Secrets of the Tides (39 page)

That had just left Violet, who had bustled around the kitchen in her tight black dress and too-bright lipstick making cups of tea and beans on toast. None of them had had an appetite but at least it had been a diversion of some sorts from the profound and somewhat intimidating business of grieving.

‘You’re an angel,’ Helen had sighed wearily up at Violet as she poured herself another glass of wine. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘Rubbish,’ Violet had said. ‘You lot need a little TLC right now. And here I am. It’s not as if I’ve got anything better to do . . .’

She remembered Richard had cleared his throat. ‘If you’ll all excuse me . . . I think . . .I’d quite like to . . .’ His face was pale and he stumbled over his words. ‘I think I need to have a little lie down.’

‘Of course.’ Violet patted him on the arm. ‘You go, dear. I’ll look after the girls here.’

Helen exchanged a worried glance with Violet. ‘He’s just tired,’ she said, more to herself than anyone else. ‘It’s been a long day.’ But the truth was it was only three in the afternoon.

Not long after Richard had left the kitchen the telephone had rung. Helen rushed at it, reaching the receiver seconds before Cassie. ‘Hello?’

‘Can you talk?’ It was Tobias. They hadn’t spoken for a couple of days.

‘Yes. Hold on one moment please.’ Her voice was all polite efficiency. She turned to the others. ‘It’s a friend from work. Do you mind?’

Violet nodded. ‘Come on, girls, let’s go and see what we can find on the telly. Maybe an old movie or something?’ Cassie and Dora had trooped out of the kitchen, reluctantly following Violet and her swaying hips, leaving Helen to her call.

‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m here. How are you, my darling? I’ve been thinking of you all day. Was it dreadful?’

‘Yes. Unbearable.’ She closed her eyes. ‘They said we might feel a little better once we’d held the service, but to be honest, I think I feel worse. The house just seems so empty without him. I keep expecting him to burst through the door any moment, demanding his tea or asking me to find some toy or other.’

‘My poor love. I would have come to the church but I didn’t think it appropriate somehow.’

‘No,’ agreed Helen.

‘When can I see you? I’m dying to hold you, to put my arms around you and make it all better.’

Helen breathed quietly down the phone for a moment. ‘Tobias, there is no making it better. My son is dead. He’s gone.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I meant how can I make
you
feel a little better?’

‘I don’t know that you can.’ She paused as her words sank in. It was the first time she’d admitted it, to him, and to herself, but she found the thought of being with Tobias repellent now.

‘You could let me try?’ he asked plaintively. ‘I miss you.’

‘It’s not a good time. I need to be with my family.’

Tobias was silent for a moment. ‘You know, I need you
too
, Helen.’

Helen shook her head. ‘No, I need to be here, with Richard.’

There was a heavy silence at the other end of the phone. ‘What are you saying, Helen?’

She sighed. She felt so tired. Too tired for this conversation.

‘I don’t know. I have to get my head together. I never should have come to meet you that day. It was a mistake . . . a terrible mistake.’ Her voice had risen to a strange, hysterical pitch. ‘Do you know how guilty I feel? I’m tormented by the fact that we were there, together, when Alfie went missing. Can you imagine what it’s like to know that it’s your fault your son is dead? I haven’t been able to tell anyone and it’s killing me inside. I feel so alone.’ She let out a strangled sob of anguish.

‘Darling, you’re not alone. I’m here for you. Why don’t we meet? We can talk about it. You’ll feel better, I promise. I can make you feel better. Remember how good I can make you feel?’

Her stomach churned at his words. ‘No, Tobias,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this right now. My family needs me.’

‘So I don’t matter? Is that it?’ There was an unattractive whine to his voice. Helen wondered how she could have never seen this childish, egocentric side to him before. She thought of their many stolen moments together, in hotel rooms and in the back of his car, snatched moments of sex and lust wrapped up in the heat and excitement of the forbidden, and felt her stomach heave again. Swept up in the romance of their affair, she had failed to see what a terrible, pathetic cliché it all was. She had played the misunderstood wife to a T, she’d painted Richard as the neglectful, distracted husband to perfection, and Tobias had admirably filled the role of the illicit suitor. She wanted to shake herself. How had she ended up here? How had she put everything she cared about on the line, for this? All those years with Richard, spent building a life and a family, and she’d risked it all for what? A meaningless fling.

