Authors: Sam Baker
She thought about it. ‘Could have been, yes.’
‘Do you remember how long was he staying in Paris?’
Helen hesitated. ‘Overnight, I think. He had annual leave coming up and a hot new lover back in Berlin he wanted to spend it with.’ She frowned. ‘He said he’d stop over on the way. That was it.’
‘Not so hot the lover bothered to investigate when Carl didn’t turn up,’ Gil said.
‘True.’ Helen shrugged. ‘That’s Carl for you.’
‘Remember more,’ Gil said.
‘Gil … I can’t just conjure it on demand. Don’t you think I would if I could?’
‘I’m serious. Try. Where did you go?’
Helen wrapped her hands around her mug and closed her eyes, trying to picture the last time she had seen Carl, feeling fragments coalesce.
‘A bar in Bastille I liked.’ She thought some more. ‘It was a hot night and we chose a table on the street so Carl could smoke. Camels, always Camels. He’d buy them by the crate in duty-free. For a while he had a South Korean boyfriend and afterwards he swore that what he missed most was the cut price cigarettes.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Helen. He was an old friend. A dear friend. He’s
dead.
You owe it to him to remember.’
Slamming her mug on the table so that tea sloshed on to the wood, Helen glared at Gil. How dare he?
‘
I don’t remember
.’
‘You do,’ Gil said. ‘You know you do. It’s in there somewhere. You just have to dig.’
They sat in silence listening to the crows chattering on the Dales, the floorboards creaking. Out on the main road, Helen thought she heard a car. ‘I told him I was getting out,’ she said eventually. ‘Had got out. Carl thought I meant out of photography. He was outraged. Told me I was a natural. I said, “Why would I leave this behind?” Something like that.
‘And Carl said, “If not this, then what?”’
Helen hesitated. ‘He must have seen the answer in my eyes, because he emptied his beer and said, “I thought you were meant to be
really good together
.” His words dripped sarcasm. “
A team
.”
‘“Who told you that?” I asked.
‘“You did. Don’t worry. I never believed you. No one believed you. I think, we just thought … Well, if you stayed that long you must have some reason we didn’t know about. You must like …” Then he told me he’d been in the next room that night in Syria. The night we had the
argument
…
‘And he told me it wasn’t an argument. He said, “Walls can be thin even in five-star hotels. I heard him rape you. It sounded endless. To be honest, I considered coming round, but then I thought … well, you know.”’
‘What did he mean?’ Gil asked. ‘
You know?
’
Helen swallowed hard. ‘I guess he thought, each to their own.’
Gil nodded, put his mug back on the table and picked it up again when he realised he didn’t have anything else to do with his hands.
‘He asked me if I loved Art.’
‘Did you?’ Gil asked.
‘No,’ said Helen. ‘I did. Once. At the beginning. Very much, I think.
‘Carl wanted to know about my plans. Not that I had any. I was sleeping on floors, taking the occasional cheap hotel room while I decided which city to live in. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in Paris if Art was there. Same went for London I suppose. I was biding my time, waiting to see what Art would do. I’d heard he was in New York seeing a man about a job. I said as much to Carl.
‘Carl just snorted. Said he’d heard something of the sort from a friend and made it pretty clear what he thought of Art’s chances. Art wasn’t big on gays. Carl called Art the
war junkie
. They’d never exactly been each other’s biggest fans. Carl was just the one friend of mine Art never managed to see off.
Helen hesitated ‘I told him that, in the short-term, I needed to go back to the flat, unless Art had changed the locks. Carl nearly choked on his beer. Asked if I was completely fucking mad.
‘Not
back
back, I told him. Just in and out, to get my stuff – most of my things were still there. Assuming Art hadn’t trashed everything. It was too much of my life to leave.’
Helen stopped, mug poised in mid-air. She stared at Gil.
‘He offered to come with me.’
Gil inhaled sharply. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I don’t know … Yes, I think so. Oh God. I shouldn’t have let him, but I was too grateful and too scared to go alone. I was probably even hoping he’d offer.’
‘You’re saying you think he was with you, that night in Paris?’
