The Husband's Secret (33 page)

She longed to be out here having an ordinary argument with John-Paul about the damned pool filter. Even a really bad ordinary argument, where feelings were hurt, would be so much better than this permanent sense of dread. She could feel it everywhere, in her stomach, her chest, even her mouth had a horrible taste to it. What was it doing to her health?

She cleared her throat. ‘I need to tell you something.’ She was going to tell him what Rachel Crowley had said today about finding new evidence. How would he react? Would he be frightened? Would he
run
? Become a fugitive?

Rachel had not told her the exact nature of this evidence because she’d been distracted by Cecilia spilling her tea, and
Cecilia had been in such a state of panic it hadn’t occurred to her to ask. She
should
have asked, she realised now. It might have been useful to know. She wasn’t doing too well in her new role as a criminal’s wife.

Rachel couldn’t possibly know exactly
who
the evidence implicated or she wouldn’t have told Cecilia. Would she? It was so hard to think clearly.

‘What’s that?’ asked John-Paul. He was sitting on the wooden bench opposite her, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved striped jersey the girls had bought him last Father’s Day. He leaned forward, his hands hanging limply between his knees. There was something odd about his tone of voice. It was like the gentle, fiercely strained way he would have replied to one of the girls when he was in the early stages of a migraine and still hoping that it wasn’t going to take hold.

‘Have you got a migraine coming on?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good. Listen, today when I was at the Easter hat parade, I saw –’

‘Are
you
okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said impatiently.

‘You don’t look fine. You look really sick. It’s like I’ve made you sick.’ His voice trembled. ‘The only thing that ever mattered to me was making you and the girls happy, and now I’ve put you in this intolerable position.’

‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. She curled her fingers around the slats of the bench seat and watched her daughters as their faces simultaneously dissolved into laughter over something they were watching on the television. ‘Intolerable is a pretty good word for it.’

‘All day at work, I was thinking, how can I fix this? How can I make it better for you?’ He came over and sat next to her. She felt the welcoming warmth of his body next to hers. ‘Obviously I can’t make it better. Not really. But I wanted to
say this to you: if you want me to turn myself in, I will. I’m not going to ask you to carry this too, if you can’t carry it.’

He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Cecilia. If you want me to go straight to the police or to Rachel Crowley, then that’s what I’ll do. If you want me to leave, if you can’t bear to live in the same house as me, then I’ll leave. I’ll tell the girls we’re separating because – I don’t know what I’ll tell the girls, but I’d take the blame, obviously.’

Cecilia could feel John-Paul’s whole body shaking. His palm was sweaty over hers.

‘So you’re prepared to go to jail. What about your claustrophobia?’ she asked.

‘I’d just have to deal with it,’ he said. His palm got sweatier. ‘It’s all in my head anyway. It’s not real.’

She flicked his hand away with a sudden feeling of revulsion, and stood.

‘So why didn’t you put up with it before? Why didn’t you turn yourself in before I even knew you?’

He lifted his palms and looked up at her with a contorted, pleading face. ‘I can’t really answer that, Cecilia. I’ve tried to explain. I’m sorry –’

‘And now you’re saying I get to make the decision. It’s nothing to do with you any more. Now it’s
my
responsibility whether Rachel hears the truth or not!’ She thought of the blue crumb on Rachel’s mouth and shuddered.

‘Not if you don’t want it to be!’ John-Paul was almost in tears now. ‘I was trying to make things easier for you.’

‘Can’t you see that you’re making it my problem?’ cried Cecilia, but the rage was already fading, to be replaced by a great wave of despair. John-Paul’s offer to confess made no difference. Not really. She was already accountable. The moment she’d opened that letter she’d become accountable.

She sank back down on the bench on the opposite side of the cabana.

‘I saw Rachel Crowley today,’ she said. ‘I dropped off her Tupperware. She said she had new evidence that implicates Janie’s murderer.’

John-Paul’s head jerked up. ‘She couldn’t have. There’s nothing. There is no evidence.’

‘I’m just telling you what she said.’

‘Well then,’ said John-Paul. He swayed a little, as if he was having a dizzy spell, and briefly closed his eyes. He opened them again. ‘Maybe the decision will be made for us. For me.’

