Authors: Lucie Whitehouse
The situation had reached a nadir when I’d told her he was married. The day after that dreadful Boxing Day night I’d rung her and told her everything, unable to contain my misery. She hadn’t said I told you so, hadn’t even implied it, but I knew it had to be behind the comforting words. Then I had been beyond caring, had wanted someone to listen with sympathy and join me in condemning him. I had agreed with her that if he ever contacted me again, I had to harden my heart. I had promised.
When I took Richard back after that, I emailed to tell her: I hadn’t been able to admit it face to face or even on the phone. And the morning that I had wanted to talk to her about what had happened on the bridge, I’d understood that I couldn’t. I had used up her sympathy. And I had made my choice: him over her.
Things were different now. In the afternoon, when the last of the five lunch customers departed and I was alone, I got out my mobile and rang her, keeping one eye on the door for new customers or for Mary, who’d gone out for a while. It was when I heard the unfamiliar tone that I remembered Helen was still in Munich and probably in a meeting. I hung up without leaving a message; I would call her later.
I’d already tidied the kitchen and swept, so to pass the time before anyone came in for tea, I filled an old ice-cream container with soapy water and started cleaning the tall drinks fridge, taking out all the bottles and scrubbing the glass shelves until I began to get hot. I didn’t see anyone at the door and it was only when the bell rang that I realised someone had come in. It was Chris.
I dropped the sponge into the water and stood up, pushing the hair off my face with my forearm. My cheeks were already rosy.
‘Hard at work? I’ve just been into Harwoods for some varnish’ – he held aloft a tin, the evidence – ‘and thought I’d pop in to see where you are.’
‘This is it,’ I said, looking around the room, not at him.
‘It’s rather nice. I’ll come in for something to eat another time.’ He smiled. ‘Look, thank you for your note; there was no need to write. And there was certainly no need to apologise: accidents happen.’
‘Not to sober people so often.’
‘Ah well – we’ve all done it. And you weren’t that bad – you’ve got a thing or two to learn if you reckon that’s drunk. Think no more about it.’
‘No wonder Peter ran for the hills,’ I tested.
‘Don’t think badly of him. Sometimes he does that, just disappears when he needs to be on his own; it wouldn’t have been because of you. He’d be embarrassed if he knew you thought that. What’s that chocolate sponge like? Have you tried it? I should get back – I’ve closed the shop – but I’ll take a piece with me, if that’s OK.’
I cut him an extra large slice and put it in one of the plastic takeaway boxes.
‘Come and see me soon,’ he said, tucking his scarf into his jacket again on his way towards the door. ‘And don’t wait till you’ve finished your books.’
Chapter Seventeen
I didn’t have a shift on Wednesday so I got in the car and took the military road to Ventnor, wanting the perspective of a wide sky and a view of the sea. The email from Richard was still weighing on me. Helen had seen my missed call and rung back in the early evening but she’d been in a cab on her way to a client dinner, her conversation punctuated with directions to the driver. It hadn’t seemed fair to burden her with my worry when she was away and I didn’t want to get into it all until we could talk properly. Stoppered up inside, though, without the neutralisation of talking about it, Richard’s threat – for I was sure that was what it was – seemed to be strengthening, becoming not less potent with time but more so.
It was too wet to get out and walk so I threaded the car down the steep roads through the town centre and parked on the esplanade where I sat and watched the sea foam up on to the beach, its edge airy as beaten egg white. Ventnor was massed on the hillside above me, pressing down, but the only places open in the row of businesses lining the other side of the road were a greasy spoon with a full English for four pounds and the amusement arcade, whose one-armed bandits flashed garish invitations at odds with the morning’s muted palette. The rain fell in fat drops, making a tinny music on the roof of the car. I listened to it and watched as the mist cloaked the headlands beyond the Spyglass inn, then revealed them again, shifting like the sea itself. Nothing in the view would have changed in two hundred years, I thought, when pirates must have made a handsome living along this coast.
