The Night Book (2 page)

‘And out here,’ Seb said as he moved into the corridor. He paused. ‘I thought it was supposed to be cooler up in the frozen north. Since I got here it’s felt more like
Greece. Thirty-two degrees again tomorrow.’

‘Yup. Ninety in old money.’ The engineer nodded and reached for a razor blade to start slicing the tape. ‘I’ve never known a summer like it. Haven’t seen a cloud in
weeks, have you? My lawn looks like a piece of toast. Still, not as hot up here as your precious London, eh? They’re dropping like flies on the pavements down there. At least that’s
something to make you glad you quit Fleet Street for us hicks in the sticks, eh?’

Seb gave a short laugh.

‘You have to be bloody joking, Jess. I wish I’d never left.’

No one could remember a heatwave like it. People old enough to have lived through the legendary Spitfire Summer of thirty-six years earlier, when snarling British and German
fighter planes left their gleaming white contrails twisting against endless china-blue skies, agreed that 1976 was in a league of its own. Weeks of uninterrupted sunshine had blazed unbroken from
sunrise to sunset and still there was no sign of the great heat breaking.

Cloudless day followed cloudless day. There hadn’t been even a single thunderstorm to break the pattern. True, once in a while a scattering of mackerel-shaped clouds would appear high
overhead, like a sparse shoal of fish moving slowly through a barren ocean. Far below them the brilliant sunlight dimmed a little, briefly filtered and denied its full strength. But soon, always,
the skies became spotless again and the faint promise of relief quietly evaporated.

It was hot, hot,
hot
.

To begin with, almost everyone was ecstatic that a Mediterranean summer had banished Britain’s Atlantic depressions far from its shores. Roads to the coast around the country were jammed,
especially at weekends. Car dealers couldn’t lay their hands on enough convertibles. Barbecue sales rocketed. Air-conditioning units, long seen as a pointless extravagance on a mostly rainy,
cloudy island, were suddenly in demand for the first time and quickly sold out. Fresh units were hastily flown in from America and went for absurd prices.

Ancient shibboleths and customs melted away like an iceberg drifting on a summer sea. In the City, gentlemen’s clubs relaxed their ‘jacket at all times’ code. During a
celebrated trial at the Old Bailey, the judge allowed barristers to remove their horse-hair wigs, from under which perspiration had been dripping steadily onto their case notes. His Lordship, too,
gave himself permission to hear the case bare-headed.

In the countryside, dust-devils danced like tiny tornadoes across the parched wheat fields. Trees seemed to pray for rain and for some reason the birds fell strangely silent. Perhaps it was just
too hot for them to sing. Pig farmers reported that their stock was suffering from severe cases of sunburn; if the animals could not be kept indoors, their backs were slathered in sunscreen bought
in bulk from the nearest chemist. One Fleet Street wag dubbed it ‘swine-tan lotion’.

Out in the meadows, the shallow horse ponds shrank and dwindled and eventually evaporated completely. Dry, cracked mud greeted thirsty cattle desperate to drink; they bellowed and stamped the
ground in frustration. Farmers rigged up metal drinking troughs, filling them with water from milk churns dragged clanking across the parched fields by tractor.

All this – the discomfort, the inconvenience, the sleepless nights with windows flung open onto airless streets and gardens – was at first, in that peculiarly British way, almost
perversely celebrated. But after weeks of Roman-hot days and nights, the mood began to shift, subtly, but distinctly. This endless, glorious sunshine was all well and good, but . . . it
wasn’t
natural
, was it? A decent fine spell was one thing: this was starting to feel like something far more profound, an endless gavotte with the sun and the moon and the stars that
meant . . . well,
what
, exactly? A fundamental shift in the planet’s weather patterns? Why not? It had happened before, hadn’t it? Look at the Ice Age, or even the mini-ice age
of a few centuries earlier, when winter fairs were held on a frozen Thames.

