The Secrets Between Us (39 page)

I tried to interject but Claudia held up her hand to stop me.

‘I thought we were friends!’ she said in a desperate voice.

‘Oh, Claudia, we are!’

‘Really? So it’s not true that you were planning to run away with Alexander? The police didn’t come across you packing boxes ready to go?’

‘They did, but—’

‘You knew they were going to start searching the area! You knew they were going to find my sister! So you thought you’d get away before they closed in on you, didn’t you?’

‘No, no, it wasn’t like that … Claudia, I didn’t know about Genevieve. I didn’t know anything!’

Claudia’s eyes narrowed. She jabbed a finger towards me.

‘You didn’t say anything to me! I have been so loyal to you, Sarah, and you didn’t say anything about leaving!’

I tried to remember how it was, but the last few weeks were a blur to me. I couldn’t pick out any mitigation at all.

‘And worst of all, you were going to take Jamie away from his grandparents when he was all they had left! At Christmas! How could you do that to them?’

‘They still have you, Claudia. They have our daughters,’ a voice said quietly. Bill had come into the room behind me. He stepped forward and took Claudia in his arms, and she collapsed into him and began to sob. He stroked her hair. She was crying like a child, her shoulders heaving, and Bill pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and soothed her, cradling her like a baby.

‘Shhh,’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right.’

I turned and left the kitchen. I went into the garden, even though I had no coat and it was freezing cold. Blue, who had been sniffing around the shrubs at the far end, turned delightedly when he saw me, and bounded over. I had my arms wrapped around myself and I turned my back to him, but still he jumped up at my side, causing me to stumble and fall. Because I was at his level, he could reach my face, and he started to lick and nuzzle me roughly. I pushed him away, and climbed to my feet. I went to stand at the garden’s edge, where I was hidden from the house, and I looked out across the winter countryside, so colourless it was almost entirely black and white and shades of grey, and I thought: It’s over. Genevieve is found and everything between Alexander and me is lost. I had always known that when Genevieve returned, there would be no place for me with Alexander. I just hadn’t expected it to end this way.

*

A little later, Jamie came out to find me.

‘Sarah, I’m still hungry,’ he said patiently. ‘I told you I was hungry ages ago and I’m only going to keep being more hungry until you get me something.’

‘I know, sweetheart,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘Yes.’

Jamie looked at me strangely.

‘I am very starving,’ he said.

We went back into the kitchen. Claudia now was sitting at the table, her hands cupped round a steaming mug of tea. Bill was taking the packaging off frozen pizzas and heating them in the oven.

‘Ah, Jimbo!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just the man. I need you to help me move the furniture around in the den so you guys can eat in front of the TV.’

He shut the oven door and he and Jamie disappeared.

I wanted to comfort Claudia and make her feel better but I did not know how. I wanted to explain myself, but could think of no way to do that either.

She sighed heavily, like an old woman.

‘Sarah …’

‘Yes.’

‘I know you didn’t know about Genevieve. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I understand. I just wish—’

‘I’m going up for a bath.’

‘Would you like me to make you another drink?’

‘No.’ Claudia shook her head. ‘I don’t want you to do anything for me.’

She heaved herself to her feet, and hobbled towards the stairs as if her back and her hips hurt.

I hated myself for betraying Claudia. I could have told her we were planning to leave Burrington Stoke: she would have kept our secret; she would have understood why we had to
go. Only Alexander had made me swear I wouldn’t tell a soul, and I hadn’t. It was too late to change things now. I knew Claudia would never want me near her again. She had, that day, discovered her sister was dead. At the time when she most needed a friend, I had let her down. Again.

I went into the living room and switched on the TV with the sound muted. I saw the exterior of Avalon on the screen. It was so odd to see somewhere I knew so well on the television. I was compelled to watch. Everything was the same but it looked different. The Land Rover was being manoeuvred on to the back of a truck to be taken away for forensic examination and the Christmas tree lay on its side by the wall, still encased in its plastic netting. The police had taken Alexander away. He had been arrested, but not charged at that point. I imagined him sitting hunched and humiliated in some small, tiled room, the police despising him, thinking him a murderer, asking questions, and my stomach clenched with sadness like a pain.

