Authors: Lucie Whitehouse
I stayed in the bushes for almost an hour. Twice Richard circled the garden but he didn’t have keys and no one else came in so that he could push in after them. Instead he stalked the pavement around the perimeter, walking as casually as if nothing had happened to disrupt the morning. Through the leaves of the rhododendrons and the cast-iron railings I saw him, the slow, comfortable stride, the pale November sun playing over the shoulders of his suit jacket, and I was afraid that my shaking would set the leaves trembling and betray me. My heartbeat was too loud.
None of the sun reached down to me. The dew was still on the leaves and it transferred to my jumper and chilled me even further. My feet grew numb from standing on the cold soil. I was shivering and shivering, couldn’t stop. Blood ran from the split on my brow and I pressed the tissue from my pocket gently against it, wincing silently. The minutes stretched. I looked at my watch. Half past nine. I knew he had a meeting at half ten; he wouldn’t miss that. And he was going to New York in the afternoon. He must have gone, surely. I scanned what I could see of the pavement and the garden, then stepped out on to the gravel path. My head was pounding, the pain in my forehead intensifying. A blackbird looked up from pecking at the lawn and cocked its head to one side. There was no sign of Richard.
More than anything now, I wanted my flat. I wanted to lock the door and put the chain across it. I let myself out of the garden and went to the corner of the square. Richard had driven last night, told Sarah he had a meeting in Henley and was staying over. His car was still there, parked two doors down from mine, and I could see him in the driver’s seat, the outline of his head and shoulder. My pulse accelerated again. If I stepped into my street now, he’d see me for sure.
I doubled back and used the access on the other side of the square to get on to Earls Court Road. I still had to pass the end of my street but I had distance on my side and I walked behind a pair of women to disguise myself in case he happened to look in his rear-view mirror. Lowering my head to hide my face, I ducked into the library on the Old Brompton Road and found a chair in a far corner, out of sight. I sat there until noon, trying in vain to process what had happened. The man I loved had attacked me, tried to have sex with me against my will – to rape me. It seemed so outlandish; could I have imagined it, or read it in a book and absorbed it into an especially vivid dream? Without the pain, I might have believed it. And yet, I had to acknowledge, I couldn’t claim that I had never seen hints of this side of him before.
The library began to get busier and several people came into my corner, where I let my hair fall across my face and looked down, pretending to be preoccupied with the illustrated guide to India that was open on my lap. The tissue against the cut on my eyebrow was soaked.
When at last I left the library and walked back round the corner into my road, Richard’s car was gone. My keys were still in my pocket from the trip to buy breakfast and, heart in my mouth, I opened the door to my building. I walked slowly upstairs, light-headed. On the landing I hesitated, listening at my own front door, but there were no sounds from inside. I let myself in, pulse pounding, sending pain shooting through my eye. The orange juice and crumpets I’d bought for our breakfast were still lying on the carpet. I checked the rooms quickly, looking behind the doors, even throwing open the wardrobe, but he wasn’t there. It was only when I sat heavily down on the sofa that I saw the note on the coffee table.
Whatever it takes, Katie.
In all the time that I saw Richard, I had never let myself think about Sarah – not properly, as a person who might be much like me, who had friends and a family, favourite books and films, who might have loved Richard like I did. I hadn’t denied she existed; I couldn’t: she had been a fact. But I had learnt to turn my thoughts away from her, to convince myself that the force of my feelings for him justified what I was doing. When I did think about her, it was in the abstract. If I needed to mention her to Richard, I did so as ‘your wife’. On one hand, I’d felt it would have been patronising to use her name, the sort of instant familiarity assumed towards someone weaker or pitiable, nurse to patient. On the other, it was self-protection. If I kept her as an idea, a circumstance which held us apart, like a missed aeroplane or a sudden unscheduled meeting, then I could cope. If I called her by name, I was forced to face the truth of what I was doing. ‘Your wife’ was a shade; Sarah was a person.
