Set in Stone, page 9
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
“I was beginning to get worried about you,” said Lucy, with a smile of relief as I walked into the drawing room. She was sitting by the open French windows, sipping coffee, with the debris of the morning papers spread around her chair. She was wearing your coral-trimmed shirt and cream trousers, quite unself-consciously it seemed. She looked more genuinely relaxed than at any time since your death. She looked, to tell the truth, quite radiant. “Did Matt get off OK?”
“No problems.”
“Want some coffee? There’s plenty in the pot. Nesta made some fresh before she left. I brought another cup just in case.”
I poured myself some, drew up a chair and sat down opposite her. “Anything in the papers?” I asked banally.
“They might as well be about another planet.”
“But who’s on the other planet, Lucy? Them, or you and me?”
“Since you ask, I think it might be you and me.”
“What sort of place is it?”
“Strange. Unsettling.”
“That’s what a lot of people say about this house.”
“A world unto itself, then. But it grows on you.”
“Matt’s worried it might have grown on you more than it should.”
“He worries too much.”
“Because he loves you.”
“Sometimes love isn’t enough.”
“It should always be enough.”
“Not between a man and a woman. There’s something else. Something more.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes you do.”
“No.” I stood up and walked out into the open air. “I don’t.”
“Don’t be frightened, Tony.” She was suddenly standing at my shoulder, her hand resting lightly on my arm. “Some things have to be.”
I took a few distancing steps out onto the bridge across the moat and leaned against the parapet, looking back at her. “Marina’s death,” I said, slowly and deliberatively, “is a loss both of us have to learn to adjust to—to live with as best we can.”
“We can help each other.” There was nothing even remotely disingenuous in her gaze. She meant exactly what she said. But what she meant by it encompassed my future as well as hers. “We share the loss. We can share the healing.”
“It sounds so simple.”
“It is.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re lonely without her.”
“Of course.”
“So am I.”
“But you have Matt.”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed, stepped closer and leaned against the parapet beside me. “There’s something you don’t know about Matt and me,” she said in an undertone. “He’s impotent, you see. That is, he can’t…hasn’t…for a long time now.” She lowered her head. “I don’t know what the problem is. He won’t try to find out. But it eats away at him. And at me. Worse than ever, since Marina died. I don’t know why that should make it seem suddenly so unbearable, but it does.” She turned to me, tears brimming in her eyes. “I can’t go on like this, Tony.”
“I had no idea.” Instinctively, I put my arm around her. She sank against my shoulder. “None at all.”
“Marina knew. I made her promise not to tell you.” I felt a stab of shock at that. We never had any secrets, you and I. Or so I’d supposed. And I didn’t blame you for keeping this one. But still, it was a secret. “I feel so sorry for Matt. And for myself. But I can’t love him unconditionally. I need more than he can give.”
“Lucy.” She raised her head and looked at me, her eyes searching my face. “We can’t…”
“We can’t not.” Then she kissed me. And I returned her kiss, the long denial of physical closeness swamping my doubts and scruples. Forbidden fruit is the sweetest, don’t they say? With my first taste of it I knew they were right. Forbidden, yet faintly familiar. There was part of you in her. And I missed you so much. The rest was a dark longing that burst from its hiding place. My dream of two nights before flashed into my mind. It was going to happen. And I wanted it to. Everything else was futile resistance. “Come upstairs,” Lucy urged, breaking away. “Now. If we wait, we’re lost.”
But we were lost either way. It was already too late to put our world back together. We were standing amidst its ruins. We didn’t see them, but they were there. All around us. Waiting for us to notice. When we could notice anything again. Beyond each other.
“I’m sorry,” I said later, sitting on the edge of the bed, with Lucy lying against the pillows behind me, her hand on my hip, the noon sun warm on my thigh. “That should never have happened.”
“We both wanted it to,” said Lucy, softly.
“What we want isn’t all that counts.”
“Sometimes it has to be.”
I turned and looked at her, my eyes drifting across her body. “You’re beautiful.”
“Like Marina.”
“I’m not using you as a substitute for her.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were. I’d understand, you know.” She took my hand and led it to her breast. “You remember I said I dreamed I was here while I was with Matt at Cliveden?”
“Yes.” Her nipple stiffened beneath my palm.
“This is what I dreamed of. You and me. Like it just was. I mean, exactly like it was.” We’d both dreamed it. We’d both seen it. And now we’d acted it out. “It had to be.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But it’s true, isn’t it? You sensed it as well.”
“Yes.” I looked straight into her eyes, sparkling with recent memories. “I did.”
“There are no limits.”
“We can’t go on.”
“We can’t stop.”
“Matt is—” She pressed her fingers to my mouth, silencing me.
“Thousands of miles and hundreds of hours away. We have the present—and a small chunk of the future. Let’s enjoy it.”
“What we’re doing…is wrong.”
“But it’s so good.” She reached down towards me as I leaned across her. “Isn’t it?”
And it was. God forgive me, it was.