I’d tried so hard to trust him.

I’d tried.

‘Turn it off,’ said Bill, coming in behind me. ‘For goodness’ sake, turn it off before the children see.’

The first television crew turned up at the entrance to the old quarry before dark. From the bathroom window of Claudia’s house, I could see the lights of outside broadcast vans stretched down the lane. The police had strung crime-scene tape across the entrance to the quarry and a respectfully serious-faced officer was standing guard in case anyone tried to sneak in. All the news reports I’d ever watched over the years about murders or suspicious deaths, all of them featured artificially illuminated streets or forests, a burly policeman cross-armed by the tape and earnest journalists doing pieces to camera, gesticulating with their arms, wires trailing around them. I had, I supposed, always thought they
were acting out roles. It was a circus, and everyone knew what was coming next.

Now I realized those people weren’t acting – it was their job – and what I saw on television was exactly how it was in real life.

Genevieve’s body wasn’t there, in the quarry, any more.

They had taken her away, zipped up in a body-bag in the back of a blacked-out estate car. The vehicle had sped through the Somerset lanes. Of course, the body was not, officially, Genevieve’s – it had not been identified – but we all knew it was her. The police divers had pulled her out of the water and now a tent marked the place where they’d cleared the undergrowth to lie her body down and examine her.

I couldn’t bear to think of it but I couldn’t stop imagining how it was. In my mind Genevieve was like a mermaid, pale green and bleached white like fishbone, shimmering as she dried in the winter sunlight.

The children ate their pizzas on their laps in front of the TV screen in the den. Bill had disconnected the aerial so they could not watch live programmes, only DVDs. He had set them up with a stack of films. Then he’d gone up to Eleonora House to manage the media and host calls from friends and relatives who had seen or heard the news reports. He told Claudia that Genevieve’s face was all over the television channels; her charismatic face. He said, with bitterness in his voice, that they loved her – the journalists, editors and TV presenters. She was perfect material: a beautiful, talented heiress, unlucky in love, a young mother whose husband had threatened to kill her if she left him. She had been ready to leave and now she was dead, found broken at the bottom of the quarry that had been mined to exhaustion to make her family’s fortune. Stories didn’t come any more romantic or satisfying than that. That’s what Bill told Claudia. Nobody
was talking to me. I was the thorn in their side and they didn’t want me there. I didn’t blame them. They’d tried to persuade me to go to Betsy’s, or to a hotel – there was a Travelodge on the airport road and Bill offered to drive me there – and I said thanks, but my place was with Jamie. Bill rolled his eyes at Claudia and I saw her tighten her lips.

They didn’t want me there and I didn’t want to be there, but what could I do? I could not leave Jamie. I would not. Claudia and Bill must have had some inkling that it would cause more trouble for them if I went, that night, than if I stayed. They could have insisted I go, but they didn’t. Probably they thought Jamie would be upset if he were separated from me as well as Alexander, all in the space of a few hours, and they simply did not have the capacity to deal with any more trauma. So I stayed in the Barn and I crept through it, like a bad smell or an infection. I only went into spaces that were already empty in that beautiful, family home; I learned how to make myself and my injured face completely invisible.

There was a drinks cabinet in the living room. Carefully, making sure it didn’t chink its neighbours, I removed a large tumbler and mixed myself a small gin and tonic. I just wanted a little pick-me-up. I sipped my drink and I thought of Alexander lying on a thin mattress in a police cell somewhere. He would cope with prison, he’d been there before and survived – but he’d had less to lose then.

It would destroy him to be separated from Jamie, knowing that he was going to lose him for ever.

Jamie and I were to sleep in Claudia and Bill’s spare room that night. The bed was already made up for visitors because Claudia had invited her maternal cousins over for the holiday period and they had been due to arrive the following morning. The room was lovely; huge soft towels on the heater and red flowers in a vase on the window ledge. Jamie
was over-wound and over-excited. At midnight, I took him out of the snug and, upstairs, we changed into borrowed nightclothes together. He stood beside me, peeing into a spotlessly clean toilet bowl in a comradely fashion even though he was wearing a Barbie nightie, while I brushed my teeth in a voluminous pair of men’s pyjamas.

