The Secrets Between Us (21 page)

‘What have you heard?’ I asked.

‘That you and Alexander were in the pub and Dale Vowles gave Alexander the seeing-to he’s been asking for.’

‘It wasn’t like that at all.’

‘Maybe not. But I think you and Mr Westwood should exercise a little more discretion,’ she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘All we did was go for a drink.’

‘It’s a tabloid world out there, hon,’ Betsy said. ‘You know that. A missing young woman, especially a pretty one, is always going to be the victim, and a well-built husband with a temper on him is always going to be the villain, particularly
when he shows no remorse and starts flaunting his bimbo. I’m sorry, but that’s how they see you.’

I leaned my head against the wall.

‘Bimbo …’ I sighed.

‘And the rest.’

‘Can I come over to yours for a bit?’ I asked.

‘It’s not a good idea right now.’

‘You don’t want to be seen drinking coffee with a bimbo?’

‘Dale’s cousins live over the road. They might give you some grief.’

‘Could we meet in the village then?’

‘I’d stay away from the village for a couple of days if I was you.’

‘Betsy, what am I going to do?’

‘Oh, don’t start with the dramatics. I’ll come up to yours.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

I could not have been more grateful. I don’t think I’d ever needed a friend so much in my whole life.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ONE CRISIS PASSED
and another arrived. They were like waves coming closer and closer together. It was Claudia who came round to warn me on the morning the posters went up, but she was too late: I had already seen them when I was taking Jamie to school. Genevieve’s face was smiling out from every lamp post, every telegraph pole and wall. Scores of laminated A4 posters had been stuck up in Burrington Stoke with the word ‘
MISSING
’ above a colour photograph of Genevieve. There was an appeal for information and the offer of a ‘substantial’ reward to any person who could tell the police where Genevieve was, or give information as to her whereabouts.

The posters were obviously a direct response to Alexander and I going to the pub. It would have taken no time at all for word to get back to Virginia, and for her suspicions about Alexander and me to be raised another notch or two.

‘Why is Mummy’s picture on the lamp posts?’ Jamie asked. ‘Is it because she’s famous?’

‘Yes,’ I said, grateful that he had come up with his own rationale. ‘Your mummy’s one of the best horse-riders in England.’

‘In the whole wide world,’ Jamie said. He spelled out the
letters of the word above her head. ‘Why does it say “Missing”?’

I sighed. ‘Because for the moment we don’t know where your mummy is.’

Jamie nodded. ‘I wish she would tell us,’ he said.

I squeezed his shoulder. ‘So do I, Jamie.’

Genevieve was already in my life so much, and now she was in it more. She was everywhere. That morning, after I’d dropped Jamie at the school, I carried on walking towards the village with my head held high, because to turn back would have been the action of a coward, and a person with something to hide. The first people I met were an elderly couple who ran a bed-and-breakfast business from their cottage behind the Spar. Normally, we exchanged pleasantries, but on this occasion, when they saw me they crossed the road and pretended to be so involved in their own conversation that they had not noticed me.

Then I met Roseanne, a very pretty girl a few years younger than me who worked as a nanny for a couple who had a second home in Somerset. I often spoke to her at the school gates. She pulled a sympathetic face when she saw me.

‘Looks like the shit’s about to hit the fan,’ she said. ‘Those pictures are all over the place and Mrs Churchill was on the radio this morning talking about a reward.’

‘Oh no.’

‘And Midge told me there’d already been a newspaper reporter in the shop asking about Genevieve and what she was like and what people thought might have happened to her.’

I swallowed and looked past Roseanne up the road. I half-expected to see a pack of paparazzi hurtling towards me, but there was only a tractor trundling along.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked. Her breath smelled of peppermint chewing gum.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘You sure?’

‘Actually, I think I will go back to Avalon.’ I looked at Roseanne. I was going to ask her to come with me, but I realized it wouldn’t be fair.

‘I’ll see you later,’ I said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

AUTUMN WAS DYING
around us, pulling in its reds and golds, its berries and its dampness. On the moors, the bracken browned and collapsed. Seedheads were everywhere, tiny silver parachutes like fairies swarming over the walls and clinging to our clothes.

