The Memory of Midnight (34 page)

Luke took a hand off the wheel and dragged it through his hair as he blew out a breath. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve got
a kid, a harassing husband, a critical mother and a ghost intent on sucking you back into the past to deal with at the moment. That’s more than enough for anyone.’

Relieved to see the tension slip from his face, Tess swivelled back in her seat. ‘You’re one of the reasons I’ve been able to deal with any of it,’ she said.
‘I’d forgotten what it was like to have a good friend,’ she added in a low voice. ‘I’d forgotten how to
be
a good friend. It shouldn’t be one-sided.
You’ve done everything for me, and I’ve done nothing for you.’

‘For God’s sake, Tess, don’t start beating yourself up,’ said Luke with an alarmed glance at her profile. ‘Forget I said anything.’

‘I can’t do that. You were angry with me.’

‘Only because . . . I was frightened, all right?’ It was Luke’s turn to sound defensive. ‘You were out of Ambrose’s control, and I felt responsible, and powerless
to help you. And yes, if you must have the truth, I was jealous too. You were so absorbed in the past when you came round, so happy with your babies, it was like you had nothing left for anyone in
the present – not for Oscar, and certainly not for me.’

‘You don’t need to say anything,’ he said gruffly as Tess opened her mouth. ‘I know it’s mad. There’s no way you can think about me at the
moment. You’re married, you’re possessed by a ghost . . . it’s not exactly great timing, is it?’

‘Could be better,’ said Tess, but a treacherous glow was uncoiling deep inside her, curling through her distress and her guilt, warming her.

‘I’m just telling you why I was angry.’ He held the wheel at arm’s length, concentrating fiercely on the road. ‘I wanted some of your attention, that’s all.
I’m not proud of it.’

Tess moistened her lips while she tried to get her jumbled thoughts in order. It was difficult to know how she felt exactly. Reassured, definitely. She hadn’t realized how much she had
come to rely on Luke until his anger had made her think about how self-absorbed she had been. There was guilt, too, and pleasure, and a little throb of anticipation. It was so long since she had
felt wanted, desired.

But mixed up with it all was fear and frustration and a touch of exasperation. Luke was right: his timing was appalling. There was so much going on in her head. She had Oscar to think about, and
Martin, not to mention a whole other life in the past that was clamouring at the back of her mind. How could she give Luke the attention he deserved too?

Her hands throbbed as she looked down at them. That was something else she needed to do something about. If the pain got any worse, she would have to go to the doctor.

‘Luke—’

He held up a hand, like a traffic cop. ‘No. Please don’t try and explain. I understand.’

‘Then you know more than I do,’ said Tess tartly. ‘I don’t understand anything at the moment – that’s the truth. But I do know that I’m really glad to
have you as a friend again, and I know I’m really sorry that I hurt you.’

Luke made a face, slid a glance at her. ‘We’re not going to have a let’s-just-be-friends conversation, are we?’

‘We are,’ she said, but her smile softened the words before she sobered. ‘I’ve got things to be scared of at the moment, Luke, but the thing that scares me most is that I
might end up using you.’

She looked down at her hands where they lay in her lap, cool and undamaged on the surface, pulsing and flinching with pain inside. ‘I’m afraid of being needy, of letting myself
depend on you. I really need to prove that I can manage on my own. I never want to be the way I was with Martin again. I need to be strong, and I’m afraid you might tempt me to be
weak.’

‘Weak?’ Luke shot her a look, shook his head and turned his eyes back to the road ahead. ‘You? You’re the strongest woman I know, Tess.’

Tess stared at him. ‘What are you talking about? I’m pathetic. If I was strong, I would never have let Martin walk all over me for so many years.’

‘You were strong enough to leave.’

‘I don’t feel strong,’ she said. ‘I feel scared. I’m overwhelmed by everything and I don’t know how I’m going to cope with any of it.’

‘But you
are
coping with it,’ Luke pointed out. ‘All these awful things are happening to you, and you haven’t fallen apart once.’

‘Apart from smashing plates and throwing cereal all over the kitchen.’

‘Okay, once.’

‘And time travelling back to Elizabethan England and forgetting my own child.’

