The Older Man (25 page)

“It wasn’t his fault. I went through that window, didn’t I?” Rennie asked, looking at her hands. She could see several small red nicks not covered by the bandages. “How bad are the cuts?”

“They can’t tell yet. Fortunately the glass missed your eyes.” Her mother sounded reassuringly matter-of-fact.

“He must have been crazy,” Rennie said. “Kevin. With all those people about — “

“I could wish some of those people had reacted a bit faster,” Marian said.

“Didn’t they do anything?”

“Oh, yes. But only after he’d knocked you through that window. Then a couple of men held him until the police got there. And the ambulance.”

Rennie moved her right arm, and winced. “You must have been worried. Getting a call from the hospital — or was it the police? I suppose that would be worse.”

“Actually, Grant phoned me.”

“Grant? How did he — “

“It happened right across the street from his office,” Marian reminded her. “When the ambulance arrived, naturally he looked out to see what was going on. He recognised you — well, your clothes — as they were putting you on the stretcher. He went down, insisted on going with you to the hospital, then phoned me. When I arrived he was with you. You don’t remember?

Rennie shook her head. “I thought I’d dreamed — ” Grant holding her hand, stroking her hair, whispering words of comfort and love into her ear. That part she must have dreamed. “That was kind of him,” she said. “Please thank him for me.”

Marian hesitated. “I have, of course, for all of us. But you can do that yourself when you’re feeling better,” she added.

“I don’t want to see him.”

“You don’t want to see him? Or you don’t want him to see you?”

“Does it matter?” Rennie felt tears gathering in her eyes. “Please! Please, keep him away from me!”

Marian got up and took her hand. “All right, I’ll explain that you’re not up to having visitors except family, okay?”

“Thank you.” The tears were trickling down her cheeks, now, soaking into the dressings and bandages.

“Shh.” Her mother smoothed her hair. “It’s all right, Rennie. Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”

It won’t, Rennie thought. But she was childishly glad of her mother’s comforting presence, and in a little while the tears stopped and she went to sleep.

She had to agree to see Grant. It was unreasonable not to, and he had been asking to visit. She didn’t dare say that she couldn’t bear him to bring Lorna, but when he arrived he was alone, bearing only messages from her. And flowers. She was glad of the yellow roses, because the business of thanking him and smelling their perfume and asking a nurse for a vase helped her to get over the initial greeting.

“They tell me you stayed with me on the way to the hospital,” she said. “I don’t remember, but thank you.”

“I only wish I’d realised sooner what was going on,” he said tautly. “If I’d looked out the window before it happened…”

“Even if you had been watching,” she said, “there was nothing anyone could have done. I’ve had enough guilt to deal with from Shane and Amanda. Don’t you start.”

His smile was strained. “They got off lightly.”

“I was the unlucky one,” she agreed. “I must have been a mess.”

His mouth compressed as he nodded. He said, his voice hoarse, “You were, rather. I’ve never seen so much blood in my life.”

Rennie looked down at the blue hospital coverlet. “I’m sorry if I gave you a fright.”

“I was scared out of my mind.”

“Maybe it’s just as well I was unconscious.”

“Rennie — why didn’t you want to see me?”

“Don’t take it personally. I’m not exactly pretty just now. I guess I was just self-conscious.”

“You looked much worse in the ambulance. Compared to then, you’re a raving beauty now, bandages and all!” He smiled, but not with his eyes, which were anxious.

“Yes, I s’pose. How is Lorna?” she asked. “And the children?”

“Lorna’s well,” he said shortly. “The children…” He hesitated. “They wanted to visit, but … oh, I forgot. They made cards for you.” He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it over. Her bandaged hand fumbled with the opening of it and he had to help her.

Looking at the childish drawings, and the painstakingly printed messages, she blinked back tears. “Thank them for me,” she said. “I can’t write to them with this — ” She moved her bandaged hand. “And you’re right, it’s probably better if they don’t visit.”

“Rennie — ” He stretched out his hand to hers, and she said sharply, “Please don’t touch me, Grant!”

He sat back, looking at her strangely. She thought he had paled.

“It hurts,” she explained, and tried to smile. “I have cuts and bruises all over. “I just — don’t want to be touched. Nothing personal.”

