Set in Stone, page 10
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
We didn’t talk about the Milners or the Strathallans or their sundry tragedies. Suddenly they’d become too much like ill omens for me to want to dwell on them. I had my own tragedy in the making now, anyway, blind though I was to the form it was already assuming.
“I’m not going to be able to give you up,” Lucy said to me after we’d made love in the cool lethargy of a still, grey dawn. It was the day of our projected trip to Newmarket with Daisy. The week was wearing on. Matt would be back soon. He was bound to be. Our small chunk of the future was nearly done.
“You have to give me up. I have to give you up.”
“Why?”
“Because Matt’s your husband. He’s also my best and oldest friend. This would destroy him,”
“He’s stronger than you think.”
“Not strong enough.”
“Are you? Am I? How can we resist what’s so obviously right?”
“But it isn’t right. It’s all wrong. You know that.”
“I know what I feel. And what you feel. We have to trust that. I don’t really think we’re going to be able to stop, do you? Not when it comes to it.”
“Don’t answer. Not now. I know what you think you ought to say. And I know what we’ll do when the time comes. They aren’t the same, believe me. Not the same at all.”
I remembered her words several times as the day unfolded. Daisy was with us for the greater part of it, so there could be no hint of intimacy between Lucy and me, no suggestion that any kind of crisis was looming. We were both pensive and distracted, though no more so than recent bereavement might account for. So I hoped, anyway. But I’d reckoned without Daisy’s perspicacity. She chose a moment during the afternoon when Lucy wasn’t with us to let me know she’d seen through us very clearly.
We’d gone down to watch the horses parade before one of the later races, leaving Lucy in the stand. “Can you tell how they’re going to run from just looking at them?” I asked, as the twitching thoroughbreds circled in front of us.
“Oh yes,” Daisy replied. “Appearances aren’t really as deceptive as some people like to think.”
“Perhaps it’s your sculptor’s eye.”
“Perhaps. Or just old age. One learns to recognize pretence when one sees it.”
I smiled. “Are any of these pretending?”
“No. Only humans do that.”
“But we’re talking about horses.”
“Are we?” She looked at me sharply. “I rather thought we’d moved on to something else.”
“Had we?”
“You’ve recently lost your wife. Lucinda has lost her sister. Such experiences can lead to misjudgements: of what is right, of what will last, of what is truly…desirable.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Daisy.”
“I’m sure you do. Lucinda isn’t as strong as she supposes. Attribute that insight to my sculptor’s eye, if you like. I see the frailty beneath the skin. Yours as well as hers. You seem to me to be in the process of making a considerable mistake. Possibly the greatest mistake of your life.”
“But it is my life.”
“And is therefore none of my business?”
I shrugged. “You said it.”
“Lucinda is my friend.”
“And would like to remain so, I’m sure.”
“Just think about what you’re doing, Tony.” She paused. “That’s all I ask.”
Daisy said nothing in Lucy’s presence that revealed her understanding of the situation. She was all bright-eyed levity as the meeting ended and we started back for Rutland. We stopped for a meal at a restaurant in Stamford on the way, and she went on behaving as if our conversation hadn’t taken place. Such glances as we exchanged were on her part defiantly open, declaring to me, it seemed, that she withdrew nothing and resented nothing. The choice was ours to make. But she was determined to ensure that I appreciated there was a choice to make.
If I’d been in the slightest doubt about that, it didn’t last much longer. When we got back to Otherways that night, after dropping Daisy at Maydew House, there was a message from Matt waiting for us on the answerphone.
“I’ll be leaving tomorrow night. Flight BA174. It gets into Heathrow at seven o’clock Saturday morning. I’m hoping one of you—or both of you—will be there to meet me. Lots to tell you. Bye.”
“Lots to tell us,” said Lucy, as she switched off the machine. “There’s irony for you.”
“So soon,” I murmured numbly.
“What difference does it make? Whether sooner or later, we have to face it.”
“Face him, you mean. With this. With what we’ve become.”
“I’m not ashamed of it. Are you?”
“Not ashamed, no. Frightened, I suppose.”
“Of what he’ll say?”
“No. Of what it’ll do to him. Of what we’ll do to him.”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Yes. Of course. We have to…think…about…” I stopped, hearing in my voice the echo of Daisy’s words.
“I think we have to tell him the truth.” Lucy faced me, her eyes searching my face for confirmation, for reassurance—and for complicity. “But if you can’t bring yourself to, and if you won’t let me…”
“Yes? What then?”
“We can go on in secret.” Her head fell. “Somehow. I don’t know. Without him realizing. We can find a way.”
“You’d be willing to do that?”
“I can’t give you up. I told you. It’s as simple as that.”
So now, here we were, where we were always bound to arrive, lured by passion and longing into the sordid beginnings of conspiracy. We could destroy him, or we could deceive him. There was no middle way.
“Do you love me, Tony?”
“How can I—”
“Do you?”
“I—” Breaking free of her gaze, I strode to the window and stared out at the dusk gathering moistly over the garden. I heard Lucy move in the room behind me. I sensed the whirl and confusion of her thoughts as well as mine.