An image of Richard standing outside the church suddenly filled her mind’s eye. He’d stood there, his face pale and taut with grief, his eyes gazing out across the horizon, one arm wrapped around each of their daughters as they leaned in to the comfort of his body. Dora’s face had been buried in his jacket and Richard’s lips had been moving slowly, offering words of comfort to the girls, even though Helen could practically feel the anguish radiating from his core. Her good, strong husband. How foolish she had been.

‘Right now I’m afraid you don’t,’ she replied. Suddenly she saw things more clearly than she had in a long, long while. She had already lost her son. She couldn’t risk losing her daughters, or her husband too. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound callous, but I think it’s best if we don’t see each other again. My family is most important right now.’

‘If it’s time and space that you need . . .’

‘No. It’s not.’

Tobias fell silent at the other end of the phone. When he next spoke there was an edge to his voice. ‘Well, this is a turn up for the books . . . After weeks of “Tobias, I want you”, “Tobias, I need you” you just want to call it a day?’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t do this any more.’

‘So that’s it? It’s over, just like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’

They were both silent for a moment. She could hear him breathing at the other end of the phone and realised she felt nothing, absolutely nothing. Her infatuation with him had simply dissipated into thin air.

He spoke next. ‘Well, I guess there’s nothing left to say then . . .’

‘No.’

He paused again. ‘Goodbye, Helen.’

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

There was another pause, as if he were waiting for her to change her mind but Helen remained silent and when the click of the receiver came she felt only relief. She sat there for a minute or two listening to the shrill bleeping of the disconnect tone and let the familiar sounds of her home settle in around her.

Over the coming days she collapsed at intermittent and unexpected moments. She’d feel OK, almost normal sometimes, but then the sight of something would send waves of unbearable sadness bearing down upon her. It could be anything: a stray toy retrieved from under the sofa cushions, the pencil marks on the kitchen wall where they had charted Alfie’s height, or an old half-eaten box of sultanas found at the bottom of her handbag. They were small things but they had the power to knock the wind out of her lungs and send her running to the bathroom where she would collapse and ride out the pain with great heaving sobs. Or sometimes at night, when her grief was at its most wild and raw, she would take herself up to Alfie’s bedroom, close the door and lie upon the coolness of his bed, letting the last, precious scent of him invade her nostrils and her tears stain his pillow.

Richard, on the other hand, collapsed completely. Her husband, normally so strong, so dependable, had simply disintegrated. Up until the moment they had lowered the little empty coffin into the ground Richard had been with purpose. He had spent every waking hour searching for Alfie. Then, when hope had faded and the police had called off the hunt, he had transferred his energy into the funeral arrangements. But once they’d held the service, Richard had fallen apart.

He stayed in bed for a week after the funeral. He just lay there, in the semi-darkness of the bedroom with his face turned to the wall, mourning his son. She had wanted to reach out to him; had been desperate to hold him, for him to hold her, to feel the reassuring solidity of his body against hers. After she’d wept her tears into Alfie’s pillow, or screamed her pain in the privacy of the bathroom, she would go to him, driven by an overwhelming need for her husband. She would sit in the shadows and listen to the steady rise and fall of his breath, waiting for him to speak, wondering if she should tell him the truth about where she had been that day. But he hadn’t spoken; and neither had she.

In the end it had been
her
words that broke the silence, but they weren’t about the affair. Instead, she talked about Alfie. In halting, broken phrases she started to remember their son. She talked about his birth and about the precious moments she and Richard had shared standing over his cot watching him sleep. She remembered Alfie’s desire to do everything in a hurry; how he’d cut his first tooth at six months, crawled around the living room floor after the girls at just seven months, and taken his first wobbly steps at eleven months. She reminded Richard of Alfie’s first word: ‘Dada’; how they had sat up all night with him when he had chicken pox, and the time he had run a dangerously high fever and covered every single item of bedding they owned with his watery vomit; how his hair had shone golden in the sun and how the old ladies of Bridport would stop and coo as she pushed him around in his pram. She remembered him repeatedly pulling all the books off the bookshelves until, exasperated, she had spent a morning wedging them all in tight as sardines. She’d recalled the time he had stood outside innocently one late summer’s day and pelted rotting cherries, found at the foot of the cherry tree, one by one at the freshly painted exterior of the house; and the funny little dances he would do with the girls when they put their favourite CDs on and leapt and whirled around the living room. She relived a catalogue of memories from the end of the bed, sometimes laughing, sometimes sobbing, sometimes both, and all the while Richard had lain there, still and silent, his face turned away from hers into the darkness of the room.