‘Has it occurred to you, Tess, that anyone else would have been having the screaming abdabs if they did the same? They’d have been running off to their doctor in a panic, but not
you. You won’t risk Oscar, so you’re just gritting your teeth and sticking to your plan, just like you always did.’

Puzzled, Tess shifted round with a frown. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You always had a plan.’

‘No, I didn’t!’ She gaped at him, amazed that he could remember things so differently. ‘I was always a follower. Look how I always tagged along after Vanessa at
school.’ She swung back to look through the windscreen. ‘I was lucky she was so kind to me, or I’d have been really lonely.’

Luke snorted. ‘Vanessa wasn’t kind. She needed you much more than you needed her.’

‘What are you talking about? Vanessa didn’t need
me
. She was always pretty and popular.’

‘Was she?’

‘Of course she was. She had loads of friends.’

‘I don’t think so. Oh, she had the boys after her, but you were her only girlfriend.’

Tess opened her mouth to protest, only to shut it again. She had never thought of it before, but Luke was right about that. ‘It was still kind of her to take me under her wing,’ she
said finally. ‘I was so gawky and too shy to talk to anyone else.’

‘And what better foil for pretty Vanessa?’

‘Perhaps you might like to try that again?’ Tess suggested, sweetness tinged with acid. ‘Here’s a suggestion: of course you weren’t gawky, Tess?’

Luke laughed. ‘You weren’t, but you would never believe it. You were awkward and aloof, but you were interesting. I liked that about you. And you knew you wanted more than just to
stay in York being safe. I liked that too, even if your plans didn’t involve me.’

Tess was silent. She looked at the cars ahead, unseeing, trying to remember the girl she had been, the dreams she had had. ‘I don’t remember having a plan,’ she said at last.
‘I thought I was being a good girl, doing what was expected of me. Go to university, get a job, get married. That’s not much of a plan, is it?’

‘You said that was what you wanted,’ said Luke. ‘You were very clear about it.’

‘Only because you made it clear that your plans didn’t include me,’ Tess said. She remembered
that
. ‘You were always talking about going off and travelling on
your own. There wasn’t much scope for archival research bumming around the world with you, even if you had wanted me, so of course I pretended that I wanted something different.’

Luke’s mouth twisted. ‘I only made such a thing about travelling because you were so set on a life that had no place for me. The truth is that I didn’t
know
what I
wanted. I just knew that it wasn’t to stay in York without you.’

Tess wished that she had known. She wondered how different her life would have been if she had, if she hadn’t been hurt and lonely when she met Martin, if she and Luke had talked, found
some way to compromise. But what was the point of regretting? The past was past. She had made her choice and she had to live with the consequences.

But maybe, just maybe, they would have another chance. Tess slid a glance at Luke, at his beaky profile; let her gaze linger on the cool curl of his mouth. His hair was too long and standing
every which way where he had dragged his hands through it. His jaw was dark and rough with stubble, and the urge to lay her palm against his cheek, to feel its prickle and anchor her swirling
emotions in the physical reality of him, rose in her on a flood of heat so powerful that her hand twitched with it.

She could do it. She could tell him to pull over, into a layby, onto the hard shoulder. She wouldn’t care. She could clamber all over him the way she had used to. She could burrow into his
lean, hard body. She could forget Martin and Nell, forget the pain in her fingers, forget
herself
. Blot out the turmoil and the fear and the uncertainty and the shame and the regret in the
feel of him, the taste of him.

But that would be using him, and she didn’t want to do that.

Luke glanced at her and Tess jerked her gaze away. ‘Your colour’s back,’ he said. ‘That’s something.’

She had enough to deal with, Tess reminded herself. As Luke had pointed out, being regressed by Ambrose only appeared to have made Nell stronger, but Tess was running out of options. She still
had Pat French’s card in her bag, but just thinking about contacting her made her fingers jump as pain and panic slashed across their tips like a knife. In the end they had agreed that
Ambrose would do more research on safeguards and that he would try to regress Tess again in a couple of weeks. Luke wasn’t happy about it, but Tess didn’t know what else to do.

She wasn’t going anywhere near a doctor. Doctors would talk about drugs and psychiatric evaluations. Doctors put records on computers. Tess didn’t trust Martin not to find them, and
use them against her.

