A Dark Dividing (36 page)

It came tumbling out, breathlessly and apologetically, but Mel could not help recognizing a note of satisfaction in Roz’s voice, almost as if Roz was saying, See! See what was going on, and you didn’t know about it!

With a feeling of incredulity, Mel said, ‘You and Joe—you and Joe were having an affair?’

‘Yes. Yes, we were.’ It came out defiantly.

She thinks she’s hurting me, thought Mel, staring at Roz. And she’s liking hurting me—is that because she was jealous of me? What she can’t possibly know is that I wouldn’t have given a damn if Joe had slept with half the county. But she was still conscious of surprise that Joe, who had wanted to project that slightly nauseating ‘I’m-a-good-husband-and-father’ image, had become tangled up with this odd, old-fashioned little creature.

‘Joe asked me to look for clues at St Luke’s,’ Roz said. ‘We were having dinner at my house at the time.’ There it was again, that sly, I’ve-scored-over-you tone, and the insistence on a cosy image of Roz and Joe enjoying a warm intimacy. ‘And shortly afterwards I found the letter you sent to Martin Brannan—at least, not the letter, but the envelope.’

‘And you saw the postmark for Norfolk,’ said Mel, slowly. ‘Yes, I see now.’ And, you poor deluded thing, I also see what Joe was really doing. With the idea of drawing Roz out a bit more, she said, ‘I worried about the postmark when I sent that letter, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. But how on earth did Joe home in on Castallack? There are dozens of those remote little villages in Norfolk, and Castallack’s barely a speck on the map.’

‘Dear me, you’re quite naïve, aren’t you, Melissa?’ The animosity was stronger now. ‘Once Joe had a starting point—the starting point I found for him—he employed a firm of private detectives,’ said Roz. ‘They found Castallack.’

‘Ah yes, I hadn’t thought of that.’ Mel paused, and then said, carefully, ‘Joe’s death must have been a great blow to you. A dreadful shock. I’m sorry—I hadn’t known—’

‘It was a blow. I thought he cared about me,’ said Roz. ‘But then he found out where you had gone, and he went straight off to get you and never gave me a second thought. He didn’t even bother to tell me he had found you.’

‘No, he wouldn’t.’

‘He used me,’ said Roz bitterly. ‘I saw that later. He used me to find you.’

‘It was more what I represented,’ said Mel. ‘Conventional family image—supportive wife, children—I don’t know that there was much love lost between us.’

‘So much for the grieving widow.’

Mel had been holding on to her temper fairly well, but at this she said sharply, ‘Oh Roz, for goodness’ sake, Joe was a selfish cheating bastard, you must have known that! And he wanted the twins back even more than he wanted me—he was going to use them in his wretched campaign.’

‘Yes. The twins—’ Roz went over to the pram standing near to the window, and as she stood looking down at Simone and Sonia, Mel had to bite back an involuntary protest—‘Don’t touch them!’—because it was surely only the cold grey light from outside that made Roz’s face look suddenly hard and cruel. Even so, Mel had had the absurd feeling that Roz was about to snatch the twins up and run out of the house with them.

Then Roz said, ‘You’re so very lucky. To have these two—’

‘Yes, I know.’ There’s something wrong about all this, thought Mel. There’s something wrong about Roz. She said, ‘Roz, I’m sorry for you if you got hurt by Joe, but I think it would be better if you left now.’

‘After I understood that Joe had made use of me to find you,’ said Roz, as if Mel had not spoken, ‘And after he went off to Castallack to bring you back—’ She stopped, and Mel waited.

Roz said, ‘I found out that I was pregnant.’

‘I don’t know if this will be good news or not,’ the GP had said, glancing non-committally at Roz’s left hand with its absence of a wedding ring. ‘But I can tell you that you’re definitely pregnant.’

‘Yes, I thought so.’ She had, in fact, been watching the calendar anxiously for more than a week, counting the days up. She had been sick when she got home from Joe’s house that night in the drenching rain, but that could have been from shock and distress. And how likely was it to conceive on a single encounter? Minimal, surely? Yes, but remember the final moments: remember what he said to you afterwards? ‘I’m sorry I didn’t pull out in time, Rosie, but you made me so aroused…’

She looked back at the doctor, and smiled. ‘It’s good news,’ said Roz.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, I am sure. It’s very good news indeed.’

It had been the best news in the world.

Walking back from the doctor’s surgery she thought she would cope all right with a child: her nurse’s salary was not huge but her aunt had left her the house and some modest investments, and there were a couple of insurance policies from the deaths of her parents. Financially there would not be too much of a problem. Socially there would not be too much of a problem either; it was the 1980s by then and people had long since ceased to care about single-parent births.