And then once, in a moment of sheer need and loneliness, she had padded upstairs, undressed silently and climbed into their bed, pushing her warm nakedness up against her husband’s back. He was awake. She could tell from his breathing and she willed him to turn and put his arms around her. She wanted nothing more than to forget herself, to bury her pain in the familiarity of his scent and skin. But Richard just lay there, rigid and still under the sheet, until she had eventually turned away from him and fallen asleep.

Exasperated and out of ideas, she’d talked about it to Violet.

‘I just don’t know what to do any more. I’m so worried about him. He can’t go on like this . . . he’ll make himself sick . . . and I’m not sure I can handle things on my own.’

‘Well, I’m here,’ Violet offered. ‘I’ve already told you I don’t have anything pressing to rush back for and I really don’t mind helping.’ She paused, realising she’d missed Helen’s point. ‘But I see what you mean. It must be difficult for you. I suppose he’s terribly sad right now. I think it might be harder for a man, in some ways.’

Helen had raised an eyebrow sceptically. ‘Oh yes?’

‘You know,’ Violet had continued as Helen stared at her blankly, ‘I’m not saying it’s easy for you. You are Alfie’s mother, after all. But Richard is the man. He’s the provider – the provider and the protector of the family. I suppose he might feel a little as though he’s failed you all, or failed Alfie. Not that he has, of course,’ she rushed. ‘I just think perhaps he’s feeling terribly to blame. Poor chap.’

‘But it’s not Richard’s fault!’

‘Oh I know that! I’m so sorry, of course it’s not anyone’s fault,’ Violet apologised. ‘This is coming out all wrong. What I mean to say is that Richard is a very honourable man. I should think he’s taking this very hard because he wishes there was something he could have done to save Alfie. Do you see what I mean?’

Helen nodded. No one understood that better than she. She woke every day and faced the guilt of her decision to spend that day with Tobias rather than care for her son. If she’d done things differently, if she’d made a different choice that morning, she had no doubt that Alfie would still be alive.

Violet interrupted her thoughts. ‘You could call a doctor. There may be things they can do for him . . . antidepressants . . . counselling? I know there’s all sorts of treatments available these days for breakdowns.’

Helen shook her head. ‘Richard’s not having a breakdown.’ She paused. ‘He’s not. He’s grieving. He’s succumbed to his emotions. He was never one for really expressing himself, and this is what happens when you bottle everything up inside.’

Violet nodded.

‘I don’t know what to do, V.’ Helen sagged at the table. ‘Where do we go from here? How do we carry on with normal life when everything is so utterly destroyed? I don’t think I can do this on my own.’

‘I think you’re probably all a long way away from a “normal life” right now. A little time will help. You’ll see,’ Violet said, patting her arm. ‘Try and be patient.’

Helen had shrugged her shoulders. What else could she be?

In the end, and rather unexpectedly, it had been Violet who had got through to Richard. It had been her last day with the family and Helen had asked if she would mind taking Richard a tray of tea and toast before she left.

‘Would you mind? You could say goodbye at the same time . . . not that he’ll say anything back,’ she added grimly, ‘but maybe just let him know you’re leaving?’

‘Of course, however I can help, you know that.’

Violet had taken the tray and disappeared upstairs. When she hadn’t returned a few minutes later Helen’s curiosity was piqued. She’d crept up the stairs and stood outside their bedroom on the landing. The door to the room was ajar and she could see Violet sitting on her side of the bed. Richard lay with his back to her. Violet looked uncomfortable; she shifted her weight awkwardly on the mattress and played with the buttons on her shirtsleeves as she spoke to him in a low murmur. Helen could just make out what she was saying.