Faith

by Peter James

  He took it without grace and swiped it. Then he swiped it again, all his body language showing this was merely a formality, a courtesy, before handing it back to her. 'Not valid either.'

  Feeling her cheeks reddening, Faith said, 'There's something wrong with your machine.'

  Behind her an irritable male voice said, 'Look, I'm in a hurry.'

  Ignoring Faith, the attendant punched a couple of keys on his terminal, then took the man's credit card. Moments later the slip printed out. With a triumphant smirk at Faith, he handed the man his card and slip for signature. Then he turned back to Faith. 'Machine's working fine.'

  Now she was feeling riled and anxious. What the hell was going on? There had to be some kind of computer error, and she was going to create hell with the card companies when she got home, force each of them to write letters of apology — and, she decided, she would make them write to this cocky little bastard also. But now there was a bigger problem on her mind. Did she have enough cash on her?

  'How much did you say I owe you?'

  The grin was almost unbearable now. 'Sixty-eight pounds seventeen. Plus for the Beano, that's —'

  'Don't forget my comic, Mummy, you've got to pay for that too!' Alec said.

  'Have to see if I've got enough money on me, darling.' She looked in her purse, pulled out all the notes she had and counted them. Sixty pounds exactly. She emptied all the coins on to the counter.

  Another irritable voice behind her said, 'Excuse me, could you serve the rest of us then deal with this woman?'

  Wishing she could disappear into the floor, Faith moved to one side. Five pounds twenty-four pence. She was still short.

  A little hand placed three coins on the counter. Alec's hand. 'I've got sixty pence, Mummy, you can borrow that.'

  She smiled. 'Thank you, darling, I'm going to need it.' She turned to the attendant. 'I've got some money in the car — just going to get it.'

  To her relief she found seven pound coins in the small purse she kept for parking meters. She went back inside, paid the attendant, then strapped Alec into his seat. He was immediately absorbed in his comic.

  She started the engine, drove clear of the pumps, then stopped and dialled the number on the back of her gold card. When the customer services assistant answered, Faith said, 'Can you help me? My card has just been refused at a petrol station.'

  The woman asked for the card number, then ran the usual security check of Faith's address, date of birth, mother's maiden name. Then she asked Faith to hold.

  After about thirty seconds the woman came back on the line. 'I'm sorry, that card has been cancelled by the principal card-holder.'

  'By the principal holder?' Faith said, astonished.

  'That's correct.'

  Faith thanked her and hung up. Then she rang the number on the back of the other two cards in turn.

  Ross had cancelled them too.

  Furious now, she dialled Ross's Harley Street consulting-room number. His secretary answered, haughtily distant as usual. The woman irritated Faith beyond belief. Lucinda Smart. An arid, horsy divorcee in her late forties, with a sister who had been an assistant private secretary to Princess Margaret, Lucinda always treated her with frosty aloofness.

  'Could you put me through to Ross, Lucinda?' Faith asked. 'It's urgent.'

  'Mr Ransome can't be disturbed, Mrs Ransome. He has a patient with him.'

  'I need to speak to him the moment he's free.'

  'I will convey your message to him, Mrs Ransome.'

  'You'd better do more than that. Will you kindly tell him we're not going to have any food tonight if he doesn't call?'

  He didn't call.

  28

  Once, but it seemed a long time ago now, the sound of those tyres on the gravel would have been like music to Faith. Ross arriving home. Once, she would have thrown herself at him as he came in at the front door, hugging and kissing him. And one summer evening, shortly after they had moved here and before Alec had come along, they had lain down on the hall floor and made love — without even shutting the door.

  She could hear Rasputin barking wildly, racing down the hall to greet his master, and she could hear Alec, in his pyjamas, trailing after him. 'Daddy's home! Daddy's home!'

  Looking through the gap in their bedroom curtains Faith could see the Aston Martin glinting in the security lights that had clicked on. She stepped back. She was still in her jeans and chunky polo-neck, but she didn't care. Tonight he could go hang.