Her aunt would have cared, of course; she would have been scandalized to think that Rosamund had behaved in such a sinful way. A bastard, she would have said, thinning her lips in the way Roz hated and feared. Making yourself cheap with a married man—no wonder he cleared off and left you.

But Roz’s aunt had also talked about what she called her own lost childhood and there had even been the occasional wistful note in her voice when she did so. She had rocked back and forth in the old wooden-framed rocking-chair where she liked to sit in the evening, and she had unrolled the memories for Roz.

‘You should write all this down,’ Roz said once when she was thirteen. ‘Write it all down, so that people can read about it.’

But her aunt had said, no, she would not care to do that, letting strangers know such things about her life. Roz was different; she was family. And in any case, said her aunt, her life had been written about once already, a long, long time ago, and people did not want a twice-told story. She said this sternly, but Roz had picked up the bitterness, and she had not liked to ask any more questions.

She felt the presence of that indomitable old woman as soon as she unlocked the front door. She felt her aunt’s disdain and disapproval, hard and cold and abrupt, like walking into a clenched fist, so that a headache smacked across her eyes as soon as she entered the house. But she remembered again about her aunt’s lost childhood, and she remembered the austere years of her own childhood in this house, and she thought she would make it very different for her own child. The headache persisted a bit and in the end she took paracetamol which dulled it to a low sad ache that spread through her entire body.

The headache finally went but the other low-down ache remained. It went on hurting for the best part of a day and a night, and at three a.m. it suddenly resolved itself into a dreadful clenching agony that came and went with frightening regularity. Roz lay in bed, clutching the sheets, trying not to cry out, trying to take deep, calming breaths, not knowing how serious the pain was, not knowing whether she should try to summon help or not.

But by the time it was growing light outside—a grey, dispirited, wintry light—and by the time she heard the cheerful clatter of milkmen and postmen and people going off to work, she had started to bleed quite badly. This time she managed to get to the phone to call her GP’s answer-service, asking if an emergency visit could be made to her house. No, she could not possibly get down to the surgery. But please to hurry.

The GP arrived an hour later, but by then the child had bled itself out on to rolled-up bath towels from the airing cupboard and her aunt’s second-best eiderdown.

‘I lost the child,’ said Roz expressionlessly to Mel. She was still standing in the window, still watching the twins. ‘It died—it bled out all over the bed—’

‘I’m so sorry, Roz,’ said Mel rather helplessly. What could one say in the face of this? ‘It’s a desperately sad thing to lose a child, and an unborn one is no less of a tragedy. Had you—had you wanted it?’

‘Oh yes. Oh yes, certainly I wanted it. It was going to put the balance right, you see. It was going to replace a childhood that had been lost.’

‘Your childhood?’ Roz had never said very much about her family, but Mel had always had the impression of a bleak, rather lonely childhood.

‘No, not mine. Someone else’s.’

‘Oh,’ said Mel, not understanding, but not liking to ask any questions.

‘But then I lost it that night. But you,’ said Roz, staring at the twins, ‘you had two babies together. Double yolk. And from the same man who fathered mine. That’s not really fair, is it?’

‘Well, put like that—’ Mel was starting to wish Roz would go. She was starting to feel extremely uncomfortable at the look in Roz’s eyes. Sadness, was it? No, something stronger than that.

‘In fact,’ said Roz, turning the hard dark stare on Mel, ‘in fact, looked at in one way, it could almost be said that you owe me a child, Melissa.’

And then Mel identified the look in Roz’s eyes.

Hunger.

‘Did she really say that?’ demanded Isobel, having listened to Mel with growing concern. ‘That you owed her a child?’

‘She did.’ Mel had not been able to get warm since Roz’s visit. She had gone round the house turning up all the heating, but it was an inner coldness. ‘She said it and then she stood looking at the twins for a while longer, and then she went out. I haven’t heard from her since.’ But she knew Roz was nearby; several times she had sensed Roz’s presence, and twice she had got up in the night to see to the twins, and caught sight of a dark figure standing in the road outside the house. Looking up at the lit bedroom window…

‘She’s probably a bit unbalanced, I suppose,’ Isobel was saying.

‘When she was staring into the twins’ pram, there was a look—a kind of greed—I can’t begin to describe how sinister it was.’ Mel twisted her hands together, and then said, ‘I’m truly sorry for her. I really am.’

‘But you’re also a bit frightened of her,’ said Isobel shrewdly.

‘Yes. Just a bit. Well, more than a bit.’

‘OK. So what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Mel. ‘I don’t think she’s violent or dangerous or anything like that. But I’m still thinking I’d like to sell this house and move to a different part of London. Try to shake off all that press interest and give the twins a normal life—’