The Ice Twins (25 page)

He shrugs. ‘Don’t know. They just said they want things to calm down. Anyway, I picked her up and brought her home.’

‘Did you sneak into the house – I just – you gave me the fright—’

‘Didn’t realize anyone was here, to be honest. Lights were all out.’

He is lying. Again. I know it.
He is lying.
His eyes fix on mine. Maybe he knows I was looking in the chest. And perhaps he knows that I found the book,
and he doesn’t care
. But what about Lydia? What must she be feeling now?

‘I have to talk to her.’

‘No, I’m not sure that—’

Pushing his big, controlling hand away, I creak open Lydia’s door. She is sitting on her bed, her eyes glassy, reading the Charlie and Lola book again. As she used to do, years back. It must be like comfort food. She wants something reassuring. I wish her room had more light; and more heat. This cold is abominable.

‘Lydia, what happened at school?’

She stays quiet, reading.

‘Darling, I need to know if anyone did anything bad to you.’

Only the sea is talking, whispering to the sands and the rocks.

‘Lydia …’ I sit down on the side of the bed, and stroke her arm. ‘Lydia. Please talk to me.’

‘Nothing.’

There it is. Again. The discernible voice of her mother.

‘Lydie-lo, please—’

‘Nothing.’ Her face lifts and her eyes burn. ‘Nothing! Nothing happened!’

I stroke her arm again, but she reacts with greater fury.

‘Go away!’

Lydia is screaming at me. Her pale, pretty face is pink with anger, and scrunched with loathing. ‘Go away, I hate you, I hate you—’

‘Lyd—’

I reach out another hand but Lydia slaps it, hard, much harder than I knew she could: the pain is quite stinging.

‘GO AWAYYYYYY!’

‘OK.’ I stand. ‘OK.’

‘GO AWAYYYY!’

‘OK, I’m going.’

And I am, I am retreating. Pitiful and defeated, the worst of mothers. I go to the door, and open it, and shut it behind me, leaving my daughter alone in her room. I can hear her sobbing like the sea, keening like the seagulls on Camuscross; there is nothing I can do.

I look at the door, it says
Lydia Lives HERE
and
Keep Out
in golden spangled letters. I resist the urge for tears. What’s my crying going to do? How can my emotions help? A deep, quiet voice intrudes.

‘I heard.’

Angus is standing three yards down the hall, at the open door to the living room. I can hear a woodfire crackling, and see warming lights.

‘Hey.’

His arms are open. He wants to hug me. I want to slap him. Very hard. And yet, a part of me wants his hugs.

Because I still want sex.

If anything, I want sex
more
. I do. I think this is probably jealousy sex. It’s that book signed by Imogen. It’s made me jealous, but more desirous. I want to possess him, mark him, prove that he’s still mine. The way he once repossessed me.

I also just want sex. We never have enough.

He comes close.

‘There’s nothing we can do, you’re doing your best.’ He comes closer still. ‘She’s confused, of course. But she will get better. She will. But maybe she needs help. Maybe we all need help. Perhaps you ought to speak to that guy again, the one in Glasgow. What was it? Kellaway?’

His hand is reaching for mine, I can see that he wants it as well.

Softening my gaze, I open my lips, and I lift my face to his; and he sinks his mouth onto mine. And we are kissing as we have not kissed in a month. Perhaps three months.

And now we are stripping. Feverishly. Teenagerishly. I rip his jumper up, and off; he is unbuttoning the studs of my jeans. We topple, giddily, into the living room, he is picking me up, carrying me, and I want to be carried.
Just do it, Angus Moorcroft. Fuck me.

He fucks me. This is good. This is what I want. Him taking me, like it was, like we used to. I don’t want foreplay, I don’t want fooling around; I want him inside me, resolving any doubts, just for a few minutes.

His kisses are strong and deep. He bites my shoulder as he turns me over, and fucks me again; I grasp at the pillows. Listening to him kissing me, biting me.

‘I love you, Sarah.’

‘Fuck you—’

‘Sarah.’

I gasp into the pillow. ‘Harder.’

‘Ah.’

He has a hand around my neck, pressing my head into the pillow, as if he is going to break it, with one snap, I look around, and I can see the angry glitter in his eyes; so I push up, and push back, push him out of me; I turn over. I am hot and shining with sweat, and bruised, and ready to come, I take his hand and put it round my slender neck again.

