Believing the Lie (15 page)

She loved the fact that this house—a gift from her husband’s father to celebrate the occasion of her marriage to his only son—sat just above the Kent Channel, which was itself part of greater Morecambe Bay. From the edge of the property where a stone wall marked a public footpath along the channel and ultimately up to the wild, open hilltop of Arnside Knot, she could stand with a voluminous shawl wrapped round her and watch the renewing return of the salt water. She could pretend she knew something about how to read the eddies that it created.

She was there now, on this November afternoon. The sunlight was dimming as it would do earlier and earlier until late December,
and the temperature was fast falling as well. A cloud bank over the rise of Humphrey Head Point across the channel to the west suggested a coming night of rain, but she wasn’t bothered by this. Unlike so many people in this adopted country of hers, she always welcomed rain with its promise of both growth and renewal. Still, she found herself uneasy. Her husband was the cause.

She hadn’t heard from him. She’d phoned his mobile during the afternoon, once she’d learned from ringing Fairclough Industries that Nicholas hadn’t gone into work that day. She’d made that phone call round eleven, when he still should have been there prior to leaving for the Middlebarrow Pele Project, where he now spent half of his workdays. She’d first assumed that he’d gone to the project earlier than usual and she’d then rung his mobile. But all she heard was that disembodied voice telling her that she had to leave a message. This she had done, three times now. The fact that Nicholas had not replied filled her with concern.

His cousin’s sudden death loomed large. Alatea didn’t want to think about it. Not only did death in general shake her, but this death in particular and the circumstances of this death filled her with a dread that took every ounce of her skill at subterfuge to hide. Ian’s drowning had hit the family hard. Particularly had it devastated Nicholas’s father. So staggered had Bernard been at first that Alatea had wondered at the nature of his exact relationship with Ian. But it was only when Bernard had begun to distance himself from Nicholas that Alatea had sensed an undercurrent beneath the older man’s grief.

Nicholas was not involved in Ian’s drowning. Alatea knew this for a hundred and one reasons but most of all she knew it because she knew her husband. He seemed weak to people because of his past, but he was no such thing. He was the rock and substance of her life, and he would become the same to many others if he only had the chance. This was what the Middlebarrow Pele Project was giving to him.

But he hadn’t been at the project today any more than he had been at Fairclough Industries. Had he been, he would have had his mobile switched on. He knew it was important to her to have contact with him periodically and he was always willing to allow
her the access. He’d said at first, “Do you not trust me, Allie? I mean, if I’m going to use again, I’m going to use again. You can’t stop me with a phone call, you know,” but that hadn’t been the reason she wanted close contact with him, and through partial truths she’d ultimately been able to persuade him that her need had nothing to do with the need he himself had finally managed to conquer.

Whenever he was gone from her, she worried that something might happen to him, entirely unrelated to his addictions. A car crash, a stone falling from the old pele tower, a freak accident…exactly like what had happened to Ian. Except she
wouldn’t
think about Ian, she told herself. There were too many other things to consider.

She turned from the sight of the floodwaters swirling into the Kent Channel. Up the slope of the lawn in front of her, Arnside House spread out. She allowed herself a momentary feeling of pleasure as she looked upon the building. The house gave her a focus for her energies, and she wondered if Bernard had known that when he presented it to them upon their return to England.

“It was used for convalescing soldiers after the war,” he’d said as he’d walked her through it, “and then it spent some thirty years as a girls’ school. After that there were two sets of owners who did a few things to restore it to what it once was. But then I’m afraid it stood vacant for a time. Still, there’s something about it that’s very special, my dear. I think it deserves a family running about inside it. And more, it deserves someone like you to put your touch upon it.” He’d kept his hand on the small of her back as he’d walked her through the place. He had a way of looking at her that was a little disturbing. His gaze would go from Nicholas to her and back to Nicholas as if he couldn’t understand what they had between them: either where it had come from in the first place or how it was going to endure.

