The Secrets Between Us (30 page)

‘Alexander, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have touched the dress, I …’

‘Take it off!’ he said, turning away. ‘Just take it off! Get rid of it!’

I heard him galloping down the stairs, and then I heard the sound of the door opening and closing. I heard the Land Rover engine start up. I put one hand over my mouth and tried to contain a sob.

‘Sarah?’

Jamie stood barefoot in the entrance to my room, his poorly white face all pinched and anxious.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘Why did Dad go out again?’

‘Nothing’s wrong, darling,’ I said as calmly as I could. I bent down and smoothed his face with my fingers. He was burning hot. There were two circles of red on his cheeks, like on a doll’s. I blew on his forehead.

‘Daddy was cross.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it was my fault, not yours.’

Jamie wiped his nose with the back of his hand and left a glistening trail across his cheek leading all the way to his ear.

‘Are
you
going to go away?’ he asked. ‘Is that why Daddy was shouting?’

I kissed the top of his head. He tasted salty and sweaty.

‘No, Jamie,’ I said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Definitely?’

‘One hundred per cent.’

Jamie nodded. He reached up and took hold of my hand, and his lower lip was swollen and trembling.

‘Oh, sweetheart, Jamie!’

I took the little boy in my arms and when I picked him up he wrapped his legs around my waist and snuggled his head into my neck.

‘You are a darling, beautiful boy,’ I told him. ‘I will never leave you, ever, no matter what.’

I stroked his back and held him tight while he cried with all his body, great big cathartic sobs, and I knew he was crying for his mother and, although I would never be Genevieve, I promised him that I would be there for him whenever he needed me.

I promised.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

THE NEXT MORNING
, the morning of the party, Virginia came to Avalon.

I did not hear her car on the drive, or the banging of the gate, or her footsteps on the path because I was fresh out of the shower and preparing to dry my hair. I heard the outer door opening and I ran to see who was there and it was Virginia, standing in the rosette room. She looked up at me. The hairdryer was in my left hand. My hair was wrapped in a towel.

‘Hello,’ I said.

I held out my free hand but, for the second time, she ignored it. She stepped up into the kitchen. She was wearing baggy old trousers, a polo-necked sweater, a quilted body-warmer, and her hair was tightly tied back.

‘I came straight from the stables,’ she said, crossing to the sink to wash her hands. ‘I didn’t have time to make myself presentable and I didn’t have the chance to call to tell you I was coming.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘You’re always welcome.’

She looked around for something to dry her hands on. I passed her the kitchen roll. She tore off several pieces.

‘The police came to Eleonora House yesterday,’ she said, rubbing at her palms. ‘Did you know?’

‘No.’

‘Claudia was with me. We were decorating the hall for the party. They came and they made us sit down in the living room.’

‘Oh no!’ I steadied myself on the back of a chair. My towel came loose and fell across my face. I pulled it away and let it fall across my shoulders. ‘What’s happened?’

‘You don’t know?’

I shook my head.

‘Human remains have been found,’ she said, and her voice was calm and clipped but I could sense the fear beneath it and I realized how bleak those words were. They were cold words to describe something that had once been a warm and vital person, somebody’s child; perhaps somebody’s parent.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The police came and they were very professional. It was a family friend, Detective Inspector Twyford, and a family liaison officer. I …’

I watched her quietly as she tried to find the right words. Her stoicism was humbling.

‘I felt like an actor who didn’t know his lines,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what one is supposed to say in those circumstances. Nothing prepares you.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, but I didn’t know what to say after that. Was she telling me Genevieve was dead? I stared at her stupidly.

‘The remains were found in a shallow grave in the sand dunes at Tenby. Hidden. Dumped. That’s the word they’ll use on the television.’

Her voice was faltering.

‘I’m so sorry …’ I said again.

‘My husband was resting when they came. I haven’t told him.’

‘No.’

‘You see,’ she said, pulling out a chair and sitting down, ‘the police don’t know anything themselves. All they have are
bones and … and hair. They could belong to anyone. What is the point of distressing him if it turns out to be somebody else?’