Now you know. Maybe you’re not so very surprised after all. Lucy was the closest I could be to you. There was a sort of logic to it. And a lot of passion. I hadn’t realized just how much passion there was, waiting to be released, in me as well as her. You were gone. You were lost to me. There was nothing I did that betrayed you or our love. That was the past. This was the present. So I told myself, anyway. So I tried to believe. But even then I couldn’t delude myself where Matt was concerned. Every moment I enjoyed with Lucy, every act I savoured, was a wrong I did him. We were all going to pay for what was happening. In our different ways.
“You haven’t mentioned the magazine article,” Lucy said later, with a teasing smile. “Has something taken your mind off it?”
“You could say so, yes.”
“Just as well. It’s all ancient history, you know.”
“Not to Daisy, I imagine.”
“I never talk to her about it.”
“Do you think she has the confession James Milner wrote in prison?”
Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Rainbird reckons Daisy gave it to Strathallan.”
“You shouldn’t believe anything that man says. He’s an obnoxious little shit. I keep telling Daisy to turf him out. God knows why she puts up with him.” She frowned. “When did you and Rainbird have this heart-to-heart?”
“I met him by chance, in the Whipper-in at Oakham on Saturday night.” The lie was forgivable, wasn’t it? I didn’t know how she’d react to the discovery that he’d tricked his way into the house during her absence. “He seemed remarkably well-informed.”
“What about?”
“The Milner family. And the Strathallans. Did you know Strathallan’s daughter committed suicide?”
“Yes. Daisy mentioned it. But it’s common knowledge.”
“How common?”
“Depends on who you ask.”
“Does Matt know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It doesn’t seem to have been a lucky house.”
“It has been for me.” She grinned, then looked sombre. “But it does hold a lot of secrets. Including Rosalind Strathallan’s.” She paused, weighing something in her mind, judging, I suppose, how much trust went with our new-found intimacy. “There was a diary. Hers. Of the last year of her life. It was on a shelf, concealed within the disused chimney breast in her room. The room you’ve been sleeping in. I found it when I redecorated. Her parents can’t have known it was there. I showed it to Daisy. She realized whose it was and told me what had happened to her.”
“Does it explain why she killed herself?”
“Not exactly.”
“Does it explain anything?”
“You’ll have to judge that for yourself.”
It was a Leeds University Guild of Students pocket diary for the 1975⁄76 academic year, small enough for Lucy to have concealed it, still wrapped in the plastic bag she’d found it in and sealed with a rubber band, in a drawer she was confident Matt would never go to. She left me to leaf through it while she took a bath.
There was a map of the Leeds University campus, then fifty pages listing term dates, departmental details and student societies—everything from change-ringing to transcendental meditation. The diary itself started in early September 1975 and ran to the end of August 1976. The entries, sometimes in green biro, sometimes blue, were in minute but perfectly legible script, more like printing than handwriting. They didn’t start until late September, when term began, perhaps when Rosalind bought the diary. From there until December was terse, unremarkable stuff: the times of lectures and tutorials, social events, shopping lists, plus a suspicious number of appointments with somebody, or something, called HD, and several weekends crossed through beneath the name Martin visits to or from Martin Fisher, presumably.
Term ended on 9 December and Rosalind went home. A train time was recorded—departure from Leeds, arrival at Peterborough—followed, in stark capitals, by ‘OTHER WAYS’. Blank pages covered Christmas and New Year.
Normal service resumed with her return to Leeds on 8 January. I hurried through the pages, seeking but failing to find anything of significance. Easter, however, wasn’t the blank Christmas had been. Rosalind spent a week in Paris with Martin during the vacation and every day was crammed with a list of the sights they’d seen, plus potted reactions from Rosalind—‘dreamy’, ‘beautiful’, ‘magical’, ‘awesome’, ‘delightful’. It sounded as if it could hardly have gone better. Train and ferry times marked their return to England on 15 April, and the following day, Good Friday, struck a new and sinister note in the diary. “They were waiting for me. Why oh why can’t they leave me in peace?” Another entry, later in the weekend, was crossed out so fiercely that I couldn’t make anything of it. Whatever kind of an Easter she’d had, it hadn’t been a happy one.
Nor did the summer term start like its predecessors. The day after her return to Leeds, Rosalind wrote ‘HORROR, HORROR’ as her sole entry and, the day after that, “They’ve followed me here.” Three days later, however, was her first HD appointment of the term. ‘A shaft of light’ she wrote in brackets after the time. She saw Martin the following weekend and ‘Everything OK’ seemed to sum up their reunion. The entries settled down after that, though there were many more deletions than in the earlier pages. She was using Tipp-Ex now to amend the record, though why, given that she was presumably keeping the diary for nobody’s benefit but her own, I couldn’t imagine.
June looked sane and carefree, with exams, followed by a round of parties, a couple of weekends in London with Martin and a graduation ceremony at the end of the month. July found her back at Otherways, however, and the tone changed instantly. “So much worse than before,” written on 11 July, was typical of a string of entries. She seemed to have taken some sort of temporary job at a riding school, but references to that stopped abruptly after a couple of weeks. She saw a doctor, presumably her GP, twice in the following week, and started employing asterisks, sometimes one, sometimes two, occasionally three, as recurring symbols. She spent the weekend of 24⁄25 July in London, with Martin, and wrote, “He doesn’t understand. He can’t imagine,” at the end of it. The next day she copied out the Heraclitus epigram, in Greek, from Ann Milner’s gravestone and, beneath, wrote, “No way out.” There was a run of blank days, then, on 5 August, in capitals, the entry “THEY WON’T GET ME.”
