Never Tell Page 10

  I asked him about Society X and he admitted it was really just a game that he had started because he was bored. ‘I had a point to prove once, I think,’ he said, ‘but I seem to have forgotten what it is right now.’ And we laughed, slightly feverishly.

  I had accepted we would never become lovers – I knew deep down that he usually preferred boys – but he made me feel like I was different: special, intelligent – beautiful, even. ‘Your skin is all creamy,’ he whispered, stroking my hair as I lay beside him. And I had spent so long waiting to be accepted, and I knew now I was part of something great. Something the other students could only look on and dream of themselves, something they were not privy to. We were the lucky ones.

  ‘Little dreamer’, Dalziel called me when we were alone. ‘You’re always hoping to step outside real life, aren’t you?’ and he was right. The lure of the opium for me was finding myself in deserts with Byron or sailing the seas of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The world was opening up for me in more ways than one, and I wanted more.

  Chapter Six

  GLOUCESTERSHIRE, MARCH 2008

  My poor wounded car just about made it back to the village after the incident at Albion Manor. I kept wondering if it had been James’s Audi I’d seen at the gate, but then Fred and Effie were waiting at the nursery door, their chubby faces beaming, and some kind of peace settled over me like a thin blanket. I watched them padding across the grass with a huge drawing of superheroes fluttering between them, Effie’s hat slipping over her face so she could hardly see where she ran.

  ‘We thought you wasn’t coming, Mummy,’ Freddie said. ‘But Mrs Foster said you’d only be a mimit.’

  I gathered them to me. ‘I’m sorry, baby. I won’t be late again, I promise.’

  ‘Mummy,’ said Effie, freeing herself impatiently, ‘I’m vegetarian, aren’t I?’

  ‘Are you now?’ I kissed her cheek. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘I’m not vegetarian,’ Fred said scornfully. ‘I’m English.’

  I laughed and kissed their shiny heads, tucking them into the car beneath the frosting of cherry blossom on the roof. I looked at them and closed the door, thinking of Danny Callendar’s words, thinking uncomfortably of the man being marched to the house, the sly boot in the ribs. I had been warned off, and right now, it made absolute sense to stay away. I’d made a silent promise to the children, to the unborn Alicia after I was threatened in LA during my first pregnancy, that I’d never put their lives or my own in danger again; that I wouldn’t choose the story over safety any more.

  ‘I’m going to Vietnam next week,’ James said, feet up on the kitchen table.

  ‘Oh?’ I put a plate of slightly singed macaroni cheese in front of him, which he ignored, flicking the television on. ‘Get us a beer, petal, would you?’

  ‘Why Vietnam?’ I opened the fridge.

  ‘To talk about opening a branch of the club out there. Saigon’s the new Bangkok, didn’t you know?’ He wasn’t looking at me, but at the screen behind me. ‘Oh, goal!’

  ‘Right,’ I said, handing him a Becks. I picked up the salad and plonked it on the long kitchen table. ‘Stay with me, J, will you?’ I could tell he was itching to return to the studio but he did as I asked, forlornly abandoning his Sight and Sound magazine and taking his feet off the table.

  ‘You know, it’s funny.’ Carefully I stuck my fork prong through a macaroni tube and cast a quick look from under my lashes at my husband. ‘I’m probably going mad, but I suddenly thought I saw you out at Hadi Kattan’s today?’

  ‘You didn’t.’ He shovelled a bit of pasta into his mouth and pulled a face. ‘Christ, Rosie! This macaroni’s all crunchy.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I jabbed at it, ‘it might not be one of my absolutely best efforts. Have some salad.’

  ‘It never is a best effort.’ He pushed the bowl away. ‘I hate bloody rabbit food, you know that.’

  ‘It’s good for you,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m sure I saw you there when I went to get the car, you know.’

  ‘You didn’t, darling, really.’ James leaned over and kissed my cheek, and slowly I began to relax a little. I was about to tell him about the man up at Albion Manor, about my disquiet and the violence and whether I should report it to someone, when James stood, putting his plate in the sink. ‘I’m not very hungry, actually. I had a burger in Oxford earlier.’

  ‘Oxford?’ I said warily.

