A Deep Deceit (15 page)

The words were roughly scrawled in thick daubs of bright-red gloss paint which had run and dripped down the wooden panels. I reached out and touched a particularly shiny patch. It was still wet. My hand came away smeared with red. I stared at it. The dripping red paint looked like blood. I felt my vision blur.

Carl's grip on my arm tightened.

I wanted to cry out, but my voice temporarily deserted me.

Carl found his all right. He bellowed his anger into the cold night air. ‘Son of a bitch!' he shouted at the top of his voice. And immediately he began to scrub at the paint with his free hand and the sleeve of his good overcoat. I didn't try to stop him. After a few seconds he seemed to pull himself together and stopped the frantic rubbing. ‘We don't even have to look at this,' he muttered, his earlier flash of near hysteria apparently under control.

Swiftly he unlocked the front door and together we climbed the stairs to bed. The joy of our evening out had been destroyed.

We didn't say much. There wasn't much to say. But I knew what would happen that night, knew it with dreadful clarity, and so, I am sure, did Carl. I did not have the energy nor the determination to pace the house and keep myself awake, so I just gave in to the promise of misery. Maybe I hoped that the alcohol I had consumed would give me some kind of bizarre protection as I slept. It didn't.

That night the nightmare was the very worst of all. The blood had seen to that. For that is what I saw on my front door, blood, not paint. And it was blood, I knew all too well, that I was going to see inside my head. Always.

At breakfast the next morning, I finally gave voice to most of what I was thinking. ‘The reality may be that we just can't hide any more,' I told Carl sombrely.

‘Maybe,' he said. ‘Not here, anyway. Maybe we can't stay here any longer. I think the time has come to move on. What do you say?'

I was numbed by his words. ‘This is our home,' I protested. ‘I don't want to move from here, I really don't.'

‘Anywhere we are together would be our home,' he countered. ‘That's all that matters isn't it?'

I nodded. I didn't know quite what to say.

‘Let's give it a few days, see if anything else happens,' I managed eventually.

But I knew what I truly felt. Not only did I not
want
to run again, I was not
going
to run again. The running was over. I also knew I could not expect any more from Carl. He had done too much already to protect me. I suspected that he was drained of energy. I was not going to be a victim any more, not of nightmares nor superstitions nor anonymous threats. I reckoned it was up to me to sort out our lives once and for all, to remove the fear that had always been there in its different ways for both of us.

That afternoon, while Carl was working, I slipped out of the house. I had to creep away stealthily because Carl would never have allowed me to do what I was planning. He loved me too much and I knew only too well how great was his fear of losing me. But I had had enough. It had all gone on far too long.

I found an inner strength I did not know I had. On tiptoe I left the cottage, opening and shutting the old front door with the greatest of care. I was afraid, but my steps were determined as I walked along our little cobbled lane and into the network of narrow streets that led down the hill from our cottage to the harbour, the place that had always been so special to us.

I wanted to be there alone just once more before it all changed, perhaps for ever. Before I took our futures into frightening unknown territory beyond the point of no return.

This was where Carl had given me my new name. ‘You're Suzanne from now on,' he had told me softly. ‘Suzanne – my Lady of the Harbour.'

And as I walked alone along the harbour side, inside my head I could hear him singing to me softly from the Leonard Cohen song of the Sixties that he so loved and from which he had named me Suzanne, the song that had been so much a part of his growing up, a growing up so utterly different from my own sheltered childhood:

I turned away from the quayside and headed towards the police station.

Eight

I was certain it would be a relief to rid myself of the burden I had carried for so long. And as I walked through the Cornish seaside town I had grown to love so much, on my way to confront the past at last, irrevocably, my thoughts turned, as they so often did, to how it had begun.

Poor Gran. All she had ever wanted was to protect me, to do her best for me. When she arranged for me to marry Robert Foster she believed she had found somebody who would love and continue to protect me just as she had done. And, of course, it did not occur to her to doubt a man of God.

Until well after the wedding I suppose I never doubted him either. I was bewildered, but not afraid. I had never had reason to be afraid of those close to me – I suppose there had only ever been Gran, really, and I expected, as a matter of course, kindness from both a husband and a clergyman. The fact that I had barely ever been alone with Robert did not particularly concern me at the time. Maybe I thought that was normal for a bride and I suppose it had been once in a bygone age. I read a lot of Jane Austen in those days and had always suspected that I might have been more at home in her time than my own. I told myself that what was happening to me was all rather romantic. I knew Robert Foster only in the way Gran presented him to me – as an intelligent and apparently kindly man, a cleric respected and revered by his congregation. But I quickly found out how wrong I was – certainly about his kindness.

When we were married in Robert's church, with what seemed like the entire congregation gathered there, I did feel some of Gran's pride in spite of the sense of unreality about it all. The music was rousing, people said I looked beautiful. There was something splendid about the occasion and, unused to being the centre of attention, I found I quite liked it.

My wedding night – spent in the rectory that was to be my home because Robert did not have time for a honeymoon – was painful and difficult. I knew so little about sex and had had no experience. It went without saying that I was a virgin. I hadn't even known exactly what would happen – or how, but Robert had been patient as he could, and had allowed me to take my time, and I suppose I had expected pain. It was not until much later that I learned that, had there been more love, more arousal, rather than a clinical kind of forbearance, I might have experienced no pain at all.