‘Fuck me like you fucked Imogen.’

He says nothing. He does not even blink. His thumb is light yet firm on the narrowness of my throat. My windpipe. He could press. He is strong enough. Instead he looks hard and furious into my eyes, and he rises up and pushes me back and he enters me again, and I say:

‘Did she come? Did she come when you fucked her? Was it like this?’

He fucks me, his strong hand on my white neck, and I imagine him fucking her, fucking my best friend, and I want to hate him, and I hate him. But even as I hate him the orgasm comes, my orgasm, dizzying and irresistible.

As my own orgasm pulses away, ripples into nothing, he comes too: slumping forward, then not breathing, then breathing hard. Then receding. He slumps to my side. Two hearts beating, and the sea outside the window.

‘I never had an affair with Imogen,’ he says.

19

‘There’s a book, in your chest of drawers. Signed by her.’

We are both lying back, naked, perspiring, under the duvet, facing the ceiling. With that huge patch of damp, which looks bigger in the feeble light from the bedside lamp.

The twilight has turned to darkness; the window is open to the starlit sea.

‘You looked?’ he says.

‘It was signed. It said
Love, Immy. Kiss kiss kiss.
’

He says nothing.

I turn, briefly, and glance at him, his handsome profile, silent, and staring upwards, like one of those knights on tombs in churches, carved in stone. Then I lie back, too, and gaze up.

‘She gave you a novel. About adultery? You never read novels. She signed it with love and kisses. Now tell me you’re
not
fucking her.’

‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘Not sleeping with her. Not having an affair with her.’

And yet there is a pause here. Fatal, and revealing. He sighs, and goes on: ‘But we did sleep together once.’

The cold breeze kicks at the half-drawn curtains.

I control myself. And ask the obvious question: ‘When
was this, Angus? Was it that night?’

‘The night of the accident?’ I sense him turn, towards me, across the pillow. ‘No, Sarah. Jesus. No!! Everything I said back then was true. I just stopped by, I was just coming back from work. You have to believe me.’

I hesitate. Maybe I do believe him, on this point. He sounds halfway convincing.

But …

‘But you said you did. With her?’

He sighs, again. ‘It was afterwards, Sarah, after Kirstie fell. You were so, you know, so wrapped in your grief – mad with grief.’

‘And you weren’t?’

‘No. Not saying that, course not. God. I was just as bad, I know, in my own way, all the booze. But you were untouchable. Wouldn’t let me near you.’

I don’t remember this. Don’t remember being
untouchable
. But I will let it go, for now.

‘So you turned to Imogen? My best friend? For someone to cuddle?’

‘I just needed a female friend. You were out of reach. And we were always close, Immy and me, always got on. I mean – she was there the night we met, remember?’

I refuse to look at him. I gaze at the ceiling. I can hear a solitary bird outside. Piping and skirling. I see now why Imogen Evertsen stuck with me, when so many other friends fell away. She felt guilty. But her guilt made our friendship awkward: and for ever different.

‘I still need to know.’ Half turning. ‘Tell me, Angus. When you slept with her.’

He takes a long breath.

‘It was … I was in pieces, maybe a month after the accident. We’d had a few bottles. We were talking. And she started … she leaned over and she kissed me. She was the one who, y’know, did that. And yes, I responded, but … But then I didn’t, Sarah. I stopped her after the first night. I said no.’

‘And the book?’

‘She sent it a week after. Don’t know why.’

I muse. So Angus stopped her. So what? At what point did he call a halt? Did they do it all night? A weekend? Did they kiss and laugh in the morning? Do I care? I am less vengeful than expected; more indifferent. This is just so weak. I have gone from fearing to despising my husband. And yet even now, as I want him away from me, I wonder what I would do without him: as we are stuck on this island.

I still need him, practically, even as I revile him.

‘Sarah, I wanted a friend. To talk about the accident. Listen. Believe me. But Imogen got confused. Afterwards, she was wracked with guilt. Really truly.’

‘How jolly fucking nice of her. To feel guilty. For screwing my husband.’

‘I didn’t want an affair. What else can I say?’

‘Why did you keep the book?’

