In Her Shadow (26 page)

‘No!’ I cried. ‘Jago, don’t!’ But Jago had already turned the handle. He pushed open the door.

The man sitting on the bed was wearing a donkey jacket. He had his back to us. His shoulders were hunched, and his posture was of defeat and despair. His head was wrapped in bandages. As Jago and I stood and stared at him in horror, Adam Tremlett slowly turned. The side of his face that we could see was swollen and bruised; the skin was mottled black and yellow, and ugly black stitches train-tracked across his forehead, disappearing beneath a bandage that crossed his face diagonally, covering his right eye. He slowly raised himself up from the bed to his full height.

‘Come on!’ said Jago. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards the stairs. We galloped down, not caring
how much noise we made, not caring about anything but escaping. At the bottom, Jago threw open the front door and we ran out of the house, out into the lane, and although my lungs felt like they were bursting in the cold night air, we didn’t stop running until we were home.

A few days later, we received a postcard showing a picturesque Saxony town. It had a German postmark and was covered with Ellen’s trademark small, neat handwriting.

We are with Mrs Todd in Magdeburg staying with my grandparents
, she wrote.
They are looking after us very well. My aunt is going to bring us back to Cornwall as soon as Papa is better. I’ll see you soon, love Ellen
.

‘Is Mr Brecht ill?’ I asked my mother.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Two more postcards arrived in quick succession, together with a letter from Mrs Todd to my mother. Inside was a cheque, made out to my parents. Mum passed it to Dad. He looked at the cheque, whistled, folded it and put it into his wallet.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

‘It’s my payment for helping Mrs Todd clean up,’ said Mum.

‘Blood money,’ muttered Jago.

‘Enough to treat us all,’ said Dad. ‘We can get that car of yours on the road at last, son!’

Mum said Mrs Todd’s letter was reassuring. The Brecht family were rallying round Ellen and her father. They had employed a physician to help Mr Brecht deal with his demons. They had sent a ‘generous’ sum to Adam Tremlett as compensation and Adam Tremlett had agreed to drop all charges against Mr Brecht. Ellen was recovered from her ordeal. She was ‘quiet, but calm’.

‘What do you think that actually means?’ I asked.

‘Never mind Ellen Brecht, you worry about yourself,’ Dad said, with a nod towards the kitchen table where my books and papers were laid out. ‘You’ve got the rest of your life to worry about other people.’

Soon enough the A-level exams started. They were an ordeal to me. I felt out of my depth, and helpless. It dawned on me that maybe I was not, after all, clever enough to go to university and become an explorer. But if I didn’t do that, what else could I do? Natural History was the only subject that had ever interested me.

The other students congregated at the bus stop and in the cafeteria for post mortems after each exam. I stood at the fringes of the groups, feeling isolated and wishing Ellen were with me so we could, together, laugh at the false agonizing. Ellen had never been able to tolerate any form of hypocrisy.

Now she was no longer in Cornwall, I missed her desperately. Several times I became Ellen in my dreams. I saw her father through her eyes. I walked into the front room and saw him raising the iron poker above his head. I saw Adam Tremlett’s blood, black and wet on the floorboards, and I imagined running to get between Mr Brecht and Mr Tremlett and slipping on the blood – and the stickiness of it on my hands, how it would not wipe away.

The nightmares woke me and I lay on my bed, staring at the patterns of the Artex on the ceiling and thinking of Mr Brecht. I told myself he had only been defending what was his. He had a right to defend his property.
Anyone would have done the same
.

I walked up to Thornfield House once or twice a week with the dog, in the evenings, but nobody was ever there. The front door that Jago and I had left wide open the night we broke in had been padlocked, and the ground-floor windows boarded over. The garden was reverting to wilderness but at least some of the flowers had returned, the
self-seeding varieties of stocks and poppies and verbena. The lavender bushes that were amongst Mrs Brecht’s favourites had grown new heads, along with one or two of the roses.

‘What if they decide to stay in Germany?’ Jago asked over and over again. ‘What if they’ve left for good and I never see Ellen again?’

We were sitting at the kitchen table, close together, Jago and I. I had one more exam to go and was trying to revise. Jago was tapping his fingers on the table and chewing his lip, both habits irritating me. Trixie lay solid on my feet. I could feel her heartbeat through my socks.

‘Jago, can you stop doing that?’

‘What?’

