‘I’m not going to wear a basque and suspenders every night just to keep you happy. And you’re not answering my question.’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Yes.’
‘But we weren’t talking about it, were we?’
‘Lou, most people move in with each other because it’s sensible. You can love someone and still see the financial and practical advantages.’
‘I just … don’t want you to think I made this happen. I don’t want to feel like I made this happen.’
He sighed, and rolled on to his back. ‘Why do women always have to go over and over a situation until it becomes a problem? I love you, you love me, we’ve been together nearly seven years and there was no room at your parents’ house any more. It’s actually pretty simple.’
But it didn’t feel simple.
It felt like I was living a life I hadn’t had a chance to anticipate.
That Friday it rained all day – warm, heavy sheets of it, like we were in the tropics, making the guttering gurgle and bowing the stems of the flowering shrubs as if in supplication. Will stared out of the windows like a dog denied a walk. Nathan came and went, a plastic bag lifted above his head. Will watched a documentary about penguins, and afterwards, while he logged on to his computer, I busied myself, so that we didn’t have to talk to each other. I felt our discomfort with each other keenly, and being in the same room as him all the time made it that much worse.
I had finally begun to understand the consolations of cleaning. I mopped, cleaned windows and changed duvets. I was a constant whirl of activity. No dust mote escaped my eye, no tea ring my forensic attentions. I was dislodging the limescale on the bathroom taps using kitchen roll soaked in vinegar (my mother’s tip) when I heard Will’s chair behind me.
‘What are you doing?’
I was bent low over the bath. I didn’t turn round. ‘I’m descaling your taps.’
I could feel him watching me.
‘Say that again,’ he said, after a beat.
‘What?’
‘Say that again.’
I straightened up. ‘Why, are you having problems with your hearing? I’m descaling your taps.’
‘No, I just want you to listen to what you’re saying. There is no reason to descale my taps, Clark. My mother won’t notice it, I won’t care, and it’s making the bathroom stink like a fish and chip shop. Besides, I’d like to go out.’
I wiped a lock of hair from my face. It was true. There was a definite waft of large haddock in the atmosphere.
‘Come on. It’s finally stopped raining. I just spoke to my dad. He said he’ll give us the keys to the castle after five o’clock, once all the tourists are out.’
I didn’t feel great about the idea of us having to make polite conversation during a walk around the grounds. But the thought of being out of the annexe was appealing.
‘Okay. Give me five minutes. I need to try and get the smell of vinegar off my hands.’
The difference between growing up like me and growing up like Will was that he wore his sense of entitlement lightly. I think if you grow up as he had done, with wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants as a matter of course, you probably just have this sense that good things will fall into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one.
Will had escaped into the empty grounds of the castle his whole childhood, he said. His dad let him roam the place, trusting him not to touch anything. After 5.30pm, when the last of the tourists had gone, as the gardeners began to trim and tidy, as the cleaners emptied the bins and swept up the empty cartons of drink and commemorative toffee fudge, it had become his private playground. As he told me this, I mused that if Treena and I had been given the freedom of the castle, all to ourselves, we would have been air punching with disbelief and getting giddy all over the place.
‘First girl I ever kissed was in front of the drawbridge,’ he said, slowing to look towards it as we walked along the gravel path.
‘Did you tell her it was your place?’
‘No. Perhaps I should have done. She dumped me a week later for the boy who worked in the minimart.’
I turned and stared at him in shock. ‘Not Terry Rowlands? Dark slicked-back hair, tattoos up to his elbows?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s him.’
‘He still works there, you know. In the minimart. If that makes you feel any better.’
‘I’m not sure he’d feel entirely envious of where I ended up,’ Will said, and I stopped talking again.
It was strange seeing the castle like this, in silence, the two of us the only people there apart from the odd gardener in the distance. Instead of gazing at the tourists, being distracted by their accents and their alien lives, I found myself looking at the castle for perhaps the first time, beginning to absorb some of its history. Its flinted walls had stood there for more than 800 years. People had been born and died there, hearts filled and broken. Now, in the silence, you could almost hear their voices, their own footsteps on the path.
‘Okay, confession time,’ I said. ‘Did you ever walk around here and pretend secretly that you were some kind of warrior prince?’
Will looked sideways at me. ‘Honestly?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yes. I even borrowed one of the swords off the walls of the Great Hall once. It weighed a ton. I remember being petrified that I wouldn’t be able to lift it back on to its stand.’