Now I asked myself how I could have done it, put up the mental smokescreen that allowed me to behave like that. What sort of monster was I? However much I’d thought I loved him, I should never have been able to do it. I was disgusted with myself – sick to my stomach with guilt.
I imagined her terror when he lunged at her, shoving her, dragging her, hitting her. I imagined her smashed mouth, the missing teeth, the broken bones. She’d had every reason to despise me and yet she had thought to warn me, as soon as she’d got out of hospital. The contrast in our behaviour towards each other shamed me.
Just as when it had been me Richard had hurt, my instinct was to go home and lock the door, shut out the world. This time, though, there was something I needed to do first. Instead of heading straight back to Yarmouth, I drove to Newport again. On my birthday, I had seen a branch of Carphone Warehouse and now I went in and asked to change my number. Sarah had taken it from Richard’s mobile; I needed to make sure that he could never call me again.
Chapter Eighteen
I lay awake all that night, my stomach clenching with fear. I tried all my tricks for finding sleep but it wouldn’t come. The noises in the house – the judder of the fridge, the clicking of the old radiators – had reclaimed their strangeness and each one had me lying rigid now, straining my ears in the darkness for the crank of the front door handle, the sound of breaking glass. My mind was roiling, the memory of that morning replaying itself over and over again – him lunging for me, tearing at my clothes; the deadness of his eyes.
Normally he can stop
, I heard Sarah’s thick voice say again. I’d thought when he attacked me that it had been extraordinary, the result of him being out beyond his limits, but it wasn’t; it wasn’t even unusual.
Towards dawn, I stopped trying to sleep and made a cup of tea. I sat on the edge of the bed watching the first of the daylight infuse the sky, lifting it from a heavy navy to an intense royal blue. A shape, black and scarcely visible, flickered past the window and was gone: a bat, whirling through the last of the darkness. I thought about what it would be like to be so free. The air in the room seemed to thicken, the ceiling to come lower, and suddenly my fear mutated into a furious anger.
I was dressed in two minutes and out of the door in three. On the path I stood and took in great breaths of air, as if I had just broken the surface after a deep-water dive. The air was cold and felt like medicine as it came in across my tongue; exhaled, it made clouds like empty speech-bubbles.
Without thinking, I found myself heading for the path around the estuary. I crossed Tennyson Road and passed Sally’s house, the curtains drawn against the first signs of the morning. The stillness of the air heightened every sound: my breathing, the scratch of the loose chips of tarmac under my feet. In the bushes there was the light music of the dawn chorus, but over the estuary I could hear the sharp cry of a seabird. That cry was not music; it was a single sustained sound, a screech more than a note, which echoed in the sky and left a desolate silence when it died away.
The road became a track of mud and shingle, its edge shored up by a stone wall which kept back the tide. It was high water now and the first colour of the sun, a bloodish rose, caught the surface wherever it was disturbed. On the other side, the saltmarshes lay low and dark, brackish water shining here and there amongst them, made glassy by the cold. My anger was beginning to dissipate already, the rhythm of my feet breaking it down. The track found its way between trees, and the estuary disappeared from sight. It was darker again, gloom lingering among the trunks and in the undergrowth as if rising from the ground.
Twenty minutes later, I turned the last corner and saw where the end of the path met the lane to Freshwater. At the low stone bridge over the top of the river I stopped. The estuary was spread out in front of me now like a spill of mercury and at its mouth, hazy in the early-morning mist, I could make out the roofs of Yarmouth, the spire of St James’s and the tall red-brick chimneys of the George.
A long way downriver, something was moving. I watched, and saw that it was a rowing boat, making a silent but steady progress upstream. Minutes passed. Only when it was thirty yards away was there any sound at all and then just the gentlest plashing, the slow beat of oars dipping into water and lifting out again. The boat was a silhouette between sky and water, a black shape amongst tones of silver. As it drew nearer, I could see that the rower was an old man. His back was curved but he rowed neatly, waiting for the boat to travel as far as each stroke would take it before pulling the next. The oars dipped then rose, dipped again, and the water shimmered around them. I watched until he was close enough to talk if he turned and saw me and then I moved away.
