Darkest (17 page)

Chapter Twelve

Voices. Somewhere. A long, long way away. Then silence.

Again. That voice, calling my name. And something about an ambulance. Anxious, scared. Angry. Then silence once more. I’m tired, need to sleep.

Gulping, gasping, desperate. More voices, louder now. Shouting. Screaming at me. Punching me. Shaking me. My watery cradle gone—in its place the cold, hard, unwelcoming ground. Cold, so cold.

“She’s coming round. Breathe, Eva. For Christ’s sake breathe…”

No, no. Not coming back…

“Eva, for God’s sake!” A mouth covering mine, soft and warm. Familiar. Forcing air into my lungs. The grey clouds in my head shift and part, and sunlight pierces through, cruel and strident. I squeeze my eyes shut, try to burrow down, away. It’s no use. I cough, instinctively roll to my side as the cool, bitter tarn water dribbles from my lungs, out of my mouth and onto the ground beside me.

“Thank God.” The voice is soft, low. And so well known to me. He brushes the tangle of dirty, wet curls from my face, lifting my head to cradle it on his lap. Nathan. My nemesis. And now, it seems, my saviour.

“How are you doing with that bloody ambulance?”

“I’m trying. The signal down here’s shite.” A different voice, not Nathan. I mumble something, anything to stop them handing me over to the authorities. They’ll lock me up for sure.

“No, no ambulance…” I mutter the words, barely coherent, but Nathan hears.

“You need checking over, Eva.”

“No! No ambulance!” I’m fighting now to get up, to get away.

“Okay, okay, calm down.”

“I can’t find a bloody signal anyway… Let me try with your phone?” The other voice again, so familiar. Tom. It’s Tom.

“It’s in my pocket. Reckon I drowned it. Let’s get her up to the house and phone from there.”

Nathan continues to hold me, soothe me, as the clouds in my brain clear and I slowly return to consciousness. I am dimly aware of the crunch of boots on asphalt, moving away. A car door slams. Then Tom is back, shrugging his jacket on and tossing a car blanket at Nathan which he carefully wraps around me.

Tom is crouching now, inspecting the damage to the dry stone wall. He turns to us, tilting his head at the abandoned Porsche. “You take Eva, get yourselves dried out before you both catch pneumonia. I’ll do some quick repairs to this wall so no one else goes through it, then I’ll follow you on foot. Do you need a hand getting her in the car?”

“No, I’ve got her.” Nathan stands and helps me to my feet, keeping his arm clamped firmly around me as I make my shaky way across the road to the Porsche. It occurs to me to resist as he opens the passenger door and I crouch down to slide inside. I ought to be saying that I don’t want to go anywhere with him, but I’m just too cold and too scared and too bloody shocked to come up with anything in the way of protest. Exhausted, I’ve stopped resisting now. Semi-conscious possibly, I find myself drifting back to that other time, almost a year ago, when he offered me warm, dry comfort in his house. Moments later he’s beside me, in the driver’s seat.

My vision comes back into focus and I can see that Tom’s still standing beside the road and waving his phone in the air, frantically searching for some sort of signal. Nathan calls across to him as he starts the engine.

“Don’t worry about the emergency services, I’ll phone them when we get home. If you do manage to find a signal though, maybe you could get in touch with Jack and ask him to sort out a winch. For tomorrow if possible. I don’t doubt Eva’s going to want her car back, she seems pretty fond of it. You never know, we might be able to dry it out.” He glances back at me, his eyes narrowing. “I think we might prefer to not get the authorities involved if we can help it so I’ll do the scuba work.” He waves to Tom as he pulls away. “See you up there.”

* * * *

Moments later the car is purring back up the lane towards Black Combe. Nathan drives right around the house to the back door before he pulls up. Grace is hovering nervously on the kitchen doorstep, Isabella clutched to her chest. Nathan glances up at the pair as he gets out of the car, but if he’s surprised—and I suppose he must be—he manages to keep a lid on that as he comes around to open my door without making any comment. He holds out his hand to help me out and I take it dumbly. Still clutching the soggy car blanket around me I let Nathan usher me through the kitchen door as Grace obligingly steps aside to let us pass.