We had reached the swell of the hill, and from here, at the front of the moat, we could look down the long sweep of grass to the ruined wall that had marked the boundary. Beyond it lay the town, the neon signs and queues of traffic, the bustle that marked the small town’s rush hour. Up here it was silent apart from the birds and the soft hum of Will’s chair.
He stopped the chair briefly and swivelled it so that we looked down at the grounds. ‘I’m surprised we never met each other,’ he said. ‘When I was growing up, I mean. Our paths must have crossed.’
‘Why would they? We didn’t exactly move in the same circles. And I would just have been the baby you passed in the pram, while swinging your sword.’
‘Ah. I forgot – I am positively ancient compared to you.’
‘Eight years would definitely have qualified you as an “older man”,’ I said. ‘Even when I was a teenager my dad would never have let me go out with an older man.’
‘Not even if he had his own castle?’
‘Well, that would change things, obviously.’
The sweet smell of the grass rose up around us as we walked, Will’s wheels hissing through the clear puddles on the path. I felt relieved. Our conversation wasn’t quite as it had been, but perhaps that was only to be expected. Mrs Traynor had been right – it would always be hard for Will to watch other people moving on with their lives. I made a mental note to think more carefully about how my actions might make an impact on his life. I didn’t want to be angry any more.
‘Let’s do the maze. I haven’t done it for ages.’
I was pulled back from my thoughts. ‘Oh. No, thanks.’ I glanced over, noticing suddenly where we were.
‘Why, are you afraid of getting lost? C’mon, Clark. It’ll be a challenge for you. See if you can memorize the route you take in, then take the reverse one out. I’ll time you. I used to do it all the time.’
I glanced back towards the house. ‘I’d really rather not.’ Even the thought of it had brought a knot to my stomach.
‘Ah. Playing safe again.’
‘That’s not it.’
‘No problem. We’ll just take our boring little walk and go back to the boring little annexe.’
I know he was joking. But something in his tone really got to me. I thought of Deirdre on the bus, her comments about how good it was that one of us girls had stayed behind. Mine was to be the small life, my ambitions the petty ones.
I glanced over at the maze, at its dark, dense box hedging. I was being ridiculous. Perhaps I had been behaving ridiculously for years. It was all over, after all. And I was moving on.
‘Just remember which turn you take, then reverse it to come out. It’s not as hard as it looks. Really.’
I left him on the path before I could think about it. I took a breath, and walked in past the sign that warned ‘No Unaccompanied Children’, striding briskly between the dark, damp hedging which still glistened with raindrops.
It’s not so bad, it’s not so bad, I found myself murmuring under my breath. It’s just a load of old hedges. I took a right turn, then a left through a break in the hedge. I took another right, a left, and as I went I rehearsed in my head the reverse of where I had been. Right. Left. Break. Right. Left.
My heart rate began to rise a little, so that I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. I forced myself to think about Will on the other side of the hedge, glancing down at his watch. It was just a silly test. I was no longer that naive young woman. I was twenty-seven. I lived with my boyfriend. I had a responsible job. I was a different person.
I turned, went straight on, and turned again.
And then, almost from nowhere, the panic rose within me like bile. I thought I saw a man darting at the end of the hedge. Even though I told myself it was just my imagination, the act of reassuring myself made me forget my reversed instructions. Right. Left. Break. Right. Right? Had I got that the wrong way around? My breath caught in my throat. I forced myself onwards, only to realize that I had completely lost my bearings. I stopped and glanced around me at the direction of the shadows, trying to work out which direction was west.
And as I stood there, it dawned on me that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay in there. I whipped round, and began to walk in what I thought was a southerly direction. I would get out. I was twenty-seven years old. It was fine. But then I heard their voices, the catcalling, the mocking laughter. I saw them, darting in and out of the gaps in the hedge, felt my own feet sway drunkenly under my high heels, the unforgiving prickle of the hedge as I fell against it, trying to steady myself.
‘I want to get out now,’ I had told them, my voice slurring and unsteady. ‘I’ve had enough, guys.’
And they had all vanished. The maze was silent, just the distant whispers that might have been them on the other side of the hedge – or might have been the wind dislodging the leaves.
‘I want to go out now,’ I had said, my voice sounding uncertain even to me. I had gazed up at the sky, briefly unbalanced by the vast, studded black of the space above me. And then I jumped as someone caught me around my waist – the dark-haired one. The one who had been to Africa.
