The House of Secrets Page 11

  I can’t look him in the eye. The lie slips out with the ease of years of protecting my son. I’m in my light polyester pyjamas and a matching dressing gown. I put the pan on the draining board and reach to pull the belt tighter around my waist, knotting it twice as if that’s some sort of defence against Duncan.

  ‘Which friend? That idiot, Callum what’s-his-name, who wastes all his days shooting up behind the supermarket in Belston?’

  ‘What?’ I take a step towards Duncan. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Haven’t you realised? Jesus, Claire, you’re so naïve sometimes!’

  ‘Are you saying Joe’s into drugs? That’s bollocks. I’ve never seen any sign of that and I don’t believe Callum would do that either!’

  I totally believe Joe wouldn’t touch drugs, he couldn’t cope with the mind-bending messing up of his head. But I’m not so sure about Callum. I feel a seed of doubt squirming in my brain.

  ‘And how would you know, Claire? When did you last go calling on Joe’s friends? You sit here in this ivory tower and spend all your days cleaning the house!’

  ‘Oh, really, is that what you think?’ I smart at the glorified you’re just a housewife quip. ‘How dare you! I’ve given up everything to look after Joe, and you for that matter. My career, my freedom, my time – do you think you could have built your business without me?’

  ‘You chose to have children, nobody forced you! Look what a disaster that’s been!’

  I take a sharp intake of breath, my face flush with heat. Tears threaten to spill over, but I won’t let them. I won’t let him see how much that hurts. He knows it’s unfair; he’s saying it because he likes to rattle me. I struggle with myself and let the anger win, grinding my teeth.

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about Joe’s friends,’ I say. ‘You’re too busy carving out an empire in progressive limb surgery for dogs, or cruising the streets of Derby for a shag to bother to learn what actually interests your son!’

  His eyes flash but he refuses to be drawn.

  ‘Take a look around the back of Tesco’s on Alcott Street on a Friday night, then, Claire. You might be surprised by what you see.’

  I don’t reply. No, I won’t believe it. This is Duncan trying to hurt me. He knows my soft spots. But that seed of doubt is growing. I knew I didn’t like Callum. And how well do I really know my son? What does he really get up to when he stays out all night? Is he tripping out at Callum’s flat when all the time I thought he was metal detecting? I feel my body sway.

  Duncan apparently relents.

  ‘I don’t think he’s doing drugs, Claire.’ He gives a staggered sigh. ‘Just his friends.’

  My face is pale and I’m feeling sick.

  ‘Maybe,’ he says. He’s smiling, making it clear how much he’s enjoying my discomfort.

  I wish to God I had the courage to tell Duncan now. That I’m leaving him. That our life together is over and he can go fuck himself. But I don’t know how he’ll react. He could make things really difficult for me, with money, with Joe. He might even call the estate agents; try to stop them from giving me the lease. There is only one estate agency in Belston.

  And he’s too close. I can feel the fast rhythm of his breath. His eyes flit across my body, taking in the thin pyjamas and dressing gown, my feet bare against the cold tiles, my breasts cool against the fabric. Suddenly, I am all too conscious of my nakedness beneath.

  He takes a step towards me, one arm reaching out to grasp mine.

  ‘Claire …’

  His grip is hard and painful. How long has it been since we last made love? Made love. What an old-fashioned, meaningless phrase that is, belonging to the days when women had to ‘love, honour and obey’. He hasn’t loved or honoured me for years. I pull back.

  ‘Piss off, Duncan!’

  His hand tightens and I try in vain to shake it free.

  ‘You’re a cold bitch, do you know that, Claire?’ His voice is low and threatening. ‘All these years and you’ve never really responded to me.’

  We both know that’s not true. I use my free hand to slap his. A sharp, hard slap that means business. He swears. His hand releases me with a jerk. He casts around with his eyes then storms into the utility room. My heart gives a leap – he’s noticed that the metal detector is gone. He flings open the back door.

  ‘Joe!’ he yells. ‘Joe!’

