Читать книгу Lessons in Heartbreak - Cathy Kelly - Страница 10

Anneliese Kennedy sat down in the big armchair that faced the sea and picked up one of her old flower catalogues. There were always a pile of dog-eared catalogues on the white cane table beside the chair, ready to flick through when she hadn’t the energy for the newspaper.

Normally, her fingers had only to graze the pages for a feeling of contentment to flood through her. Pages of seeds illustrated with full-bodied blossoms made her think of hours spent in her garden, hands buried in the soil, nurturing and thinking about nothing more than nature.

Today, the magic wasn’t there. They were just a bunch of well-thumbed catalogues, and the hand that lay on them was veined with alligator skin and ragged cuticles.

‘You’ve such pretty hands, you should look after them,’ her mother had sighed some thirty-seven years before when Anneliese was a young bride and prone to plunging her hands into dishwater without the time or the inclination to think about wearing rubber gloves.

Anneliese was a high-speed sort of person. Not reckless, never. Quick, practical and deft. Gloves and hand creams were for her mother’s generation, not for a twenty-year-old with vast energy and a life to be lived.

‘Artist’s hands and green fingers,’ Edward said proudly as they stood in the front of the church the day their daughter, Beth, got married and Anneliese had spent hours tying barely unfurled blush pink roses into tiny posies for the pews.

Anneliese preferred growing roses in the comfort of the Tamarin Garden Centre to making them into bouquets, but she’d have tied the roses together with her teeth in joy at seeing Beth walk up the aisle.

Four years ago now, it had been the best day of her life, seeing Beth finally settled. Beth was like a rose herself: one of the rare antique tea roses that Anneliese and Neil, who owned the garden centre, liked to grow in the shelter of the giant greenhouse.

Madame Alfred Carrière, very beautiful to look at with a glorious scent, but also prickly, high maintenance and needing hours of tender care. The day Beth married Marcus – gentle, strong of heart and crazy about her – Anneliese knew someone else was going to be providing that tender care, or at least, sharing it with her.

If Beth was a rose, Edward was a tree, a rare oak, standing tall and strong against the sea wind. And Anneliese? When she’d met Edward, she was like a poplar: tall, slim and vibrant from the top of her fair head to the tips of her ever-moving toes.

But she didn’t know what she was any more. Time and life had changed her.

Once, when she’d started working in horticulture, she’d thought that the art of growing things was the answer to all questions. The earth taught you to be calm, to wait, that the cycles changed but it would all come round again: spring would follow a harsh winter, eventually. Nothing, not problems nor solutions, could be rushed – any more than you could rush the questing head of a snowdrop. The snowdrop would emerge sleepily into the air when it was good and ready.

That became Anneliese’s motto. Things happened when they were good and ready.

And now, it seemed, she was wrong. Totally wrong.

She got up, went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. It was a reflex action. When she had nothing to do, she flicked that switch and busied herself with the ritual of tea-making. Most of the time, she barely drank more than half the tea.

Edward wasn’t a tea person: he preferred coffee. There was still a jar of his favourite and wildly expensive Blue Mountain from Fortnum & Mason in the cupboard.

Anneliese hated coffee but liked the smell of it. There would be no one to make coffee now, no rich aroma lifting into the air to tell her that Edward was in the kitchen, idly listening to the radio as he brewed up.

There would be no other person to move a tea towel, reposition a cushion, unfold a newspaper. After three decades of living with another person, would she now get used to this aloneness? Perhaps aloneness was the true human state, and not the Platonic vision of two together. She hoped so.

She flicked off the kettle switch, grabbed her keys and went to the back door. Swapping her flat shoes for boots, she put on the old padded jacket that hung with a selection of others on a peg in the tiny back hallway. The back door faced the beach and when Anneliese pulled it open, the fresh hit of sea breeze caught her breath.

The scent of sand and the tang of the sea filled her lungs and she gasped for a moment before recovering.

Her cottage was half a mile from the beach, half a mile where tenacious scrub grass and hardy sea orchids clung to the land before giving way to a crest of small stones that gleamed like precious jewels when the sea drenched them. Now, the tide was out and a swathe of fawn-coloured sand stretched out ahead of her in a big horseshoe. This was Milsean Bay, a small cove that sat beside the much larger Tamarin Bay, the two separated by the jagged cliff that ran down to the edge of the water.

The Milsean side of the cliff was the more exposed part of the headland, where sand and sea rusted cars and pummelled paint off houses, leaving cottages like Anneliese’s the same colour as the driftwood that swept up on to the beach.

On the other side of the cliff sat Tamarin itself, protected from the bite of the wind and the sea by a tiara of cliffs.

The valley that ran through Tamarin down into the bay, where a chunk of glacier had carved a path millions of years ago, was occupied by both the River Bawn and the fat road in and out of town. In a sunny haven in the curve of the valley was the garden centre where Anneliese had worked until last year.

Years ago, Anneliese had thought she’d like to live safely nestled within the crook of Tamarin Bay, where the wind still rattled the windows but there were neighbours close by on the nights when the power went. In the shelter of the cliffs and the hills, what was almost a micro-climate existed and in the garden centre Anneliese grew plants and flowers she wouldn’t dream of planting on the Milsean side.

Her aunt-in-law, Lily, had a fig tree in her garden, for heaven’s sake: hugely rotund and not so good in the fig department nowadays, like an old gentleman who couldn’t be bothered with productivity now that he’d reached his three score and ten, but it was still a fig tree, still a creature of warmer climes.

Now though, Anneliese was glad she and Edward had moved out here to the cottage twenty years before. The sense of isolation suited her. The wind couldn’t scream with any more pain and anger than she did, and here at least if she wanted to sit on her weather-beaten porch and drink wine while Tosca shrieked in the background, nobody would call her mad or phone her relatives wondering if they ‘could have a quiet word’.

The beach was scattered with shells and trails of slick seaweed. High on the shoreline were the hoof marks made by the morning riders who galloped along the beach from the stables three miles inland. Edward had taken photographs of them one summer: black-and-white shots of the fury of the gallop, nostrils flared and manes rippling as horses and riders thundered along, sand and surf flying.

One of the photos still hung in the cottage where she could see it every time she walked in the front door. It was a beautiful shot.

