Читать книгу The Wife’s Secret: A dark psychological thriller with a stunning twist - Caroline England, Caroline England - Страница 12
CHAPTER SIX
Оглавление‘Toni, who is Christine and why is she on my calendar? I want to go out. Or stay in. Whatever. Should I be worried about standing her up?’
Antonia holds the iPhone between her ear and her shoulder as she sweeps crumbs from the granite work surface with one hand into the other. She can tell Sophie is being very careful to enunciate her words clearly and slowly.
‘Do you want me to come over?’ she replies.
‘No, why?’
‘Because it’s a Wednesday morning and you don’t usually start this early,’ she says evenly. ‘Has something happened to upset you?’
She unties her apron and sits down. The heady smell of the baked chocolate embraces her, but she won’t be eating any. Her mother has put on a great deal of weight as she’s got older; it could be genetic and she doesn’t want to be fat.
‘It’s Sami’s fault. If he didn’t spy on me, I wouldn’t have to drink a whole bottle. I could just have a civilised glass instead of a bloody great lecture. He’s not there with you, is he?’
‘No. Why, should he be?’
‘No reason,’ Sophie responds. ‘There’s the doorbell. It’s probably Christine, whoever she is. I’ll let you know later if she’s your type, Toni. Bye.’
Antonia puts down the mobile carefully. Baking cookies earlier gave her a little high. Like a wide-eyed child she watched the TV chef make them and she copied him, stage by stage, from lining the trays with parchment, to pouring the pre-measured ingredients into a mixing bowl, to spooning the mixture out and to placing them in the oven. Then the waiting. Twenty minutes. Ping!
Of course she knows how to bake just about everything one can bake, but to do it under instruction, like an obedient school child, was surprisingly satisfying. But now she’s wondering about Sophie, about what’s bothering her so much that she’s not letting on. The IVF treatment, she reasons, but then Sophie has already told her all about it, in every gory detail. Indeed, there isn’t a lot about her life that hasn’t been discussed, dissected and examined by the two of them over the years. The fact that Sophie is drinking is no surprise, it’s her way of dealing with stress. But there’s something else, definitely something else.
She looks at her watch and wonders whether she should nip round to Sophie’s house to see what’s going on. It’s a twenty-mile round journey, but it’s tempting because she doesn’t like this uncertainty. Then again, she dislikes Sophie when she’s drunk, she loathes anyone drunk, which makes her think again of David and the strange way he behaved last weekend.
‘Don’t look so bloody tragic,’ Sophie said on the Monday, putting her arms around Antonia and holding her for a few moments before pulling away and stroking her arm from shoulder to elbow in that way she always does. ‘Don’t overreact. He was only pissed. It’s not the end of the world.’
‘I know,’ she replied, thinking that perhaps it was the end of the world and feeling tense, as always, from Sophie’s touch.
‘He’s not your dad, you know, Toni.’
She flinched at Sophie’s comment, but didn’t reply. It was strange, hearing her dad mentioned twice within a week. There had been the telephone call a few days earlier, out of the blue. It was a friendly female voice, but then they’d always appeared friendly, the journalists.
‘Hi, is that Jimmy Farrell’s daughter? You’ve been difficult to track down! My name’s Zara Singh. I’m a journalist and I’m looking into—’
She’d put down the phone as though it burned.
Antonia now sits silently at the kitchen table and stares through the open patio doors at the glinting fields and the hills beyond. It’s still a bright September. She can see glowing green meadows, horses and cows, huge trees and stone walls. This is her life. There’s nothing to say about her dad. He doesn’t exist. She won’t let him creep into her thoughts. And yet here he is today, looming large in her sunlit kitchen, amid the smell of cookies. ‘She was asking for it, girl. She can go back to where she fucking belongs if she doesn’t like it. And so can you.’ Each memory is filed away, but still clear and in colour, like a series of framed photographs.
She remains motionless on the leather chair, the peppermint tea lukewarm in its cup, her mind cramped as it tries to regain order. It’s just the alcohol; it changes people from normal decent human beings into something else, she reasons slowly and calmly, like a mother to a child. David isn’t bad. He isn’t a monster and nor is Sophie. There’s nothing to worry about. She isn’t afraid of them.
As she strides down the science faculty’s main corridor, Helen Proctor thinks about snowmen. The Snowman, in fact, the film she watches every Christmas. She’s never really understood the expression ‘walking on air’ until today. There’s no doubt about it, today she is indeed walking on air, or perhaps in it, like The Snowman. She has to fight back the desire to announce it to her students, to blow her own trumpet (another silly expression) or to sing out loud (which she is known to do). They’ll probably think she’s completely deranged, but Helen is fully aware of her reputation for mild eccentricity and doesn’t care.
Ted Edwards asked for a quiet word first thing. ‘I have something to say to you, Helen. Perhaps a spot of lunch at the usual?’ he said, lifting his black eyebrows which no longer matched his hair and adjusting his glasses. ‘When all will be revealed!’
The reveal was unexpected but thrilling. Ted had clearly been pleased as he patted her hand.
It’s only a secondment, nothing particularly special, she now chides herself. Another professor walking the other way gives her a sidelong look beneath his varifocals and she wonders whether she has spoken the thought out loud. But it’s special to me, she continues with a shrug, an opportunity to teach and to research in America!
She looks at herself in the lavatory mirror as she washes her hands. She no longer notices the streaks of grey in her hair or the odd sprouting growth on her chin. She tried to pluck them at one time, those hairs, but they only grew back twofold, wasting time in which she could be doing something useful, like marking or reading, or chatting with Charlie.
‘Oh, Charlie!’ she says to the mirror. Her reflection looks startled, and a little downcast, as it wonders how on earth to break the news to him.