I was brought out of my reverie by the sound of my mobile. The number was a landline in central London but I didn’t recognise it. I hesitated and the phone went on ringing, insistent. Richard wouldn’t call me now, though; he’d know I’d hang up on him. It could be someone offering me translating work: an agency. I answered, catching it just before it stopped.
‘Is this Kate?’ a woman asked slowly. Her voice was thick, smudged-sounding, as if she’d been drinking.
‘Yes,’ I said, hesitant.
‘This is Sarah Brookwood.’
It was a second or two before I put the parts of her name together.
‘Are you there?’
I deserved this; it was fair. ‘Yes.’
‘He was my husband – did you ever think about that?’ She was speaking carefully, enunciating but slurring anyway. ‘We were married.’
I was trembling all of a sudden. It was shock, shock at getting the call now, not a year ago, when I’d almost expected it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘It’s too late for that. And I’d save your pity for yourself.’
Cold went over my skin, down my arms like a pair of freezing hands.
‘Do you know what you’re dealing with? Do you? Two nights ago he . . . My collarbone’s broken and three of my ribs. I’ve lost my front teeth.’ She was crying now but trying not to. ‘It was never like this before – this bad. Normally he can stop. I’ve been in hospital two days. If I’d punctured a lung . . .’
I shuddered, a sudden spasm, and one of Helen’s expressions came into my head: ‘Someone walk over your grave?’
She swallowed again, as if she were drooling and wanted to empty her mouth. Her breathing was coming in sobs. ‘I hate you for what you’ve done to me,’ she said. ‘But I pity you, too. I mean it. He won’t let you go – not until he wants to.’
I felt a wave of nausea, the contents of my stomach rising up my throat, and quickly opened the car door. I took deep breaths of the air, smelling the salt, the stale cooking oil from the café. Sweat had broken out on my forehead.
‘You’re not the first – he’s always had women. There have been others even while he’s been with you.’
‘What?’
‘Yes,’ she said, pleased to have shocked me. Or hurt me – could it be hurt, that note in my voice? ‘Last year he got one of them pregnant. He dumped her straight away, like he always does.’
I swallowed down the acid that scorched my throat.
Pregnant? Last year?
I felt myself rock forward in the seat, my head suddenly too heavy. The world seemed to have pulled away from me.
‘But you,’ she said, her voice reaching me from the other end of a long tunnel. ‘You are different. You’ve lasted longer than any of them. It’s not love – don’t make that mistake – but it’s something.’
‘Why did you stay?’ I said weakly. ‘If you knew.’
She’d given up trying to hide her crying now. ‘We’re married. He’s my husband. He’s my son’s father. I didn’t want a divorce and – it starts to break you, you don’t even realise. And I always thought I could make it better; I thought that if I could just be enough for him . . .’
‘It would have been hard,’ I said, tentative. ‘When you were ill.’ The nausea ebbed a little and I pulled the door shut again and snapped down the button to lock it, wanting to feel the shell of the car closed around me.
‘Ill?’
‘He told me.’ There was silence on the other end of the phone and I ploughed on. ‘I wouldn’t have carried on seeing him, unless . . . He told me that you were going to get a divorce but then you got ill. You were waiting until you were better.’
There was the start of bitter laughter and then she choked. ‘He’s a liar – didn’t you know? He lies and lies and lies. I did try to leave once, last year, but he wouldn’t let me; he harassed me till I gave in. No one leaves Richard; he leaves them. He decides.’
I closed my eyes, and said nothing.
‘You’re starting to get it, aren’t you? I’ve seen the emails he writes you – it isn’t over. I hate you for what you did but I couldn’t just stand by. If anything happened and I hadn’t said something, I couldn’t live with it.’
‘I . . .’
‘I don’t have any choice now – I have to leave him. He’s broken me, everything I wanted, and I can’t take another beating: he’d kill me next time. He’ll let me go now because he knows that. But you – run, and just pray he doesn’t find you.’