Nathan takes a long look at Isabella before turning back to me, now shivering inside the kitchen. He can’t fail to recognise her, the similarity is nothing short of uncanny. He’s no fool, he’ll be doing the sums, working out the dates. I’m waiting for the storm, the torrent of angry recrimination as he realises how cruelly and completely he’s been deceived, his baby kept from him.

But there’s no storm, just Nathan’s calm, capable voice. Taking charge and making things right.

He turns to Grace. “Eva had an accident—her car ran off the road and into the tarn. I think she’s all right, but we’re both piss-wet through and bloody cold. We need a hot bath, and ambulance. Could you phone for one—we couldn’t get any signal down by the tarn?”

I’m staring at my feet, water pooling on the stone flags beside them. Nathan gently frames my face in his hands, forcing me to meet his gaze, his expression a mix of sadness, anger and sheer bloody exhaustion. He glances back at Grace and Isabella, shakes his head in disbelief. Then he turns back to me. “You need to be checked over, Eva. But we’ll start by getting you dried, warmed up. Then you’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do, love.”

I feel my knees start to buckle, but Nathan’s arm is around me again. He continues to hold me. Without his support I have no doubt I’d have been down on the Yorkshire stone flags with Barney. Mrs Richardson’s face is lined with anxiety, a sweetly gurgling Isabella still wriggling in her arms as she reaches for the wall mounted kitchen phone.

“Oh my goodness, oh Lord. What happened?”

Nathan’s answer is succinct. “Eva’s car went off the road into the tarn. I managed to get her out, but she’s frozen. We both are.”

Grace is starting to punch in the three nines as she looks up sharply at Nathan. “Did she do it on purpose?”

What!

Nathan’s incredulous reaction to the question is obvious and genuine. Like mine. He stiffens, and turns to Mrs Richardson in amazement. “I beg your pardon?”

“Did she drive into the tarn on purpose? Was she trying to kill herself?” Mrs Richardson is adamant. Her question hangs in the air, circling us like a buzzard. I notice, gratefully, that she’s stopped dialling.

“Why the fuck would she have been doing that? It was an accident. She swerved to miss me.” In the surreality of the moment all thoughts of ambulances seem to have fled as Mrs Richardson stares both of us down, ready to make her case.

“Eva turned up here, out of the blue, with this little mite.” She jiggles the mite in question, just in case there could be some doubt of who she’s referring to. “Said she’s yours, and that she was leaving her here for you to care for. She said she wasn’t coming back and just ran out of here. Next news is she’s driven straight into the tarn. What does that sound like to you?”

“It sounds like bloody bad luck. And some seriously crap driving. We were probably both going too fast and like I said, she swerved to miss me.”

Nathan’s tone is brooking no argument. His belief in me is evident and unshakeable, and I’m genuinely pleased. Relieved. Pathetically grateful. And I might have been more vehement in my own defence if there wasn’t some faint ring of truth in Mrs Richardson’s version of events. I definitely never made a conscious decision to die, and no way did I plan the accident. But I do know, in that water, that I gave up without a struggle. I just expected to die there and I accepted my death, maybe even welcomed it as a way out of my hopeless despairing excuse for an existence.

The flash of lucidity is more than I can bear. Oh dear God, what’s happened to me? What have I done? How could I have been so… What? Stupid? Deluded? Selfish? The bitter twist of self-loathing is like a physical pain, a punch in my stomach that doubles me over. I clutch my middle.

“Eva? Eva, are you injured? Are you in pain? Grace, how are you doing with that ambulance.” Nathan is frantic, convinced that I’m haemorrhaging or, worse, about to expire from internal injuries. He is crouching beside me as I sink to the flags, hunching myself into a defensive foetal curl. I am shaking violently, my teeth chattering so hard I might break a few, a combination of cold and wet as well as the delayed shock. But far more profound than any physical injury I might have sustained—and I don’t honestly think I have injured my body in any significant way—is the psychological battering of knowing I have lost my grip on what’s real, on what matters.

My little girl, what would she have done without me? My mother? Even Ben and Gina care enough about me to have given me a home all these months. Christ, what have I been thinking? And now Nathan wants to call an ambulance. I’ll be carted off to a mental hospital for my own safety.