“Well?”
“I need you. I want you. But…”
“Is that all?” She was at my shoulder now. “Don’t you understand? Yes, this will break Matt up. Of course it will. If he finds out. But he doesn’t have to find out. There are ways and means. Trust me.”
“He trusts us. That’s the problem, Lucy. There, in that inconvenient, stubborn little word. Trust. What do we do about that?”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“I suggest we stop. Now. Before it’s too late.”
“Stop?”
“Take a step back. Think about what it means.”
“It means one of two things: either this is real and true and wonderful, or it’s not. Either we give in to what we feel for each other, or what we feel, what you feel, is shown to be a lie.”
“It’s never been that.”
“Then what is it—if you can walk away from it so easily?”
“I never said it would be easy.”
“But possible, right? Feasible. Survivable.”
“It has to be.”
“Not for me.” She pulled me round, forcing me to face her. “For you, apparently. But not for me.”
“Maybe I should go away. Before Matt gets back. For a few days, anyway. While we both…think things through.”
“I don’t need to think anything through.”
“But I do.”
“Yes. And your needs come first, don’t they?”
“Of course not. I just—”
She hit me a stinging blow on the cheek and I staggered back, more in shock than pain. She aimed another blow and I raised my arm to fend her off. Her face crumpled and tears welled from her eyes. She pulled away. “Bastard!” she cried. “You fucking bastard.” Then she reeled to the door, sobbing as she went.
“Lucy!”
“Leave me alone.” She looked back at me from the doorway, her eyes red and brimming, her whole body quivering. “Isn’t that what you’ve been saying you want to do?” Then the door slammed and she was gone.
I forced myself to wait half an hour before knocking on her bedroom door. But there was no answer, not even when I called to her and pleaded with her to respond. Finally, I tried to open the door. But it was locked. I was excluded as well as rejected.
I went back downstairs and drank some Scotch, nursing the glass in my lap as I sat by the French windows, watching darkness close around the house. I’d known such a moment of lacerating misery was bound to follow as soon as Lucy and I had admitted our attraction to each other. It hadn’t stopped me. But maybe, it bleakly occurred to me, Lucy hadn’t known. If not, it was even worse for her than it was for me. Small wonder she thought I’d played her false. I’d betrayed her now, as well as Matt.
Eventually, around midnight, I crept upstairs and went to bed. In the morning, I told myself, things wouldn’t seem so bad. We’d find some way out of this. We had to.
I must have fallen asleep quite quickly. I have no memory of lying awake at all. My next memory is of being roused, suddenly, by a movement in the room, and looking up to see a figure standing beside the bed. There was enough moonlight peeping between the curtains for me to make the figure out as a woman. She was naked, tall and slim, with dark hair falling over her shoulders, and she was trembling, not from the cold, for it felt stiflingly hot in the room, but from fear, it seemed, as she pointed and stared at me.
“Who are you?” she said in a quavering voice. “What are you doing here?”
I tried to speak, but could only mumble. I reached for the bedside lamp, but my arm moved slowly, impeded by something, responding reluctantly to the urgings of my brain.
“You’re real, aren’t you?” she went on. “I’m not imagining you.”
My fingers found the switch, but couldn’t seem to move it, fumbling for a hold. I was gripped not just by alarm, but by sheer, unreasoning terror. I knew who she was. But I didn’t want to believe it.
“Tell me who you are. I have to know. Why are you here?”
At last, the switch moved. There was a click. Electric light burst into the darkness.
And she was no longer there. I was awake, with the bedside lamp burning. I must have fallen asleep with it still on. The rest had merely been a dream. But the dream had seemed real enough to leave me bathed in sweat, bewildered by my susceptibility to the inventions of my subconscious.
I scrambled out of bed and blundered to the bathroom, tugging at the light cord as I pushed open the door, aware, as I did so, of unreasonable heat and humidity, and of the sound of water dripping into water. Then I saw the cause.
The bath was full, very nearly to the brim, with the hot tap dripping. I turned it off tightly, pulled the plug and watched the water drain away, asking myself whether there was any chance I could have run a bath and somehow forgotten doing so. But I was as certain as I could be of anything that I’d done no such thing. It was impossible. Yet there was the water swirling down the plughole. There were the streams of condensation on the mirror and the windows. There was the proof that somebody had, even if it wasn’t me.
Sleep was out of the question after that. I bathed my face in cold water, threw on some clothes and went down to the kitchen. The night was just beginning to weaken outside, the sky paling as dawn made its first inroads. A few birds were already singing in the garden. I brewed some coffee and began seriously to wonder, as I sat at the table drinking it, whether I was losing my mind. Maybe, I reasoned, it was delayed shock, following your death: an unhinging of reason as well as emotion. If so, Lucy and I might be caught up in a mutual aberration that later, a few months down the road, we’d be happy to forget.
Lucy walked quietly into the room as I was sitting there. She was wearing a short towelling bathrobe and mules. Her hair was unbrushed, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow. She stopped and looked at me. A moment passed. Then she drew out a chair, the legs scraping on the floor, and sat down opposite me.