Such speculation, idle at first, gradually took on an unmistakable edge of seriousness, even panic. Science writers aired increasingly crackpot theories in the newspapers. Perhaps the Earth had
somehow deviated from its usual course through the heavens. Could it have wobbled on its axis, effecting a small but crucial shift in the planet’s aspect to the sun?

In other words, was this thing going to be
permanent
?

It had certainly become lethal. Deaths from sunstroke were multiplying, which was to be expected. That was a problem mainly affecting the south.

But hundreds of miles north, in the beautiful shining waters that lapped scorched screes and sparkled under bone-dry mountain tops, there was another penalty to be paid for such implacable,
sweltering heat.

The drownings had started.

She didn’t mean a word of it, of course. Not a word. God, she wasn’t some kind of homicidal maniac. Far from it – she even had trouble killing flies; if she
could shoo them out of a door or window instead, she would. She was terrified of wasps but it troubled her conscience whenever she swatted one. Which was stupid, really; she’d once read that
wasps serve no useful function whatsoever in the chain of life. Nature would be quite undisturbed if the horrible things became extinct overnight.

But if anyone ever found her diary – the secret one; the one she wrote every few months, always late at night when her husband was asleep, and which she kept hidden under an old towel at
the back of the airing cupboard – well, God knows what they’d think. They’d assume that either she was a frustrated horror writer, a sort of Stephen King
manqué
,
or a total psycho.

She was neither. She was just . . .
what
, exactly? Bloody miserable, obviously, in her fucked-up, god-awful marriage to Cameron. Even after eleven years she still couldn’t quite
believe the levels of psychological cruelty the man was capable of. My God, how well he hid all that during their courtship and early days of marriage. And from her, of all people! Meriel Kidd, the
famous, award-winning, feminist agony aunt, with her own weekly radio show and a column in one of the more upmarket Sunday tabloids. The expert on standing up to abusive men and cutting control
freaks and bullies down to size – or efficiently out of your life.

It would be almost funny if it wasn’t so tragic. But her listeners and readers must never, ever know the truth about Cameron and what she routinely had to put up with from him. Her
credibility would evaporate overnight and she would become a national figure of pity, perhaps even contempt. Because how many times over the airwaves or in print had she counselled women in
marriages
exactly
like hers – tied to abusive, mean-spirited, boorish and supremely selfish men like Cameron? Her advice to them was always firm, always unambiguous.

You give him one ultimatum to change his ways. ONE. If he doesn’t? LEAVE. HIM. Get out from under and start again. You’re worth much more than this. You can do it. You know you
can. You’re a lot stronger than you think.

Her public would demand to know why she couldn’t follow her own counsel.

In her defence, it had been a gradual descent into the nightmare with Cameron. She hadn’t woken up one morning in their sprawling Victorian house at the foot of the Cumbrian fells to find
that her husband had metamorphosed overnight into a controlling monster. It wasn’t as if a bad fairy had hovered over their bed as they slept and cast an evil spell over the union.

No, the depredations had been subtle, almost unnoticeable to begin with. The occasional sneering comment directed at something she had just said or done, swiftly followed by a contrite
apology.

But the put-downs gradually grew more frequent and the apologies less so. Then the dominating behaviour began to emerge. Especially over money.

Cameron was not only much older than her – she was thirty-one, he was fifty-nine – he was wealthier, too. A
lot
wealthier. By the time he was forty he’d made his first
million and he was worth many times that today after making a series of killings on the stock market. As soon as they married, in what seemed to her at the time to be a sincere and generous act,
he’d insisted on adding her name to all three of his private bank accounts.

‘But I earn a fraction of what you do,’ she protested. ‘It doesn’t seem fair.’

‘What’s mine is yours,’ he told her firmly and, with a mixture of guilt and gratitude, she had agreed.

Now, the joint accounts were joint in name only. Cameron had slowly asserted complete control over every aspect of their financial affairs. What had begun as the occasional good-natured question
from him at the breakfast table when he opened their bank statement (‘Hello, what’s
this
about? I don’t remember taking out a hundred pounds from the cashpoint in Kendal
last Thursday. That must have been you, darling. What did you need it for?’) had become a forensic weekly inquisition.

