Night Music (35 page)

She hesitated, glancing through the trees at the lake. It was at its most beautiful at this time of day, the sun’s last rays a vivid pathway across the water, the birds almost silent as they settled to roost. She could ask to defer payment until she had sold the house. She could try to borrow. She could pay Matt with all the money she had left, and hope they could support themselves until more work came through for her. Isabel sat down heavily on a tree stump. She could curl up here and forget everything.

‘Isabel?’

Byron was silhouetted against the sun, his large frame black against the trees. She jumped to her feet, trying not to appear as startled as she felt.

But he had seen it.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ she said. She couldn’t see his face.

‘I did call.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said, too brightly. He was so broad across the shoulders – his whole body spoke of strength, solidity. Now, though, she couldn’t help but think of the damage such strength could inflict, the menace implicit within it. Since he had walked out of the house several days previously, Byron, her gentle, awkward accomplice, had become a stranger to her, the things she had thought she’d known smashed away by Matt’s words.

‘I was on my way back to the house,’ she said, determinedly upbeat. ‘Did you want something?’ She found herself walking towards the lake, as if being in daylight, out of the shadowy confines of the woods, was safer.

When he turned, he seemed more nervous than she felt. It was then that she saw he was holding out letters. She took them, observing that there was something familiar about the handwriting. Both envelopes had been opened. ‘I didn’t read them,’ Byron said, ‘but Thierry did. I should tell you . . . He thinks . . . it’s not safe to talk.’

‘What?’

Isabel read the first fourteen lines of beautiful, looping handwriting. She stared at the words written by the unknown woman. The woman who had been unaware that Laurent had died, that he was not avoiding her. She reread the note, trying to make sense of it, forcing herself to recognise the truth. This had to be a joke, she told herself, half beginning to laugh. Then she read it again.

It was the letter Kitty had tried to make her read all those months ago when Mr Cartwright had shamed her into looking at the Pile. One of the first letters she had received, barely a week after he had died. She hadn’t opened it – she hadn’t opened anything for months. Why had Thierry taken it?

It couldn’t be right. The second had been forwarded from Laurent’s office, and as she read the urgent words her heart, what she had believed remained of it, dropped into an abyss.

No, she said silently. And the music was gone. She was left with the deafening silence of her own wilful ignorance.
No. No. No. No
. Byron was still standing there, watching her. And she realised that he had known what the letters contained. What was it he had said?
He thinks it’s not safe to talk.
Not her husband. Her son. And her sense of betrayal was overwhelmed by another emotion. ‘He knew?’ she demanded, holding up the letter, her voice quivering. ‘Thierry knew about this? He’s been carrying it all this time?’

Byron nodded. ‘The woman delivered the first by hand. He recognised her. And later he saw the other in a pile of letters.’

‘
Recognised
her? Oh, God.’ And now it all made sense, and she was engulfed by her husband’s betrayal, by her own ignorant betrayal of her son, who dared not speak because he knew too much. And now there was nothing left of the little family who had once lived in a warm house in Maida Vale. Because there were no memories, no innocence, nothing she could salvage from that car crash. Isabel sank back on to the tree-trunk. There was no one who could help, no one who could make this better. And she could no longer even mourn the love of the husband she had lost, because she knew now that she had lost him long before.

‘Isabel? Are you okay?’ The question sounded so stupid, hanging between them.

Thierry, she thought blindly. She had to go to Thierry.

She stood up a little shakily. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely, unsure how she had forced her voice into such a semblance of normality. ‘Thank you for letting me know.’

She walked briskly towards the house, stumbling on the rough ground now that the light was ebbing. The woods rose and fell around her, blurred at the edges. Byron was beside her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She spun round. ‘Why? Did you sleep with my husband? Did you drive the lorry that killed him? Did you traumatise my son into silence? No. So don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing to do with you.’ She was a little out of breath and the words sounded shrill and unforgiving.

‘I’m sorry to have brought you bad news,’ he said. ‘I just thought you should know for Thierry’s sake.’

‘Well, good for you.’ She stumbled over a fallen tree-trunk.

‘Isabel, I—’

‘Who else knows? Perhaps you could nip down to the Cousins, be the first to tell them. No doubt it’ll be all over the village by morning, anyway.’

‘No one knows.’

