More Than You Know (75 page)

It was after midnight when Matt got home; he’d been to a trade dinner and been made much of. It had soothed his damaged ego, made him feel less of a failure: in fact, rather the reverse.

He’d expected Eliza to be in bed, but when he walked into the drawing room, as she insisted on calling it, holding his nightcap of whisky and ginger, she was sitting on one of the sofas.

“Hallo,” she said.

“Hallo. You’re up late. Emmie all right?”

“Yes, yes, she’s fine. Fast asleep. Matt—”

“I’ve got some news for your friend, by the way—the one who hasn’t got anywhere to live. Found her a couple of very cheap flats. In good buildings.”

“Oh, God,” she said, and then: “That’s very … very good of you.”

“Yes, well, it might help to persuade you I’m not actually the devil incarnate. What is it? You look as if you’ve seen a coachload of ghosts.”

She was holding something: a newspaper.

“What’s that, then?”

“It’s tomorrow’s
Daily News
. I … I sent out for it. There’s something in it. Something you won’t like. And … oh, here, read it.”

He read it; it didn’t mean very much at first, just words on the page. Until he came to a name: a familiar name. And an account of how the owner of the name had made millions—and the methods he employed to enable him to do it.

He put the paper down very slowly. “Well?” he said.

“Matt, it was my fault. I didn’t realise it was anything to do with you. But I told the journalist about Heather and the other tenants. I just didn’t … didn’t think, I tried to get it stopped, but … I couldn’t. I’m so, so sorry.”

“You bitch,” he said, “you stupid, arrogant little bitch. You think you know it all, don’t you, with your fancy friends and your fucking oh-so-important career. You really do despise me and what I’ve done, don’t you? And now you’re rubbing my nose in it. Very attractive. Have you ever considered that everything, everything you have, including that fucking pile down in the country you care about so much, is down to me?”

“Matt, no, no, I don’t despise you; that’s the last thing I feel; I think it’s amazing what you’ve done; I admire it so much—”

“So much you publish a lot of filth about me, and the people who work for me.”

“I didn’t publish it, Matt; don’t be ridiculous. I just … just …”

Her voice trailed off.

“You just alerted your Fleet Street friends to it, said, ‘Do write about this; it’s shocking, isn’t it, what my husband gets up to’—isn’t that about the size of it?”

“No, no, Matt, it isn’t; I had no idea it was anything to do with you; how could I have …”

“It was my business, though, wasn’t it? The business you look down your aristocratic nose at. Have you even thought what this might do to me, me and my colleagues and my clients, come to that? How it will diminish me, do me harm?”

“Yes,” she said, very quietly, “yes, of course I have. And I’m sorry—”

“Oh, you are? Well, that’s mighty good of you. You ruin me professionally—we won’t go into the personal damage—and all you can manage is to tell me you’re sorry—”

“Matt! Of course you’re not ruined. You’re being ridiculous. It’s very unfortunate—of course it is—and I’m terribly sorry. But it will be forgotten in a couple of days; you know it will. You’re overdramatising things and—”

She stopped. He had walked towards her: his face was white, his eyes black pinpricks in it, his mouth working almost as if he was going to cry. “Don’t you tell me I’m being ridiculous,” he said, “just don’t. How fucking dare you?” And then very, very slowly, it seemed, he raised his hand and hit her hard across the face and then again, knocking her head from side to side.

“You bitch,” he said finally, and there was a break in his voice, “you stuck-up, arrogant little bitch.”

There was a long silence while Eliza stared at him, disbelieving what had happened, shaking not with fear but shock; then she recovered herself, pushed back her hair, faced him down.

“Well,” she said, “so there we have it. Is that the best you can manage, knocking your wife about? And I had hoped to have civilised you a little. But you’re still the same ignorant working-class boy, aren’t you, Matt? In spite of all your millions.”

Matt said no more, simply turned and walked out of the house.

Several hours later, and extremely drunk, he turned up at Gina’s flat.

He sat drinking black coffee, telling her everything, all the ugly, brutal truth as he saw it.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, and two tears rolled down his face. He brushed them off, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“She just seems to want to destroy me. She hates me. And I … I … Sorry …”

“Matt, it’s OK. Really.” She went over to him, put her arms round him, stroked his hair.

“Perhaps you should think about divorce,” she said.

Early Summer 1970

H
E HAD APOLOGIZED, OF COURSE
. T
HE FOLLOWING DAY, HIS FACE WHITE
and set, unable to meet her eyes, while studying her face for the damage he had done, genuinely ashamed and remorseful, he had said he was sorry, that he should not have done it. He asked her whether she was all right; she said she was. And that was the end of the conversation; it had not been referred to between them again. And he was still quite clearly ferociously angry with her, in spite of the remorse.

She felt very odd about it, confused, shocked. To have behaved so badly that it induced violence, and from someone who had once loved her so much; it had clearly been very bad, that behaviour, and the blows something she had deserved, had almost earned.