He went through their statements line-by-line, using a clear Perspex ruler, peering over rimless reading glasses at each entry as he moved remorselessly down the page. He insisted she account
for everything. Last year she’d made a short local speaking tour around the Lakes and the Scottish borders and had quietly asked the organisers to pay her expenses in cash. The fees
weren’t much more than token payments but at least, she thought, she’d have a few pounds of her own to spend how she liked without being grilled.

But Cameron had found the money – he went through her purse one evening when she was in the bath – and there’d been a terrible row. ‘You can’t have it both ways,
you deceitful bitch!’ he’d roared, waving the pathetic handful of banknotes in her face. ‘If what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. I’m putting this
straight in the bank tomorrow. Actually, I’m not.
You’re
going to. And I’ve bloody counted it so you’d better not keep any of it back. I’ll know if you
do.’

Belatedly she’d realised that Cameron’s insistence on adding her name (and of course her income) to his bank accounts had nothing whatsoever to do with generosity of spirit. From the
start his motive had been to keep her under constant observation, supervision and constraint. It begged the question she knew would mystify any dispassionate observer: why on earth was a strong,
self-confident woman like Meriel Kidd sticking with her marriage to a total shit like Cameron Bruton?

She knew the answer and it shamed her. She was doing it to preserve her career. There was no lie she wouldn’t tell to preserve the public fiction that she enjoyed the happiest of
marriages. ‘I’m very lucky,’ she’d told
Woman’s Own
only last month. ‘I know it sounds like a terrible old cliché, but Cameron and I were quite
simply made for each other.’

Perhaps if she had left him years ago, as soon as she realised the kind of man he really was, it would have been all right. More than all right; it would have demonstrated that she practised
what she preached.

But divorce him now? It was simply too much for her to risk. Her career gave her self-worth and public standing and respect. It was the only thing she had left (Cameron had made it clear he had
no interest in becoming a father) and she was damned if she was going to risk losing it. She’d just have to carry on, chin up, smile firmly in place.

For now.

Always that caveat at the back of her mind.
For now.
One day, she
knew
she’d find a way out. It was that quiet certainty, unsupported by any actual plan of action, which
kept her going.

That, and the secret diary.

She’d bought it on impulse years before from a second-hand bookshop in Windermere. God knows who it had originally belonged to, but whoever it was, they hadn’t written a single word
on the thick white pages that were bound inside an expensive-looking supple black leather jacket. A red silk ribbon was attached to the spine to mark entries and, just beneath it, a hollow leather
tube, a sort of holster, to hold a pen.

There were no lines on the pages, no margins, no dates. The diary was perfectly blank. Meriel couldn’t help thinking that it had been waiting for her, and her alone, to buy it. She
couldn’t really understand her compulsion to do so, but it was absolute and not to be denied.

Her marriage to Cameron had yet to descend into the abyss; she was still relatively happy on the day she bought the diary.

But for some reason, she didn’t tell him about it. She hid it from her husband right from the start.

Cameron never listened to Meriel’s show – he made a point of telling her that, pleasantly describing it as ‘your brainless apology for a programme’
– but if he had, how he would have laughed. ‘Healer, heal thyself,’ he would surely mock when she arrived home (Cameron was fond of Biblical aphorisms). He knew exactly how
unhappy she was with him. Of course he did. Her misery was his hobby.

Her hobby was her secret.

She’d begun writing the diary five years earlier, when she’d finally admitted to herself her catastrophic mistake in marrying Cameron. The first entry was inspired by a letter from
one of her listeners, a woman who had poured her heart out to Meriel in half a dozen anguished pages that described the emotional abuse she was suffering at her husband’s hands.

Meriel had identified with the woman’s wretchedness, but it was what was scribbled below the signature that had caught her imagination.