  ‘I had to go to the bank.’

  ‘Oh?’ Our avoidance of the place was unspoken – but we’d never once visited the small city since we’d moved out here.

  ‘Yeah, it couldn’t wait.’ Was it my imagination or did he look a little sheepish? ‘I just shot in and out again.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ I abandoned the macaroni myself now and attacked the lettuce instead. I pushed thoughts of Society X away; they were already too near the surface.

  ‘Of course, petal. Never better.’

  ‘And you definitely weren’t up at Albion Manor earlier?’

  ‘Rose!’

  I recognised the warning signs; I raised my hands in supplication. ‘OK, OK. I just thought, I could have sworn it was your car.’

  ‘Everybody’s driving silver Audis now. Where one leads, the others follow, eh, Rosie? Actually that reminds me. Have you seen the Beamer catalogue around?’

  ‘Probably in that pile.’

  I was sure he was lying about Hadi Kattan but frankly I didn’t have the energy to argue with him now. If he had decided to deny it, the row could go on all night. I watched him rifle through the pile, dislodging the travel supplements stacked on the top. He came across an unopened bank statement and for a moment his eyes seemed to darken as he gazed at it. I had a sudden flash of inspiration.

  ‘Why don’t we all come?’ I looked at him, light in my eyes.

  ‘What?’ He pocketed the statement quickly. ‘Come where?’

  ‘To Vietnam. I’m serious, J – I mean, it’d be amazing, wouldn’t it? The kids would love it.’ I felt genuinely enthused. ‘It’s good to do these things now, J, before Alicia gets too big to take out of school. It’d be brilliant. A real bonding experience. We could go back to Nha Trang.’

  James and I had travelled all the time before we had the children, it was part of the glue that held us together. We’d had such adventures; we’d seen such sights. He would come and meet me when I finished foreign assignments and we would discover new places, basking in the sun, pottering round parts of cities that the tourists never saw, drinking the local hooch or playing cards into the early hours under star-studded skies.

  ‘No way.’ James finished his beer and threw the bottle in the bin. ‘I’m flying in and flying straight out again. There’s too much to do here to have a holiday.’

  I gazed at him and I wondered when this huge gulf had opened up between us. I’d been staring down into it, teetering on the edge for too long now.

  ‘It’s quite, kind of – solitary sometimes, you know – specially when you’re working all the time.’

  ‘But you like your own company. Pottering around the garden and all that.’

  I gritted my teeth. ‘I do love the garden, yes, of course I do.’ He’d been working on the super-club project for months now, staying up all night again, chasing sponsors and investment deals. I was trying to be understanding; trying so very hard not to feel ignored. ‘But there’s only so many plants you can talk to before you feel a little mad.’

  ‘And only so many you can smoke.’

  ‘Shut up, J,’ I muttered. ‘Just forget it, OK?’

  James backtracked. ‘Look, I wouldn’t be able to spend the time with you I wanted to. Next time, petal, I promise.’ He turned the football up. ‘Let’s book something nice for the summer. The Caribbean, yeah? Nice five-star all-inclusive, nanny service, all that malarkey. Just what the doctor ordered.’

  I looked at him blankly. The old James would have rather stuck pins in his eyes than go all-inclusive, hermetically sealed into a ‘safe’ environ
ment for overprivileged tourists.

  ‘Just no leaving the kids alone at night and going off for tapas, yeah? By the way, have you seen my phone? Oh fuck’s sake, John Terry. You muppet.’

  He lost his phone at least once a week.

  ‘No I haven’t, and that’s not funny, James,’ I said quietly. I retrieved the beer bottle from the bin and put it in Alicia’s recycling box. ‘Where’s your spirit of adventure gone?’

  ‘It’s all used up in this bloody club, that’s where it is. Stop bloody moaning, woman. Oh, come on, Cole – oh, you stupid twat.’