‘You could take up photography,’ Anneliese had told him. Edward was very artistic, although there wasn’t much call for artistry in the insurance business.

‘I’m only an amateur, love,’ Edward said back, although she knew he was pleased. He hadn’t been raised to compliments. Edward’s mother thought praise was a word you only used in church, praising the Lord. Anneliese had always tried to make up for the lack of praise in Edward’s youth.

‘It’s pretty good for an amateur.’

‘You’re blind, do you know that?’ Edward said, smiling. ‘You only see my good points.’

‘Selective blindness,’ Anneliese smiled back at him. ‘I see the bits I like and I like most of it.’

Walking along the beach now, Anneliese knew she’d have to take the picture off the wall when she got home. It would hurt too much to see it.

The wind bit into her face, stinging her eyes. Anneliese stared down at the sand, determined to find something to shift her mind off the sharp pain in her heart. A few yards ahead of her lay a piece of driftwood, tangled up in a skein of chemical blue net from the fishing boats.

Bending slowly, she picked it up. It was a foot long, twisted like a coil of rope. Some of the driftwood was beautiful, sculpted by the sea, still a thing of beauty despite the battering.

And then there were pieces of driftwood that were just that: wood flung on the beach after thrashing around in the surf, desolate and hollowed out, ugly and unwanted. Like this one. Like me, Anneliese knew.

She wasn’t a plant at all – she was driftwood. Ugly to most people, beautiful only to the very few.

Summoning all the pent-up energy in her body, she hurled the driftwood back into the ocean and screamed at it.

‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’

There was nobody to hear her scream. Her voice was caught on the wind and whipped away into the air where the seagulls paid no attention.

Edward hadn’t seemed to pay attention that morning when she’d got up at eight and said she was going to Sunday Mass at nine, then might call in on Lily. He’d murmured something that sounded like assent, and rolled over in the bed, bunching the snow white of the duvet around his lanky frame. Anneliese didn’t mind. She was a lark and he was an owl. Opposites and all that.

Ten minutes later, she was showered, dressed and sipping a cup of green tea before she hurried out the door. She’d grown to like green tea, for all that she’d loathed it for ages after the acupuncturist had said it was good for you. Why was it that things that were good for you took a long time to get used to and things that were bad were instantly addictive?

The early service in St Canice’s in the square in Tamarin was pure and perfect. The cold spring sun sent rays of light shining through the stained-glass windows, leaving dust motes hanging in the air, an effect that was for all the world like celestial rays blessing the faithful in biblical paintings. There was no music at the early service.

The choir sang at eleven Mass, with Mr Fitzpatrick strangling hymns on a rheumatic organ, with the congregation wincing and Father Sean smiling bravely, willing people not to laugh openly.

Dear Father Sean. He had a great sense of humour which he had to subdue because not everyone wanted a priest who cracked jokes. Anneliese felt sorry for him, having to toe some invisible line.

Eleven was the family Mass too, where toddlers knelt on pews and twinkled bored eyes at the people behind them. Adorable but distracting.

At nine on a Sunday morning, the church was only a quarter full and it suited Anneliese perfectly. She loved the peace of it all. Time to think but not so much time that her mind skittered off into dark areas. No, she didn’t like that. Luckily, it never happened at Mass. Something to do with the ritual of standing and kneeling, murmuring responses to prayers that were engrained in her soul because she’d been murmuring them for so many years.

Anneliese’s religion was a meditative, safe place for her to rest rather than an intense, doctrinaire version.

Then the migraine came helter skelter into her head without warning; not the full blast that required lying down, but certainly a blistering ache that made her eyes narrow with pain.

There was no point waiting: she had to go home and lie down. She could phone Lily and apologise later. Her aunt, well aunt-in-law strictly speaking, because she was actually Edward’s aunt, wouldn’t mind. Lily had many glorious qualities – she was funny, warm, had a marvellous sense of humour – but one of her absolute virtues was the fact that she never sulked or took offence at anything.

‘Take care of yourself, Anneliese, and drop round when you’re better,’ was all she’d say.

Anneliese knew so many people who cherished perceived injuries and looked for them in everything. It was comforting that Lily wasn’t such a person.

Anneliese drove home slowly, feeling the car judder with the wind, and hurried into the house, thinking only of the blessed relief of getting into her bed, only half registering that the car parked outside belonged to her friend, Nell. Edward would have to talk to her. Nell wouldn’t mind: she and Edward were great pals and Nell knew that when a migraine hit, Anneliese could only think of lying down.

And then she stepped into the kitchen to see Edward and Nell sitting together at the table, his dark head bent towards her fair one and their hands clasped.

There was no soft music or gentle lights, no state of undress. But the intimacy of their togetherness cut into Anneliese like a knife sliding into the underbelly of a chicken fillet.

‘Anneliese!’ gasped Nell, seeing her.

They moved apart sharply, quickly. In another universe, Anneliese might have joked about what the speedy movement might do to Edward’s sciatica or Nell’s dodgy neck. But she knew, with absolute certainty, that there was nothing innocent about their closeness. The migraine pummelled louder in her head, fighting with the sense of nausea that rose instantaneously.

‘We were just…’ began Nell awkwardly, and then stopped as if she had no idea what to say next.

Nell was never short of words. In contrast to Anneliese, who preferred silence often, Nell had a word for everyone and a comment for anything.

Like the rain: ‘It’d be a great little country if only we could get someone to put an umbrella over it.’

People loved that.

Or thoughts on money: ‘Spend it now: there are no pockets in a shroud.’

Now, Nell had nothing to say.

‘Anneliese, you don’t want to get the wrong idea,’ began Edward, his face a mask of anxiety as he moved towards Anneliese and tried to take her hands in his. His hair was wet from the shower. It was only twenty-five minutes since she’d left the house. He must have leapt out of bed as soon as she’d gone.

‘Explain the wrong idea to me, so I can understand the difference between it and the right one,’ Anneliese said, gently detaching her hands. Her head still felt cloudy but the powerful instinctive message in her brain told her not to let her husband touch her.

‘Lord, Anneliese, please don’t think we’d ever do anything to hurt you,’ began Nell.

She looked anxiously at Edward, pleading with him to sort it out.

You could tell what people thought by their eyes more easily than by anything else, Anneliese knew.

