Hidden Cottage (28 page)
‘What’s the latest on Eliza?’ he asked, clearing his throat to loosen the sudden tightness in it.
‘She didn’t go to work today. Simon told them she’d come down with a bug. She’s in the shower now.’ His mother glanced at her watch. ‘And Simon’s due back any minute. I insisted he stay with us, rather than a soulless hotel. It seemed the right thing to do.’
‘Fair enough. What’s he like?’
She smiled. ‘Perfect for your sister. Only she doesn’t realize it.’
Intrigued, Jensen tilted his head. ‘You’re going to have to fill me in.’ The pillow sorted, he tossed it on the bed and put his arms around his mother, gave her one of his trademark massive hugs that lifted her off the ground.
She smiled when he put her down. ‘It’s going to be good having you living back here again,’ she said.
‘Oh, you’ll soon be sick of me. Come on, downstairs and tell me all I need to know before talking to Eliza.’
While Simon helped Mia clear away after supper, Eliza sat outside with Jensen in the gathering twilight.
‘Simon seems nice,’ Jensen said.
‘He is,’ she replied. ‘We’ve always worked well together. He’s been very good to me, has more than gone the extra mile in covering for my ineptitude this week. I owe him.’
‘Never been anything between the two of you, then?’
She turned and looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, in a non-work-colleague way. No special water-cooler moments between you?’
Eliza tutted. ‘Just goes to show how poor your powers of observation are. Simon’s
so
not interested in me.’
‘He
so
is, little sis.’
‘And you, big bro, couldn’t be more wrong.’ She lowered her voice, even though there was no danger of them being overheard out here in the garden. ‘Simon’s gay; I’d have thought you’d have managed to work that out for yourself.’
Jensen laughed. It was the first time anyone had laughed around her since Sunday morning at the airport. But for some reason, her brother appeared to be laughing
at
her. ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked, feeling cross.
‘Take it from me, Simon is
not
gay.’
‘He is too.’
‘Eliza, you’re hopeless.’
She looked at him indignantly. He was smiling now. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘OK, so tell me what makes you think he’s gay.’
‘It’s perfectly obvious; he never talks about any girlfriends, or even girls in general for that matter. And look how he is with Mum, helping her with the slightest thing. He’s in there now washing up, for heaven’s sake!’
‘That’s the sum total of your critical analysis, is it? The guy’s too helpful and never talks about girls.’ Jensen shook his head in what she considered to be a very irritating manner; it made her want to thump him. ‘Honestly,’ he went on, ‘for someone who is so smart, you can be remarkably stupid.’
‘And you can be remarkably annoying,’ she snapped. Now she did thump him. On the arm. Hard. Like they used to when they were children and were giving one another dead arms.
‘Go on, thump me again,’ he laughed. ‘Get it fully out of your system.’
She raised her hand again, but then dropped it. She could feel her cheeks burning. ‘Why are you being so horrible to me? You said you’d come here to cheer me up and all you’re doing is making fun of me.’
He put his arm around her shoulders, tried to pull her close. But she wouldn’t yield to him. He said, ‘Let’s call it the art of misdirection, because for a short while, I took your mind off Greg the Bastard, so you could at least thank me for that. If it helps, you can take out your anger with him by using me as a punchbag. Nothing like some good old-fashioned violence to make you feel better.’
It was on her lips to say she didn’t think she’d ever feel better again, but then she realized that compared to this time last night, she did indeed feel less manic.
It was dusk-dark and what little light there was made black silhouettes of the trees and The Gingerbread House at the far end of the garden. A few birds were still chirruping farewell to the day. Sitting here like this with Jensen, as they had many times before as teenagers, she felt a clearing of the miasma that had fugged her brain since seeing Greg at the airport. She welcomed the moment of clarity, sensing that it would be fleeting, that all too soon it would be lost and she would be dragged back into a debilitating state of wretchedness.
She had woken this morning leaden with inertia and incipient tears. She hated feeling so pathetic and so full of self-pity. Never before had anything reduced her to this awful mess. She was unrecognizable to herself. All her energy had gone, the slightest thing left her exhausted, and she just wanted to sleep and sleep.