  I picked up my plate and carried it to the sink where I ran the water until it was almost boiling. I held my hands under the water until I couldn’t bear the heat any more. Outside was complete darkness; my beautiful garden was utterly veiled by the night. The foxes barked and screamed. I looked at James’s reflection in the darkened window before me, and considered the tight layers of care we construct around ourselves, those nearest to us who supposedly protect and support us. I remembered the boy James once was; looked at him lounging in his chair, beer in hand, and I saw the man he had become. Not the man I had foreseen, somehow, a much looser cannon. And I saw the care I had for him, my fourth child almost, and then all around me I saw the cage I was in. But nowhere, nowhere – however hard I looked – could I see the care he had for me.

  Stupid with sleep, I was woken at dawn by a tousled Alicia standing by my bed like a small wraith in her white nightie. James wasn’t here, which meant he’d crashed out on the studio sofa yet again. I slept without James five nights out of seven these days. I blinked blearily.

  ‘Climb in, baby.’ I discovered a snoring Fred already curled up in the small of my back. I pulled back the duvet to let my daughter in, but she stayed standing where she was.

  ‘There’s a man in the garden, Mummy,’ Alicia whispered. ‘I saw him. He went like this.’ She held a finger to her lips. ‘You know, like “Shh”.’

  I sprang out of bed, and rushed to the window, my heart thumping. Alicia followed me.

  ‘Get back, Lissie,’ I ordered urgently. ‘Get in bed now.’

  I pulled the curtain back quickly and peered out into the gloom, but there was nothing.

  ‘Are you sure you saw a man?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alicia insisted. ‘He had sticky-up hair, like this.’ She demonstrated with her own dark locks. ‘And it was white.’

  ‘You mean blond?’

  ‘And he waved at me, and then I couldn’t see him any more.’

  ‘Get into bed. I’ll be right back.’

  I ran downstairs. In the half-light I made out a small flat object on the doormat. I picked it up. James’s mobile phone.

  I unlocked the front door, looking out at the break of light on the horizon, a pale sliver between dark sky and hill. The garden was empty, a quiet settled over it by dawn. I shut the door again, put the phone on the hall table and went back upstairs. I pulled the curtains tight and got back into bed between the two children, moving Freddie, who was sprawled in a diagonal across the whole mattress. Then I got out again and checked on Effie next door, invisible apart from a tuft of hair sticking out from under her duvet.

  So James had lied, as I’d suspected he had, about being at Albion Manor. And Danny Callendar had been creeping around my garden whilst we slept. Nothing made sense, least of all the strange knot in my stomach.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t get back to sleep again.

  UNIVERSITY, JANUARY 1992

  I approach and ye vanish away,

  I grasp you and ye are gone;

  Longfellow

  I was desperate to get back to college after the holidays; I was bored watching Christmas television with my parents, listening to my brother bang on about motorbikes and the assets of Sally from Accounts; eating endless turkey dinners. Worst of all, I was bored by my friends in the pub who suddenly all seemed terribly ordinary after Oxford. James came to see me just after New Year, and stayed in the spare room; chastely I didn’t creep down to him in the night. We drove over to Chatsworth in his bashed-up old Renault, and drank tea, freezing out by the swans, and to my surprise, when he left, my mother said she’d really liked him. But I didn’t care: I was just desperate to see Dalziel – and, if I was really honest, to get high. I missed the descent into calm; I craved the slow heavy hold the drug had over me as it entered my bloodstream. Our first Saturday back in January, Dalziel and I smoked yet another opium bong in my room. I’d been reading Longfellow all week and as we lay entwined on my narrow bed, I told Dalziel of my dreams of the great white winged horse: that I had seen myself flying over the world on the mighty Pegasus. I stroked Dalziel’s face and curled myself into him as he coaxed my visions on, until eventually my eyes fluttered closed against my will.

  Already I loved Dalziel in a way I’d not known was possible. He made me feel alive and yet relaxed; protected yet exhilarated. It was like living on a knife-edge between reality and paradise. I adored him in a way I’d only experienced in the school playground aged five, perhaps, but never since. We didn’t have sex; it wouldn’t have seemed right, by now I was clear on that, and I knew that he didn’t see me that way.

  The next night I was asleep in my room when Dalziel woke me, his eyes shining strangely as I tried to focus on him.

  ‘Number Eight,’ Dalziel said, gazing at me as if in a trance.