Cecilia thought back to exactly what Rachel had said. Something like: ‘I’ve found something that proves who killed Janie.’

‘This evidence she’s found,’ said Cecilia suddenly. ‘It might actually implicate
someone else
.’

‘In that case, I’d have to turn myself in,’ said John-Paul flatly. ‘Obviously I would.’

‘Obviously,’ repeated Cecilia.

‘It just seems unlikely,’ said John-Paul. He sounded exhausted. ‘Doesn’t it? After all these years.’

‘It does,’ agreed Cecilia. She watched as he lifted his head and turned towards the back of the house to look at the girls. In the silence, the sound of the pool filter became loud. It didn’t sound like a choking baby. It sounded like the wheezing breaths of something monstrous, like an ogre from a child’s nightmare, creeping around their house.

‘I’ll look at that filter tomorrow,’ said John-Paul, his eyes fixed on his daughters.

Cecilia said nothing. She sat and breathed in time with the ogre.

chapter forty-two

‘This is sort of the ultimate second date,’ said Tess.

She and Connor were sitting on a low brick wall overlooking Dee Why Beach, drinking hot chocolate in takeaway cups. The bike was parked behind them, the chrome gleaming in the moonlight. The night was cold but Tess was warm in the big leather jacket Connor had lent her. It smelled of aftershave. ‘Yeah, it normally works like a charm,’ said Connor.

‘Except you already scored with me on the first date,’ said Tess. ‘So you know, you don’t need to waste all your seductive charms.’

She sounded odd, as if she was trying out someone else’s personality: one of those sassy, feisty girls. Actually, it was like she was trying to be Felicity and not doing a very good job of it. The magical, heightened sensations she’d felt on the bike seemed to have dissipated, and now she felt awkward. It was too much. The moonlight, the bike, the leather jacket and the hot chocolate. It was horribly romantic. She’d never been fond of classic romantic moments. They made her snicker.

Connor turned to look at her with a deadly serious expression. ‘So you’re saying the other night was a first date.’
He had grey, serious eyes. Unlike Will, Connor didn’t laugh a lot. It made his occasional deep chuckles all the more precious. See,
quality
, not quantity,
Will
.

‘Oh, well,’ said Tess. Did he think they were
dating
? ‘I don’t know. I mean –’

Connor put his hand on her arm. ‘I was joking. Relax. I told you. I’m just happy to spend time with you.’

Tess drank some of the hot chocolate and changed the subject. ‘What did you do this afternoon? After school?’

Connor squinted, as if considering his answer, and then shrugged. ‘I went for a run, had a coffee with Ben and his girlfriend, and ah, well, I saw my shrink. Thursday evening I see her. At six pm. There’s an Indian restaurant next door. I always have a curry afterwards. Therapy and an excellent lamb curry. I don’t know why I keep telling you about my therapy.’

‘Did you tell your therapist about me?’ said Tess.

‘Of course not.’ He smiled.

‘You did.’ She poked his leg gently with her finger.

‘All right, I did. Sorry. It was news. I like to make myself interesting for her.’

Tess put her cup of hot chocolate down on the wall next to her. ‘What did she say?’

He glanced at her. ‘You’ve obviously never been in therapy. They don’t say a word. They say things like, “And how did that make you feel?” and “Why do you think you did that?”’

‘I bet she didn’t approve of me,’ said Tess. She saw herself through the therapist’s eyes: an ex-girlfriend who broke his heart years ago suddenly reappears in his life when she’s right in the middle of a marriage crisis. Tess felt defensive.
But I’m not leading him on. He’s a grown man. Anyway, maybe it will go somewhere. It’s true I never thought about him after we broke up, but maybe I could fall
in love with him. In fact, maybe I am falling in love with him. I know he’s all messed up about his murdered first girlfriend. I’m not going to break his heart. I’m a good person
.

