'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 hi
m 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 facade 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.
He would have the house for the McCarthys. He would show everyone round here that what mattered was not where you came from but what you could achieve. He would restore the house and his family's reputation.
It should have been fairly simple to ensure that the widow, the interloper, did not stand in his way for long. But then, on a blustery early-summer night, the widow had become Isabel, breathing, pulsing Isabel who had flooded his head with music and made his life seem drab, grey and silent. Isabel, who floated ethereally through the trees, whose hips swung with music, who had looked at him with slanted, defiant eyes, who had made him realise what he was reaching for, what had been missing all the time he had been preoccupied with practicalities and square footage. The only woman who had ever posed a challenge. He still wanted the house - oh, he still knew it was his. But it was no longer enough.
Matt McCarthy shut his eyes, then opened them, trying to clear the noise in his head. He fumbled with the CD player in the dashboard until Handel's Water Music started. He turned up the volume. Then as the strings soothed him, restored him, he grabbed his notebook from the glove compartment and began methodically to write a list of all the things he had still to do, from sealing pipework to installing that last window. He could remember every last nail, every last piece of plasterwork. No one knew that house better than him. He sat and scribbled, ignoring the darkened pages that fluttered to the footwell, as the sun dropped behind the Spanish House.
For three days and two nights Isabel did not sleep. She lay awake, engaged in a million silent confrontations with her dead husband. She railed at him for his infidelity, berated herself for leaving him alone so much that he had felt the need and taken the opportunity. She replayed family events, holidays, her trips away, inserting this woman into what she had considered their memories. The excessive spending, his more frequent trips away last year: it all made sense, and knitted together into an ugly pattern. Nothing was hers now, nothing solely theirs. His affair had corrupted everything. And she hated herself for having been too self-absorbed to notice what was happening, too complacent to think of checking bank accounts, credit-card statements.
She had hurled her wedding ring into the lake at midnight, not sure whether to laugh or cry when she did not hear the splash. But mostly she wept for what he had done, by default, to their son. That very morning, at breakfast, she had recalled, Laurent had kissed Thierry's head and made some comment about how grown-up he was. Was that some coded message? Had it been Laurent's way of warning Thierry not to speak? Had hiding his infidelity meant more to him than his son's peace of mind? Or had he said that Thierry was growing up simply because he was?
It corrupted everything, this knowledge. It made her head spin.
Matt had come the morning after she had made the discovery and when she heard his van, and the knock at the back door - she had removed the emergency keys from under the mat - she had opened it and told him it was not convenient.
'You need the bathroom doing,' he had said. 'You've been going on about it for weeks. I've got all the stuff in the van.' He looked awful. He had several days' stubble on his chin and his T-shirt was grubby. Not building-work grubby, but crumpled, greyed, as if he had slept in it.
'No,' she had said. 'Now is not a good time.'
'But you said you wanted--'
'We've been using a tin bath for months. It's hardly going to make any difference now, is it?' And she had closed the door, not caring that she had sounded rude, or that Kitty would wail yet again that they were living in prehistoric conditions. She hated Matt for being a man. For sleeping with her when he, too, was married, and not having the grace to appear as if he had given it a second thought. She winced when she remembered her own unthinking duplicity. Hadn't she done to Laura what she was so distraught at having had done to herself?
No one else came to the house. She ignored the few telephone calls. Outwardly she gave a virtuoso performance. She cooked, admired the new chicks, and listened attentively when Kitty returned with Anthony from the hospital where Asad was recovering well from the asthma attack. She listened, with satisfaction, to her son's voice. He was tentative at first, and selfconscious, but he asked for breakfast instead of helping himself silently to cereal, he called his puppy, and later that afternoon she heard him laughing at it as it raced after a rabbit near the lake.
She was glad that the children no longer wanted to return to London: the house in Maida Vale had morphed overnight from a lost idyll, a comforting home, to a place of deception, of secrets.
At night, when the children were asleep, unable to play the violin, she walked through her unfinished house, accompanied by the mosquitoes that had found their way in through unfixed windows, the scurrying of nocturnal creatures under the floorboards or in the eaves. She no longer saw the naked plasterboard. That it was a shell in places did not make it any more or less a home than the supposed haven in London. It was not about decor or soft furnishings, or the number of floorboards that were missing. It was not about wealth or security.
She was no longer sure what made a home. Any further than it was about two quietly sleeping bodies upstairs.
Jack-by-the-hedge. Hairy bittercress. Wild thyme and chanterelles. Byron walked round the edge of the woods, where the aged trunks segued neatly into pastureland, hemmed by years of successive farmers, and, in the dim light, picked himself a supper from the places he had known since he was a boy. He had lost weight, but suspected it was due less to his having to forage than to his lack of appetite.
He had spent the last few days holed up in the daytime, sleeping in the heat, and wandering the woods at night, trying to work out what to do next.
She was wary of him now. That much was clear. He had seen it in the way she had jumped when she saw him coming through the trees, in the way she fixed on a smile, too broad, too bright. He had heard it in the determined nature of her greeting,
as if she wouldn't show him how afraid she was. He knew that reaction: he had seen it in those villagers who knew him by reputation rather than in person.
When Byron thought of Isabel being afraid of him, of her family believing he could do them harm, something heavy fell upon him like a shroud.
There was little point in attempting to remain in the Bartons, he knew. His past, no matter how misreported, would hang around him like a filthy stench as long as people like Matt were there. And with the land shrinking, swallowed by 'unique' new home developments, industrial units or arable farming, there were few people locally who could offer him work. He had seen the new career options for people like him: shelf-stacker, security guard, mini-cab driver. Something in Byron died even when he was reading the advertisements and picturing himself in a concrete car park, being told by a supervisor when to take his fifteen-minute break and paid, begrudgingly, the minimum wage.
I should not have challenged Matt, he told himself, for the hundredth time. I should have kept my mouth shut. But he didn't believe it.
'Hello?'
She had put the first line of her address at the top of the letter: 32 Beaufort House, Witchtree Gardens. An odd thing for a lover to do, Isabel thought. To be so specific. As if he might confuse you with somebody else.
Forty-eight hours after she had received the letters, she had called Directory Enquiries and found there was only one Karen living at such an address. Karen Traynor, destroyer of marriages and memories. Who would have thought that two words could have such an impact on so many people's lives? Isabel pictured her as tall, fair, athletic, perhaps in her late twenties. She would be immaculately made up - women with no children always were: they had time to be self-obsessed. Did she play music? Or had Laurent relished possession of someone whose mind wasn't always drifting elsewhere?
She didn't know what she would say, although she had rehearsed a hundred arguments, a thousand pithy put-downs. She suspected she might shout at her or scream. She would demand to know where all their money had gone. Where had Laurent taken her? How many hotels, Paris breaks, expensive treats had there been when Isabel had assumed he was away on business? She would show the woman what she had done, explain to her that, contrary to what Laurent might have said (what had he said?), she had been an intruder in a marriage that was still full of passion, still pulsing, still alive. She would put her straight, this unthinking, selfish girl. She would make her see.