When she hung up, I put my head on the steering wheel and let them come, the images which I had fled here across the Solent to escape. They crowded down on me now like gulls in the wake of a trawler, screeching and triumphant: images of the last time I’d seen him, that final morning in the flat when I’d walked through the open door and heard him on the phone, so obviously talking to a child. Had I made a sound, let the breath catch in my throat? I didn’t know but suddenly he had been aware of me in the doorway, had told the little voice that he would call back. ‘Katie,’ he’d said, standing, seeing the look on my face, taking steps towards me which I’d matched with steps backwards. ‘I can explain.’
I can explain
. It wasn’t that the floor moved beneath my feet; it was more that the floor had ceased to exist and I was there, three storeys above the pavement, without anything to keep me from crashing to the ground. I was unanchored, waiting to fall. I heard my voice telling him to get out. It seemed to come from somewhere outside me, from yards away, perhaps even from the other side of the communal garden whose trees I could see dappling with the autumn light that had matched my spirits and warmed me through my coat only minutes before. I had the post in one hand, the bag of breakfast things in the other, and I gripped them. ‘Get out,’ I said.
He took another step towards me but now I was backed up against the table in the hall. His hands were on my coat collar, pulling me towards him. I dropped the bag, heard it hit the floor. His breath was sour, his teeth not yet brushed. His eyes seemed huge, the pupils black and enormous, ringed with that strange toffee colour. I looked at them, mesmerised. They were expressionless – utterly blank.
‘What did you say?’ His voice was almost conversational.
‘Get out of my flat.’ I twisted, trying to jerk free of him. ‘Leave me alone.’
He changed his grip and suddenly there was pressure on my windpipe. I took a quick breath, tried again to pull back. Then without warning, he yanked me up from the table and thrust me away from him. I fell backwards, my head cracking against the wall beneath the coat rack, my back jarring as I hit the floor. Pain jolted up my spine. I stayed there, momentarily stunned. He reached down and grabbed me up by the shoulder, lifting all my weight, then pushing me backwards into the coats and shoving himself against me, his tongue forcing itself into my mouth. I moved my head to one side but found his arm already there, blocking it. His fingers held my jaw, pressing it open. I clamped my teeth down and bit his tongue.
He pulled back and looked at me a moment, as if he was amused. ‘You always think you can beat me, don’t you, sweetheart?’ He kicked my legs out from under me and then I was on the floor and he was on top of me, pinning me as he had so many times before. One hand tore at my jumper, pulling it up, exposing my breasts, and the other fumbled with my fly, shoving to get inside my knickers. I squirmed and fought. He brought his face down to mine again, his teeth banging against mine so hard that there was a rush of blood into my mouth. He was undoing his own trousers, yanking down the fly, pulling himself free. The fingers of his other hand were inside my knickers now, jabbing at me, hurting me. He was out of his boxer shorts and he brought his spare arm up and pressed it hard over my throat. I gagged, from the pressure, from fear. Richard was gone, replaced by this furious, vicious man who didn’t even seem to recognise me.
‘I can’t breathe,’ I croaked, and the arm came down harder. ‘Please.’
He pulled back as his jabbing fingers found their mark and I looked at him and saw triumph in his eyes. Hatred coursed through me, and he saw it. ‘Fuck you,’ I whispered.
His fist connected with my brow. The pain was exquisite, a firework explosion of agony in the bone and the socket of my eye. The shock of rage that followed gave me a burst of strength far beyond myself and I got my leg free from between his and brought my knee up sharp into his groin. He groaned, closing his eyes for just a second, and I took the advantage and shoved him off me. I scrambled up but he grabbed at my ankle and I stumbled. I kicked back at him, meeting flesh, and then I ran, out of the flat and down the stairs, tearing my jumper down to cover myself, not caring until I was almost in the lobby, steps from the street, that my jeans were still undone. I could hear his feet coming down the top stairs now and he was running but I was too far ahead and I burst out of the building and on to the street, still running when I reached the square at the back. An old lady was opening the gate to the private garden and, without thinking, I dived past her and ran until I reached the rhododendrons which were large enough to hide me.