A Deep Deceit (41 page)

It's hard to explain what that means when you have spent a lifetime believing that all those kinds of things were always going to be impossible for you.

The only thing absent is a lover and I do miss that. But I can put up with it. I have to put up with it, because I am not yet ready to cope with that sort of intimacy. And I think it will be a long time before I am.

A single dad, unusually perhaps these days a widower rather than a divorce, lives next door. I have been to the cinema with him once or twice and out to dinner and for a drink several times when he has been able to get a babysitter for his four-year-old daughter. He is good company and he knows what pain is, having nursed his wife through a long terminal illness. I enjoy being with him and am growing quite fond of him. Mariette teases me relentlessly and refers to him as ‘your chap'.

He isn't quite that and there has certainly been nothing physical between us so far other than a few brief goodnight kisses. But I like him and I like the fact that he seems to sense that I'm not ready for anything more just yet. Perhaps he isn't either. I don't really know.

I do know that Carl is a hard act to follow and I am beginning to understand just how special our relationship was. I no longer think of it as having been founded on a lie. Our feelings were not a lie. Our love was an overwhelming truth and nothing that has happened could ever change that.

Indeed, Carl had loved me so much that it had, in a way, been his final undoing. That was a painful legacy, but there are worse ones.

Nor do I feel guilty any more. In fact, far from it. I sometimes wonder if Carl's death was not a kind of release. I regret terribly that he died alone and such a dreadful death. But I am no longer sure how much I regret his death in itself. Sometimes I wonder if Carl could ever have coped with the real world instead of the pretend one we had built around us.

Could he ever have sufficiently conquered his obsessiveness in order to share his life with a woman who wanted more than just him, one no longer prepared to live only in his shadow? I would never have been able to go back to being the Suzanne I had been before, the Suzanne he had created. I am now quite sure of that.

Never again would I rely on one human being. Never again would I let a man or anyone else make my decisions for me, let alone run my entire life.

I could never love anyone more than I loved Carl. But now that I have tasted normality and freedom, or as close to it as any of us can get, I realise that nothing less will do.

Imagine being let out of prison. You would never want to go back, would you, however kind the jailer, however warm and pleasant the jail?

That may be a cruel analogy, but it is what my life with Carl became – not just because of his behaviour, but also because of my own belief that I needed to hide, living in fear of discovery for so long, convinced that I could never have the kind of life others enjoyed. I had been imprisoned all right, not only in that awful old shed, but throughout all my time with Carl. It had been at times an almost glorious imprisonment, but an imprisonment nonetheless. And it is only since I accepted this, that I have been able to go forward.

I can face the future now, because I have finally conquered my past. All of it. My weird, restrictive childhood, my terrible marriage and the awful violence I suffered, my years with Carl culminating in the abduction, all that is behind me now. I am no longer frightened and unsure of myself.

Carl's wonderful
Pumpkin Soup
dominates the living room of my little house, hanging in solitary splendour on a white-painted wall. It is all I have left of him, apart from my memories.

I still call myself Suzanne. Suzanne Adams. Mrs Peters no longer sounds right. But Suzanne, the name Carl gave me the night we arrived in St Ives, the night our extraordinary hidden life together began, that name I will bear for ever.

Carl's voice is already not quite so clear inside my head as it once was. But I think I will always be able to hear him, albeit more faintly as the years pass: ‘You're Suzanne from now on. Suzanne, my Lady of the Harbour.'

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Epub ISBN: 9781446473085

Version 1.0

  

Published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by

Arrow Books

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Copyright © Hilary Bonner 2000

The right of Hilary Bonner to be identified as the author of

this work has been asserted by her in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of

the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living

or dead, is entirely coincidental

First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by William Heinemann

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