‘You can’t go yet,’ he said. ‘You’ll spoil the game.’
I had known then, just from the feel of his hands on my waist. I had realized that some balance had shifted, that some restraint on behaviour had begun to evaporate. And I had laughed, pushed at his hands as if they were a joke, unwilling to let him know that I knew. I heard him shout for his friends. And I broke away from him, running suddenly, trying to fight my way to the exit, my feet sinking into the damp grass. I heard them all around me, their raised voices, their bodies unseen, and felt my throat constrict in panic. I was too disorientated to work out where I was. The tall hedges kept swaying, pitching towards me. I kept going, pushing my way around corners, stumbling, ducking into openings, trying to get away from their voices. But the exit never came. Everywhere I turned there was just another expanse of hedge, another mocking voice.
I stumbled into an opening, briefly exultant that I was near freedom. But then I saw I was back at the centre again, back where I had started. I reeled as I saw them all standing there, as if they had simply been waiting for me.
‘There you go,’ one of them said, as his hand grabbed my arm. ‘I told you she was up for it. Come on, Lou-lou, give me a kiss and I’ll show you the way out.’ His voice was soft and drawling.
‘Give us all a kiss and we’ll all show you the way out.’
Their faces were a blur.
‘I just … I just want you to –’
‘Come on, Lou. You like me, don’t you? You’ve been sitting on my lap all evening. One kiss. How hard is that?’
I heard a snigger.
‘And you’ll show me how to get out?’ My voice sounded pathetic, even to me.
‘Just one.’ He moved closer.
I felt his mouth on mine, a hand squeezing my thigh.
He broke away, and I heard the tenor of his breathing change. ‘And now Jake’s turn.’
I don’t know what I said then. Someone had my arm. I heard the laughter, felt a hand in my hair, another mouth on mine, insistent, invasive, and then –
‘Will … ’
I was sobbing now, crouched over myself. ‘Will,’ I was saying his name, over and over again, my voice ragged, emerging somewhere from my chest. I heard him somewhere far off, beyond the hedge.
‘Louisa? Louisa, where are you? What’s the matter?’
I was in the corner, as far under the hedge as I could get. Tears blurred my eyes, my arms wrapped tightly around me. I couldn’t get out. I would be stuck here forever. Nobody would find me.
‘Will … ’
‘Where are – ?’
And there he was, in front of me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking up, my face contorted. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t … do it.’
He lifted his arm a couple of inches – the maximum he could manage. ‘Oh Jesus, what the – ? Come here, Clark. He moved forward, then glanced down at his arm in frustration. ‘Bloody useless thing … It’s okay. Just breathe. Come here. Just breathe. Slowly.’
I wiped my eyes. At the sight of him, the panic had begun to subside. I stood up, unsteadily, and tried to straighten my face. ‘I’m sorry. I … don’t know what happened.’
‘Are you claustrophobic?’ His face, inches from mine, was etched with worry. ‘I could see you didn’t want to go in. I just … I just thought you were being –’
I shut my eyes. ‘I just want to go now.’
‘Hold on to my hand. We’ll go out.’
He had me out of there within minutes. He knew the maze backwards, he told me as we walked, his voice calm, reassuring. It had been a challenge for him as a boy to learn his way through. I entwined my fingers with his and felt the warmth of his hand as something comforting. I felt foolish when I realized how close to the entrance I had been all along.
We stopped at a bench just outside, and I rummaged in the back of his chair for a tissue. We sat there in silence, me on the end of the bench beside him, both of us waiting for my hiccoughing to subside.
He sat, sneaking sideways glances at me.
‘So … ?’ he said, finally, when I must have looked as if I could speak without falling apart again. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on?’
I twisted the tissue in my hands. ‘I can’t.’
He closed his mouth.
I swallowed. ‘It’s not you,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘I haven’t talked to anyone about … It’s … it’s stupid. And a long time ago. I didn’t think … I would … ’
I felt his eyes on me, and wished he wouldn’t look. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling, and my stomach felt as if it were made of a million knots.
I shook my head, trying to tell him that there were things I couldn’t say. I wanted to reach for his hand again, but I didn’t feel I could. I was conscious of his gaze, could almost hear his unspoken questions.
