you leaving, is there?’ She knew she had to attack this head-on, not skirt around it any longer, prodding and poking the conflict like a coward with a long stick. And indulging in a glimpse of the whirlwind emotions of the past served no purpose, either, except to stir her up in ways she didn’t need or want. ‘You can sod off and sail around the Greek Isles again,’ she added grittily. ‘A bikini-clad girl in every port.’

Silas frowned. ‘Ellena . . . You know better than that. That wasn’t what it was like.’

‘Do I know better?’ She shook her head. ‘How can I? I haven’t had any word from you for seven years.’

‘It was never about other women,’ stated Silas, slightly patronising in tone. ‘And I wasn’t sailing around the Aegean, or anywhere else.’

‘Well, you always spoke about it as if it was a lifelong dream.’

‘That wasn’t why I left,’ he said mulishly.

‘So, what was it then? Some kind of slightly premature mid-life crisis? You abandoned your family, your job, your home. You ran away, for no apparent reason except that you couldn’t hack it any more. I imagined you were living your dream, at least, in return for selling your soul like that.’

‘No, Ellena. That’s not how it works.’

‘How what works?’

‘My life.’

‘Oh, so you go by different rules from everyone else, do you?’

‘It’s not about what I wanted. It’s about what I had to do. I’m not designed to stay in one place for long.’

‘Designed?’ echoed Nell. ‘You make yourself sound like a robot. As if you were programmed to behave like a bastard.’ Her voice cracked.

‘Was the money I sent every month not enough, Ellena? I worked hard enough for it.’

Oh God. She squeezed her eyes shut. At this precise moment, it would have been so much easier if he had never extended any financial support. She would have been vindicated in bawling and ranting and ordering him to leave her and the children alone. But knowing that it was his money that had paid for the abundance of gifts lying under the tree left Nell with no option but to swallow what was left of her pride.

‘It was enough,’ she said croakily. ‘I only ever spent it on the children. And whatever I haven’t spent I’ve set aside for them, for their future.’

‘Frankly, I thought you would come back up here, to Harreloe, when I left,’ Silas admitted, his own voice lowering slightly. ‘Why didn’t you come home,
Ellena?’

Like her father - and Abe Golding too, strangely - Silas had always had the ability to make the name she’d been christened with sound like the most beautiful name in the world. The way he enunciated those three syllables had made her feel special, like that little princess again, who had looked out of her turret, sometimes imagining she was trapped there, dreaming of a handsome prince to ride to her rescue.

Tonight, though, from his lips, the name seemed to belong to someone else. To a stranger. Not
her.

‘When I was forced to leave
our
home, you mean?’ Nell finally tackled his question. ‘Well, I couldn’t afford the house on my own, not even with the money you deposited in my account. Abe rented me the flat. I suppose I was too proud, and too . . . humiliated to come back up here.’

Silas said nothing. His brow simply hooded his eyes a little more than normal.

‘Anyway, a few years later, and things change. As they do.’ Nell twirled the cut-glass whisky tumbler around in her hand. ‘Time has made me see that I wasn’t the one who ought to feel humiliated.’

‘I’m sorry,
Ellena. One day, I hope you’ll understand why I left.’

‘Oh, I understand all right. I just wanted to hear you say it.’

Silas seemed surprised. He shifted uneasily in the chair.

‘I suffocated you,’ said Nell. ‘
Fatherhood
suffocated you. You have this thing about you, Silas, like you said - you can’t be pinned down. When we were together, I guess I tricked myself into ignoring it, but as soon as you’d left I knew why you’d gone. The shock wore off almost instantly, even if the anger didn’t, because I must have known all along that that day was going to come. I’d just kidded myself that it wouldn’t.’

He nodded slowly. ‘You’re right,’ he said, as if admitting to something more mundane and far less important.

Nell suddenly wanted to throw the whisky in his face. But she had been brought up by her mother with more restraint than that.

Instead, she cast her coldest stare. ‘You bastard. Why did you even marry me in the first place? Why did you even have to
look
at me the night we met? Why couldn’t you have picked on someone else, someone who deserved what you did? Because
I
didn’t. I didn’t deserve that whole charade -’

‘
Ellena . . .’ He leaned across, his hand touched her knee. ‘Please . . .’

She flinched, twisting away as she pressed her back into the armchair. ‘I think you need to leave now, Silas.’

He glanced towards the open door, in the direction of the lounge. ‘About Joshua . . . will you let me visit him on another occasion, Ellena?’

Nell also glanced towards the door, but more apprehensively than Silas. ‘What about Freya?
Don’t you want to visit her, too?’

‘Yes,’ he said, hesitating, ‘of course I do . . .’

‘You don’t seem very certain. She’s as much your daughter as Joshua is your son.’

‘Joshua looks like me,’ said Silas.

‘Yes, and Freya’s a mini
me
. That doesn’t make her any less yours.’

Silas still seemed unsure. ‘You’ll let me see them both?’

Nell paused, then imploded into an agonised heap inside. ‘It’s up to them. I can’t stop them, if that’s what they’d like. They’re old enough to decide if they want to see you.’

Silas hesita
ted again, staring at her, then pulled a business card out of his jacket pocket. He passed it to her.

Her hand shook. It was horribly, alarmingly familiar.

She shivered in disbelief. ‘You’re “
S. A. Marner
” . . . ?
You’re
Simon?
Si
. . . ?’

‘Again, I apologise. It wasn’t my intention to mislead anyone.’

‘
Silas Marner
. . . The book you said you were named after . . .’ Nell raised her stunned, baffled gaze to his. ‘But - you were never a joiner . . . You worked in the City . . . You did financial . . . stuff. Investing in new ideas or something.’ To be fair, she had never quite grasped the intricacies of what he did, even when he’d attempted to explain. Economics beyond the basics had never been her strong point.

‘That was a few years out of my life,’ he said. ‘It was never what I was best at.’

‘You let me believe you’d always worked in the City, since leaving university . . .’

‘If you think back,
Ellena, you’ll realise you let yourself believe that. You heard and saw what you wanted. What you needed. What you’d always longed for. I was merely the outward manifestation of your fantasy.’

‘You . . . ?’ Nell felt dizzy, as if the effects of the whisky were more detrimental than helpful now. ‘You’re not making sense.’

‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s too much. And you’re not in a receptive state.’

‘You could try talking English,’ she suggested sourly under her breath.

He unfolded himself from the chair, rising to his full height and looming over her like a dark granite tower. Impenetrable. Impossible to scale or conquer.

‘We’ll talk again soon.’ He gestured to the card. ‘You know where to find me now. I’d be grateful if you could speak to Joshua - and Freya - on my behalf.’

Nell stared wordlessly as he nodded at her.

‘Merry Christmas,
Ellena.’

His footsteps on the parquet faded away. Still Nell couldn’t move, couldn’t think except to wonder if she had just dreamed the past hour, or however long it had been. For a long time, she simply sat there, willing herself to wake up. 

Eventually, she looked down at her trembling hands. In one, there was a half-drunk glass of whisky. In the other, a business card, with a dark wood-effect background.

Nell took a few deep breaths, steadying herself, then put down the glass. She rose to her feet, her legs shaking treacherously, and slipped the card into the pocket of her dressing gown. Then forcing one foot in front of the other, she went to check on the children. The sound of some cartoon or other emanated quietly from the lounge.