She had told Luke about the cutlery drawer on the drive down to Lincoln, and his response had been instant.

‘Change the locks,’ he said.

‘I might be wrong. I could have tidied it up without thinking.’

‘Change them anyway,’ said Luke.

‘But how could Martin have got into the flat? There was no sign of a break-in.’

‘You told me yourself that he’s got money and contacts,’ Luke had said. ‘You can get pretty much anywhere you want if you’ve got enough cash, and a flat like
Richard’s would be a cinch. I could probably get in myself if I put my mind to it. Get some new locks,’ he had said, ‘and be very careful about who you give spares to.’

Tess locked up with special care that night. Oscar had been tired and whiny by the time they picked him up from her mother’s and it was some time before she could get him
to bed. Feeling guilty still over how easily Nell had been able to push him from her mind, she had allowed him extra time watching television and gave in to his demands for two more stories, but at
last he was asleep and, worn out by the emotional turmoil of the day, Tess was ready for bed too.

Change the locks.
Luke’s words rang in her head as she checked that the door was firmly closed. It seemed secure enough. He had promised to come and do the locks himself the next
day.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Tess had said when he left. ‘Nobody’s going to come into the flat while I’m there.’ She was perfectly safe, but on an impulse she hooked
the chain across the door.

Her fingers still resting on the door handle, she stood and listened. For Nell or for Martin? Tess wasn’t sure which.

The flat was quiet. She could hear the faint hum of the fridge in the kitchen, the muted sound of the television in the front room, and, louder than both, the roar of her own pulse in her
ears.

No sinister creaks, no creepy footsteps.

Still, there was
something
. She had been aware of it all evening. As if the air had been disturbed and was still settling.

Tess let her hand fall. She was getting paranoid. She switched on both computers in the front room, and got out the transcript she had printed out so far to check, but she couldn’t
concentrate. She kept thinking about the flat, about that sense that something didn’t belong.

Deliberately, she turned and studied the room. There was nothing out of place here, she was sure of it.

She checked the kitchen. The cat flap was open as it should be. Ashrafar was out patrolling the rooftops, but she could get in whenever she wanted. Bink was squashed under Oscar’s arm,
tail flopping over the duvet, while Oscar breathed deep and slow. Tess stood looking down at him for a long time, watching the dark sweep of his lashes on his cheek, the way he lay sprawled as if
he had taken a knockout blow to the chin.

Hugh had slept like that too.

‘No,’ she whispered, curling her fingers into defiant fists and deliberately forcing Meg and Hugh from her head. ‘No,
this
is my son.’

The bathroom was undisturbed.

In the doorway to her bedroom, she paused, braced for the icy wave of horror and panic that would roll over her without warning sometimes when she walked into the room. It was muted today, like
a ripple lapping at her shore rather than a breaking roller. Tess stepped past it and stood in the centre of the room, turning very slowly.

Silence. Not even the desperate scrabbling that still woke her sometimes in the night.

Tess’s eyes moved from her bed to the chest and onto the wardrobe, before jerking back to the chest. Frowning, she went over and laid her hand on the top. Her favourite picture of Oscar as
a toddler was there, along with a china dish where she kept the few pieces of jewellery she had brought with her. She touched them one by one. Everything Martin had bought her, she had left in the
house in London, but she had her grandmother’s pearl necklace and a pendant that had been her father’s last gift to her, and a pair of earrings Luke had given her the last Christmas
they were together. They were tiny silver squares and Martin had hated them.

‘They make you look butch,’ he had said dismissively. ‘Wear those pretty pearl drops I gave you.’

And, God help her, she had done. She had given away her worn jeans and leggings. She had thrown out her comfortable bras and knickers and worn silk and lace instead. Every morning now when she
pulled on jeans and a T-shirt it felt like a dangerous act of defiance.

Nothing was missing, nothing was wrong. It was all fine. She was just spooking herself.

Tess didn’t know what made her do it. Perhaps the drawers had been too carefully closed. Perhaps there was some other sliver of wrongness that tugged at her subconscious, but before she
had even thought about it, she had jerked open the top drawer, where she kept the plain bras and knickers she had bought since leaving London, shoved in anyhow where she could grab at them the way
she had that morning.