Love and Devotion (58 page)

There was no quicksand, but there was the next best thing; a pit of brightly coloured plastic balls and an enormous obstacle course above it. The children’s eyes lit up when they saw it.

 

It was a surreal experience having lunch in such an environment with Dominic: only the Queen could have looked more out of place. ‘Felicity told me these places existed,’ he said, tossing his paper napkin onto his half-eaten plate of beef and ale pie and casting a disdainful glance around the Muzak-pumped pub, ‘but I had no idea they were as ghastly as this. Whoever came up with the idea for this one obviously couldn’t decide whether it was to be a crèche or an S and M dungeon.’

‘Trust you to make that comparison.’

‘What’s an S and M dungeon?’

Harriet jumped in smartly. ‘Nothing you need ever think about, Carrie. Have you chosen what you want to eat for pudding? The ice-cream sounds good.’

Carrie puffed out her cheeks. ‘I’m too full to eat anything else,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ agreed Joel. ‘Can we go and play?’

‘If you like. Carrie, keep an eye on your brother for me, please. And make sure you don’t forget where you’ve left your shoes.’

Joel immediately looked uncertain. He came round to Harriet’s side of the table. ‘Why don’t you come and watch us?’

‘I’m sure you’ll be all right, Joel.’

He leaned against her, his small body heavy against her side.
‘Pleease.’

‘Okay, just until you’re settled in.’

His face instantly brightened and he slipped his hand in hers and pulled her to her feet. ‘You can either stay here on your own,’ she told Dominic, ‘or you can come and watch as well.’

‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. What do you think, kids, shall we throw Harriet in too? She’s no bigger than a child, so no one would notice, would they?’

Carrie and Joel laughed, but Harriet scowled back at him. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

He ruffled her hair and laughed. ‘I’ll think exactly what I want to.’

Fifteen minutes later, she and Dominic were still standing next to the ball pit where a swarming army of small children had the place under siege. Each time Harriet tried to move away, Joel would come over to make sure they were staying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Dominic, ‘but it looks like we’re stuck here.’

He shrugged. ‘I can think of worse places to be.’

‘You can?’

‘Lunch with my parents in Maple Drive would be a hundred times worse, I assure you. And for the record, I’m sorrier than I can say for what I said to you that night with Miles. I deserved what you did to me. Am I forgiven?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

He smiled. ‘So now we’ve got that behind us, why don’t you fill me in on what you’ve found out about Felicity and her not so mysterious lover. You must have come across some proof by now.’

Harriet hesitated. If she told Dominic what she’d discovered, and he then knew for sure that Miles had had a passionate affair with Felicity, how would he react? In his current state of mind, would he think that Miles had defiled his dearest friend in some way?

But it had been a mistake to hesitate. He leapt on it. ‘You’ve found something, haven’t you? What a clever sleuth you’ve become! Come on, don’t hold back.’

It was pointless even to think about lying to Dominic. Any prevarication on her part would have him turning up the pressure until she caved in. So she told him about the last email she’d read.

‘I knew it. I knew it from the moment you told me in Dublin. Well, well, well. And isn’t it always the quiet ones you have to watch? What did Miles say when you confronted him?’

‘I haven’t spoken to Miles about it and I’m not sure it’s a matter of confronting him.’

‘Really? And yet, if I’m not mistaken, there was a moment not so long ago when you had hopes for Miles, didn’t you? Oh, don’t insult me by feigning shock and denial. Is that why you had a fling with this Will character? To get back at Miles?’

The accuracy of his guesswork was breathtaking. But it was only guesswork, she told herself. He had no way of knowing what had been in her mind when she’d asked Will to kiss her that night. ‘Stop fishing, Dominic,’ she said firmly. ‘What passed between Will and me was private, and it will remain that way.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Hat. Old friends like us don’t have secrets from each other. You realise, don’t you, now that Felicity’s dead, you’re my oldest and closest friend?’

Unsure whether to be flattered or even more on her guard, she said, ‘That’s as maybe, but I’m not going to tell you anything; it wouldn’t be fair to Will. He deserves that much respect from me, if nothing else.’