The posters were outside the house, in the village, even on the lamp posts outside the school gates. There was no avoiding them, so as much as possible, I stayed inside, where I was not obliged to look at the image of Genevieve’s smiling face, and where people could not look at me with mistrust and fear in their eyes.

For Jamie it was a game. He counted the pictures of Mummy in the village. Some days he counted twenty; some days he told me he’d counted to more than a thousand. The other children talked about the posters for a few days, but they soon became part of the landscape of the village, and were no longer remarkable. Even Jamie stopped looking.

It must have been terrible for Alexander, but he would not talk about his feelings. He went to work as usual, and came back and said nothing. Once, he was door-stepped at the yard by a photographer and a journalist; they tried to get him to talk, to ‘put the record straight’ by giving his side of the story, but he wouldn’t. He didn’t even mention it to me.
I only knew because Betsy, whose sister worked in Castle Cary, told me at school the next day.

The prank calls increased in number and regularity. Sometimes the phone would ring thirty times in succession and, each time I answered, there was nobody there. Sometimes I didn’t say anything when I picked up the receiver, I just held it to my ear and held my breath, trying to hear the breathing of the person at the other end, but there was nothing. I tried dialling 1471 to retrieve the caller’s number, but always it had been withheld. When I told Alexander, he said it was obviously an automated cold-call system trying to connect. This was the only sensible explanation, but it never happened if Alexander or Jamie answered the phone. When they picked up the receiver there was always a perfectly normal human being on the other end of the line.

At first I suspected the silent calls were part of a campaign of disapproval by the villagers. Maybe somebody was watching the house to see who picked up the telephone and muting the call if it was me. Then, one evening, when all the curtains were drawn, the phone rang again. Nobody looking at the house from outside would know who was going to answer. I held my breath, picked up the receiver and held it to the side of my face.

Again, there was nothing. Only, it felt like more than nothing; there were whispers in the low-level static buzz down the line. A chill went through me. The fingers on the hand that was holding the phone began to tingle. I dropped it and the handset swung stupidly on its cord, to and fro, between the legs of the dining-room table. I jabbed at the button on the base to cut off the call, but it didn’t cut off; I could still hear the buzz that hid the silence. Only the caller could terminate the call. I picked up the handset and banged it back into its cradle.

‘Stop it!’ I told the telephone. ‘Please stop it!’

I steadied myself against the table and told myself not to be stupid. It was an inanimate object, that was all. It didn’t have feelings, it was incapable of malice.

Still, I didn’t dare pick up the handset again, because I knew perfectly well that, if I did, that ghostly static would still be there.

When the telephone rang the next time, I disconnected the cable at the wall socket.

A few evenings later, I was standing at the kitchen sink peeling carrots. The potatoes were already cooking in a big pan of boiling water on the hob, and the room was warm and steamy. I put the carrots into the colander and crossed to the window, to open the skylight to let out the steam. The panes were hazy. I reached up to the skylight latch and, clear as anything, saw two words written in the condensation on the window, as if someone had spelled them out with a hasty, shaky finger.
HELP ME
.

I dropped the colander. Alex came in to see what had happened and made me sit down.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked, and I nodded.

‘I just came over a bit faint,’ I said. He put the kettle on and, when I dared to look, the window had steamed over again and the words were gone. I must have imagined them.

Eventually, I casually suggested to Alex that Genevieve might possibly be behind the silent phone calls. They were coming so often now, usually when I was alone, that I felt as if I could not stand them any longer. It had reached the point where I was becoming afraid to pick up the phone even to call May.

‘Of course it’s not Genevieve,’ Alexander said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because it isn’t! It can’t be!’

I gazed at Alexander.

‘Because,’ he repeated, ‘if Genevieve had something to say,
she would come out and say it. She wouldn’t do some freakish heavy-breathing act down the line. That wasn’t her style.’

‘There isn’t any breathing,’ I said miserably.