She could see the house. Her son would be inside. Upstairs, perhaps, silently locked into a computer game.
How could I not have seen? How could I have let him suffer like this?

‘Isabel. Slow down. Give yourself a minute before you speak to him.’

He laid a hand on her shoulder but Isabel shook it off.

‘Don’t touch me!’

He stepped back as if he had been stung. There was a short silence. ‘I would have burned them if I could. I was just trying to help Thierry.’

‘Well, I don’t need you to help him,’ she snapped. ‘We don’t need your help or anyone else’s.’

He searched her face, and then, jaw set, he walked away from her.

Isabel watched him go. ‘I can protect him myself!’ she yelled.

He was about fifty feet away when she added: ‘I can protect both of them!’

He didn’t slow down.

A great sob escaped her. ‘All right,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Byron, tell me why.’

He stopped and turned. She was beside a fallen oak, the lake just visible behind her. Her hands were on her hips, her face flushed.

‘Why did he tell you all this and not me? Why couldn’t he tell me? I’m his mother, right? I may not always have been a very good one, but I’ve loved him his whole life. I’m all he’s got left. Why did he tell you and not me?’

He registered the hurt on her face, the shock and misery underneath that fierce exterior. A wounded animal would lash out at anyone.

‘He was afraid,’ he said.

She seemed to crumple a little then. She lifted her eyes to the sky, closed them briefly. If he was anybody else, Byron thought suddenly, anyone else in all the world, he could have walked up to her and put his arms around her. He could have offered this bruised woman the smallest comfort.

‘His silence was supposed to protect you.’

He waited, just until she turned away, then he began to walk steadily towards the road.

He was awake when she returned. Even in the half-light of his room she could see his eyes on her. She suspected that he had been waiting for some time. He must have guessed what Byron would say. But now she was here she wasn’t sure what to say to him. She wasn’t even sure she had taken in the truth of what she had been told. But she knew she had to relieve him of his burden. She laid a hand on his head, feeling the familiar soft hair. ‘I know everything,’ she whispered, ‘and it’s all right.’ She focused on keeping her voice calm. ‘People . . . don’t always behave in the way they should, but it doesn’t matter. I still love your daddy and I know he loved me.’

A small hand emerged from the covers and took hers and she stroked his fingers.

‘What you saw in those letters doesn’t matter, Thierry. It doesn’t change how much we loved Daddy, or how much he loved us. You mustn’t worry about it.’

She closed her eyes now. ‘And you have to know something else, something very important. Nothing is ever so bad that you can’t tell me. Do you understand, Thierry? You don’t have to keep anything like this to yourself. That’s what I’m here for.’

There was a lengthy silence. It was completely dark outside now, and Isabel lay down on the bed beside her son. Out of the window, the stars were illuminated pinpricks in the night sky, hinting at some great brightness beyond.

How inadequate a mother had she been that her younger child had felt unable to lean on her? How fragile, self-absorbed and selfish she must have seemed that they had both felt obliged to protect
her
.

‘You can tell me anything,’ she said, almost to herself now. She was weary with grief and shock, and wondered briefly whether she might just sleep here. Moving upstairs seemed impossible.

Thierry’s voice cut into the silence. ‘I told him,’ he whispered. ‘I told him I hated him.’

Isabel was instantly awake. ‘That’s okay,’ she said, after a beat. ‘You’re allowed to say what you feel. I’m sure Daddy understood. Really, I—’

‘No.’

‘Thierry, darling, you can’t—’

‘The day I saw them. Before the concert. She came to the house and I saw them . . . and Dad tried to pretend it was nothing. But I’m not stupid. And I told him . . . I told him I wished he was
dead
.’

He began to sob into her chest, his small fists clutching her shirt. Isabel screwed her eyes shut against the dark, against the black place where her child had been for months, and swallowing down the cry that rose in her throat, placed her arms tightly around him.

Twenty

That day she had come out of the house twice, once to pick leaves from her vegetable patch, strolling head down along the path, a colander dangling from her hand. She had been wearing a faded T-shirt and cut-off shorts, her hair swept carelessly into a large pin from which it made a tangled bid for escape. Heat made her clothes stick to her skin. It hung over the lake all day, smothering movement and sound, with only a whisper of breeze to bring relief.