David puts his head around Charlie’s office door to wish him goodnight, but to his surprise the room is dark, cold and empty. He strolls in and swings round in Charlie’s newly upholstered chair before opening the leather-bound diary to see where he is. It’s an office rule that work diaries always stay on the premises on top of the fee earner’s desk. David regularly ‘forgets’ this rule, preferring to risk censure than be pinned down. He studies Charlie’s week: his ‘school tie’ handwriting shows he’s been busy, but the page for this afternoon is blank, which means he’s gone home early, which is unlike him, or that he’s doing something he doesn’t want the rest of the office to know about.
David gives a low whistle. The doctor. God, Charlie. He hopes he’s all right. Charlie has always looked older than his years, even at school, using his bumbling act to hide the sharp intellect behind. But he isn’t old really; David doesn’t want him to be.
He sits back and gazes at the signed painting of a Lancaster bomber that Charlie has recently acquired as he tries to steady his breath. ‘Lancaster Under Attack’, the painting’s called, and he knows how it feels. Over the last few days his heart has started to race, suddenly, without warning, like the hammer of a machine gun. Low blood pressure, high blood pressure, lack of fitness, whatever. It doesn’t last long, so it really doesn’t matter. The important thing is for him to focus. Not on the problem (which he’s finally accepted exists), nor the fucking, fucking consequences (which make him want to vomit), but on the plan. And today he has focused. He’s come up with a plan. At least a temporary one, which he now needs to put into action. Velle est posse! he remembers from school. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
It’s time to go home, but David isn’t ready to do that. He wants to avoid his wife and her watchful eyes a little longer. It’s as though Antonia knows. Her brown eyes are huge when she looks at him: perceptive, worried, knowing. ‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul?’ they say. ‘Don’t do it, David.’
Eyes like saucers, he thinks, to deflect his churning thoughts. The Tinderbox story. I have a wife with eyes like saucers. Who would have thought?
He picks up a gilt-framed photograph from the desk and smiles. It’s of three generations of Proctors: Charlie, his father and his son Rupert, with only a nose in common. He remembers Charlie’s father well. Harold, Harry to his friends, so much like Charlie, fair and genial, old fashioned to a fault. He thinks fondly of Charlie’s mother, Valerie, a horsey woman both in hobby and looks who is still going strong. Always such a warm and welcoming family, eager to draw him into the fold of their love when his parents were absent.
‘What would I have done without you, eh?’ he says to the photograph.
A memory strikes him, of being clutched to Valerie’s huge bosom. She was wearing a coat with a real fur collar and it made him sneeze. He’d been holding back the tears and the sneeze was such a relief.
‘I was only a boy,’ David mutters. The sneeze allowed him to cry.
He wonders when he last looked at a photograph of his own parents. Indeed, does he still have any? Has he ever shown one to Antonia? He doubts it; she’s never asked. Their meeting at a night club and their simple yet heady marriage only months later at the registry office was like a natural start. They’ve never looked back to a life before then. It seems to suit them both.
And yet he’d adored his parents. He can still vividly recall the frenzied beating he’d given Smith-Bates at boarding school when he’d taunted that his father shagged his mother from behind. David called him a bloody great liar, told him to shut his ugly face. His father was stern but kind. He was certain his dad would never do such a repugnant thing to his flame-haired flawless mother, but Smith-Bates refused to back down. So David struck out, fuelled by longing and need for his parents, who were in Singapore at that time. When he was forcefully peeled away from Smith-Bates, the master asked him to explain why he’d done it, but he couldn’t bear to repeat the profanity and so instead faced the consequences. Even as the lash was brought down on his small palms he was resolute. His pride at defending his mother’s honour had been worth it.
‘Live with honour. Die with pride,’ he remembers, looking at his grown-up palms and desperately wishing the adult could match those words.
He glances at his watch and a thought occurs to him. He remembers Charlie’s chuckle when he opened the desk drawer to show David his stash. ‘There for times of trouble and strife, David!’
Leaning down he pulls open the drawer on the bottom right. The Glenfiddich bottle is more than half full. ‘To trouble and strife! Cheers, Charlie,’ he declares to the photograph, settling back down in Charlie’s chair and taking his first liberal swig.
The ringtone penetrates the evening silence and Antonia answers immediately from her bedside telephone.
‘Hello, Chinue, love. How are you keeping?’ Candy Farrell asks in her small voice.
‘It’s Antonia, remember? I’m fine. How are you, Mum?’
‘I was wondering if you were coming to visit. I haven’t seen you for so long …’
‘I was there on Sunday. I brought you some lovely flowers. And I’m coming again this Sunday, just as usual.’
‘Will Jimmy be coming?’
Smoothing her hair, Antonia tenses, but keeps her voice even. ‘No, Mum. Dad’s dead. Remember?’
‘Are you sure, love? I thought I saw him.’
‘I’m absolutely sure, Mum. EastEnders will be on the telly soon. Why don’t you check the television page and I’ll see you on Sunday.’
Antonia replaces the receiver carefully and gazes at the tree whose branch taps at the shuttered bedroom window, reminding her to stand and view the garden from upstairs, to appreciate its size and splendour and to remember just how lucky she is.
‘Human beings, we’re all different, either inside or out,’ her mother used to say. ‘But we’re all the Lord’s children. There’s good in everyone.’
She used to be full of wise words, her mum, even when she was bowed and bruised. But now that same person telephones her two or three times a day, forgetting a conversation she’s had only moments earlier, sometimes completely oblivious of her daughter’s weekly visits and yet still seeing the man who had no good in him at all.
She turns away from the window with a sigh, recovers her book from the pillow and continues to read.