  It’s completely pointless. I hug myself as the cold air whistles around the bottom of my pyjama trousers and I hear Duncan swearing again as he rages through the stuff leaning up in the corner of the utility room. He throws the ironing board down on its side for the sheer hell of it, then he sprints out into the hall and up the stairs. I hear the slam of Joe’s bedroom door, once, twice, and he comes back down again. I eye the empty dog bed on the far side of the kitchen island, glad that Arthur, too, can’t see this.

  ‘Claire?’ Duncan says. His voice is calmer, fiercer.

  I don’t reply. I’m back to my washing-up, like the good little wifey I am, like none of this is happening.

  ‘Has he gone metal detecting again? How did he manage to do that? I’ve got his battery pack. I took it with me to work. Has he gone to meet up with his metal detecting friends?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lie again. My voice has dropped. I know I’m the one in trouble here, not Joe.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Claire – I thought you didn’t want him to do this? I was trying to support you the other night!’

  ‘You call that support?’ I round on him. ‘You practically attacked him! And then you walked out and stayed out, all night!’

  It hangs in the air between us: Where were you, Duncan Henderson? The blood is roaring in my ears. I tighten my hold on the plate in my hand and stiffen my back.

  ‘I barely touched him!’ he says. He makes it look like he has no idea.

  I ignore that. Just as he’s ignored my reference to his own activities.

  ‘You tried to take away the one thing he adores,’ I say. ‘His metal detector. How would you like it if someone nicked the keys to your car?’

  ‘That’s hardly the same, is it, Claire? And I only took the battery. I was trying to stop him from disappearing again.’

  ‘Well, he’s gone anyway, thanks very much.’ Bitterness creeps into my voice. I feel my defiance surge: ‘He had a spare pack!’

  I regret the words as soon as I’ve spoken them. It’s a betrayal of my son. But it feels so satisfying to tell Duncan all the same. To tell him how Joe has got one over on his father.

  Duncan takes another step towards me. I start as he slams his fist down on the granite worktop and the plate slips from my hands, crashing onto the floor between the sink and me.

  ‘I’ll bloody murder him when he gets back!’

  I wince. That kind of statement scares Joe because he takes it so literally. But Duncan is scaring me too, now. His voice has changed again. I don’t turn round. Instead, I see our reflections in the window in front of me. The way he towers above me and the curved fist of his hand. I feel a delayed stab of pain from the broken plate at my feet and the warm ooze of blood on my toes. But I don’t move. I stand at the sink and hold his gaze.

  Duncan growls at me, like he barely comprehends what’s going through my head. Then he opens his fist, swings round and leaves the room.

  CHAPTER 24

  CLAIRE – BEFORE

  Duncan has gone. Left for work. Stepping away from the broken plate, I have moved to stand at the big patio window in the kitchen and I cry. Slow tears that well from the bottom of my eyes and sit warm on the mound of my cheeks. I can’t stop myself. I brush them away with the back of my hand, but they keep on coming until the tears become audible sobs. Most days I cry. When no one else is around. Until I shake my head and wash my face and tell myself to grow up. Button it. Don’t give him the satisfaction, Claire. I don’t like to admit to myself that this is what I do. What he’s reduced me to.

  This isn’t what I want, it’s never been what I wan
t. I loved Duncan so much in those early days. I remember how he used to come home from his first job as a vet, tired and stressed but bearing some small treat – a takeaway to eat on the patio, or a bunch of flowers – not expensive designer bouquets, we couldn’t afford it, but a bunch of daffodils from the supermarket or roses cut from the front garden. I loved those daffodils, bright and yellow and full of cheer. All I ever wished for was for us to have a family of our own, a place where I belonged, to use my brain and build a home and leave something good behind me when the time comes.

  My brother, Ian, wanted that too. He couldn’t hack it in the UK, not after Mum died. He said he hated how things were going in this country, the way everyone treats foreigners, each other, the politics. He said there was nothing to keep Moira and him in the country anymore. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be a reason to stay. I guess he thought I was all sorted, happy with Duncan.

