Girl Unknown (33 page)

Holly was standing outside, her face caught in the light thrown by the kitchen window.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked, and she jumped, the sharpness of my tone giving her a fright.

‘Inside.’

It was like entering a different house from the one we had left a couple of hours previously. All that busy energy, the sense of anticipation before a night out, gone now, replaced by an uneasy stillness. I found myself walking softly, as if wary of disturbing someone, but whom I could not tell.

The light was on in the kitchen, illuminating the undressed salad, the vegetables half-peeled and abandoned, spilling over the side of the chopping board on to the table. Straight away, I knew something was wrong. I knew it in the way Zoë seemed to have backed into a corner, her hands behind her on the counter, shoulders a little high and tense.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked. Even from that distance, I could see her contracted pupils – small pinpricks in the green fabric of her eyes.

‘Nothing,’ she said. But I knew it wasn’t nothing. I knew it from the way David was leaning against the counter, swaying slightly, as if he hadn’t heard or noticed me. His nose was bloodied and while her pupils had shrunk to almost nothing, his had dilated. Two black discs fixed on her, like a drunk.

‘Linda,’ he said to her, and I just about caught her
reaction – that recoil of horror – before my eyes snapped in his direction.

‘What did you call her?’

He slumped briefly against the counter, before pushing himself upright. He was still gazing at her in that sluggish way.

I said, louder this time: ‘David, what did you say?’

My words seemed to hit the middle of his forehead, the way he winced, put his hand to his brow, briefly pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose. When he took his hand away he looked at her again. It was extraordinary the change that came over his face. Confusion cleared, replaced by an expression of naked disappointment. A hurt that went deep. He shook his head to rid himself of it and said: ‘Nothing.’

He was coming back to himself, whatever delirium he had experienced trickling away, but the shock of it remained.

‘You thought she was Linda.’

He looked around for something, then finding the towel, he picked ice cubes up off the counter-top and began filling it with them.

‘Didn’t you?’ I insisted.

‘I should go,’ Zoë said, and started to move past me.

‘No,’ I told her firmly. ‘You’ll stay right here until someone tells me what’s going on.’

Something had happened. The air moved differently between them.

‘Mum?’ I heard Holly say.

‘Go to your room,’ I told her, my tone brusque, my heart beating quickly now with the feeling that I was on the cusp of something – a hard truth.

She turned away, leaving the three of us alone. I had no idea where Robbie was – it wasn’t important. Nothing was important right then except getting to the nub of the rot in our home. This weed that had taken root, growing and strangling all about her.

‘What happened just now?’ I said again, looking from one to the other.

‘Caroline, my face is bleeding, for crying out loud.’ He was recovering but he still sounded groggy.

‘The way you were looking at her just now. You were thinking of Linda, weren’t you?’

He took the towel from his nose, examined the blood on it.

‘You told Zoë about the baby, about the termination, didn’t you?’ I said, changing tack.

That caught his attention. He put aside the towel, buying some time to think.

‘Didn’t you?’ I pressed, my voice trembling with anger.

‘I didn’t think you’d react like this.’

‘You stupid, heartless –’ I stepped forward and he caught my wrists before I could reach him. I wanted to lash out, but his grip was strong and all I could do was pluck ineffectually at his shirt.

‘Caroline, for God’s sake.’

I was crying now, tears of rage and grief and helplessness. Tears over a decision made many years before. He held on to my wrists until the fight in me died and he let me twist from his grasp. Leaning against the table, I could feel her eyes on me, but I had no idea what she was thinking or how she might use this situation later against me. I was so tired of her, exhausted by her constant
presence, trying to second-guess her motivation, bracing myself against her manipulation, feeling the waters closing over my head. One thought rose to the surface, a single piece of flotsam:
She must go.

I told him then. Told him I’d had enough. Enough of her and the trouble she brewed up, enough of him and his wavering loyalty, his lack of trust. Enough of Linda. He blinked as I said her name, a raw nerve touched. I had read it in his inward stares, his lost thoughts – I had felt him summoning her memory, like the medium at a séance calling back the dead.