Over the years, she and Edward had exchanged many telling looks. And she and Nell had exchanged them too – they’d been friends for nearly twenty years, a lifetime.

Only she’d never been aware of these two important people in her life looking at each other in this way. Until now.

Anneliese felt as if she was watching the last reel of a movie where all the plot loopholes are tied up.

Nell and Edward were the ones sharing the telling looks now because they were the couple in this scene: not Anneliese and Edward, but Nell and Edward.

‘Please, Anneliese, sit down.’

Edward was still beside her, his expression anxious and his hands out in supplication.

‘I wish we didn’t have to do this but I suppose we have to. Now or never, right?’ he said, looking defeated but determined, determined to have this awful conversation.

And that was when Anneliese knew absolutely that Edward was leaving her for Nell.

Edward hated confrontation of any kind. He’d been useless on those occasions when Beth was in floods of tears, distraught over something or other.

His facing a conversation that could easily end in shouting told her all she needed to know.

‘You’re going, aren’t you? You’re going with Nell.’

Edward nodded mutely and held his hands out imploringly, as if to say, What else can I do?

Anneliese sat down then and placed her hands on the table. ‘I came home early because I’ve got a migraine,’ she said to no one in particular.

‘Shall I fetch your pills?’ Edward said.

She nodded.

He rushed from the room, eager to be gone.

‘Tea might help,’ Nell added and turned to open cupboards, finding cups and teabags easily. She’d spent so many hours here, sharing tea and life with Anneliese, that she knew where everything was as well as Edward and Anneliese did.

‘Tea wouldn’t help, actually,’ Anneliese said harshly. ‘Nothing is going to help.’

Defeated, Nell sat down at the far end of the table opposite Anneliese.

Her hair was different, Anneliese realised. Normally, Nell’s dark blonde curly hair was windswept even when there wasn’t wind. She rarely wore much in the way of make-up and for a woman of her age – Anneliese’s exact age, actually, fifty-six – she had remarkably clear, unlined skin with just a few freckles and the inevitable little creases that spun out from her laughing blue eyes. Today, her hair was brushed carefully into shape and she wore lipstick and mascara. She looked done, ready for some event.

And that event was running off with Anneliese’s husband.

‘Why, Nell, why?’

‘Oh Anneliese, don’t sit there and look so surprised,’ snapped Nell, who’d never snapped at Anneliese before in her life. ‘You must have known. Edward said you didn’t, but I knew you did. Women know. You’re turned a blind eye, that’s all. Which says a lot about your relationship, that you didn’t care enough –’

‘I didn’t know,’ interrupted Anneliese, shocked at this new version of Nell whom, mere moments ago, was saying she’d never meant to hurt Anneliese. ‘If I’d known, do you think I’d have gone on wanting to be your friend, going for lunch with you, asking you here for dinner?’ She stopped because she felt too numb to think up other examples of how she hadn’t known.

‘How long has it been going on?’ she whispered.

Anneliese knew she should summon up rage and fury, but all she felt at this moment was a terrible weakness in her legs, and the sense that she’d been totally wrong about the people in her life.

If either Edward or Nell had betrayed her individually, the other would have been there to remind her that they still loved her. But they’d both betrayed her. Together.

‘Don’t let on you didn’t know. You must have known,’ Nell hissed.

Again, Anneliese felt herself recoil at the bitterness in her friend’s voice.

‘Don’t lie to me, Anneliese. You might lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. If you two were crazily in love with each other, would Edward have come to me? Answer me that, then? No, he wouldn’t. He came to me because you didn’t need him, you cut him off. You had so much and you didn’t care, didn’t realise it. Well, I did and I’m not going to apologise to you for it.’

Anneliese felt the weight of Nell’s rage at her: at Anneliese for having the wonderful Edward all to herself and not realising what a treasure she had, a treasure that she’d stupidly lost.

She thought of all the Saturday nights she’d invited Nell over to the cottage for dinner, making it sound as if they were three friends sharing a meal instead of a happily married couple reaching out the hand of friendship to a widow who might be sitting on her own at home otherwise. Eric, Nell’s husband, had died ten years previously, and since then Anneliese had tried so hard to include Nell in their lives. Anneliese had meant it as pure friendship, but perhaps Nell had seen it as something else: as pity? Or as Anneliese showing off, as if to say, I have a husband and you don’t. Come and eat with us and feel jealous, why don’t you? What else had Nell misconstrued?

‘I thought you knew me well enough, Nell, to know that if I’d realised you and Edward were –’

Saying it was hard.

‘– having an affair, I’d have said something. I might have a lot of flaws, but I know that I’m honest. Remember how many talks we had about the value of friendship where honesty mattered? How we hated fake friends, people who said the right things at the right time and meant none of it?’

The anger that hadn’t been there suddenly blazed to life in Anneliese’s heart. They’d lied to her. They’d both said they valued truth, and now it transpired that truth had been missing for such a long time. Worse, Nell was trying to put the blame on to Anneliese.

‘I didn’t have a clue what was happening,’ she went on in a harsh voice. ‘It might make you feel better to think I did and that I was giving you tacit approval to steal my husband, but I didn’t.’

‘I’m sorry, Anneliese.’ Edward stood in the doorway, the small plastic container of Anneliese’s migraine medicine in his hand and a look of desolation on his face. ‘I knew you didn’t know. I wanted to think you did because it would be easier, but I knew you didn’t.’

‘How long has it been going on, this thing between you two?’ Anneliese asked, purposely not looking at Nell any more.

‘Not that long,’ said Edward.

‘Since the fundraiser for the lifeboat,’ Nell interrupted, obviously not keen on the damage limitation of breaking it all to Anneliese gently.

Well over a year, Anneliese thought to herself.

‘I presume you were waiting for a nice time to break it to me, then. My birthday? Christmas?’

‘It had to come out sometime,’ Nell said coolly. ‘Might as well be now.’

Both women looked at Edward, who shrugged helplessly.

Anneliese felt another surge of anger, white hot this time.

The words were in Anneliese’s mouth before she had time to think about them: ‘You should pack, Edward. Nell, I’d like you to wait outside, please. I don’t want you in my house any more. You could always go home and wait for Edward to come. He’ll need space for his things.’