‘How very honourable. I wish I could be more like you. But the sad truth is; there isn’t an honourable bone in my body. My father saw to that.’

His voice echoed faintly with something that, coming from him, didn’t add up. It was regret. Harriet studied his face closely.

‘Don’t look so surprised,’ he said. ‘I was always going to blame my father for my behaviour at some time or other. After all, he’s made me the man I am.’

‘That’s a cop out.’

‘Perhaps so in your eyes. However, it’s the truth. I knew a long time ago that I had to distance myself from him and to do that I had to recreate who I was. I would have happily killed myself rather than turn out like Dr Harvey McKendrick, local do-gooding General Practitioner but healer of no one and nothing. Ironically, he destroys people rather than heals them. He used to make me look at porn magazines when I was a boy. Oh, nothing too vile, just the run-of-the-mill stuff that he secretly enjoyed. You see, he suspected then that I wasn’t normal. He once caught me brushing my mother’s hair and he beat me senseless afterwards. That’s when he decided I had to go away to school. Stupid old fool thought an all-male environment would cure me of my tendencies and I’d have it knocked out of me. I was raped three times in my first week by the head boy and his cohorts. I was eleven. Not much older than Carrie.’

Harriet was appalled. She and Felicity had known that Harvey McKendrick was a fierce disciplinarian, and they had always been a bit scared of him, but this was awful. How could any parent victimise their child so cruelly? And what would he have done with a sensitive boy like Joel ... who also liked to brush his mother’s hair? She shuddered. Let anyone lay a hand on that boy and she’d kill them. Which begged the question what Freda McKendrick had been doing to protect her eldest son. ‘But we all thought you were sent away because you were so bright,’ she said.

He let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘A convenient enough cover. And it had the added bonus of making me even more of an outsider. My father was and still is an overbearing, sadistic bully. It suits him perfectly that he has an agoraphobic wife; it means he can control her completely. These things don’t happen by accident.’

‘Did Felicity know all this?’

He nodded. ‘Felicity knew everything about me. It’s why I miss her so much. As Victor Hugo put it so well, the supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or more correctly, of being loved of yourself.’ He put an arm around Harriet and drew her to him. ‘But now I have you.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘Oh, Hat, it feels good being able to talk to you. Hey, you know what we should do, we should get married. We could bring up Carrie and Joel together. We wouldn’t be the best or the most orthodox of parents, but we’d be better than the majority of idiots who attempt it.’

She laughed nervously. It was difficult to know when he was joking sometimes. ‘I think you need to go outside and get some fresh air. You’re talking crazy now.’

He tilted his head back and looked deep into her eyes. At once his close proximity aroused in Harriet a dangerous mix of emotions - love, hate, admiration, affection, fear, but most of all confusion. She tried to keep her face from betraying her; she couldn’t stand for him to know the effect he had on her.

‘Actually, I’m being serious,’ he said. ‘You could come and live in Cambridge. You’d easily get work there.’

‘And what kind of marriage would we have?’

‘An unconventional one. They’re usually the best sort.’

‘Mm ... so while you were off having sex with the entire male population of Cambridge, I’d be doing what exactly?’

He grinned. ‘I’d leave that to your imagination. You do have one of those, don’t you?’

He was mocking her now, and knowing they were back on safer and more familiar ground, she said, ‘Believe me, Dominic, there’s nothing wrong with my imagination.’

 

 

 

 

W.B. Yeats

 

 

 

 

It was New Year’s Day, the day of the McKendricks’ drinks party. Upstairs the children, having minutes earlier pulled back the curtains, were going crazy with excitement. Overnight, a heavy fall of snow had covered the garden, and as Bob stared out of the kitchen window he could see that not a breath of wind stirred. The sky was leaden with the threat of further snow showers. The weather forecasters had said they were in for a big freeze. Bob filled the kettle and plugged it in, hoping the weather wouldn’t delay Harriet’s move. Her moving out with the children heralded the start of their lives getting back to normal. Or rather, a life that resembled some kind of unreal normality, for he knew that nothing would ever feel truly normal again. Jennifer had told him that his life had been changed irrevocably and that he had to accept that. But how? How did one go about that? Accepting it seemed a wounding insult to Felicity’s memory, as brutal as it had been to witness Carrie and Joel enjoying Christmas without their mother. He could not bring himself to do it. Never. Others were all too willing to consign Felicity to the past - and how he hated them for it - but he would not betray her.