I looked down at Jamie and he grinned up at me, a gappy grin, and I thought how strange it was that there was nothing of Alexander in the child, no genetic bond at all, and yet he was so irrefutably Alexander’s son.

‘I like this house better than ours,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s warmer.’

‘Yes,’ I said noncommittally. ‘It’s nice.’

‘Where’s Daddy?’

‘He’s busy.’

‘Why?’

I stared at my reflection in the mirror above the basin, a white froth of toothpaste on my chin.

‘I don’t know exactly. He has things he has to do.’

Jamie looked at me. ‘What things?’

‘Jamie,’ I said calmly, ‘why did you get rid of the blue teddy and your mummy’s letter?’

He shrugged and looked a little sheepish.

‘I don’t care why,’ I said. ‘It really doesn’t matter but I just want to know is all.’

‘Mummy told me to,’ he said.

I leaned down to fill my mouth with cold water from the tap. I cleaned my mouth and spat out and then rubbed at the chalky residue in the basin with my finger.

‘Did she tell you in a dream?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She just did.’

‘Did Daddy tell you to say that?’

Jamie pulled the face he used when accused of something he had not done or even known about.

‘No!’

I felt a rush of relief in my bones and, at the same time, it became perfectly clear to me what I should do.

I needed to get Jamie away from Burrington Stoke and take him somewhere safe where I could look after him and protect him.

If he stayed, what would happen would be this.

In the morning, probably, Genevieve’s body would be formally identified by poor Claudia or her mother and somebody would have to tell Jamie that his mummy was dead. The man he had always believed to be his father was not there to protect him. He would, no doubt, learn soon enough that everyone believed his father was responsible for his mother’s death. There would be a media frenzy. It would be impossible to keep it all from him. His fragile world would come crashing down and his life would never be the same again. For ever after, he would carry the burden of having a mother who died when he was very young and wear the stigma of a father who had, at best, failed to protect the family and, at worst, destroyed it. He would be a different child, and would grow into a different man. He might struggle with relationships. He might become clingy because he was so afraid of loss, or he might reject intimacy, knowing it could lead to pain.

He grinned gappily up at me and I smiled down at him as if nothing at all was wrong. To have to face so much sadness and shame seemed so unfair on Jamie. If he stayed here, then this was his last night of innocence. His whole future would have been decided and mapped out by other people.

If I took him away, all this could be avoided.

‘Go on, you,’ I said. ‘Into bed.’

In bed we sang ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’ about a thousand times. Jamie’s feet were pressed against my thighs. I was trying to put meat on the bones of my plan, but I couldn’t think beyond the next hour or so, especially not with Jamie nagging me all the time to keep singing. What I
was thinking was that, if we could somehow get to Manchester before morning, we would be all right. I’d be able to keep Jamie safe. I knew the city well enough to know where we could rent a place where nobody would ask questions. All we had to do was travel a few hundred miles through the night. After that, I wasn’t sure. I’d wait and see what happened to Alexander and, in the meantime, I would look after Jamie just as I had been looking after him. We’d manage somehow, and Jamie would be happy. That was the most important thing.

‘Sarah!’ he said crossly.

‘What?’

‘You’re not concentrating!’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Jamie.’

He fell asleep eventually. I left the lamp casting a gentle yellow glow over the face of the child, and climbed carefully out of the bed. I crept downstairs. The clock over the fireplace showed 2.10 a.m. The only light still on was in the kitchen. Gently, I pushed open the kitchen door. Bill was sitting at the table, in the same place where Claudia had sat earlier, with a whisky bottle and a glass in front of him. He was dishevelled and his head was cradled in his arms, his mouth slightly open. From the whistling of his nostrils, I was sure he was asleep. Blue, in his basket by the back door, looked up at me and thumped his tail on the floor. I held my finger to my lips, and carefully pulled the door to.