Work could not be further from her mind. And that scared her. Really scared her. She had to pull herself together. There could be no more days like today, when the sum total of her achievements had been to have a bowl of soup with Mum at lunchtime and then spend the afternoon in her pyjamas on the sofa, mindlessly watching the telly until her eyes were gritty and she had grown tired of the inexorable game shows, property searches and cookery programmes.
Finally when she could take no more, she had switched off the television and determined not to give in to the increasing paralysis of her mind, she had hauled herself to her feet. ‘I will not allow that man to make me feel this way,’ she had said aloud. With an unexpected burst of energy, she had feverishly gathered up the sodden tissues that she had cast around her, thrown them in the bin and gone upstairs for a shower. No sooner was she out of the shower than the lethargy returned and she lay on her bed and gave in to another bout of furious and pitiful tears, thinking of the utter pointlessness of it all. And by ‘all’, she meant life. Just what was the point of it when it could be so bloody awful? When it could be wrecked in a single moment?
Now, as she rested her head against her brother’s shoulder, she thought how weary she was. She was only twenty-six years old but felt more like a hundred and six and that every day of her life so far had been a waste, because nothing in it had prepared her for what Greg had done to her. Whenever she thought of his wife’s face at the airport – in particular her friendly smile and the affectionate way she had spoken to her son – Eliza wanted to squeeze her eyes shut with sickening shame. How dare Greg turn her into the kind of woman who could have wreaked such wanton destruction on a family.
Eliza had noted that Jensen, who never said anything he didn’t mean, had not added his voice to the highly implausible theory that maybe Greg had cared for her all along and was waiting for the right time to leave his wife. She loved her brother for that, for his unequivocal honesty. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said to him now.
‘Thank
you
for hitting me. It’s a long time since I’ve had a dead arm.’
In spite of everything, Eliza smiled into the growing darkness. It gave her the courage to say: ‘It seems so obvious now; all the signs were there that Greg was lying to me. The absences, the times I couldn’t contact him, the sudden changes to his itinerary. I was blind to every one of his lies. The truth was staring me right there in the face, and I never once saw it.’
‘No,’ Jensen said firmly. ‘No hindsight crap. Don’t you dare go beating yourself up with it.’ She couldn’t see if the expression on his face had changed, but she heard his voice soften when he went on to say, ‘What was it about him that you loved?’
She sighed. ‘The way he made me feel.’
‘Which was?’
‘That I mattered. That I counted for something.’
It was a few seconds before Jensen said anything. ‘I get that,’ he murmured. ‘I really do. If it makes any difference, you’ve always mattered to me.’
She swallowed. ‘You to me as well.’
The birds had squawked their last notes of the evening now and in the shadowy indigo light, the silence wrapped itself around Eliza as tangibly as her brother’s arm.
‘We’re changing, aren’t we, Jensen?’ she said quietly. ‘You, me, and Daisy. She phoned me today, said Mum had been in touch and told her about Greg. She told me to jack in my job and run off to Sydney with her.’
‘Not such a bad idea. Could you do it?’
Eliza shook her head. ‘What and leave you?’
‘Wherever you were in the world, I’d always be here for you, you know that.’
‘Stop it; you’ll make me cry again. Just as I was beginning to feel almost human.’
He gave her shoulder a small squeeze. ‘Another tear from you, and I’ll be forced to give you a dead arm.’
She smiled. ‘You and Tattie, you have something special, don’t you? Something true and lasting.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Aren’t you sure?’
‘I’m so sure of it, I’m scared of losing it. Of cocking it up.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Track record says otherwise. Relationships have never worked out well for me.’
‘This time it’s different for you. I know it is.’
‘Don’t say that. Don’t tempt fate to have the last laugh.’
Later, when he was in bed, Jensen spoke quietly into his mobile phone to Tattie. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I just wanted you to know that.’
‘I love you too, JC.’
‘And I love Madison as well. I love us being a family.’
There was a pause.
‘What’s wrong?’ Tattie asked.
‘Nothing. I just want you to know how much you mean to me. Before I met you, I was a bit of a loner, a screw-up; nothing ever seemed to go right for me. But you changed that. I took one look at you and it was as if I knew you already. It was like some kind of amazing recognition. Am I making any sense to you?’