 

After Harriet had fulfilled her promise to help the children build a snowman and they were thawing out in the kitchen drinking mugs of hot chocolate, she told her father - her mother was resting in bed after a sleepless night - she wanted to sort through some of Felicity’s things in the garage. He looked up sharply from polishing his shoes ready for the McKendricks’ party. Knowing that he couldn’t handle the idea of any of Felicity’s things being thrown away, she said, ‘I don’t want to move with anything that will just lie around in the attic or garage. I won’t have the luxury of space you have here,’ she added reasonably.

‘You haven’t got much time,’ he muttered, glancing at the clock above the fridge. ‘We’re expected at Harvey and Freda’s in two hours.’

‘The sooner I get started, the sooner I’ll be finished,’ she said, and before he could invent another reason why she shouldn’t touch Felicity’s things, she slipped out of the kitchen.

There was a gas heater in the garage, which her father used on cold days when he was tinkering at his workbench, but given the densely packed state of the place, Harriet thought better of using it. Quite apart from the worry of reducing Felicity’s furniture and possessions to a heap of ash, there was her asthma to take into account. The combination of the damp cold, a dusty environment and gas fumes could very likely bring on an attack. Her last attack had been with Will, in his shop; it felt like a long time ago. Reminded of Will and the kindness he’d shown her that afternoon, she then recalled the illogical feeling she’d had during the drive to Kings Melford, when she’d imagined Felicity in the car with her and had a chilling sense that she’d failed her sister.

That day when she and the children had had lunch with Dominic, she’d tried to share this feeling with him, but he hadn’t shown the slightest interest. Instead he’d wanted to know more about her and Will. ‘You really like him, don’t you?’ he’d said.

‘Yes,’ she’d answered, without a second’s hesitation. ‘Will’s a hundred times the man you are, or will ever be.’

‘My, but you have it bad for him. Isn’t he the lucky one?’

‘Lucky is not the word I’d use. His eldest daughter is dead and his world’s just ground to a halt.’

He’d looked at her with a bemused expression. ‘You’re angry. Why?’

‘Perhaps I’m tired of the perverse games you play. Like suggesting you and I should get married. It’s practically the sickest thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘I think you expect too much of me. But as I’ve said before, your stubborn one-track brain allows you to see things only in black and white. One day you’ll realise there are myriad shades of grey in between.’

Putting Dominic and Will from her thoughts, Harriet got on with the job she’d come out here to do. She regretted not doing it sooner; there was so little time left before the move. She cleared a space in front of her father’s workbench, deciding to create a pile there of anything she didn’t want to keep. Her father could then go through it for anything he thought he couldn’t live without.

An hour later, knowing she ought to go and change, she opened one last box. It was one she remembered packing herself and it contained a selection of photograph albums as well as several bundles of snaps clumsily held together with rubber bands. At the time, she hadn’t had the courage to look at any of the photographs; she had simply boxed them up as quickly as she could to get the job done. One of the albums had a discoloured photograph stuck on the front of it. Harriet recognised herself in the picture, along with Felicity and Dominic. Why was Miles absent? Then she remembered; he had been behind the camera, taking the photo. They had been walking by the river in Durham. It was a freezing cold day and Miles and his brother had come to stay with them. It was before Jeff had arrived on the scene. Dominic was threatening to pull his trousers down if Miles didn’t get a move on and take the picture. How young they looked, Harriet thought as she opened the album to revisit those days. Arrogant too, she thought with a wry smile as she turned the pages. We thought we knew it all. How wrong we were.