Alexander took my hands in his and squeezed.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘if the calls are bothering you that much, just keep the line unplugged.’

That could have been a solution, but I didn’t like keeping the line unconnected when I was at Avalon on my own, because it was the only sure means of communicating with the outside world. As a compromise, Alexander and I worked out a system. When he called he did a two-ring code first, and I asked Betsy and May to do the same. I told May it was because we were being bothered by salespeople. We stopped subscribing to the answerphone service and, if I didn’t hear the code, I didn’t pick up the phone.

Neil left a message on my mobile asking what was going on. He called from work, obviously not wanting May to hear what he had to say. He said he’d seen a background feature about Genevieve’s childhood that was being touted round the papers by a south-west news agency ‘ready for when the big story broke’, together with photographs. The news desk at NWM was collating information about the Churchills. He asked me to call him urgently. I didn’t. In my increasing paranoia I was worried that he might betray me, or that I would somehow betray Alexander.

I watched Alexander, and he moved around me, sometimes warming me with his smile and his touch, sometimes, more frequently now, even when Jamie was in Avalon, coming into my bed secretively like a night-creature hard and sinewy and masculine; a wolf. He possessed me silently and I allowed it because our love-making overrode all other thoughts, all anxieties. I knew he was thinking, as I was, that we had nothing left to lose.

At other times, he was oblivious to me. I may as well not
have existed. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he ignored Jamie too. Then I made an extra effort with the child, to compensate. The two of us established a rapport that was independent of Alexander, and it was something that we both fell back on when he was in one of his uncommunicative moods. I was terrified Jamie would pick up some cruel insinuation in the playground and that he would come home one day full of renewed mistrust of me, but so far that had not happened. He was young enough, and his friends were young and innocent enough, to be largely oblivious to the gossip and the rumours and the suspicions.

Jamie was the only person in my life with whom I could relax completely. He did not judge me, or doubt my motives; he accepted me as I was. I loved sitting on the settee beside him as he, forgetting himself, cuddled into me, putting his hot feet on to my lap, leaning his head against my chest to be soothed by my heartbeat. I knew him so well by then: I knew every tiny part of his body, I worried over every bruise and scab, I delighted in his strong bones, his perfect skin, his eyelashes. He came home one day with a note about head lice and, sure enough, when I combed his hair I found a tiny creature caught in the tines of the comb. He sat patiently in the bath while I washed his hair and doused it with medicated shampoo, and I told him a made-up story about a family of dinosaurs who lived in a cave in the quarry while I went over his scalp with a metal nit-comb and wiped the resultant debris on a pad of toilet tissue.

‘That was a good story,’ Jamie said sleepily, over the thumb that was in his mouth, as I rinsed his deloused hair with warm water. ‘Can we do that again tomorrow?’

I tried not to let thoughts of Genevieve spoil my time with Jamie. I tried not to let her come between us. I told myself that it wasn’t my fault I was growing so close to her son. She was the one who had chosen to go away and leave him.
She was the one who had created the hole in his life and, if somebody had to fill it, then why not me?

I wondered if Genevieve had any idea what was going on in the village. She must, surely, be in contact with somebody. There must be a spy, somewhere, who was letting her know that Jamie was OK. Or did she trust Alexander enough to know that he would never let the boy suffer?

The next time the phone rang, I counted one, two, three rings and then I picked it up. All I could hear was the faint static rustle.

‘Genevieve,’ I said, but my voice caught on the word and it came out faint and strange. ‘Genevieve, if that’s you, please would you let your family know you’re all right because everyone’s so worried; nobody knows where you are. Please, Genevieve …’

I heard something down the line. Something changed: the static became more high-pitched, so high and frantic that it hurt the inside of my head, like fingernails on a blackboard.

‘Genevieve?’ I asked, and the handset leapt out of my hand, wrenching back my wrist, and threw itself against the dining-room wall. The casing shattered and shards of plastic flew everywhere. I was too shocked to scream. I ran in my socks out into the garden and I huddled in the hay in the old horse trailer until it was time to meet Jamie from school.