A tear dripped off her chin to the kitchen table and Helen wondered when she’d started crying. When she admitted she’d once loved Art, probably. He’d never been the man she thought he was. And it was a very long time since she’d been the woman she was back when they met. How could she have brought Carl into the middle of that?
Gil hadn’t said anything or even appeared to notice. Even now he didn’t comment.
‘You really think Carl was at the flat with you?’ he said. ‘It’s not just because I suggested it?’
Shaking her head, Helen put her head in her hands. Tears seeped through her fingers. ‘I can see him in my head, almost. Putting my key fob against the courtyard door to open it. The big old door swinging open. I thought Art was away, but he must have been there when we got there or come back before I’d finished packing …’
Helen sat there sobbing, not caring if Gil stared.
Everything she’d ever had, every friend, everyone and everything that mattered, Art had to try to take it away. She hadn’t killed him, Helen knew that now, if only because Gil said she couldn’t have done. But she wished she had.
Dusk was beginning to settle by the time Gil got up to leave. Before he did he followed her from room to room while she checked the windows, and shut and locked every door she could. If he thought she was mad, he didn’t show it. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her do it before or heard the locks on the front door shift, one, two, three times whenever she shut that behind him.
They started on the ground floor where all the windows had sash locks.
Helen shot the bolt on the back door and did the same for the side door into the pantry. The French windows in the main drawing room were already locked top and bottom, although the wood was so rotten a good kick would cave them in. The door locked from either side so she locked it from the hall and took the key with her before heading upstairs to check the windows to her little drawing room.
All the bedrooms on the first floor had locks, but only on the inside. Helen made do with checking their windows and shutting each door firmly behind her. At the next stairs, Gil saw her hesitate and slipped ahead. The servants’ quarters had horizontal windows high in the wall so they couldn’t look out on whatever the family were doing in the gardens. There was a huge bath with curved legs that ended in ball claws sitting in the middle of a bathroom. China bowls were inset into a wide oak shelf like basins in a row.
‘This place should be properly listed,’ Gil muttered. He caught Helen’s look and shrugged. ‘How can this not be Grade I?’
Helen rolled her eyes and Gil grinned sheepishly. ‘Don’t retire,’ he told her.
‘Photographers don’t.’
‘Journalists shouldn’t either.’
They came to a halt at the bottom of the attic stairs, where the door was locked and firmly bolted from their side.
‘Do you want me to check?’ Gil asked.
‘Would you?’ She didn’t want to admit she hadn’t dared explore before. She tried a light switch inside the door and nothing happened. So Gil led the way with the torch on his iPhone. A skylight was partly open and a rolled carpet beneath dripping wet. There was probably a matching stain on the ceiling of a servant’s room below.
‘Been open for ever,’ said Gil, shutting it and wrestling the bolt as close to locked as he could get it.
He played his torch over the darkness around them, revealing mementoes of lives forgotten. A huge rocking horse grinned back, made piebald by peeling paint. A large painting, torn in one corner, showed a ringletted girl in a green dress peering at a monkey in a cage. On her shoulder sat a parrot. There were chairs stacked one upside down on the other. Rotting velvet revealed the horsehair of their seats. There was a mahogany prie-dieu, a walnut bureau so buckled with damp it looked like dented metal. A dozen paintings in cheap gilt frames leaned against a leather trunk, which would sell for thousands in a chichi London shop. The paintings were of the Dales, mostly. The Dales and Wildfell.
‘Satisfied …?’ asked Gil, when they’d done a more comprehensive circuit than Helen would have dared.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t blame you.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to stay? On the sofa, I mean. Or in the bedroom, if the sofa’s already taken. By you, that is.’ He smiled, to make it clear he was joking.
‘I’ll be fine, really.’
‘Or come with me. There’s a spare room at the cottage. Stay there tonight.’
‘That’ll get them talking,’ Helen grinned.
‘Sod the lot of them,’ he said with feeling.
Helen shook her head. ‘And tomorrow? And the day after …?’
‘What will you do?’
‘Leave. Stay. Think about it.’
‘You can’t live like this, not indefinitely.’
‘I’ve been living like this for years. I can barely remember any other way. Thank you for humouring me, though. I’ll be fine now.’