I could tell that her mouth was dry. I filled a glass with water from the tap and passed it to her. She took it and drank. A trickle of water ran down the line from the corner of her lips to the edge of her chin. It made her look terribly vulnerable.

‘I keep praying, God forgive me, that it is somebody else,’ she said. ‘Anybody. I don’t care who it is, so long as it’s not Genevieve.’

I nodded. I wanted to reach out to Virginia, but did not know how.

‘And the worst thing, Sarah, the worst of it is that it was I who pressured them into searching the area once we knew she had connections there. I thought I wanted to know the truth, but I don’t. If that is Genevieve they’ve found, I don’t want to know. I’d rather go back to knowing nothing.’

‘I’d feel the same.’

‘But surely Alexander told you about this? They spoke to him yesterday too.’

I opened my mouth to tell her she must be mistaken, and then I remembered how Alexander had come straight upstairs the previous evening, still in his boots, and found me wearing Genevieve’s dress, and the shock on his face and how he had gone straight out again. He had not returned until I was in bed. We had not spoken since. I died a little inwardly. The police had told him they’d found bones that most likely were Genevieve’s and he’d come upon me all dolled up in my make-up and her wedding dress. What had I done to him?

Virginia wasn’t looking at me. She stared through the window, into the distance. ‘It’s Philip’s birthday,’ she said. ‘It’s his birthday today. He is hoping Genevieve will surprise him at his party. That’s what he’s hoping. So how can I
tell him about the bones? How can I do that to him on his birthday?’

‘It’s not Genevieve,’ I said, and as soon as the words were out my hand flew to my mouth as if to stop any more emerging.

Virginia looked at me.

‘How do you know?’

I shook my head. I didn’t know where those words had come from but I was certain they were true.

‘Do you know where my daughter is?’ she asked, fixing me with her eyes. I moved my fingers from my lips.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t, but I’m sure she’s not in South Wales.’

There was a very long silence. I heard Virginia’s stomach rumble. She had almost certainly been up all night.

‘That was a very strange thing to say,’ she said at last.

‘I just had a feeling,’ I said, but it had been more than a feeling. I
knew
.

Virginia continued to stare at me.

‘Do you often have “feelings”?’

I realized how I must look to her, how stupid and how insensitive. I said nothing.

‘You don’t have any children, do you?’ she said eventually.

I thought of my baby boy. I remembered the feel of his little heel pressing against my swollen belly the week before he was born. I remembered the angle of his elbow, how utterly charming I used to find his foetal hiccups and how, when he slept curled inside me, I could feel the shape of his back, even the little buttons of his spine beneath my skin. How I used to balance a mug on my stomach and how touched and endeared Laurie and I were when the baby made it wobble and shake with his movements.

I remembered the stillness of him deep as an ocean.

I looked up to Virginia.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t have any children.’

‘Then you can’t possibly understand how it feels to lose one,’ she said.

‘Genevieve’s missing,’ I said quietly. ‘She’s not lost yet.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

SOME HOURS LATER
, Alexander came home. He looked exhausted. I went to him and kissed him gently, careful not to crowd him.

‘Virginia’s been here,’ I said. ‘She told me they’ve found—’

‘It’s not Genevieve,’ Alexander said, echoing my words earlier. Was it him I had heard, somehow? He went to the sink and turned on the taps.

‘Is it certain?’

‘Watch the news,’ he said.

I switched on the television and flicked through the channels. The bones belonged to a young girl who had gone missing from Swansea several years earlier. She had a drug problem that she fed with the proceeds of prostitution. She had a boyfriend who kept her on the streets. There was a picture of her. She was fair-haired and chubby, pulling a face at the camera. She looked very young, sweet, naïve.

I stopped feeling sad and started feeling angry. I went out into the garden and said the dead girl’s name over and over; I pictured her smile. At the end of the drive, down below on the lane, I saw the news crews drive past. I heard the crackling of their radios and phones, their laughter. I knew why they were laughing.

They knew about the bones. They had been poised to start door-stepping in Burrington Stoke, asking vulnerable people, stricken with grief, how they felt now that Genevieve’s body had been found.