‘Yes. Lots of sense. And so as you know, you’re the real deal for me. The whole enchilada with extra cheese on top. I love you, JC. I wish you were here so I could show you just how much.’
He smiled into the phone. ‘Keep that thought until I get back tomorrow.’
When they’d ended the call, Jensen switched off the light. It’s going to be OK, he thought. Nothing bad was going to happen. Out in the garden with his sister, he’d had a passing moment of fear and doubt, that life was going far too well for him.
At The Hidden Cottage, with the French doors wide open to let in the cool night air, Owen was playing Brahms’s Concerto No. 2.
The Allegro Appassionato was his favourite movement of the concerto and as he always did whenever he attempted it, he heard Gretchen and Lillian instructing him to approach the piece as their much-loved hero Daniel Barenboim had played it. ‘One day, when you’re old enough and have the necessary skill,’ Gretchen had told Owen, ‘you must play it with fire in your belly. You must fill the melodic phrasing with sensual artistry. And there must be majesty to your playing! Never forget that. There must be no half-measures. You must give it your all.’
The irony was they’d never taught Owen to play it; he’d been much too young even to think about attempting such a challenging composition, not when it was considered to be one of the most difficult concertos to tackle. At that young age he may have had raw talent, which Gretchen and Lillian had seized upon and tried to nurture during that twelve-month period of living in Little Pelham, but it wasn’t until he was a lot older that he first attempted it with any seriousness. But the two women had frequently played their beloved recording for him, placing the scratchy old LP on their turntable and talking him through Barenboim’s technique and impressing upon him that Brahms Piano Concertos 1 and 2 were two of the greatest compositions ever written for piano and orchestra.
All these years on and he could still hear the passion in their voices when they spoke of music, of truly great music. Their zeal and heartfelt emotion had stripped away their age and the awful scars they bore from a horrific fire they’d been lucky to survive. He had never had the nerve to ask them how they’d come to be so badly scarred, but one day, out of the blue, Lillian, the quieter of the two sisters, had told him about the hotel in Stuttgart where they’d been staying while on a recital tour in Germany and which had been the target of a freak arson attack.
It was a miracle that only a dozen people had perished in the fire that had quickly spread to the surrounding buildings, she’d told him. Like many others their lives were changed for ever that awful night, and for the two sisters, their hands and upper bodies horrifically burnt, it meant their musical career and nomadic lifestyle were over and when eventually they were well enough to travel, they returned to England to start a new life for themselves. From what Owen had understood, they hadn’t had financial concerns – they were ladies with what his mother had referred to as a genteel background. Or what his father would call ‘born with a bloody great silver spoon in their stuck-up gobs’.
After a decade of living in London, they had moved to The Hidden Cottage shortly before Owen encountered them, having moved there to live quietly and unobtrusively. ‘We’re not great mixers,’ Gretchen explained to Owen. ‘We prefer our own company, given that others find us so monstrously disagreeable to look at.’ She further explained that The Hidden Cottage, with its wholly appropriate name, had seemed perfect for them as a place in which to settle, away from prying eyes, away from blatant and offensive stares and remarks. They went to great lengths to preserve their privacy, rarely opening the door to callers, employing a cleaner and a gardener-cum-handyman from outside of the village and ordering in anything they needed by way of food and household requirements. Apart from their GP, Owen was the only other person they had allowed over the threshold. They had granted him the extraordinary honour and privilege to enter their private world, to be a part of their sanctuary.
When Owen reached the end of the second movement, he relaxed his shoulders, dropped his hands to his lap and let out his breath. A passable rendition, he decided. Good, but, of course, not a virtuoso performance. Not even close. He wondered what Gretchen and Lillian would make of his playing. More to the point, what they would make of him being here in their house. Two questions to which, sadly, he would never know the answers.
He let out his breath again, flexed his fingers and stretched his spine, tilting his head from side to side, loosening the muscles in his neck. He got up and went and stood at the open French doors. Apart from the light spilling out from behind him, the garden was in darkness and all was quiet. Very quiet. It was one of the many things about living here that he enjoyed, the profoundly enveloping silence. Particularly at night when Putin wasn’t around to make his infernal racket.