  ‘What?’ I tried harder to focus through eyes seemingly sealed shut. He pushed my hair back from my face, gently he tucked a strand behind my ear as I tried to sit, cupping his hand behind my head. He’d taken something different from opium, that was apparent; what, though, I wasn’t sure. As I hauled myself up on my elbows, he pushed something powdery into my mouth, something foul-tasting, holding a bottle of wine to my lips so I could swallow.

  ‘Yuk,’ I shuddered. ‘What the hell was that? And what do you mean Number Eight?’

  ‘Never mind. Put these on.’ Dalziel chucked a pair of trousers on the bed. Blearily I pulled them on before he led me downstairs into the freezing night.

  ‘It’s so cold,’ I moaned, shivering as he wrapped me in a fleecy jacket. I realised I was wearing skin-tight jodhpurs as he pushed me into the small cream sports car he hardly ever used. He drove us out into the Oxfordshire countryside, the lanes quickly turning black, no light apart from the moon dappling the road through the shrouded trees that leaned eerily towards us.

  ‘You do ride, don’t you?’ he asked casually above the throb of the engine, taking a corner so fast and wide that the tyres screeched.

  ‘Ride? As in horses?’ I didn’t really. I’d tried it briefly as a plump ten-year-old, bouncing round a paddock for a few weeks on a bad-tempered pony before it finally got so cross with me mauling its mouth it deposited me smartly in the nettles. But whatever Dalziel had given me now was beginning to buzz into my brain and suddenly I felt infallible, invincible, on top of the world. I could ride in the Grand National and no doubt I’d win.

  ‘Definitely,’ I nodded with enthusiasm. ‘Love horses.’

  We shot past a huge white gate and Dalziel swore softly, reversing so fast I felt breathless, too fast for me to read the sign above it, though I caught something about ‘Royal’ and ‘Livery’. He parked the car practically in the thick hedge beside a great stone wall. His driving was atrocious at the best of times, but to be honest, I was surprised we’d made it at all.

  Grabbing a rucksack from the back seat, Dalziel slung it on his back as we clambered over a stile into a muddy furrowed field. There, in the moonlight, a boy was waiting for us. Small, skinny-legged and sullen, his flat cap pulled right down over his face, he held two great horses by their bridles, one grey, one almost black in the moonlight.

  ‘Wow!’ Slowly I approached the grey, holding a tentative hand to his velvet nose. He snorted into the cold night air, his breath crystallising before him as he whickered softly. ‘Beautiful. You’re beautiful, aren’t you, darling?’

  In response he bumped my neck with his nose and I
leaned into him for a moment, revelling in the warmth of him, the comforting pungent smell of horse, hay and dust.

  The boy was nervous, though, checking his watch.

  ‘You haven’t got long,’ he muttered to Dalziel, who kissed me quickly on the lips before giving me a leg-up into the saddle. It creaked satisfyingly as I sat down. I felt like my head was touching the sky and yet I felt tiny, tiny. I was one with the mighty horse, the power beneath me sending flashes of excitement down my spine. My teeth were chattering with cold and nervous energy.

  ‘Ready, Rosie?’ He mounted the other horse.

  ‘Ready!’

  Dalziel leaned down from the great black and handed something to the boy; money, perhaps, I thought. ‘Meet us at the other end,’ he said, and the boy nodded.

  ‘Lot’s field. I’ll be there.’

  ‘We can fly now, Rosie,’ Dalziel drawled, his horse wheeling and snorting in the cold night air. And then he slipped a riding crop from his boot and gave my horse’s flank a whack. ‘Come on, Pegasus.’

  ‘He’s called Hooligan,’ the boy called. ‘Not Pegasus.’

  The horse whinnied and bucked, and I clung on for dear life, charged with pure emotion, the adrenalin coursing through my veins to join whatever else I’d taken: the most amazing thing was that I didn’t feel fear at all.

  We galloped across the field, with only the moonlight to guide us; galloped until we were sweating and panting ourselves. The ground was flying beneath our feet, clods of earth thrown up in the first field, then through the next into the short January wheat as I clutched the horse’s wiry mane, threading my fingers through the coarse hair, and leaned low over his neck. I thought I’d never felt anything so electrifying in my life as riding this horse beneath the stars.