‘It’s her or me, David. One of us must go.’

My hands on the table, its hardness beneath my fingertips, the heavy warmth of the night air coming in through the open windows.

‘You’ve never liked me, Caroline.’ Her voice came almost as a surprise. For the last few moments, what was passing between David and me had felt so intensely personal it was as if no one else was in the room. ‘I don’t know why, but you’ve never liked me.’

Holly was at my elbow again. ‘Please, love,’ I told her. ‘Not now.’

She was handing me something, and David said, ‘No,’ with an urgency that made me look.

A scrunched-up piece of paper put in my hand.

‘Holly!’ he said.

I opened it and read quickly, David saying, ‘Look, I can explain.’

I looked at him, and it was dreadful the way he stood there in front of me, his nose bloodied but his face blank of all expression. He was simply waiting to see what I
would do next. In my hands, the lie he had told. The thing he had tried to cover up.

‘You told me it was positive.’

He swallowed, the noise of it audible in the silence of the room.

‘How could you do that?’

‘Because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t prove anything.’

But it did prove something. It proved the measure of his want. I couldn’t put it into words – it was more a feeling, an intuition about the need that lay within him, something untouchable and remote, a hole in his life that had to be filled. All those years I’d believed that our marriage, our children, his career were bringing him fulfilment. But it was still there inside him – that wanting, that emptiness.

‘You had my DNA tested?’ Zoë asked quietly.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told her.

‘You didn’t believe me,’ she stated, hurt cracking the corners of her voice.

‘I wanted to. But it was a shock.’

‘You didn’t want it to be true, did you?’ she said, and the anger stirred in me, as I watched her turn it on, how easily she went to work on him.

‘Zoë, please,’ he said, stepping towards her, although he was standing close enough already. ‘How many times do I have to say it? You’re my daughter and I’m glad you are …’

She didn’t believe it. ‘Linda told me this would happen.’

I saw him slow and tense at the mention of her name. ‘What?’

‘Towards the end, when I told her I wanted to find you, she warned me not to.’

‘She warned you?’ He was hanging on her words, soaking them up, while I listened with growing scepticism.

‘You asked me once why Linda never told you about me.’

‘You said you didn’t know.’

‘Yes,’ she said, but I could see something moving behind her eyes, some new deception being put into play. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you with the truth.’

Linda hadn’t told him about the pregnancy or the birth of her baby because she’d known he wouldn’t want it.

‘It broke her heart, she said, but there was no point. No point in telling you. Because she knew that this had happened to you before and there was only one outcome you’d wish for.’

Half the things Zoë ever told us were lies. Even now, sifting back over these memories, I can’t be sure of what was true and what was false. But if he had told Linda, then how had he told her? In what tone was his explanation couched? Heavy with regret? Or with a sigh of relief?

Or did it matter? Zoë would have twisted whatever it was. I knew that much, the way she had already drawn him in. There was something magnetic about her – you couldn’t pull your eyes away from her. And I could see the way he was watching her, the way he hung on her every word, and for just a brief moment, I understood the power she had to hold you in her spell.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t like that.’

‘She thought you wouldn’t want her to keep it.’

‘No,’ he said again. ‘I would have wanted to … It was different, you see. I loved her.’

It was as if he had forgotten I was in the room. The hurt was instant, but not new.
The love of my life.
I had felt
it before and still it had capacity to wound. She was a knot in the wood of our marriage, the grain of it forming around her. I was so busy focusing on his admission of love for that other woman that I failed to absorb the new truth – the real hurt – in what he was saying. It took a moment for my thoughts to catch up.

‘You would have kept that baby?’ I asked, disbelief curling up the end of my question. ‘But you didn’t want ours?’

I had asked the question but I didn’t want the answer. I already knew it. It was there in his eyes. A sensation of deep and bitter regret rose in me. Somehow, for almost two decades, I had lived with a man who had kept one eye over his shoulder peering back at his past. And I had chosen to ignore it.