But they had got her. That was the final entry. There was nothing else. She’d hidden the diary in her room and driven away to find the only escape she could contrive from whatever it was that refused to leave her in peace.
“What do you make of it?” asked Lucy, coming out of the bathroom to find me trawling through the pages for a second time.
“Hard to say. Something here, in this house, seems to have troubled her.”
“Maybe.”
“You have another theory?”
“I only know that Otherways seems warm and welcoming to me. Rosalind Strathallan’s demon must have been the personal kind. Of course, it could have been the people, not the house, that troubled her.”
“Her parents, you mean?”
“Them or the journo, Fisher. They were due to be married, apparently.”
“It doesn’t sound as if he was the problem.”
“Well, something was.” She plucked the diary from my hand, dropped it into a drawer and sat down on the bed beside me. “But we’re never going to find out what.”
“Probably not, no.”
“Perhaps we should concentrate on our own problems, then.”
“Or forget them.” I drew her closer.
“Yes,” she said, kissing me. “We could always do that.”
Who was the leader and who was the led? I could blame Lucy for everything, if I wanted to. Or for nothing. The truth is as simple as it’s shocking: we led each other. What we did, we did together. And the knowledge that everything we did was wrong, that it betrayed a friendship as well as a marriage, merely added a frenzy of guilt to our hours of secret pleasure. Nothing could stop us, once we’d begun. We confessed too many needs and desires to each other for the past to be retrievable. And, for the moment, we didn’t care.
Cutting through the fog of carnality that filled my mind, however, was the strange capacity of my subconscious to conjure up dream images of still darker possibilities. On one occasion that night I started awake, convinced that Matt was standing over the bed, looking down at us. On another, I put my hand out to touch Lucy, only to find her stiff and cold and dead, her eyes staring, her mouth gaping. Then I woke, and this time, when I touched her, she was warm and alive.
I said nothing to Lucy about these experiences, or the other vivid dreams I’d had at Otherways. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to worry her. I also didn’t want to worry myself. She’d dreamed of us making love the same night as I had, two nights before we’d actually done so. Maybe we’d had the identical dream in the very same moment. But that was crazy. That just couldn’t be.
I tried to write it all off as the work of my uneasy conscience, compounded by the strain of pretending to others that Lucy and I remained what we’d always been: friends brought together by marriage; not quite friends at all, in the truest sense. There were all kinds of domestic details that might have given us away where Nesta was concerned. How successful we were the next day at maintaining a front of normality for her benefit I wasn’t sure. Lucy said there was nothing for her to notice, but I wasn’t so confident. It seemed to me that Nesta could easily have detected the sexual charge between us. It was there, in the atmosphere of the house, in the air, like static electricity. Or maybe it was only there for Lucy and me. I don’t know.
I accompanied Lucy to Maydew House that afternoon, against my better judgement, afraid that we’d somehow give ourselves away. Lucy assured me everything would be all right and, ostensibly, so it was. I sat watching as Daisy worked at the bust, too absorbed in her task, it seemed, to be aware of any change in the way we behaved towards each other. The bust was still disturbingly reminiscent of you. Lucy had always resembled you more closely than most sisters. I saw that now, so clearly that I could only wonder why I hadn’t seen it before. I sat in silence for an hour, dodging Lucy’s gaze as much as I could, while Daisy’s long, nimble fingers pressed and prised at the clay, and dust-motes clouded in the sunlight that crept around the workshop walls. I realized quite clearly and unambiguously then that it wasn’t your ghost I was chasing in Lucy. It was you renewed, and altered, too, moulded precisely to my liking, and my loving, as Lucy had implied she could be, willingly and freely. It was a sick and desperate thing. It should never have been. But looking at Lucy, sitting so patiently and placidly, waiting for me as well as Daisy, I knew it was what I’d anticipated at some level from the very moment she’d invited me to Otherways. And what she’d anticipated, too. The unimaginable had merely been the unacknowledged.
We were greedy for each other’s company. We didn’t want to share it with anyone else. Unconcerned now about how such things might look, Lucy told Nesta she needn’t bother coming in for the rest of the week because we’d be out and about so much. We went nowhere, of course, although, in another sense, we went everywhere. I need you to understand that. For those few days at Otherways, we really were two lovers in a gilded cage. The door was open, but we had no intention of leaving.
The dreams diminished. Some echo of them remained, in a strange feeling that repeatedly came over me. It seemed to me that we weren’t alone in the house, that there was somebody else close by, in another room, on the stairs, never heard or seen, but present. Sometimes I’d look up, expecting to see a figure in a doorway, or turn round, convinced there was a person standing just behind me. Always I was wrong. There was nobody there. Except Lucy and me.