Somehow, Anneliese got up and went into the living room, where she broke with the habit of a lifetime and poured herself a strong brandy from the stupid globe drinks trolley that Edward loved and she’d always hated. He could have that, for a start.

She heard muffled talking from the kitchen, then the sound of the kitchen door closing and the revving of Nell’s car. That was some relief.

She couldn’t bear Nell being in the cottage now. Her very presence was poisonous: the worst sort of poison, the sort you hadn’t known was dangerous.

After the first drink, Anneliese had a second. Ludicrous to be drinking now, but she needed something to numb her. She sat on the window ledge looking out at the bay and tried not to listen to the sounds of Edward’s packing.

When Beth had been a teenager, Anneliese became very good at listening. It was different from listening to a small child messing round in the kitchen: hearing the fridge opening, the milk bottle top being laboriously pulled off, the glug of milk and the intake of breath when some spilled. That was a sort of innocuous listening.

But mothers of teenagers had to listen in a different way; what CD was being played was an excellent gauge.

Oasis and Counting Crows were good signs. Anything slow and dreamy might mean Beth was in a relaxed mood. But Suzanne Vega was fatal. A signal that Beth was in turmoil.

She’d have to tell Beth about this, of course. Anneliese closed her eyes at the thought of that conversation.

The back door banged and she jumped at the noise. Edward had gone. She rushed to the side window to see him put one suitcase and a gym bag into his car. He could have taken very little, just his clothes, she decided. Did that mean he wanted to stay after all, or was he so desperate to be with Nell that he didn’t care about his belongings? Who knew?

Evening was casting its greying spell over the beach and despite the old padded jacket, Anneliese shivered. The beach was bleak when the promise of sun had gone: like a wild kingdom that showed a softer side during the day but, when evening arrived, it was time for humans to clear off so the place could revert to its feral, untamed state.

The tide was coming in, slowly, inexorably. Anneliese stood at the edge of the water and watched as the waves lapped in and swept out, surging further and further up the darkening sand every time. It was relentless. In and out, on and on. Like life, coming at her endlessly, when she wished it would stop.

She watched as if hypnotised, until the water seeped into her shoes and then she moved back, startled.

If anyone could see her now, they’d think she was crazy, and perhaps she was: a lonely woman standing half-crazed at the shoreline, stuck in every sense of the word. Then she turned and walked home, leaving the dark of evening behind her.

The cottage was scarily silent and she went around turning on all the lights, anything to create a sense of warmth. In the sitting room, she picked up her knitting bag and looked forlornly at the tumbled skeins of coloured wools that perched on top.

She couldn’t bear the thought of the television or even the radio. But she might knit. Knitting somehow soothed her mind. It was a newish hobby. Newish in that she’d knitted things years ago: slippers, baby clothes, blankets for Beth’s dolls. But she’d never been much of an expert. She’d come back to it a year ago, after she stopped working in the garden centre and knew she needed something to occupy herself.

She’d toyed with the idea of learning another language or learning the computer, and then Marcus, her son-in-law, had helped by giving her an old laptop. Even though he apologised endlessly for its age and decrepitude, it still worked and Anneliese was thrilled with it.

‘It’s obsolete,’ he’d said apologetically.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Anneliese smiled.

‘It’s ten years old. That’s practically a dinosaur in computer terms,’ he’d gone on.

‘Like myself,’ Anneliese added, patting him on the arm.

She loved it, and surfing the Net – how she loved to say those words! – had taken her down a strange path one day to a craft site where she found all types of knitting that had nothing in common with the lumpen slippers and baby cardigans she used to make.

This knitting involved making felted handbags, crafting lace-like shawls, making wall hangings.

She loved it and instantly ordered a handbag kit. Then, in a might-as-well-be-hung-for-a-sheep-as-for-a-lamb moment, she’d also gone to the Crazee Knitters forum and signed herself up as a fledgling knitter. On the site, women from all over the world shared their knitting experiences.

It had taken her ages to write her first message: there was something scarily final about sending your thoughts out there where everyone could read them, but Anneliese felt safe in the anonymity of the internet.

Anneliese from Ireland could be anyone.

In her cottage with every light lit, Anneliese logged on, clicked on to her last message and felt a stab of utter astonishment at what she’d written only a few days before. It was so normal, so ordinary.

I’m halfway through knitting the pink-and-grey bag. It’s so pretty and I can’t wait to actually finish it because I want to see what it looks like when it’s felted. Last night, I sat up until midnight with the TV on and kept knitting. I sort of watched two medical dramas I’ve never seen before at the same time and a programme about a man-made island in Dubai and I kept knitting. I wish I was faster and I’m not sure how to knit the flower – does anyone have hints for it?

Anneliese thought of that night. Edward had laughed at her manic knitting and had gone to bed, leaving her and her circular needle in front of the television. At the time, she’d felt guilty leaving him to go to bed on his own. It was as bad as having separate bedrooms.

Just showed what she knew.

She’d been worried about sending him to bed alone, when he was probably grateful to escape her.

The pain of today was still too fresh to be anything but numb, but for a brief moment, Anneliese felt a sharp stab of agony. Edward was gone and he’d left with Nell. And all along, she hadn’t had a clue what was going on under her nose. She used to feel so intuitive, so connected with the universe. Clearly she wasn’t. That connectedness was another big misconception.

What else had she been wrong about in her life?

Suddenly, Anneliese felt that she couldn’t cope with all this on her own. She needed something to dull it. She found the corkscrew and a bottle of very expensive red wine that Edward had been saving. Blast that for a game of soldiers, she thought, pouring herself a big glass.

Then, glass in hand, she sat down in front of her laptop and felt grateful for the existence of those other people around the world, who might be sitting as she was now, alone.

The wine bit as it went down. It tasted too acidy, but perhaps that was just her. She’d had a strange metallic taste in her mouth all day: was that what grief tasted like? She drank it all the same and wondered did anyone on Crazee Knitters have any hints for what to do when your husband of thirty-seven years left you? In the five months since she’d been posting on the site, she’d only ever talked about her knitting – the pink-and-grey flower bag that had taken her three months because it was very complicated. Other people did talk about their lives, but Anneliese wasn’t the sort of person to open herself up to others. Now, when she had this unexpected longing to share her pain, it was too big to talk about.