  Maybe I’m better at lying than I think.

  I turn away from the window, bending to touch the petals of an orchid plant positioned on the table by the sofa. It probably needs watering. A thing of beauty needs nurturing, I should know that. Just as well orchids are pretty robust. The only reason that I keep them is because they somehow survive my lack of care.

  I want to think of good things, not bad, the small sensual pleasures of the life I have. The scent of mown grass drifting through an open door, the feel of summer rain lightly dousing my skin, or the rains in November thundering on the roof, running down the tiles into the gutters, filling them to the brim, glistening as each drop teeters on the edge, waiting until it’s big enough to fall.

  Each image holds me, feeds me, helping me forget.

  Maybe Ian knew the truth of how things were between Duncan and me but decided to go anyway. It’s hard to forgive him for that. He must have seen the change in me. He’s the only person still alive who’s known me all these years. But we were never close and I know he has his own life to live. We all of us make our choices.

  No, I don’t want to forget. I think of Duncan the night Joe was conceived. How, later, Duncan lay face down on the sheets of our bed beside me. He sighed as I leaned forwards, my breasts full against his back, his skin naked to my touch. My fingers ran down his spine, counting each vertebra, naming them one by one, cervical, C1, C2 … thoracic, T3, T4 … following their individual knobbly shape. I circled and trailed, naming each new bone until I found the small hollow on the base of his back, above the coccyx. I was determined to show him how much I loved him, in spite of our growing distance. My hand flattened out. I pressed into his skin. I reached down to kiss him, there where my hands had been. He rolled over and my hand drifted lower and he sighed, like the wind through an open window. I felt the smooth pressure of my own legs against his and my hand moved again.

  Me and Duncan having Joe was an act of love.

  I can’t bear to think of Duncan sharing all that with someone else. It’s not the physical act of sex that I’m jealous of – it’s what comes with it, the intimacy, the shared pleasure, the soft words of passion that slip between lips and skin.

  I saw an item that had been posted on Facebook once. It showed a watercolour painting of a cavalcade of fairies. The colours flashed up on the screen, lush greens and dark browns, but it was the story that caught my eye. How the queen of the faeries abducts a young woman’s husband.

  The queen bewitches him so that he only has eyes for her. When his wife begs for her husband to be set free, the queen says yes, if the wife can hold onto him long enough. The wife waits until the faerie court is riding through the forest at midnight. She steps out and pulls her husband from his horse. She holds on even though he tells her to let go. She holds on even when he kicks and swears and tries to shake her off. The queen turns him into a dog that bites, a bull that kicks, a snake that writhes and twists and whips from side to side, even a lion that threatens to consume her … until the wife can take no more. Still she holds on. Next, the queen turns him into a fire-breathing dragon. The husband and wife are consumed by flames. Through it all, the wife holds on until finally the faerie queen gives in. Thus, the wife wins back her husband.

  There was something about that story that made me think. I held on. Far too long. I think about all those years we’ve had, Duncan and I, the sacrifices we’ve made, our hopes and aspirations, the business, this house, us – how things have changed over time and how I have weathered it all. Wasted years. Years when both of us could have been happy elsewhere. Joe, too. If he’d been happy and secure, even with his problems, he wouldn’t keep going missing like he does, would he?

  Why hadn’t I realised that?

  But no more. I can’t hold on anymore. They’ve sent me the rental paperwork for the cottage by email and I’ve signed it. I get to collect the keys in a few days’ time.

  My new home is waiting for me.

  CHAPTER 25

  CLAIRE – AFTER

  I try to sleep. I drift off for a while, but it doesn’t last. I wake again and the air bites. The top blankets have fallen from my bed and I turn onto my side, not wanting to open my eyes. A pulse beats on the side of my neck and my body begins to shake. I’m frozen. I draw my legs up to my chin as I always do and it comes back to me, my new nightmare.

  I’m in the bath. My body is naked and the water is too cold. The bathroom window is set low into the eaves and my gaze is caught by the view. I squint at the reservoir. I can’t quite make it out, but it looks like there’s something sticking out of the water. It could be a piece of metal, cross-shaped and tilted to one side.