In the woods it was a little cooler, but through the trees the house shimmered in the heat. Those roof slates that had been repaired gleamed, free of the moss that coated their neighbours. The weatherboarding that had been replaced contrasted starkly with the older wood. In time, it would be painted one colour, but even now it was clear that quality work had been undertaken. The restoration would transform the building.

When he was working to his own architectural plans, Matt McCarthy cut no corners. He understood the beauty of true workmanship, and had gained enough experience over the years to know that it was always the thing you attempted to save money on – cheaper fittings, bargain flooring – that haunted you in the end. If you wanted something to look beautiful, you did not cut corners. His house would be perfect.

At first, if his good taste and attention to detail had cost Isabel Delancey more than she could afford, he had considered it no bad thing. It simply speeded them towards the time when he could move his family into the Spanish House and she could take hers home to London. The things she had asked him to do, the few requests she had made, he had completed in a slipshod manner, knowing there was little point in paying too much attention to a job he would only have to redo within a few months. When she had been undeterred by his charges, by the apparent hazards of the house, be it rat or rotten floor, he had invented more jobs. A wall that needed knocking through, joists that had to be replaced. He had been secretly amazed that it had taken her so long to question anything he did.

Matt swatted at a fly that buzzed through the open window. She had come out a second time shortly after lunch, rubbing her eyes as if she had only recently woken. He had thought of walking over to talk to her, but the boy had run out after her, the dog yapping at his heels. She had bent and kissed the child, and he remembered how her lips had yielded to his, her body wrapped round his own.

He might have dozed off for a while, the front seat of his van reclining as he attempted to rest his eyes. It was so difficult to sleep at the moment. His own house had become an unfriendly place: Laura’s accusatory stares followed him around, and her questions were bitterly polite. It was easier to avoid the place as far as he could. He suspected she had moved into the spare room: the door had been firmly shut the last time he had made his way upstairs. But then so had the door of their bedroom.

The last weeks had taken on an odd shape. Heat bled through the days, causing him to wake and doze at odd hours, to feel alternately exhausted or almost manic with energy. His son avoided him. Byron had disappeared. He had forgotten sacking him and, on ringing him to find out where he was, had been shocked when Byron had curtly reminded him. It was the heat, Matt had explained, messing with his brain. Byron had not responded. Matt had talked on for some time before it dawned on him that there was no one at the other end of the line.

He had gone to the Long Whistle. He couldn’t remember when he had last had a proper meal. Theresa would make him something, give him a friendly smile. Instead she had told him baldly that they had stopped serving food, and when he had begged, she had offered him a dried-out ham roll. She wouldn’t talk to him, even when he made some joke about the length of her skirt. She stood, arms folded, near the back of the bar, watching him as one would a dog with a mean eye. He had sat there for some time before it occurred to him that nobody in the pub was talking to him.

‘Have I grown another head?’ he said irritably, when their scrutiny became too much for him.

‘You need to sort out the one you’ve got, mate. Eat that roll and then leave. I don’t want any trouble.’ The landlord took his newspaper from the bar and disappeared into the back.

‘You should go home, Matt.’ Mike Todd had approached him, lowered his voice so that no one else could hear. Patted him on the back. There was something oddly like pity in his eyes. ‘Go home and get some rest.’

‘When are you coming to see this house of mine, then?’ he said, but Mike appeared not to hear.

‘Go home, Matt,’ he said.

It had been easier just to sit in the van. He was not sure how long he had been there now, but it was a while. He had forgotten to charge his mobile phone, but it didn’t matter as there was nobody he wanted to speak to. Matt stared at the façade of the house, seeing not the scaffolding at the back, the overflowing skip, the window with the flapping tarpaulin but his house. The big house, restored to its former glory, with him strolling down the lawn to the lake. He remembered sitting astride his bike in this exact spot, as a boy, vowing his revenge. They had accused his father of stealing two spare wheels from the vintage cars, had been too embarrassed – or lazy – to backtrack when the offending items were discovered at the garage, even though George McCarthy had worked blamelessly for the family for almost fifteen years. By then it had been too late: Matt and his sister had been moved from their estate cottage to the council house at Little Barton, and the family name had been tainted by the Pottisworths’ carelessness. Since that day he had known the house must be his. He would wipe the smirk off Pottisworth’s face. He would show Laura’s family, who had eyed his shoes, the way he held his knife and fork, with polite, blinking distaste.