He was saying something now about timing and opportunity, but I was backing away.
Enough. No more
, I wanted to say. I needed to be alone, to be free of this house and the people in it. I caught the look on her face as I backed away – the narrowing of her eyes and the hard line of her feline grin.
There
, it seemed to say
. Now you see.
Her triumph over me was complete. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do.

I stumbled against an ancient dresser in the hall, felt the crack of pain against the bone of my ankle but didn’t stop, not until I was outside in the warm dark, the gate jangling some distance behind me, not glancing back to check if I could still see light from the house, or if any of them had tried to follow me.

It was better that I was alone. Hurrying along the little footpath, away from the lights of the village, walking quickly without purpose towards the welcoming dark of
the coast, the gentle hiss of the sea greeting me. The sand running along the crescent of the beach was dark, bluish grey, no moon to cast it in a silver glow. The hulk of an abandoned boat lay rusting on one side, like a beached whale that had long given up the will to return, sinking to its inevitable ruin.

There was something inevitable, too, about the feelings stirring inside me, or so it seemed. The ring in my pocket, the hard roundness of it smooth against my palm. Feelings of an ending, I was sure of it now. Our marriage, that dry, desiccated thing, was a dead animal we had been dragging about for so long, both of us too cowardly to pronounce its demise. Or too blind. Willing ourselves to look away, to keep things going for the sake of the children. But I knew he would leave me once the kids were gone. All that love, the terrible waste of it.

I stood at the shoreline, listening to my breathing, waiting with no clue of what I should do next. Memory stirred uncomfortably. After what had just happened, I was vulnerable to it, helpless, and I remembered a narrow room with a high ceiling, a milk-white lampshade on a brass chain suspended above us, the shadow of dust gathered in its bowl. I remembered lying beneath it, the two of us, looking up at it, feeling the rise and fall of his head against my chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, drawing away.

It was our first time after I’d come back. Our first time since the problem had been taken care of.

I needed his touch to make me feel healed. I needed him inside me again as absolution. But in the darkness of that room as we tried to find our way back to each other,
I had felt a third presence – a watchful eye inside me. Perhaps he felt it too. But when he rolled away from me, his hands going up to cover his face, moaning his apology, I felt ashamed. Contaminated. A failure. The ghost of what I had done watched me, like a fragment of glass mingling with the dust in the lamp above our heads.

I had not returned to that memory in years. The warm relief of our eventual reconciliation had pushed it down. Two further babies had helped to obliterate it. But now, as I stopped dead by the edge of the sea, with the blunt hardness of those old diamonds pressed between my fingers, the memory ripped through me as fresh and vital and cutting as a new blade of grass spearing the earth.

That night was a punctuation mark in my life, a pause between the love that had been before and the hard road of our parting. It marked the start of a three-year lacuna and, though I hadn’t known it then, from that hole in our history came Zoë.

Out there in the darkness, something moved in the sea. A gurgle of water followed by a faint splash. I didn’t move. Inside I had become very still. It was coming to me from a distance, a disembodied notion, a shimmering thought. A cancer had taken root in our family, a spreading tumour that needed to be cauterized. A reckless thought, but I didn’t feel reckless. I felt very calm.

Surgical, clinical, my hand steady, my heart cold.

24. David

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, but my apology sounded hollow even to myself.

Zoë regarded me coolly. ‘Aren’t you going to go after her?’ she asked, picking up her cigarettes and tapping one out of the carton. As I watched her lighting up, her demeanour seem to change. She wasn’t upset. Neither did she seem frosty. If anything, she appeared bored. As if the outcome of the disastrous blow-up with my wife was dull and inevitable. She remained untouched by it all. The rancour moved within me.

‘There’s no point,’ I said quietly. What would be the use? I had said what I should not have said: about Linda, her pregnancy, my love for her. I could apologize to Caroline but those words could not be unsaid. I realized that of all the arguments we’d had over the years, all the emotional wounds inflicted, this was perhaps the worst. The one we would not recover from.