“Is that a bruise on your cheek?” she murmured.
“Could be,” I said, touching the place where she’d hit me and noticing for the first time how tender it was.
“I’m sorry.”
“I think I deserved it.”
“Not really. What you were saying…” She reached across the table, and I stretched out my hand to meet hers. “Well, it had to be said, didn’t it? We can’t just…ignore everything.”
“And everyone?”
“Exactly.”
“Much as we’d like to.”
“I know I would.”
“Me, too. But…there are other people to consider.”
“I haven’t slept much. What about you?”
“Not much. And not well.”
“Too many things to think about, I suppose.”
“Probably.”
“Well, I have thought. We’ve got to go into this with our eyes open, Tony. We’ve got to be fully committed, not just to each other, but to riding out however much anguish there’s going to be along the way.”
“I agree.”
“So, maybe you were right. If you go away, for a few days, we’ll know, won’t we, whether we love each other enough…to make the rest of it bearable?”
“It seems that way to me.” It was only partly a lie. I was too unsure of myself, in that house, in her company, to judge what a breathing space might achieve. But that we needed one I didn’t doubt.
“You will stay with me until tomorrow, won’t you?”
I should have refused. I should have insisted on leaving that morning. It would have been kinder to both of us. But leaving was going to be a grim business. And I knew we still had one more day.
“Won’t you?” she repeated. But by then she must have been able to read the answer in my face.
The knowledge that it was our last day together—at least for a while—tinged that Friday’s pleasures with despair. The hours flashed by while we feasted on the things that would soon be denied us. I don’t mean just sex. I mean lying side by side and watching the trees move in the breeze and the sunlight fade and flare between the clouds. And talking. We did a lot of that. But I’m not sure now what it was we talked about. It doesn’t matter, anyway. You were our mutual confidante, Marina. We trusted you with our secrets. So, now you were gone, it was easy, in a way, to trust each other.
Some secrets we still kept back, of course. When I came as close as I dared to mentioning the strange things I’d seen at Otherways, I was aware that Lucy’s candour was suddenly reined in. There were limits, I realized, to what she was ready to reveal to me. Perhaps, for both our sakes, there had to be.
“Have you ever experienced anything…ghostly at Otherways?” I asked, as we stood on the lawn, near the rhododendron bank, down which a path had once led to the sunken garden.
“No,” said Lucy, with a little frown of puzzlement that turned rapidly into a smile of amusement. “Whatever makes you ask?”
“Something Matt said.”
“About ghosts?”
“Indirectly.”
“I don’t know what he can have meant. There are no ghosts at Otherways. Perhaps there ought to be, in view of the things that have happened here. But I’ve seen nothing and sensed nothing. To me, the house seems…” She glanced towards it. “Surprisingly peaceful.”
“I’ve had some strange dreams since arriving here.”
“How strange?”
“Stranger than any I’ve had before.”
She shrugged. “I can’t explain that.”
“You know you said you dreamed of us making love before we did?”
“Yes.”
“So did I.”
“Well, that I can explain.” She reached out and caressed my cheek, stroking the bruise across the cheekbone with her thumb. “Your dream showed you what you most desired. And, as it happens, what I most desired too.” Her hand fell away. She looked at the house again. “No ghosts, Tony. Just you and me. No nightmares. Just dreams. Maybe we’re dreaming right now. If we are, I don’t want to wake up.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then let’s go on dreaming. For a little longer.” She began walking slowly back across the lawn, towards the bridge across the moat. And, after a moment’s hesitation, I started after her.
Night came. If we slept at all, I don’t remember it. But I remember the tears that filled her eyes as we lay together. And I remember the heavy foreboding that clamped itself around my mind one second after we’d as good as forced each other to a last despairing climax. The wrongness and the madness of what we’d allowed to happen between us was never clearer to me than in that long moment of unravelling limbs and slowing breath. There was no way forward and no way back. Waiting for us now there was only the cool grey finality of dawn.
“You won’t be here when I get back with Matt?” Lucy asked as we stood by her car, both of us shivering in the misty chill of daybreak.
“No.”
“How shall I explain that to him?”
“Say a buyer’s been found for Stanacombe and he’s pressing for an early completion, so I’ve had to go down there to sort things out.”
“Is that where you’ll be?”
“I’m not sure.”
“And how long will you be gone?”
“I’m not sure about that, either.”
“But you will be back, won’t you?” There was a skittering anguish in her eyes, more than I had the power to dispel. Though I would have done, gladly, had I been able.
“Of course.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Then she kissed and hugged me and, with a set little smile of false courage, she climbed into the car and drove away.
I could hear the roar of the engine as she accelerated down the lane towards Hambleton. It faded gradually into the pervading silence, until its distant note was finally extinguished. Then I was truly alone. I thought of that morning at Stanacombe, when you drove away for the last time. It had been the present once. Now it was the past. So, too, was this moment, a cusp between the altered states we call yesterday and tomorrow. I’d be back. Of course I would. But how and when and why—and what I’d find—lay still in wait for me. And for Lucy. The future was preparing its ambush. For both of us.