She scrolled down through the posts. MariLee had posted a picture of the most amazing lacy shawl with a rainbow motif and Anneliese wondered absently if she’d ever be able to make anything that complicated. The flower bag was only difficult because there were so many bits to it. There were no really hard stitches, just lots of fiddly little bits to knit, felt and sew painstakingly together.

Lily had loved the finished product.

‘Isn’t it a dotey little thing,’ she’d said when Anneliese arrived to show it off in all its glory.

‘I loved knitting when I was younger although I can’t knit any more,’ she’d added ruefully, holding up fingers gnarled with arthritis. ‘It calms the soul.’

‘I can’t knit, really,’ Anneliese replied. ‘I keep toying with the idea of getting a pattern for a sweater or something, but I’m not sure I could do anything so complicated.’

‘Anneliese, you can do anything you set your mind to,’ Lily smiled.

‘Am I too old to learn?’

Lily laughed outright at that. ‘You’re never too old to learn, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m still learning, and look at me – nearly ninety. You’re only a child, Anneliese. What’s it they say nowadays? Izzie said it to me once…’ Lily stopped to think. ‘Yes, I’ve got it: ninety is the new eighty! So fifty-six is like being a teenager, if you make yourself think that way.’

Anneliese sighed. She’d have to tell Lily about Edward too.

Not that Lily would be like poor, dear Beth and need careful handling once she heard the news. Lily was quite unshockable, for all that she looked like a delicate little old lady in the flesh. While Lily had once been tall, age had withered her until she had the look of a bird about her: still with those fiercely intelligent cornflower-blue eyes that missed nothing, but as fragile as a bird nonetheless. Yet there was nothing fragile about her mind or her opinions.

So it wasn’t the thought of shocking Lily that made Anneliese not want to tell her – it was the pity she’d seen on Lily’s face. Anneliese hated being pitied most of all.

She finished her drink and began to write. Perhaps her fellow knitters had the wisdom she needed.

Sorry to bother you all with this but I’ve got no one to talk to and I’ve got to talk. You see, my husband left me today. I won’t bore you with the minute details but basically I came home to find him and my best friend talking and I knew. They were having an affair. He left with her. I don’t know what to do or think. I haven’t told anybody yet – we have a daughter but she’s very emotional. You could say she doesn’t do reality very well.

The hardest thing is the sense that I didn’t know him at all – or her, for that matter. It’s like a death. I think I’m going through grief. I feel like people must feel when they discover someone they loved is secretly a rapist or a murderer. I’m so astonished that I didn’t know and then, I wonder if everything was a lie? It must be. And I never noticed.

How could that be? How many other things did he lie about? Loving me? That I was the only woman he wanted to make love to? Wanting to be with me? Right now, it all could be a lie because he managed to keep one huge lie, so how can I be sure that all the other things aren’t lies too?

I can see a photo of us on the wall from here and I’m looking at it trying to catch a glimpse of this different person who must have been there all along, except that I didn’t notice him. This picture of us – me and him and our daughter, when she was about ten – is a holiday shot when we were on a picnic and it looks different now. We had that old station wagon and that really ugly tartan rug is spread beside it, and I’m smiling and so is he, and Beth’s dancing – she was so into ballet then – once, I’d have sworn tears of blood that I knew what was in his head at that moment: that he was happy with us. And now – well, I don’t know.

So what he’s done now has made me question every single thing in our whole shared lives. My memories are gone because they might be fake and they might not.

It’s like being shown a picture of a vase in silhouette and then someone points out that it could also represent two faces in profile, and once you’ve seen the new picture, it’s impossible to look at it and just see the vase.

And how do I tell my daughter? She’s thirty-six, married – and that sounds like she should be here taking care of me right now, but the thing is, it’s still the other way round. No matter what happened to me, Beth would need to be taken care of. So, does anyone have any advice for me? I’m desperate.

Anneliese was about to click ‘send’ when she changed her mind. With a single keystroke, she erased the whole message.

She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, a voice made angry by Anneliese’s shutting the door of her bedroom and refusing to come out: ‘Anneliese, you can’t solve everything by shutting us all out, you know.’

Shutting the door might not have worked but it made her feel better. Always had. It could again too. Instincts weren’t called instincts for nothing.

She locked the doors and checked the windows were shut. That had always been Edward’s job: the man’s job, organising the house before bed. Anneliese dampened down the hurt and the pain of thinking of him. They were just doors: she could lock them herself.

She went round the cottage methodically, switching off lights, then climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Her bedroom, now.

The beams in the upstairs of the cottage were stripped wood, bleached pale like all the floorboards. Their bedroom was pale blue with white furniture, two demin rag-rugs on the floor and white curtains that were heavily lined to keep the cold out. Anneliese took one look at the big high bedstead with its white quilted coverlet and backed out of the room. She couldn’t sleep there tonight. It would be like lying in a bed of lies.

Beth’s bedroom was still Beth’s, even though she’d left home years before. Beth liked the comfort of her childhood things still being there: her Barbies and their various cars and wardrobes still arranged on the wooden shelves, her Enid Blyton books lined up neatly.

The spare bedroom in the cottage was barely a box room. Painted purest white, there was room only for a bed, a bleached wood chest of drawers with seashells laid on top as decoration, and a tiny one-drawer nightstand with an old brass lamp on it. In the twenty years she’d lived in the cottage, Anneliese had never slept in this room. Which made it perfect.

She unearthed a small container of sleeping tablets from the bathroom cabinet, took one and washed it down with tapwater. In Beth’s room, she found an old nightdress of her daughter’s and pulled it on. She didn’t want anything from her own room to contaminate her. She climbed into the spare-room bed, turned out the light and closed her eyes until the chemically-induced sleep claimed her.

The Lifeboat Shop in Tamarin was very successful. Perhaps it was due to the loud proximity of the sea itself, but everyone – locals and visitors alike – dutifully went in to search for bargains, knowing that for every second-hand blouse they bought, money went to the upkeep of the local lifeboats. Even with the sea in the bay shining serenely up at people on a summer’s day, the power of the water was felt: beautiful, and yet all-powerful.