Wasn’t she a good person? She felt a dim awareness of something almost shameful about the way she’d lived her life. Wasn’t there something closed off, even small-minded and mean, about the way she cut herself off from people, ducking down behind the convenient wall of her shyness, her ‘social anxiety’? When she sensed overtures of friendship she took too long to respond to phone calls and emails, and eventually people gave up, and Tess was always relieved. If she was a better mother, a more social mother, she would have helped Liam cultivate friendships with kids other than Marcus. But no, she’d just sat back with Felicity, giggling over their wine and sniping. She and Felicity didn’t tolerate the overly skinny, the overly sporty, the overly rich or overly intellectual. They laughed at people with personal trainers and small dogs, people who put overly intellectual or misspelled comments on Facebook, people who used the phrase, ‘I’m in a very good place right now’ and people who always got ‘involved’ – people like Cecilia Fitzpatrick.

Tess and Felicity sat on the sidelines of life smirking at the players.

If Tess had a wider social network, then perhaps Will wouldn’t have fallen in love with Felicity. Or at least he would have had a wider range of potential mistresses at his disposal.

When her life fell apart there wasn’t one friend Tess could call. Not one friend. That’s why she was behaving like this with Connor. She needed a
friend
.

‘I fit the pattern, don’t I?’ said Tess suddenly. ‘You keep choosing the wrong women. I’m another wrong woman.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Connor. ‘Also, you didn’t even bring the hot cross buns you promised.’

He tipped back his paper cup and drained the last of his hot chocolate. He put it down on the ledge next to him and shifted closer to her.

‘I’m using you,’ said Tess. ‘I’m a bad person.’

He put one warm hand on the back of her neck and pulled her close enough so she could smell the chocolate on his breath. He took the paper cup from her unresisting hand.

‘I’m using you to help me not think about my husband,’ she clarified. She wanted him to understand.

‘Tess. Honey. Do you think I don’t know that?’ Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiralling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.

6 April 1984

Janie didn’t know that boys could blush. Her brother Rob blushed, but obviously he didn’t count as a proper boy. She didn’t know that a smart, good-looking, private-school boy like John-Paul Fitzpatrick could blush. It was late in the afternoon, and the light was changing, making everything indistinct and shadowy, but still she could see that John-Paul’s face was glowing. Even his ears, she noticed, were a translucent pink.

She’d just said her little speech about how there was this ‘other guy’ she’d been seeing and he wanted her to be his ‘sort of, um, girlfriend’. So she really couldn’t see John-Paul any more, because the other guy wanted to ‘make things sort of official’.

She’d had this vague idea that it would be better to make it sound as if it were Connor’s fault, as if he was making her break up with John-Paul, but now, as John-Paul’s face reddened, she wondered if it had been a mistake to mention another boy at all. She could have blamed it on her father. She could have said that she was too nervous about him finding out that she was seeing a boy.

But part of her had wanted John-Paul to know that she was in demand.

‘But Janie,’ John-Paul’s voice sounded girly and squeaky, as if he was about to cry. ‘I thought you were
my
girlfriend.’

Janie was horrified. Her own face flushed in sympathy and she looked away towards the swings and heard herself giggle. A strange, high-pitched giggle. It was a bad habit she had, of laughing when she was nervous, when she didn’t find anything at all funny about a situation. It had happened, for example, when Janie was thirteen and the school principal had come into their homeroom with such a sombre, mournful expression on his normally jolly face and told them that their geography teacher’s husband had died. Janie had been so shocked and distressed, and then she’d laughed. It was inexplicable. The whole class had turned to look at her accusingly and she’d just about died of shame.

John-Paul lunged at her. Her first fleeting thought was that he was going to kiss her, and this was his odd yet masterful technique, and she was pleased and excited. He wasn’t going to let her break up with him. He wasn’t going to stand for it!

But then his hands grabbed her
neck
. She tried to say, ‘That’s hurting, John-Paul,’ but she couldn’t speak, and she wanted to clear up this dreadful misunderstanding, to explain that she actually liked him
more
than Connor, and she’d never meant to hurt his feelings, and she wanted to be his girlfriend, and she tried to convey that with her eyes, which were staring straight into his, his beautiful eyes, and she thought for a second that she saw a shift, a shocked recognition and she felt a loosening of hands, but there was something else happening; something very wrong and unfamiliar was happening to her body, and in that instant a far-off part of her mind remembered that her mother had been going to pick her up from school today to take her to a doctor’s appointment, and she’d forgotten all about it
and gone to Connor’s house instead. Her mother would be ropable.