But that didn’t matter to Alatea. What mattered was Bernard’s acceptance of her, and she had that. She could tell he thought she possessed a form of magical power that was protecting Nicholas, a kind of sorcery perhaps. She could also tell from Bernard’s assessing
looks, taking her in from top to toes, that he reckoned exactly what the sorcery was.

She went up the slope of lawn towards the house. A set of stone steps led up to a terrace, and she used these, careful of the damp moss that grew upon them. Across the lawn she made for a doorway tucked into the side of the building. There she let herself into the drawing room, whose pale yellow walls suggested sunlight even on the most dismal of days.

This was the first room she and Nicholas had restored. It overlooked the terrace, the lawn, and the channel. From its bay windows one could even see across the water to Grange-over-Sands forming a fan of lights up the hillside at night. In the evenings she and Nicholas sat here, a fire glowing in the fireplace as the shadows stretched across the floor.

It was early for the fire, but she lit it anyway, for comfort as well as for warmth. Then she checked the phone for a message from her husband and when there was no light blinking to tell her he’d phoned, she decided to ring him another time. She pressed the numbers slowly, the way one does when hoping a previously engaged line will now be unengaged. Before she finished, though, she finally heard him, his footsteps approaching along the uncarpeted corridor.

She hadn’t heard either his car or his entering the house. But she knew it was Nicholas just as she knew from the lightness of his step what mood he was in. She slipped her mobile into her pocket. Nicholas called her name and she said, “In here, darling,” and in a moment he was with her again.

He paused at the doorway. He looked cherubic in the diffused light, like an overlarge putto from a Renaissance painting, round of face with bright curls spilling over his forehead. He said, “You’re an impossibly gorgeous woman. Am I in the right house?” and he crossed the room to her. She was wearing flat-soled shoes for once, so they were of a height: both of them nearly six feet tall. This made it easier for him to kiss her, and he did so, enthusiastically. His hands went down her back to cup her bum and he pulled her close to him. He finally said with an engaging laugh, “I’m loaded, Allie, like you wouldn’t believe,” and for a terrible moment she thought he’d got
himself high. But then he removed the pins and the slides that kept her hair in order and he loosened it to fall round her face and her shoulders. After that he began to unbutton her blouse and talk about “swimmers and there’re millions of them, and they’re perfect in form and let me tell you they’re ready to be perfect in function as well. Where are we in your cycle just now?” and his mouth went to her neck as his hands deftly unfastened her bra.

Her body responded even as her mind assessed. She sank to the carpet before the fire, pulled Nicholas down with her, and undressed him. He was not a man who coupled in silence. Rather, it was “Christ, the
feel
of you,” and “my God, Allie,” and “oh yes, just like that” and because of this, she knew every level of his rising excitement.

It matched her own. Even if her thoughts began in another place as they always did, in another time, with one or another man, they ended up centred on this man, here. Of its own accord her body met his and they created for each other a release born of pleasure that made everything else fade into insignificance.

This was enough for her. No. It was more than enough. Enough was the love and protection Nicholas afforded her. That in addition she should have found a man whose body met hers in such a way as to drive off memory and fear…This was something she had never expected that day behind the cafeteria till on a mountain in Utah when she looked up, accepted the money for his bowl of chili, and heard him say in wonder, “Jesus God, is it difficult for you?”

She’d said, “What?”

“Being so beautiful. Is it rather like a curse?” And then he’d grinned, scooped up his tray, and said, “Bloody hell. Never mind. What a line, eh? Sorry. I didn’t intend it to sound like that,” and off he went. But he was back the next day and the day after that. On the fourth time through her queue, he asked her if she’d have coffee with him that afternoon, told her he didn’t drink alcohol of any kind, told her he was recovering from methamphetamine addiction, told her he was English, told her he meant to go home to England, told her he meant to prove to his father and his mother that he was
finally through with the devils that had ridden him for so many years, told her…There was a queue behind him, but he didn’t notice. She did, however, and to get him to move along she’d said, “I will meet you, yes. There is a place in the town, across from the town lift. Its name…” And she couldn’t remember the name. She stared at him in some confusion. He stared at her in much the same way. He’d said, “Believe me, I’ll find it,” and so he had.