She could not tell anyone, anyone at all, could not admit to any of it, simply said she had fallen down the cellar steps, to explain her swollen face and mouth, her black eye, and struggled to bury the memory and the fear—and the shame.

It haunted her, the memory; she lived it over and over again; it rose up not only in the night but harshly and unexpectedly during the day, as she drove her car, stood in the shower, walked down the street, threatening her, an excursion into another place, dark and ugly, where she could never have imagined herself to be.

It had not made her afraid of him; she felt instinctively that he wouldn’t do it again, and she knew he would never, ever hit Emmie. He was simply not a violent man. Which made her own shame worse.

She had no idea what to do next; reconciliation seemed impossible, continuing as they were worse. She felt helpless, suspended in time, moving through the days in a senseless, confused lethargy. It was very frightening. Life as she knew it was lost to her.

Matt, struggling with conflicting emotions of his own—shame, shock, almost unbearable anger—was hugely fearful of the effect of the article on his business and his professional reputation. The property community saw the story for what it was, as they viewed it, at least: a gross distortion by the media, heaped upon their already unpopular shoulders,
presented as they were as pariahs of society, impenetrable obstacles placed between decent people and the housing they deserved. And the public simply read, digested, and then moved on into their own mantra that they were all the same, these developers, but there was nothing you could do about it, and went on their way.

But his sense of betrayal at Eliza’s hands remained deep and bitter.

For the first time, Eliza was grateful for their lack of social life; there were no embarrassing comments to be endured at dinner parties, at least. Sarah, of course, had seen it, and called her to say carefully that she was sure it was all lies and that Matt would never do such awful things, and Charles’s reaction was very similar.

“Jolly hard on old Matt,” was all he said to Eliza, and, slightly duplicitously, she agreed.

The person who suffered most from the article was Heather; frightened and angry at Eliza’s betrayal, as she saw it, she refused to allow her into the house when Eliza arrived on her doorstep the next day.

“You promised, Eliza; you promised me. You said there would be no names; we wouldn’t be identified. I thought we were friends—”

“Heather, we are friends; please don’t say that.”

“That man lied and lied to me, and you told me—”

“Heather, I know he did, and I’m so, so sorry. I told him to leave you alone; I told him I didn’t want him to do the story—”

“Well, why didn’t he leave us alone, then?”

“Because … because the press doesn’t work like that. They’re all sharks; they can’t be trusted, and—”

“But you’ve worked with these people. So why tell him about us in the first place? And how did he know where we were? Did you give him this address?”

“No, of course not. Well … well … I told him you lived near Clapham Common. And that it was a terrace of big Victorian houses. I suppose after that he just did a lot of legwork. Watched you coming out, recognized you from my description—”

“So you described me to him? Funny way of keeping him away—”

“Heather, please! All I said was you were a young mum, and you were pregnant.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Eliza; I don’t want even to discuss it anymore. Alan is so angry, he won’t even speak to me; Coral’s having a horrible time at school—they’re calling her slummy—and we’re definitely going to have to go and live with Alan’s mum now.”

“No, Heather, you’re not; look, try these, a couple of much better places that actually Matt found for you; phone them, please.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think anything to do with Matt would be a good idea at the moment. We had actually found somewhere quite promising, but the landlord told Alan this morning it was off the market. I wonder why. And now I’m terrified of the landlord turning up here and just putting us out on the pavement—”

“Heather, he can’t do that. Believe me.”

“I’m a bit sick of believing you, Eliza. Anyway, we’re moving up there next week. I can’t even have my baby at the hospital I know and trust. And it’s all your fault. Oh, just go away, Eliza, please, and leave me alone. There’s one law for people like you in this country and another for people like me, and I should have known better than to trust you.”

“Well … will you at least give me your new address, so I can keep in touch?”

“No. Now excuse me, please; I’m very busy.”

And she shut the door in Eliza’s face.

Eliza went home and wept, and then wrote to Heather and told her that if she ever changed her mind, she would always be pleased to hear from her. Heather didn’t reply.

The atmosphere in the house was horrible. They hardly spoke. Matt went to work, came home very late, refused food, refused anything, just went to his study and then to bed. She lay awake half the night, every night; several times she had knocked on the door of his room. “Please go away,” he said, his voice polite but very final. Or sometimes, “Please leave me alone.”

Only with Emmie was he himself, greeting her with hugs and kisses, talking to her, playing with her, taking her out to the park. At first Eliza thought this was his way of returning to normality, an overture via Emmie, but he continued to ignore his wife, to behave as if she wasn’t there.

If Eliza spoke, he ignored her; if she tried to follow them upstairs he said, “Would you prefer to take her?” And the same thing on proposed
outings: to the swings, the river, even, most dreadfully, to Summercourt for the weekend.