“No. No ambulance, please. No ambulance…” I grip Nathan’s arm tightly, pleading with him. “Please let me stay here a bit longer. I’ll be okay. Just, please…”

“You might be injured. We need…” His voice is firm, adamant, he’s going to hand me over to God knows who. I start to panic in earnest, my only thought now to get out of there before the men in white coats arrive. I wriggle out of his arms and try to get to my feet, heading for the door. I don’t get more than a couple of feet before Nathan’s arms are around me again.

“A hot bath, and then we talk.” He picks me up from the floor and carries me out of the kitchen towards the stairs, issuing his instructions to Grace as he goes. “Tom should be here any time now. He’ll fill you in on the details. No ambulance then, for now, but could you try the surgery in Haworth, see if Gillian can call round as soon as possible. Are you okay to look after”—he hesitates, glancing sharply at Isabella—“the baby…until we come down? You can ask Tom, or Ashley, to go pick Rosie up from school.”

Ashley?
Gillian?
I have no chance to ask who these latest additions to our circle might be. Grace must have answered yes as he doesn’t break stride until we are in his bedroom. Ignoring the fact that I’m wet and filthy, Nathan places me on his bed, before striding off into the en-suite bathroom. I hear the sound of the tap running. A couple of minutes later he’s back. Pulling me up into a sitting position he tugs my soaking T-shirt over my head. I have relapsed into my pre-Nathan slovenly ways and am braless. He makes no comment as he lays me back down and starts tackling my jeans and underwear, which join the T-shirt on the floor in a wet, stinking pile in a matter of seconds. I lie there naked, and dumbly watch him strip his own wet clothes off just as quickly. Then, without a word, he picks me up and strides into the bathroom.

The bath is huge. What is it with Nathan and huge baths? I’ve shared his shower in the past, and the bath at his apartment. But never this bath. Still cradling me he bends to turn off the taps, and tests the water with his fingers. Then with no further ado he steps into the steaming water with me in his arms and sinks down.

The warmth is intense. Wonderful, almost too hot. And scented—like pine needles. Very Nathan. It penetrates my chilled body instantly and I start to melt. Like an ice cube dropped into a cup of hot herbal tea. Nathan turns me in his lap so that I am sitting on his legs, my back against his chest. Conscious suddenly of the intimacy, and the fact that this man has betrayed me, I start to sit up, to pull away, but he’s having none of that. He pulls me back against him and his hands come around me, holding me in place. I give up the struggle—I can hate him again later, when I’m warm.

For several long minutes nothing is said. We both lie there, still, absorbing the warmth of the aromatic water. But eventually it’s Nathan who breaks the silence.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Eva?”

“What?” I open my eyes to see his hand in front of my face, three fingers extended.

“How many fingers, Eva?”

No point in being difficult. “Three,” I whisper.

“Right. Now how many?”

He rearranges his hand, and this time it’s two. I say so, sullenly.

“Excellent. Who’s the prime minister just now?”

“David bloody Cameron. What is this, Mastermind?” His questions are really beginning to irritate me, but he seems oblivious.

“What’s today’s date?”

I have to think a moment, then, “Eighteenth of June. It’s a Tuesday.”

“Okay. What’s your date of birth? And Isabella’s?”

“Nineteen, four, ninety,” I respond automatically. I have to think a moment longer for Isabella’s, then give it. “Seventh of May, twenty thirteen”.

“Right. Maybe we’ll manage without that ambulance after all. And now that we’ve established that you’re fully conscious and appear to be thinking straight, you can start explaining what’s been going on here. First though…” Lifting his hands to lightly cup my breasts he whispers in my ear. “Your breasts have filled out a little. Motherhood suits you, Angel. You’re even lovelier than I remembered.”

My response is whispered, small. Hurting still. “Don’t touch me. I hate you.” But I know my tone lacks conviction and I make no effort to move, to pull away.

Nathan continues to caress my breasts, my nipples hardening under his gentle fingers. “Why do you hate me, Eva?” His head has tipped forward and he is kissing my neck, breathing the words into my ear.

“I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone.” But still I lie there, responding to his light touch feathering across my warming skin. He doesn’t leave me alone. He continues to stroke my breasts, my belly, now flat again as it was before Isabella, but the skin slightly marked from the stretching of pregnancy. If he notices that he doesn’t comment, just continues to slide his hands possessively over me. Clutching my carefully nurtured hate and sense of betrayal to me for later reference, I relax my weight against him, let the moment take over. I’ve already realised I’m mad—might as well get some benefit from it.