Monday was one of Anneliese’s days for working in the shop. She worked there Mondays and Wednesdays and had done so ever since she’d given up full-time work in the garden centre. When she woke early the day after Edward left her, she knew she had to go in.

Not turning up would make everyone think she was sick, and then someone might see Edward and ask him how she was, and he might tell the truth and –

Anneliese couldn’t bear that. She didn’t want everyone knowing what had happened, not until she’d dealt with it in her own head. She wasn’t sure when she was going to be able to do that – the sleeping tablet had made all thinking impossible as she’d crashed out twenty minutes after taking it, and to stave off the sense of solitude in the cottage the following morning, she’d turned on the radio loud, preferring plenty of news stories to being alone with her thoughts.

Her thoughts were dangerous, she decided: she didn’t want to be on her own with them.

Anneliese preferred the mornings in the shop.

The churchgoers were sure to arrive after Mass, and the women who’d dropped children at school popped in for a quick rummage. People who took early lunches sometimes crammed their sandwiches into a few minutes so they could rifle through the rails of clothes, or scan the shelves lined with books.

It was a nice, chatty place to work, with no real pressure, except when something of value came in and all the staff panicked slightly about getting the correct price sorted out for it, in case the original owner returned and felt their donation wasn’t being prized enough.

Today, there were five refuse sacks of stuff to be gone through, so Anneliese sat in the back of the shop where the storeroom, kitchenette and toilet were situated, and went through it all carefully. There were piles of clothes, mainly women’s, soft toys still covered with dust, and children’s clothes alongside ornaments, some paperback books, and bits of costume jewellery. About half of the stuff was in good condition and Anneliese began the painstaking job of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

It was incredible what some people thought was acceptable to donate to charity, she thought, holding up a man’s shirt with a threadbare collar, several missing buttons and a suspicious yellow stain on the sleeve. Curry? Flower pollen? She threw it into the ‘dump’ box.

Yvonne, another volunteer, was manning the front counter and kept up a steady stream of chat with the customers. Anneliese liked working with Yvonne because no response was ever required. Yvonne talked and didn’t appear to care if anyone replied or not. This normally suited Anneliese because she liked working in peace with just the faint hum of the radio in the background. Today, it suited her because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to have a conversation if her life depended on it.

Anneliese knew she looked wretched and said she hadn’t slept to cover up the fact, even though the chemical cosh had knocked her out for eight hours. But she looked much worse than any lack of sleep could account for. She’d been shocked at the sight of herself in the mirror that morning. Grief had aged her overnight and it was as if her very bones had thrown themselves against her skin in protest at all the pain. She felt as if the last, vaguely youthful bloom of her skin had gone, leaving nothing but sharp angles, hollows and the big indigo-blue eyes her daughter, Beth, had inherited, like shining pools in an oval face. The thick white hair – once a stunning white blonde, now just silky white – that she kept neatly tied back no longer looked feminine. Instead, it made her look far older than her years: older and pantomime witchy.

Anneliese could barely recognise the woman who’d been told by an admirer, many years ago, that she looked like a prima ballerina with her long, graceful neck and doe eyes. She’d been one of Tamarin’s beauties about a million years ago, she thought sadly, or so Edward had told her.

Who’d have thought it now?

She should have bothered with make-up, after all, she decided. Some base, a little concealer to hide the dark circles, mascara to lift her eyes and some creamy blush to bring warmth to the apples of her cheeks: Anneliese had always been very proficient with make-up.

It was the one thing she and her mother had agreed on.

If Anneliese was going to throw herself away on a job in gardening, then she should still look after her skin and never go out without lipstick, her mother had said.

Her mother had also always been firm on women not drinking hard spirits. Anneliese had kept to that dictum too and was regretting her brandies and glasses of wine the day before. Her head ached dully from the unaccustomed drinking.

‘Dogs will do their business on the beach, I said,’ Yvonne was saying to a customer. ‘Signs, that’s what we need; signs on the beach about doggy doo.’

Anneliese was one of the people who disagreed with this point of view, preferring the dog-crap option to lots of ugly signs telling people off for not clearing up. Signs would ruin the craggy, bare beauty of the beach.

But she kept quiet and allowed herself to wonder what Yvonne would make of her news.

Edward has left me. He’s living with Nell Mitchell. Yes, that Nell – my best friend. There you go. Shows you don’t really ever know people, do you?

It still sounded wrong.

She tried it again, saying it more slowly in her mind, to see if she could make sense of it.

We’ve been through hard times, Edward and I, and perhaps it was too hard for him and Nell is so easygoing and, after all, they know each other so well –

‘Anneliese, what did you say?’ Yvonne looked at her expectantly from the front of the shop. The customer was gone and it was only the two of them in the shop.

‘Nothing, Yvonne. Just talking to myself.’

‘Oh sure, I do the same myself, Anneliese.’ Yvonne sighed and went back to scanning the local paper. ‘Nobody pays me the slightest heed. Mam, the kids say, you talk nineteen to the dozen and when we try to answer, you keep rattling on, so we let you at it. Kids!’

‘Kids, yeah,’ Anneliese nodded, when what she was really thinking was ‘husbands’ and ‘best friends’.

‘But we love them, don’t we?’ Yvonne went on, still talking about children and not in the least aware that she and Anneliese weren’t on the same wavelength at all.

It struck Anneliese at that moment that it was really quite easy to deceive people once they didn’t expect to be deceived. How easy had she been to deceive? Shamefully easy, probably.

She stopped sorting out clothes to ponder this. What lies had Edward and Nell told her? Had they gone home to the cottage on days when Anneliese was in the shop, and lain on her bed, having sex?

Suddenly, she had to rush into the tiny toilet to throw up. Bile, yesterday’s wine and nothing else came up.

‘Anneliese, you all right?’ said Yvonne.

‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Heartburn. Smoked fish pie last night.’

Where did that excuse come from, she wondered, unbending and looking at her red-eyed face in the tiny room’s mirror. Was lying just a matter of practice?

The shop was mercifully busy all morning. Yvonne rushed about, chatting and working the till, while Anneliese gave the appearance of industriousness by tidying shelves and rails after the customers.

Her gaze often strayed out on to the streets of Tamarin, searching for the familiar figure of her husband loping along. Edward worked in an engineering company in town and sometimes dropped in on her when she was in the Lifeboat Shop.