After the wedding he was always busy during the day. And I realised early on that while he undoubtedly worked hard he also drank heavily, although he contrived only very rarely to appear even slightly drunk and never in public. He managed to maintain the façade of being the perfect chapel cleric in an order strongly opposed to alcohol. Extraordinary, really. I had even heard him preach from the pulpit about the evils of drink. Maybe he believed what he said, I don't know. In a curious kind of way he had good reason to, he must have known what it did to him. Maybe that gave him a crisis of conscience – although he gave no sign of having any kind of conscience at all. I certainly believed in the evils of drink by the time Robert Foster had finished with me.

Unlike most clergymen, he preferred me not to get involved in his church-work, explaining to his congregation that I was not strong enough to be a traditional pastor's wife. Instead, I stayed in the big, ugly old Victorian manse that was our home, twiddling my thumbs and cooking his evening meal. After that he continued working or reading in his study while I sat alone in the living room. Then he would summon me to bed – and that truly was the way it was. There was always a coldness about Robert. He never expressed any love towards me, never showed any warmth, but he was an ardent and accomplished lover, and our lovemaking was at first the high point of my long dull days. To begin with, briefly, he had indeed been a surprisingly good lover, technically at any rate. He knew how to excite a woman if he cared to do so. On a good night his knowledge and expertise even made up, at least partially, for his eternal coldness. I learned to relax my body and to switch off my mind against the emotional emptiness I was somehow so aware of, in spite of my inexperience, and to enjoy the sheer physical sensation.

Eventually I achieved my first orgasm and I think that was when I maybe even began to fall in love with Robert a little. I had no way of knowing that there could ever be more. For his part he seemed to take almost a kind of pride in bringing me so easily to a climax. He once told me he thought it was what gave man the most power of all over woman.

But after Gran died things began to change for the worse. Towards the end of her life Robert allowed me to bring her into the manse and nurse her there. Looking back, I think Gran was one of the few people in the world Robert might have been genuinely fond of – if he was indeed capable at all of any depth of human feeling. Anyway, I was grateful to him for that if nothing else. Gran was weak and terribly sick in the flesh but indomitable in the mind to the end. I loved her to pieces and so hated to see her suffer, but took comfort that I was with her, which I knew would be all that she would wish for, and that she remained without any fear of death. Looking after her filled my days, but they seemed all the more empty when Gran finally left us. And it was then that the true brutality of the man I had married began to show itself.

Gran had been dead for about three weeks when Robert hit me for the first time. It was in bed. And what he did seemed to me to be the ultimate cruelty. I had yet to learn that it was merely the beginning.

It was just like the nightmare that had continued to plague me, except that I could see his face all right and the cruel glint in his eye. We had sex as we did almost every night and although I suspected from his clumsy movements, a certain slowness in his speech and a slight glaze to his eyes that he had been drinking particularly heavily, as ever it did not affect his sexual appetite nor his ability to function. He knew where to touch me, how to excite me, how to make me cry out for more, but he did so, as always, in the cold, detached but efficient way that I had grown used to, almost as if he were conducting a biological experiment. On this terrible night he brought me to orgasm and, as I felt the pleasure overwhelm me, he suddenly raised his right hand and hit me hard across the mouth. The dream had always kept it so vivid for me, my lip cut open, tasting my own blood, then being punched in the chest, my body reeling in confusion.

Years had passed, my life had changed beyond recognition, yet as I turned my back on the harbour I loved so much, the seagulls wheeling above my head, I could still feel the dreadful pain and the humiliation of it.

He had grasped my right arm and forced it back on the pillows at an angle so agonising that I believed my wrist would break. All the time I was aware of his excitement rising to a level beyond anything I had felt in him before. He kept on hitting me as he began to come and I had instinctively known that it was the most extreme orgasm he had ever had with me. By the time he had finished I felt like a punchbag.

In the morning it was as if it had never happened. He made no comment about my bruised and cut face except to suggest that I did not go out until my appearance had improved. His manner indicated that I was to blame, although he did not say so. Indeed, I wondered if it was in some way my fault. I was in total shock and I had no one to turn to. I had no friends. The nearest to that were the people I knew within the church and Robert was the head of our church, the man they all respected and looked up to.

For several weeks life went on just the way it had before. I already knew about bad dreams, and I came almost to think of that one brutal outburst as just a nightmare. The sex continued in just the same way it always had, except that I never again reached an orgasm with Robert, although I frequently pretended in order to appease him.

It was almost two months before he attacked me again. This time it was before demanding to have sex with me, almost as if it were some kind of foreplay.

As Robert's drinking became more and more excessive – I discovered that there were bottles of alcohol, usually vodka, hidden in every room of our house – his physical abuse settled into a pattern. His worst drinking sessions were in bouts that lasted four or five days and occurred maybe every three weeks or so. It was amazing that he managed to continue to function so effectively, both at work and in bed, during those times, but he did. And it was then that he was at his most violent. However, he never again hit me in the face. Appearances are important for a clergyman, I suppose.

I had nowhere else to go and no money. I knew that Gran had left me everything including the house that had been our home but Robert had handled the settlement of the will and I had simply signed all the papers he put before me. That is the way I had been used to leading my life. I had never even had my own bank account. Most of our household bills were settled by Robert on account and the only money I ever had were the few pounds a week he handed me in cash.

Yet I planned and plotted ways to leave him. I even rang up a hostel for battered wives, which I had read about in the local paper, but I couldn't quite bring myself to run to them. Then, a couple of weeks after I made that call, the telephone bill arrived. Routine itemising of calls had just begun. I had not given a thought to my panicky call becoming a matter of record and, although Robert was a meticulous man, pedantic about detail, I had no idea that he had taken to checking up on me.