Below us, two cars had pulled up near the gates. Two figures got out – from here it was impossible to see who – and embraced. They stood there for a few minutes, perhaps talking, and then got back into their cars and drove off in the opposite direction. I watched them but I couldn’t think. My mind felt frozen. I didn’t know what to say about anything any more.
‘Okay. Here’s a thing,’ he said, finally. I turned around, but he wasn’t looking at me. ‘I’ll tell you something that I never tell anyone. All right?’
‘All right.’ I screwed the tissue into a ball in my hands, waiting.
He took a deep breath.
‘I get really, really scared of how this is going to go.’ He let that settle in the air between us, and then, in a low, calm voice, he carried on. ‘I know most people think living like me is about the worst thing that could happen. But it could get worse. I could end up not being able to breathe by myself, not being able to talk. I could get circulatory problems that mean my limbs have to be amputated. I could be hospitalized indefinitely. This isn’t much of a life, Clark. But when I think about how much worse it could get – some nights I lie in my bed and I can’t actually breathe.’
He swallowed. ‘And you know what? Nobody wants to hear that stuff. Nobody wants you to talk about being afraid, or in pain, or being scared of dying through some stupid, random infection. Nobody wants to know how it feels to know you will never have sex again, never eat food you’ve made with your own hands again, never hold your own child. Nobody wants to know that sometimes I feel so claustrophobic, being in this chair, I just want to scream like a madman at the thought of spending another day in it. My mother is hanging on by a thread and can’t forgive me for still loving my father. My sister resents me for the fact that yet again I have overshadowed her – and because my injuries mean she can’t properly hate me, like she has since we were children. My father just wants it all to go away. Ultimately, they want to look on the bright side. They need me to look on the bright side.’
He paused. ‘They need to believe there is a bright side.’
I blinked into the darkness. ‘Do I do that?’ I said, quietly.
‘You, Clark,’ he looked down at his hands, ‘are the only person I have felt able to talk to since I ended up in this bloody thing.’
And so I told him.
I reached for his hand, the same one that had led me out of the maze, and I looked straight down at my feet and I took a breath and I told him about the whole night, and how they had laughed at me and made fun of how drunk and stoned I was, and how I had passed out and later my sister had said it might actually be a good thing, the not remembering all of what they had done, but how that half-hour of not knowing had haunted me ever since. I filled it, you see. I filled it with their laughter, their bodies and their words. I filled it with my own humiliation. I told him how I saw their faces every time I went anywhere beyond the town, and how Patrick and Mum and Dad and my small life had been just fine for me, with all their problems and limitations. They had let me feel safe.
By the time we finished talking the sky had grown dark, and there were fourteen messages on my mobile phone wondering where we were.
‘You don’t need me to tell you it wasn’t your fault,’ he said, quietly.
Above us the sky had become endless and infinite.
I twisted the handkerchief in my hand. ‘Yes. Well. I still feel … responsible. I drank too much to show off. I was a terrible flirt. I was –’
‘No. They were responsible.’
Nobody had ever said those words aloud to me. Even Treena’s look of sympathy had held some mute accusation. Well, if you will get drunk and silly with men you don’t know …
His fingers squeezed mine. A faint movement, but there it was.
‘Louisa. It wasn’t your fault.’
I cried then. Not sobbing, this time. The tears left me silently, and told me something else was leaving me. Guilt. Fear. A few other things I hadn’t yet found words for. I leant my head gently on his shoulder and he tilted his head until it rested against mine.
‘Right. Are you listening to me?’
I murmured a yes.
‘Then I’ll tell you something good,’ he said, and then he waited, as if he wanted to be sure he had my attention. ‘Some mistakes … just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let that night be the thing that defines you.’
I felt his head tilt against mine.
‘You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.’
The sigh that left me then was long, and shuddering. We sat there in silence, letting his words sink in. I could have stayed there all night, above the rest of the world, the warmth of Will’s hand in mine, feeling the worst of myself slowly begin to ebb away.
‘We’d better get back,’ he said, eventually. ‘Before they call out a search party.’
I released his hand and stood, a little reluctantly, feeling the cool breezes on my skin. And then, almost luxuriously, I stretched my arms high above my head. I let my fingers straighten in the evening air, the tension of weeks, months, perhaps years, easing a little, and let out a deep breath.
Below me the lights of the town winked, a circle of light amid the black countryside below us. I turned back towards him. ‘Will?’
‘Yes?’