But not, she decided, today.

Still, she stared out of the window, wondering if he and Nell would pass by.

The town was designed like half of a many-pointed star, with streets all heading down towards the harbour where they converged on Harbour Square, a wide piazza with squat Mediterranean-style palm trees, an open-air café called Dorota’s, and the horseshoe-shaped harbour beyond, like two arms reaching into the sea – or like the curve of a crab’s front claws, depending on which way you liked to look at it.

The Lifeboat Shop was on Fillibert Street, halfway between Harbour Square below, and the tiny Church Square above, where St Canice’s stood in its mellow-stone glory.

Her shift in the shop ended at two, when Corinne Brady arrived to take over, trailing scarves, dangly bead necklaces and an overpowering scent of a musky oil purchased many moons ago in the town’s health-food shop. Anneliese knew this because Corinne was always telling her that modern perfumes were bad for you and that eau d’elderly musk was where it was at.

‘Natural smells are best, Anneliese,’ Corinne would say gaily, waving a tiny bottle sticky with age. ‘Modern perfumes cause cancer, you know.’

Normally, Anneliese tolerated Corinne’s eccentricities and her bizarre medical theories, but she couldn’t cope today. She was all out of the milk of human kindness and she wasn’t sure if any of the local shops stocked it.

‘Hello, Yvonne, look at this! A new consignment of black cohosh. Now, Yvonne, I know you don’t want to talk about the whole menopause thing…’

In the background, Anneliese winced. Poor Yvonne. There was no chance of a discreet talk about female problems when Corinne was involved. Corinne didn’t do volume control. She roared, even when attempting to whisper.

‘This is fabulous,’ Corinne was saying.

‘Shout a bit louder,’ Yvonne said crossly, ‘I don’t think the whole town heard you.’

‘Tish, tish,’ said Corinne, unconcerned. ‘We’re all women here and we’re proud of our bodies. It’s the cycle of life, Yvonne. The great life force that moves inside us because Mother Nature put it there.’

Normally, Anneliese would have been grinning by now. Nobody could deny that Corinne was marvellously entertaining when she went into her whole Mother Nature routine. Mother Nature was responsible for all manner of things, including Corinne’s addiction to milk chocolate and Dr Burke from Grey’s Anatomy. Mother Nature would, undoubtedly, be responsible for Edward running off with Nell, if Corinne had a chance to think about it. The great life force would be in flux or something. Anneliese shuddered at the thought of having this raw pain slapped up on Corinne’s mental chopping board for examination. She wondered if she could leave without being seen. Too late –

‘Hello, Anneliese…ohmydear, you look soo tired. Poor you. I have just the thing in my bag –’ began Corinne, reaching into the enormous patchwork leather handbag she hauled around with her. The bag smelled plain bad after too many little bottles of oil and potions had spilled in it. ‘It might look a little odd, dear, but it’s a fungus and you keep adding water to it and drink the juice and –’

‘Corinne, thank you,’ said Anneliese quickly, thinking she might have to throw up again at even the thought of drinking fungus juice. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stop, not now. Bye.’

She almost ran out of the shop, holding her jacket and bag in her hand. She couldn’t deal with Corinne. Not now.

For all Corinne’s bulk, she was very fast and fear of Corinne running after her made Anneliese rush down Fillibert Street looking blindly for somewhere to escape. The bookshop. The Fly Leaf was a small, quirky establishment with a big crime section and darkish windows so it was hard for anybody from outside to see in. Perfect. Nobody would talk to her there.

It was a Bookshop Rule: smile and nod only.

She rushed into the silence of The Fly Leaf, and made blindly for the shelves at the back. The classics section. She fingered the spines of the books, asking herself how long was it since she’d read Jane Austen?

Eventually, she felt calmer. Corinne hadn’t followed her. Now that she was out of the Lifeboat Shop, she could stop pretending and be herself again. Except she wasn’t sure who herself was. It was a strange, disconcerting feeling. Anneliese felt fogged up, not real somehow. Like she’d been teleported into this body and this life and none of it was even vaguely familiar.

Oh no, please, no.

She moved on from the classics and found herself in Self-Help. Her breathing was getting faster again. No. Breathe deeply. In, count to four, and out. After a while, she refocused on the shelves. Self-help. She’d looked in this department many times before and knew that there were no Meditations for People Who Were Pissed Off with the Whole Planet.

A definite gap in the market, she thought grimly. And no 100 Ways To Kill Your Husband and Former Best Friend, either.

But there were plenty of books on depression, which could either be cured by therapy, positive visualisations or eating exactly the right combination of supplements, depending on which book you read.

Anneliese had read lots of them, wanting to be fixed. She scanned the shelves, thinking that she probably had all of these volumes at home, apart from the newer ones. None of them had worked. Depression wasn’t something you could sever from yourself merely by reading a book.

It was so much darker and deeper. She stared angrily at the books, furious with their authors for daring to pretend that they knew what it was like.

Bloody psychiatrists and mental health gurus wrote books on depression, not real people who’d actually been in that cavern underground: a place where you couldn’t imagine ordinary, happy life; a place where functioning was almost out of the question.

Anneliese, come on out of your room and talk to me, please. Her mother’s voice in her memory again. Dear Mother. She’d tried so hard, Anneliese knew, but she’d been stuck with a daughter with a cloud of darkness inside her and their family – ordinary, kind, simple really – hadn’t known what to do with someone like her.

‘If only you’d tell me what’s wrong,’ Mother would beg.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ Anneliese would reply. Because she didn’t. Nobody had hit her or hurt her. But she felt everything so deeply, more deeply than Astrid, her older sister, who was nearest in age to her. There were days when there was simply a cloud in her head, a cloud of fear and anxiety and darkness. She didn’t know why – it was just there.

It was over forty years since she’d had that realisation. She’d been fifteen when she discovered that everyone else didn’t feel the same, that she was different.

And then, in The Fly Leaf bookshop in Tamarin, Anneliese Kennedy had that familiar, jarring sensation of darkness in her head, and something else, the onset of sheer panic. Behind her eyes came a thrumming sensation, like drums beating far away. A slow, constant noise that wasn’t real – she knew that – but felt more real to her than anything else at that exact moment. She hadn’t heard it in so long, normally only heard it in nightmares now, but she knew what it was: fear and panic.