  Small waves tug at the weeds that trail from each arm, the strands and strings of black weeping across slowly shifting liquid. It’s like one of those skinny makeshift scarecrows planted in the soil. Or a sword, Excalibur held aloft by the Lady of the Lake. It’s none of that – I think it’s the cross at the top of a church steeple.

  It can’t be. More like it’s an unwanted piece of junk. There could be all sorts of debris in the reservoir. People dumping stuff when they shouldn’t. Perhaps with this amount of rain, something’s been dragged up by the currents. Reservoirs do have currents, especially this one, the flow of water deep beneath the surface, pulling in and out as and when the water inlets and outlets surge.

  I feel the cold engulf me, yet I don’t want to leave the bath. Nor does my hand reach out to top up the hot water. I can’t. It’s like I’m trapped in a punishment of my own making. Something darkens the water of the reservoir around the cross. The shape wavers in the distance. It’s too far. And yet I can see.

  The water breaks, white and silver churning up the surface. The shadow moves again and it’s like a living thing, more than one of them, a writhing coil of creatures in the water, mad for something unseen. The weeds on the cross pull and stretch as if something’s trying to suck them underneath, and the creatures twist and turn with a frenzied fluttering like a pool of flesh-eating piranhas. Then I feel his hands around my neck. Duncan’s breath against my skin. He pulls me back against the bath and I watch the distant fish with my tongue rolled back and my body locked in ice with Duncan’s fingers crushing my windpipe …

  I force myself to sit up. I press my hand against my neck, the other against my chest, blocking the images that fill my brain with a visceral reality. My heartbeat races and my breath comes in short, sharp gasps as if I really can’t breathe.

  The endless rain has stopped. The cottage inside and out is unnaturally quiet. Arthur with his dicky leg is comatose in the kitchen.

  It was just a dream, wasn’t it? Not a memory.

  CHAPTER 26

  CLAIRE – AFTER

  Things got worse after Duncan set up his own practice. He’d worked for several years for a chain of vets in Derby before deciding he wanted to be his own boss. His ambition was to specialise in small animal surgery. He chose Belston, a town not far from the city, because it had a thriving community. It looked good on paper. That was when money was really tight. We lived in a run-down Victorian
semi on the edge of Matlock. The main road was a nightmare until they built the bypass, a constant stream of traffic at the weekend as people trailed through towards Chatsworth and the wilder countryside of the Peak District.

  Within a couple of years, the business exploded. Duncan’s reputation and referrals had grown. He was clever and hard-working. He had a stern, direct manner that seemed to inspire confidence in his clients – the owners, that is. The animals too. Dogs in particular adored him, always eager to obey his command. Duncan had a particular thing for dogs. The feeling, evidently, was mutual.

  Joe was about five years old then. He’d started school. Duncan was talking about hiring a second vet and I said why not me? I didn’t have to be a stay-at-home mum anymore, we could get a childminder for those hours before and after school and I could pick up my career and make a real contribution. But Duncan said he wasn’t sure. Joe was already playing up and a third childminder had rejected him. I was torn between pushing for my professional freedom and looking after Joe. It hurt that Duncan didn’t want me. It was always as if he didn’t want me.

  He hired Tim, who was brilliant. Younger than us but full of ideas and energy. And Tim was a local lad, the son of a farmer. A sleeves rolled-up kind of guy. All his friends and family spread the word about the new business, it was a smart move by Duncan. They all worked hard and I watched my husband and his growing team drive the practice forwards.

  Suddenly money wasn’t a problem anymore. Duncan began to talk about moving house. He’d always hankered after a modern property, with a big drive and a triple garage – something to impress. Me, I loved the older, more characterful houses. What I fancied was one of those old Derbyshire stone farmhouses with a walled garden and a vegetable plot. We talked endlessly about it. I say talked, argued is a better way of putting it. The only thing we could agree on was something that was detached and in the country.

  He came to me one day and pushed a brochure across the table.