‘Can’t remember. Just did. Sarah, this is the truth. I never wanted anything serious and when she got romantic I said it wasn’t going to happen and since then, she and me, we’ve just been friends, and she still loves you, she really does, she feels terrible that it even got that far.’

‘Must send her a thank you card. Maybe give her a book?’

He is gazing away from me, now, gazing at the sea through the window. I can sense this. Corner of my eyes. He speaks,

‘You seem to forget. I once forgave you.’

My anger is instant.

‘You mean my so-called “affair”? Really?’

‘Sarah—’

‘After the birth?? After you ignored me for a year, when you just pissed off and left me surrounded by nappies, by two screaming twins? Totally alone?’

‘I still forgave you.’

‘But that wasn’t your
best friend
I fucked. Was it, Angus? Did I fuck your
best friend
? Did I? Did I fuck your best friend right after your child died?’

He is silent, and then he says,

‘OK. You think this is different. I get it.’

‘Well done you.’

‘But please, maybe get some perspective.’

‘
What?
’

‘Nothing really happened, anyway, Sarah. Nothing emotional. So you can hate me, and you can hate Imogen – but hate us for what we actually did – not what you think we did.’

‘I think I’ll work out who to hate, all by myself.’

‘Sarah!’

Ignoring him, I rise from the bed and slip on my thick woollen dressing gown. The floorboards are scratchy and cold on my bare feet. I walk to the window. The moon is high over the Small Isles. A cloudless night in early winter. It should be beautiful. And it is beautiful. This place is so relentlessly fucking beautiful, it never stops. Whatever else is happening, the beauty goes on, like a terrible nightmare.

Angus makes more excuses, but I am barely listening.

For the first time, I see Angus as something truly inferior to what he was. Less masculine, less of a man, less of a husband, just so much less. I would probably walk out the door, right now, with Lydia, if I could. But I cannot. I have nowhere to go: my best friend Imogen is no longer my best friend; my parents’ house has too many memories.

We are trapped on Torran, financially, for now. I am trapped with my adulterous husband. Maybe in time I will forgive him. Perhaps three decades will do it.

‘Sarah,’ he says, again, like he will never stop saying it. But I walk out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, because I am hungry.

I make myself toast. And sit at the dining table. Munching mechanically, fuelling myself. Staring at the telephone. Thinking about Lydia.

I know I’ve got to call Kellaway: on that subject Angus is quite correct. I need to speak to Kellaway. I need to speak to him as soon as possible. I need his expert opinion on the strangeness. What is happening to my daughter? Maybe he could help with my so-called marriage. Is my lying husband still concealing something else?

Angus and I have one more confrontation in the evening. I am sitting in the living room, looking out at the rain. I used to like this rain sweeping up the Sound from the Point of Sleat. It made everything, somehow, into a sad Gaelic song: liquid and soft, lyrical yet indecipherable; the landscape was like a beautiful, disappearing language.

Now the rain just irks me.

Angus comes into the living room, a glass of Scotch in his hand. He’s been taking the dog for a walk. Beany slumps by the fire, chewing his favourite bone-toy, and Angus falls into the armchair.

‘Beany caught a rat,’ he says.

‘Only three thousand to go then.’

He smiles, briefly, but I do not smile. His smile disappears.

The fire crackles. The wind laments the state of the roof.

‘Listen,’ he says – leaning forward, annoyingly.

‘I don’t want to listen.’

‘Imogen. And me. It was just one night. Really. Just a drunken mistake.’

‘But you had sex. With my best friend. A month after our daughter died.’

‘But—’

‘Angus, there are no buts. You betrayed me.’

A dark flash of anger crosses his face. ‘
I
betrayed
you
?’

‘Yes. In the worst possible way. As I was grieving.’

‘Look—’

‘It was a betrayal. Wasn’t it? Or would you call it something else? What would that be, Angus? How would you phrase it? “Building my support network”?’

He says nothing, though he looks as if he wants to say a lot. The teeth are grinding in his mouth, I can see the muscles moving.

‘Gus, I want you to sleep in the spare bed.’

He slugs whisky, wholesale. And shrugs. ‘Sure. Why the fuck not? We’ve got lots of spare beds.’

‘Don’t give me that self-pitying shit. Not now.’

He laughs. With deep bitterness, and gazes at me, directly. ‘Did you read all of
Anna Karenina
? You read everything you found?’