She’d once read that certain types of situation made the lizard brain dominate. The lizard brain was the core survival part of human beings, lower down the totem pole than the limbic system and the cerebral cortex.

The lizard kicked into place when people reached a deep primal fear. There had been so many other hugely long medical words in the article that Anneliese had slightly tuned out, but she’d remembered that bit: that the lizard brain was basic survival and came out when the person was mortally threatened.

Like now. When a panic attack swept over her with raging force. No sooner had she thought the words, than the breathlessness hit and she began to wheeze, feeling her chest tightening. She couldn’t breathe, her heart was racing.

Anneliese moved so quickly that she bumped into a man bending over looking at the sports books.

‘Sorry,’ she half gasped, whisking past him. She had to get out and home. She needed to be in a safe place so she could make this fear and darkness go away.

It was years since she’d had a panic attack, years. She’d forgotten how horrific they were, how she always felt as if she was going to die.

Her hands were shaking so much, it was hard to get her keys from her bag, almost impossible to keep the key for the car at the right angle to slip it into the lock. But she did. Safe, she was a bit safe.

She sat in the driver’s seat, shaking, trying to calm her breath.

Breathe in, count to four, breathe out.

When she’d felt recovered enough, she started the engine, keeping the volume turned up loud on talk radio, willing the discussion to block out her own head. She didn’t want to think.

The house was silent when she got there – not the silence of a home where another person might be back soon, but the deadening silence of a place where only one person lived. Anneliese made herself a mug of herbal tea, the Tranquility tea that Edward used to gently tease her about. About to put the pack back in the cupboard, she took another teabag and stuck that in the mug too. She needed a double dose of tranquillity.

Then, she took the mug and an old fleecy blanket outside to sit on the deck.

With her feet curled up under her, mug in her hand and the blanket wrapped around her, Anneliese stared out at the crashing waves and let herself breathe slowly.

Breathe. In and out. Slowly and deeply. Concentrate on each breath, let your lungs fill and exhale slowly through your nose. In and out. That was all you had to do every day – breathe.

Shit, shit, it wasn’t working. Despite the deep breathing, she could feel her heartbeat fluttering along at speed, and the darkness was still in the back of her head, coming closer now.

Fuck you, Edward, for doing this to me, Anneliese thought bitterly.

She huddled into the fleecy blanket for warmth.

She was not going back on the tablets, not again.

Edward had been so good and understanding about her depression, even if he’d never entirely got it.

‘I feel a bit sad too sometimes, you know,’ he’d said early on in their marriage. ‘It’s not the same as you, love, but I understand, or at least, I’m trying to.’

Anneliese, who’d chosen her words carefully when she talked about being depressed so that she didn’t scare him or make him think he was married to a complete nutcase who needed access to a straitjacket at all times, had to stop herself from laughing out loud.

He couldn’t know or understand that depression was a part of her: she could go about her daily life like anybody else but while some people had freckles or lovely olive skin as part of their genetic make-up, she had depression. A part of her: sometimes there, sometimes not. She could go months, years, without feeling that overwhelming darkness, but when she did, it was far more than feeling a bit sad. And yet she loved him, loved him for trying.

‘I love you, you darling man,’ she said to him fiercely. He’d laughed too and hugged her, and Anneliese had ended up sitting on his lap, their arms wrapped round each other, and she’d felt really loved.

This kind, complex man didn’t really understand what she went through, but he was doing his best. That was love: trying to understand your mate, even if the understanding was outside your scope.

She remembered talking to Nell about it too. That hurt: thinking of bloody Nell knowing about Anneliese’s inner pain and then still walking off with her husband. Anneliese shuddered under her fleecy blanket.

She was beginning to hate Nell.

‘How can you be feeling like that, you know, down, and still go out and be normal?’ Nell had asked once, when Beth was a little girl and Anneliese had brought her to a classmate’s birthday party and gone home to cry for two straight hours, which was where Nell had found her when she dropped round.

‘You put your game face on,’ Anneliese said simply, her face raw with tears. ‘You can’t sit in a corner and stare into nothingness when you’ve a child. You just can’t.’

Not that she hadn’t felt like it many times, but mother love was a potent force. Anneliese might have had many days where she’d have liked to stay in bed, drag the duvet around her like armour and sit out the bleakness. But she couldn’t do that to her daughter.

When Beth grew older and it became clear that she’d inherited her mother’s depression just as she’d inherited her indigo eyes, protecting Beth had become Anneliese’s life. Beth, who needed huge love and attention, came highest on the totem pole.

Next, came Anneliese herself, sometimes staying on top of it all, sometimes falling into the pit so that she’d reluctantly have to go to the doctor and take some of those damned antidepressants, and she hated them. It was like admitting to failure and if she read one more article that said depression was like diabetes and if you had diabetes, you wouldn’t mind taking insulin to fix it, then she’d kill someone.

Edward, dear kind Edward, had come a very definite third in his wife’s list of priorities.

Women’s first love and concern would always be their children, if they had them, Anneliese had realised, while men’s would be their women. The two equations weren’t even on the same page.

Had that driven Edward away – always being third in their marriage? How could he not have known that he wasn’t third through choice but because of the rules of simple survival?

Anneliese sighed and stared out at the view that sold the house to her and Edward all those years ago. In the sharp light, Milsean Bay was like a mirror set in a valley that changed from white sand to the peaty green of the fields.

Beyond lay the Atlantic Ocean where seagulls swooped and flecks of white foam whisked up dramatically. Be careful, roared the water. It was a lesson that locals never forgot. Tourists took boats out to explore the sheltered bay, and kidded themselves that the waters were safe, only to have to be rescued when their boats were swept out into the fierce tempest of the Atlantic.

Basking sharks could sometimes be seen from the cliffs above the point, where a dolmen stood in grandeur. Anneliese could remember the day she and Edward had taken Beth to see the dolmen when she was small, wanting to instil a sense of pride in her.

‘This is our history, Beth,’ Edward had explained.

And now he’d rewritten their family history. Anneliese didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that. There was no justification, none.

Of course, it didn’t matter to Edward if she forgave him or not. He wasn’t in her life any more.