She waited for him to realise that was his cue to go.
It was still early, but she was shattered and needed to lie down, even if she knew she wouldn’t sleep. Too many memories, too many bad dreams, too much adrenalin in her blood. She’d take her laptop to the drawing room, tune the radio to something soothing and leave the light on while she dozed. Ghost would be furious. If he bothered to come back at all.
At the front door, Gil lurched slightly towards her, planting a kiss on her cheek. His hand squeezed her arm gently.
‘Call me,’ he said. ‘If you need me.’
‘I will,’ Helen said. They both knew she wouldn’t.
He was so embarrassed that he didn’t look at her as she let him out; and he headed down the drive with his shoulders hunched, shaking his head as if cross at his own clumsiness. Killing the outside light, Helen locked the door and turned for the kitchen, with plans to fetch her laptop on the way upstairs, when a knock behind her made her stop. Cursing Gil, she unslid bolts and unlocked the door.
‘What did you forget?’
A shadow, definitely not Gil.
She was pushing the door shut when the figure jammed its foot in the gap. If she’d been thinking straight, she’d have opened it a fraction, very quickly, then slammed it hard and hoped it hurt enough to make him step back. She didn’t think of that in time. Instead she pushed hard, throwing her weight against it.
‘Helen … Wait.’
Stopping, she opened the door slightly and peered at the silhouette. Forcing herself to focus through the blood racing in her head. ‘Tom?’
‘Who did you think it was?’
Helen shuddered, glanced over his shoulder and he turned, following her gaze to see what was there. Only wind in the trees, wet gravel and the outline of rusty gates. Needs a padlock, Helen thought, then laughed out loud at her own absurdity.
Tom looked uncomfortable. ‘Can I come in?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve been looking for you.’
‘Here? In the last few days? In the village?’
‘Yes.’
Helen laughed again, high-pitched, hysterical.
‘That was you?’
‘Yes.’
She sagged against the door jamb in relief.
‘Why are you looking for me?’
‘For God’s sake.’ Tom sounded almost furious. ‘Why do you think? You called me from Paris, remember? In the middle of the night. You called me from Paris and when I asked if you were all right you didn’t answer. When I asked where you were, you put the phone down on me.’
‘I shouldn’t have called.’
‘Yes, you should. We had a deal.’
She looked at him blankly. He was too relieved to have found her, too busy trying to decide what to say next, to notice.
‘Deal?’
‘If either of us was in trouble, the other would help.’
Helen laughed. ‘We were
sixteen
.’
‘What difference does that make?’
Helen looked at her first serious boyfriend, standing on the doorstep in front of her. The first boy she’d ever loved, if not the first she slept with. Although he should have been. The boy she’d walked away from over a stupid row about her being an hour late for no good reason. Getting her dumping in before he dumped her. Mistake. The first of many. Twenty years older now. Twenty years more lived in.
She felt herself smile. ‘How did you find me?’
‘Your sister. Well, your sister initially. She told me about the psychiatrist in London. Said if you’d go to anyone it would be her. It was a process of elimination to find Ms Harris. There aren’t many with her specialisms and fewer still called Caroline. The clinic refused to tell me whether you’d been in touch so I visited and played the doctor card. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing Helen’s expression. ‘She didn’t tell me anything – well, nothing medical I couldn’t work out for myself.’
‘How
did
you find me then?’
Tom grinned. Still the same Tom grin, slightly lopsided, slightly more crinkles around his eyes. ‘A huge outcrop of rock staring down over a patchwork landscape?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you said to Ms Harris. “A huge outcrop of rock staring down over a patchwork landscape.” That, and the fact you told her receptionist you’d be coming into King’s Cross. Come on, Helen. You always wanted us to come up here when we were kids. You were obsessed with the bloody Brontës. It took a while, but once I narrowed down the area, talk of the incomer was like a breadcrumb trail right to you.
‘You know the weird thing? I found a picture on the Internet from a few years ago to show round. Now I’m here, I can see it doesn’t look like you at all. Hair, eyes, nothing. I should have just used one of my old ones.’
Helen didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. Given away by a shared teenage memory.