“No,” he said woodenly. “Of course, nothing personal.”

“It was kind of you to come,” she said.

“I came because I — because I wanted to.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Give my love to Ellen and Toby. And Lorna,” she added with an effort.

His mouth was wry. “Are you dismissing me?”

She said, “I am rather tired. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” he said. “I should be doing that.”

She didn’t know what for. She didn’t ask.

He looked at her for a few moments, rather helplessly. Then he said, “Get well, Rennie.” He leaned over and very gently kissed a spot on her forehead that wasn’t bandaged, turned abruptly and left the room.

She had to make a statement to the police. But there was no need to appear in court. Kevin had decided to plead guilty, they said, so the case would be wrapped up quite quickly.

Shane came to tell her about the verdict.

“Is he going to jail?” she asked him.

“He got a suspended sentence, on condition that he remains under supervision and gets some treatment,” Shane said. “And Amanda has taken out a court order against him molesting her. So if he goes near her he’ll be rearrested and have to serve his sentence.”

“I see.” So he wasn’t to be locked up. Rennie shivered. Her left arm had been freed of its dressings, the right one was lightly bandaged and in a sling. There had been damage to the tendons of her right hand. She was having physiotherapy, but a certain amount of stiffness would probably remain. The dressings on her face were lighter and smaller than they had been. She’d had further surgery and would need more in a few months’ time.

She was allowed home in time for Christmas. The bandages and dressings came off, and she nerved herself to look in a mirror. The smaller cuts were healing nicely and would soon disappear, but there was a nasty purple scar on her temple, which she could comb her hair over, and another on her right cheek, jagged and uneven.

On Christmas Day only relatives were invited. Rennie knew her mother was being tactful. She forced herself to appear at lunch, but afterwards pleaded tiredness and said she wanted to rest. No one dared suggest a birthday party to her. Her mother told her that Grant was asking to see her. She said no. She knew her family was worried.

When visitors came she fled to her room. One day Ethan and Celeste’s car drew up outside, and she retreated from the window muttering an excuse as her mother went to let them in. From her bedroom, she heard Ethan’s footsteps in the passageway, and then he knocked on the door, calling her name.

She didn’t answer, but he came in anyway, bringing her scrambling resentfully off the bed, facing him with angry eyes.

“Rennie,” he said gently, putting both arms around her. “Your parents are worried sick. You do realise you’re suffering from depression?”

Rennie nodded. She wanted to tell him it was more than that, but that name would do for now.

“We know something about that, Celeste and I. Sheerwind is a good place to be when you need emotional healing. We want you to come back with us.”

“Sheerwind?” The magical island she had dreamed of visiting. A place where no one would know her. A thousand miles across the Pacific, a thousand miles from Kevin. And from Grant.

“We’ll check with your GP and the hospital,” Ethan said, “but we have a semi-retired doctor almost next door on the island. Henry will be glad to keep an eye on you. The only other near neighbour is a writer, and he’s away just now researching a new book in New Guinea.” He was telling her there would be almost no one she had to meet.

Her mother helped her to pack, and arranged her hair to fall across the scarred cheek so that it wasn’t so obvious. Rennie didn’t have the heart to tell her that really it didn’t matter.

The flight was quite short and uneventful. Celeste and Ethan fussed over her unobtrusively, and when they arrived on the island Celeste insisted that Rennie should take the front seat next to Ethan so that she could see the scenery. There was only one town, Conneston. They soon passed through it, and followed a road bordered by tall rubber trees with glossy leaves, a few palms waving above everything else, and lots of shrubby scarlet and yellow hibiscus.

The road eventually rounded a hillside to a small bay where the water was enclosed by a steep, tree-covered slope. Ethan’s house was nestled on the slope, a magnificent wall of glass giving the maximum impact from the spacious living room. The sea opened out from the bay and stretched away limitless to the horizon. Today it looked very calm, a great spread of crinkled dark blue with sequin glints sparking off it.

“It’s just as you described it,” Rennie said, turning to him as he carried in her case. “I feel better already.”