Now they lay on the carpet before the fire, side by side. He said, “You should tilt your hips, Allie. They’re brilliant swimmers but it’ll be easier if they’re going downhill.” He rose on one elbow and observed her. “I went to Lancaster,” he said frankly. “Did you try to phone me? I switched off the mobile because I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie to you.”

“Nicky…” She heard the disappointment in her voice. She wished she could have hidden it, but at least the sound of it was better than acknowledging the sudden fear that stabbed her.

“No, listen, darling. I needed to check, just to make sure. I did such a job on my body for so many years, it was logical for me to want to know…I mean, wouldn’t you want to? In my position? With nothing happening yet?”

She turned as well, her arm stretched out over her head and her head resting upon it. She looked not at him but rather over his shoulder. The rain had begun. She could see its pattern on the bay windows. She said, “I am not a machine for babies, Nicky, how do you call it? This thing that grows them?”

“Incubator,” he said. “I know you’re not. And I don’t think of you that way. But it’s only natural…I mean, it’s been two years now…We’ve both been anxious about it…You know.” He reached out and touched her hair. She didn’t have the kind of hair a man could run his fingers through. It was kinky and disordered, the gift of one of her progenitors, and God only knew which one because they represented a mixture of races and ethnicities too varied for logic to explain how they had all ended up reproducing with each other.

She said, “That
is
it, Nicky. The anxious part, you know. My
magazine says that anxiety alone can make this difficult for a woman.”

“I understand. I
do
, darling. But it could be something else, and it’s time we found out, don’t you think? That’s why I went and it’s also why you can—”

“No.” She shook his hand off her hair and sat up.

“Don’t sit! That’ll—”

She cast him a look. “In my country,” she said, “women are not made to feel this way: that they exist for one purpose only.”

“I don’t think that.”

“These things take time. We know this where I come from. And a baby is something to cherish. A baby is not…” She hesitated. She looked away from him. She knew the truth of the matter, far beyond what her body was and was not doing. That truth needed to be spoken between them, so she finally said, “A baby is not a way to win your father’s approval, Nicky.”

Another man would have responded in outrage or denial, but this was not Nicholas’s way. Part of her love for him derived from his absolute honesty, so strange in a man who’d given years of his life to the worship of drugs. He said, “You’re right, of course. I do want it for that reason. I owe him that much for what I put him through. He’s desperate for a grandchild and I can do that for him since my sisters didn’t.
We
can do that for him.”

“So you see—”

“But that’s not the only reason, Allie. I want this with you.
Because
of you and because there’s an
us
.”

“And if I have these tests. If what comes out of it is that I am not able…?” She dropped into silence and in that silence she could feel—she would swear it—his muscles become quite tense. She didn’t know what this meant, and that fact pounded the blood down her arms and into her fingers so that she had to move. She got to her feet.

He did as well. He said, “Is that what you actually think?”

“How can I think otherwise when this”—a gesture towards the carpet, the fire, where they had lain, what they had done—“becomes only about a baby? Your little swimmers, as you call them, and how they are shaped and how they can move and how I should position
myself afterwards to make certain they do what you want them to do. How am I meant to feel, faced with this and with your insistence that I visit some doctor and spread my legs and have instruments thrust into me and whatever else?”

Her voice had risen. She bent, picked up her discarded clothing, began to dress. “All this day,” she said, “I miss you so much. I worry when I phone you and you do not answer. I long for you because it’s
you
, while—”

“It’s the same for me. You know that.”

“I know nothing.”

She left him. The kitchen was at the other end of the house, down the long panelled corridor, through the main hall and the dining room. She went there and began their dinner. It was far too early for this, but she wanted something to do with her hands. She was mindlessly chopping onions when Nicholas joined her again. He, too, was dressed, but he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung drunkenly from his shoulders in a way that made her soften towards him. He was, she knew, a lost boy without her, just as she would be lost without him.