Now that task would have gone to a crew in Swansea instead. The journalists and the camera people were as relieved as everyone else that the Tenby bones were not Genevieve’s. They had been let off the hook, at least for now. That was why they were laughing. They could go home and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

IN THE END
, I wore the ill-fitting black dress to Philip’s birthday party. No matter what I did with my hair and my face, I felt ugly and plain. Alexander didn’t notice, as usual, or if he did he didn’t say anything. I tiptoed round him, keeping quiet, being gentle. Jamie was still poorly. I was worried about leaving him, but Alexander said he’d be fine with Claudia and Bill’s sitter.

So later that evening, we bundled Jamie up in thick socks and his duvet and I held him on my knee while Alexander drove us to the Barn. There we kissed Jamie goodnight and left him in the adoring hands of his twin cousins, who were committed to attending to his every need, and Claudia’s sitter, a capable woman in her forties who looked as if she would brook no nonsense. I huddled my chin into my coat collar and we drove the short distance from the Barn up to Eleonora House.

It was an icy-cold night and the moon was so bright that the trees, all but leafless now, cast spiky shadows across the fields. Alexander had the heater turned up high and hot air billowed against my knees and blew back my hair. The day before I had wanted to look beautiful so that Alexander would be proud of me and I wouldn’t be unfavourably compared to Genevieve. Now I wanted to
look unremarkable. I wanted to simply fade into the background so nobody could say anything bad about me; at least, the worst they could say would be that I was plain, and quiet.

Alexander smiled at me as he pulled through the huge metal gates that led to Eleonora House. I thought it was as much to reassure himself as me. I could see the lights of the house up ahead, the big windows glowing yellow, their light spilling on to the patios and gardens, and Christmassy light-bulbs had also been strung along the drive. The effect was supposed to be festive and welcoming but so much artificial brightness made me feel intimidated. It was all too big, too bright, too noisy.

Genevieve had arranged the decorations for the party, I remembered. This was her work.

Inside an entrance hall that gleamed with polished wood on the walls and tiles on the floor, a maid took our coats and showed us where to put Philip’s cards and presents, and another maid offered us a glass of Buck’s Fizz. We took one each and followed the noise into Eleonora House hall.

It was a huge room. I couldn’t take it all in at once but the impression was of wood panelling, a springy floor designed for dancing, rugs and mismatched worn but elegant chairs, heavy brocade curtains, old paintings in enormous, ornate frames; everything green, red, gold and sparkling, a great crackling fire in the marble fireplace, girls in black skirts and aprons wielding canapé trays, the largest, most opulently dressed Christmas tree I’d ever seen and people; many people.

There were probably a hundred guests, most of them at least one generation older than we were. It was noisy in the room, a combination of music, laughter and the high-pitched, excitable tune of people flirting and flattering and showing off. It was a more relaxed, jollier atmosphere than I’d envisaged and I realized that everyone was relieved because every single guest had spent most of the day worrying
about the Tenby bones. They had been half-expecting the party to turn into a wake.

I spotted Claudia in a long floaty cream and pink dress which flattered her colouring. With her hair newly dyed and piled on top of her head, she looked classically beautiful, like a woman in an Old Master painting. She was standing with two elderly women, listening to them, smiling and nodding, and as her head moved diamonds twinkled in her earlobes and at her neck. Bill stood nearby. He was also being talked at, and he was half-listening, but his sleepy, loving eyes were on Claudia. Across the room she caught my eye and she smiled and held up her hand in greeting. I smiled back.

I glanced at the face of the ornate clock that stood handsomely on a magnificent sideboard. How long, I wondered, before we could decently leave?

Alexander took my elbow.

‘Let’s say hello to Philip,’ he said.

We walked through the throng until we found the old man standing with his back to the fireplace, supporting himself on a silver-headed mahogany stick. His head was a little too big for his body, and silver hair, still bushy, stuck up from the age-spotted skin of his skull. He was a tall man; he must have been imposing not so long ago, before illness and anxiety brought him down. Although he feigned an interest in the conversation around him and his free hand still held a glass, there was something of death about his eyes. Looking at him made me feel sad.