I followed the lane up the hill and into the small square in front of the parish church. In the graveyard frost sparkled on the grass between the headstones. A robin perched on one of them looked at me in surprise as I went in but made no attempt to fly away.
At the back of the church, hidden from the road, I sat down on a wooden bench. It had been many years since I had stopped believing, if I ever had, but there had been two or three times when I had found peace in churches, not by praying but just by sitting in their silence, surrounded by things built by people whose lives were guided by belief and commitment, who were sure there was a purpose. I found a similar comfort in the gravestones now: they commemorated those who had done it, got through from birth to death, their lives no longer the uncertain skein of difficulty and confusion and fear but facts, the finite dates, the defined relationships: beloved wife, cherished son. Resting my elbow on the arm of the bench, I put my hand across my face and closed my eyes.
I woke to find that it was no longer early. The delicate light was gone, replaced by the frank tone of mid-morning. The sun was out and for the first time in the year there was heat in it. It was shining directly on me, and the thighs of my jeans were warm to the touch. I made a move to sit up straight and felt the stiffness in my neck. My arm, too, was dead from supporting the weight of my head. My mouth had been open: my tongue and throat were dry. I wondered for a moment whether anyone had been past and seen me, then realised I was really beyond caring if they had.
I went the road way back to Yarmouth, walking quickly, wanting to get home and go to bed. There was traffic now and cars sped past me in both directions. I had the strange disconnected feeling of having been awake and asleep at the wrong times; the day already felt old.
As I came down the last part of the hill at Norton, the Solent was laid out in front of me. Today it was blue, taking its lead from the sky, and patched only here and there with the familiar green-grey that mirrored cloud. Its surface was scintillating with gold like a haul of coins and though I wanted to get home, I stopped for a moment. In my exhaustion, the sparkling resolved into thousands of flashing lights.
At the yard just before the bridge, a man was working on a small wooden yacht. Struts against the hull held it upright and the mast lay along the deck, protruding at the stern from the burgundy tarpaulin which covered it. The man had his back to me and was crouched scrubbing at the keel. As I watched, he lowered himself slowly to his knees to work on a patch further down, putting a hand on the hull to steady himself. Something in the movement struck me as familiar.
‘Kate!’
For a moment I considered pretending I hadn’t heard but he was pulling himself up again, waving. I raised my hand and went over.
‘I won’t kiss you,’ he said. ‘I’m filthy.’
‘Hello, Ted.’ I put my hand down to stroke the blond head which came pressing enthusiastically against my thigh.
‘You’ve met my assistant,’ said Chris. ‘I’ve got Peter roped in all day, too, though God knows he’s got enough on without indulging me. Peter – Kate’s here.’
There was the sound of tools going into a bucket and from the other side, where he’d been hidden by the hull, Peter appeared. He was wearing a large black-and-white marled jumper and paint-splashed jeans muddy from kneeling on the ground. He wiped his hands on a dirty cloth as he nodded hello. His face was closed, his eyes screwed up against the sun streaming across the yard from behind me.
‘We’re getting her ready to go back in,’ Chris said, laying his hand on the side of the boat. ‘The sanding’s nearly all done now so we’re ready to start varnishing.’
‘This is your boat.’
‘What do you think? She’s a bit old-fashioned but I’m not a fibreglass man.’
‘Neither of us is.’ Peter balled the rag between his hands and tossed it on to the tarpaulin on which Chris had been kneeling.
‘I want a boat.’ The words were out of my mouth before I realised I was going to say them but it was true: I did want a boat, suddenly and urgently. ‘Not like this, though – a rowing boat.’ I looked down, embarrassed. I felt Peter watching me.
‘Anything in particular brought this on?’ said Chris.