The days went by, then weeks. Rennie swam and sunbathed, and watched Celeste painting silks in her studio, trying to show a normal amount of enthusiasm. But she overheard Celeste and Ethan discussing her once, when they were sitting on the terrace outside the house, unaware that their voices carried in the evening air, all the way to the trees where Rennie was climbing the path from the beach after a quick swim.

“…a vivacious girl. It’s not like her to be this quiet,” came Celeste’s voice. “Is it?”

“She certainly isn’t herself. Better, though, than when she arrived here. Give her time,” Ethan said easily.

That night she dreamed. Saw a face behind her, reflected in glass, distorted by hatred. And then she fell and the face disintegrated into a thousand pieces, and pain sliced into her.

She woke with a scream, and found strong arms around her, pulling her close, and a deep voice saying, “Shh. It’s all right, Rennie, it’s only a dream.”

“Grant!” she gasped, and clutched at him, shuddering with relief. “Oh, Grant!”

“No, not Grant,” Ethan said in a strange voice. He turned his head, and Rennie, lifting her hot forehead from his comforting chest, saw Celeste was standing by the bed.

Celeste took her hand. “Did you want Grant?” she asked quietly.

“Yes! No, I just thought … I was asleep. I thought he…”

“He was in your dream?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s him. First it’s Kevin, and then it’s him. It changes. That’s why it’s so frightening.”

“But you weren’t frightened when you thought I was him,” Ethan pointed out.

“Oh no! I knew I’d been dreaming then, and I thought…” She moved back onto the pillows. “I’m sorry, I woke you both. It’s just a silly dream.”

“A recurring one?” Ethan asked, standing up. He was wearing a short dark robe. Celeste was in her nightdress.

“Yes,” Rennie said. “But it hasn’t come so often since I’ve been here. I dream about … about going through the glass. The odd thing about it is, I don’t actually remember that part at all. Kevin had knocked me out before it happened.”

“Would you like a drink or something to help you go back to sleep?” Celeste asked.

“No. I’ll be fine now.”

A few days later she was helping Celeste to mix some paints in the studio when the other woman said casually, “Did you mention your bad dreams to Henry?”

“I haven’t had any since that night I woke you.”

Celeste said, in the same casual tone, “Grant’s not a man who would want to hurt someone on purpose.”

“What makes you think that he did?”

“That dream isn’t so hard to figure out, Rennie,” Celeste said. “Kevin injured you quite deliberately. In the dream the man sometimes changes from Kevin to Grant.”

Rennie said, her hands stilling, “I saw Grant just before — the other thing happened. I suppose that’s why they’ve got muddled in my mind.”

“I see.”

Rennie looked up, and saw that she did. Celeste didn’t need to know the details. But she knew about the pain. Rennie blinked, trying to hold back the tears, but Celeste put down the paintbrush in her hand and said, “Oh, my dear.” And held out her arms.

Rennie went into them and cried her heart out.

Rennie had received letters from her family and sent back brief, cheerful replies in a slightly wavering hand. She was feeling better, the island was beautiful, Celeste and Ethan were being very kind, Henry was keeping an eye on her health…

She wrote to Toby and Ellen too, telling them she was having a holiday on a lovely Pacific island, and thanked them again for their card. She didn’t want them to think that like their mother she had disappeared from their lives. Folding the page into an envelope, she brushed away tears. She had a sudden longing to hold Ellen’s warm little body close, to be the privileged recipient of one of Toby’s rare hugs.

She borrowed a bicycle that Janice Palmer, the doctor’s wife, had stored in her garage. “I used to ride it,” Janice told her, “but the old bones are a bit creaky now. You’re welcome to it as long as you’re here.”

She found beaches, and a deserted bay where the waves crashed around jagged black rocks and there was no beach to speak of, only a small shelf of black pebbles that rolled and drifted under the receding water and made little clicking noises. There were spiky spiral shells and spotted cowries and other more ordinary shells among the stones. And she picked some of the tropical flowers from the trees and took them home to put in vases. But they didn’t last.

The local people were friendly, and though sometimes her scars drew curious looks, but nobody stared or asked questions.

She went into town one day with Ethan to collect the mail. When they got back Celeste was on the terrace. Ethan kissed her and tossed a pile of letters into her lap.