‘Drumming with your fingers. It’s annoying.’

Mum looked over from the sink where she was peeling potatoes.

‘Let Hannah get on with her revision, Jago.’

‘I don’t know how any of you can get on with anything while Ellen’s in Germany with the Psycho,’ said Jago.

Mum sighed. ‘They’ll be back at the end of the month,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Mr Brecht’s better now, by all accounts. His sister’s coming back with them, to keep an eye on things.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Mrs Todd sent another letter,’ said Mum. ‘She asked me to open up the house.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

IT WAS RINA’S
birthday so we all went to the Hope and Anchor after work, as was the tradition. Most of us were crowded round a couple of tables in the small, steeply terraced garden, standing close together drinking cider and dipping into communal packets of crisps that had been torn open and left on the tables. I had been cornered by Betty Tralisk, an earnest young historian who was writing a history of the Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the so-called Father of Modern India who, due to an incongruous twist of fate and an ill-timed bout of meningitis, had died in Bristol and was buried in the city’s Arnos Vale Cemetery. Betty wanted to stage an exhibition at the museum in honour of the Raja, and suggested it could be financed via the education budget. She wanted my opinion on this. I was finding it hard to concentrate. I sipped my cider and nodded in the appropriate places but my mind was elsewhere. I noticed Betty staring at me in a way which suggested she was waiting for a response.

‘Yes,’ I ventured tentatively. ‘I absolutely agree.’

‘Thank you,’ said Betty. ‘So you’ll raise the matter with the trustees?’

I nodded, and apropos of nothing, John caught my eye
across the garden and smiled. Charlotte was standing close to him, laughing at something someone had said to her. Her head was tipped back so I could see her face in profile, the line of her throat silhouetted against the bright sky behind her.

So she hadn’t said anything to John yet. She hadn’t told the truth. She hadn’t left him. She was chronically unfaithful – she didn’t have a kind word to say about her husband, she was planning to leave him – and yet she was happy to stand behind him in the pub garden and act the part of the good wife. John still had no idea what she was really like.

I couldn’t look at Charlotte. I had to turn away.

Somebody tapped my shoulder. I turned. It was Rina.

‘Cheers!’ she said, raising her glass.

Dutifully I chinked with her. ‘Happy birthday!’

‘Now then,’ she said, ‘I meant to tell you earlier but it slipped my mind. After you’d gone home yesterday you had a visitor. A nice woman – dreadlocks, multi-coloured clothes. Pierced lip. You were supposed to meet her for lunch.’

‘Julia! Oh Rina, I completely forgot!’

‘That was evident. She was very charming about it.’

‘Did you …’ I took a deep breath. ‘Did you tell her what had happened?’

‘Some of it. She seemed concerned.’

‘Shit. Sorry, Rina, but shit.’ I couldn’t believe the arrangement had slipped my mind, and was furious with myself. I had been looking forward to meeting Julia. I needed to talk to her, and I had completely forgotten what we had agreed. Confusion was one of the four main symptoms of psychosis, along with hallucination, delusion and lack of insight. Oh well done, Hannah, I thought. That’s three of the four boxes ticked. Or maybe even a full house.

I picked the phone out of my bag. It was switched off. I couldn’t remember when I’d switched it off, but when I turned it on, it beeped as several new messages and
missed-call alerts came in, one after the other, most from Julia. I felt helpless. I felt useless. I was adrift.

There was no doubt in my mind now, I was losing my grip. I was usually so organized. My colleagues teased me all the time about my obsessive punctuality, my insistence on ordering and cataloguing and making sure everything was noted and in its place and done in the right way, at the right time. Now I couldn’t even remember a simple meeting.

Before I had a chance to text Julia an apology, I felt a gentle hand on my arm.

It was Charlotte.

‘Hello, Hannah,’ she said.

‘Oh hi,’ I replied, as coldly as possible.

She held up a glass. ‘I bought you a drink. Misty said you’re a white-wine lady.’

‘Actually I’m drinking cider.’

‘Oh.’ She put the wine glass on the table. ‘You could always have it later,’ she said.

I thought I would rather tip it into the flowerbed than drink it.

Charlotte played with her hair and fidgeted for a moment. There was a sheen of sweat between her breasts and she was wearing shiny, tangerine-coloured false nails. For the thousandth time I couldn’t believe that somebody like John had chosen to marry somebody like Charlotte and not somebody like me. I could have made him happy. I would have done anything to make him happy – and yet here I was again, incapable of anything apart from waiting on the sidelines to pick up the pieces when his life fell apart.

‘Is there something else, Charlotte?’ I asked rudely. ‘Only there are people here I’d like to talk to.’

Charlotte sighed. ‘Yes, there is. God, this is awkward. I don’t know how to say this, but Hannah, the other day, in the pasty shop …’

‘I haven’t said anything to John.’

‘I know, thank you. I just … Well, he … He told me you were going to Berlin together. To this conference.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hannah, I know what you must think of me – only please don’t say anything about me to John while you’re in Berlin.’

‘John’s my friend, Charlotte. I respect him.’

‘I know you do, and that’s why I’m asking you not to say anything.’

‘Everyone else seems to know what you’re up to. Don’t you think he has a right to know?’

‘He does, yes, only I’m asking you to let me talk to him. It will be better coming from me.’

‘But you won’t say anything!’

‘I will when the time is right.’

‘When will the time be right, Charlotte? When you win the lottery and can manage without John’s money? Or when you find someone richer than him to seduce?’ I was angry, but I kept my voice low.

Charlotte frowned. She seemed upset but I was certain she was play-acting.

‘It’s just …’ She looked up at the sky. She was wringing her pretty little hands with those garish nails. ‘I know what these conferences are like, Hannah, I’ve been to enough of them. They’re terribly boring, full of pretentious old duffers – not you, of course – and the temptation, always, is to drink too much because there’s nothing else to do and—Oh please, Hannah, please don’t say anything to John. I don’t want him to hear this second hand. It has to come from me and—’

She stopped in mid-flow and smiled frantically at somebody behind me. I turned, and it was John. He squeezed past me, and stood beside Charlotte. I saw the fingers of his hand reach out and take hold of hers. Charlotte smiled at me helplessly. John raised his wife’s hand to his lips, and kissed
it. Charlotte looked close to tears. I had no sympathy.

‘Are you talking about Berlin?’ he asked. ‘Charlotte’s so pleased you’re coming with me, Hannah. It lets her off the hook.’

Charlotte nodded miserably.

‘But it won’t all be work,’ John continued. ‘We’ll be put up in rooms in a mediocre hotel, not in the city centre, granted, but we’ll have coffee-making facilities and a trouser press, all mod cons. We’ll have to sit through a couple of boring presentations and make small talk with a lot of intellectuals – although really you don’t even have to do that. I could be the official face of the Brunel Memorial Museum and you could do exactly what you wanted. Stay in bed, watch movies, drink gin …’

I could not smile.

‘Don’t you mind your husband going away with another woman?’ I asked Charlotte pointedly. ‘Won’t you be lonely?’

Charlotte swallowed. Her face was rigid with tension. ‘I’m used to it,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep myself busy.’

‘What’s not to like, Hannah?’ asked John. He was a little drunk. He waved his glass around with enthusiasm. ‘This trip is basically a free, short cultural break with a stimulating talk on the dialectical relationship between curators and spectators thrown in.’

‘But—’

‘Good. Anyway, I must circulate. My beautiful wife and I are off to talk to Misty and her boyfriend about popular culture and street art. I’ll see you later.’

As he moved on, Charlotte turned to look at me over her shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry …’ she began, but I turned away before she could finish the sentence.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

MY LAST A-LEVEL
exam was the worst. I struggled to fill the allotted white space, finished forty-five minutes before the end and sat at my desk, doodling. When the invigilator finally said, ‘Put down your pens!’ I couldn’t wait to escape. I picked up my bag, went into the cloakroom to wash my hands and, while I was there, overheard a conversation between two of my classmates that made me realize I’d completely misinterpreted one of the questions. The last little part of me that was holding on to the hope that I might secure a place at a good university crumpled up and died.

Mired in self-pity, I wandered up the High Street, went into Bottoms Up and bought a four-pack of cider and a quarter-bottle of gin. I caught the bus as usual, but didn’t get off at the Trethene junction, riding on past the petrol garage until I was the only passenger left. I walked back to the church, the carrier bag of alcohol weighing heavy on my arm, and went through the churchyard and out of the gate on the other side, to sit on the bench beside the spot where Ellen and Jago first made love. Once sat down, I opened the first can of cider.