  She went out of the bedroom, leaving all the lights on, knowing that would irk him too. There was a toy police car on its side on the landing floor and, further on, some Lego left over from a garage Alec had been trying to assemble. She left them where they were. Downstairs, above the commotion of the dog, she heard the front door opening, then Ross's voice, greeting first the dog, then Alec.

  'Daddy, can I show you what I painted at school?'

  Then Ross's voice again, bellowing. 'Rasputin! Quiet boy. Quiet!'

  'Can I, Daddy? Can I show you?'

  And for the first time in their married life, Faith decided she wasn't going downstairs. She walked on down the landing and into one of the spare bedrooms at the far end.

  She switched on the light, closed the door behind her and sat down in a deep armchair. The room faced out on to the rear, over the terraced lawns, the pool, the tennis court, the orchard and the paddock beyond, but on this stormy night, beneath the threatening grey of the raging sky, she noticed only the spats of rain trickling down the windows.

  She shivered. The room felt cold and unused. The decor was cold, too, tasteful but impersonal, swagged curtains matching the floral bedspread, mahogany furniture, a pile of old Country Lifes and Vogues on the bedside tables. Pictures they hadn't particularly wanted in any of the other rooms hung here to fill wall spaces: a mediocre hunting scene, a couple of rather drab architectural drawings of the Pump House in Bath, and an equally dull watercolour of the Sussex Downs they'd bought when high on champagne and music at Glyndebourne.

  The silence of this room felt good. Fury burned inside her and she had to let this cool. She could never win a confrontation with him, and when they'd had rows in the past it was always Alec who suffered the most becoming frightened and confused.

  She closed her eyes and thought of Oliver Cabot. She tried hard to remember his face but it was elusive: one moment she could see it clearly, the next she only had a faint impression of it. Warmth was what she thought of most. Warmth and sadness, that deep, tender sadness when he talked about his son.

  There was a pang inside her, a yearning of the kind she thought was left way behind in her past and that she would never experience again. The yearning she'd had in her late teens for a boy called Charles Stourton. He'd looked like Alec Baldwin and he'd adored her. He was charming, impeccably mannered, brilliant company, an amazing lover, and everyone who met him liked him. He had a terrific job working for Sotheby's, had just been offered a two-year posting in New York, and wanted her to come with him. Then, just when she thought things could not get better with him, he had dumped her.

  One brief phone call. He had met someone else.

  For months afterwards she had been inconsolable. And that was when she had crashed her bike and met Ross. He'd put four stitches into her forehead, and she'd been terrified she would be scarred for life, yet within weeks of the stitches coming out, there had been no mark at all. And by then she was dating him.

  He had seemed so strong, so attentive, no hint then of the control-freak he had turned into — or maybe she had been blind to it then, in her infatuation for the tall, charming, incredibly handsome, ambitious young doctor.

  'What the fuck are you doing in here?'

  She turned her head and saw him standing in the doorway, his face blazing with anger. She stayed put as he strode towards her.

  'I said, what the fuck are you doing in here?' He stopped right in front of her, towering over her, shaking with rage, and she gripped the arms of the chair, too
angry to be frightened of him, so angry that if he struck her she was going to hit him back.

  'I live here,' she said, calmly. 'This is my home. This is one of the rooms in my home, and I'm sitting in it. Do you have a problem with that?'

  He stared back at her as if uncertain how to handle this. 'Is this the room you like to fuck him in?'

  'What on earth are you talking about?'

  'Where were you yesterday, Faith?'

  'I told you, I was in London.'

  'You fuck him in London?'

  'Fuck who? I was shopping — for your birthday. As I told you.'

  'In Knightsbridge?'

  'Yes. In Harrods, Harvey Nicks, then I went to the General Trading Company.'

  He gave her a long, doubting look. 'I've been to Knightsbridge, Faith. I was a houseman at St George's Hospital — the building on Hyde Park Corner that's now the Lanesborough Hotel. I know Knightsbridge well.'

  He turned away from her, walked over to a chest of drawers, picked up a wicker basket of pot-pourri that sat on top and sniffed the contents. 'These need replacing, they've lost their scent. You're not running this house very well. Thinking about your lover all the time, are you? I don't want my son to be ignored by his mother because she's off with her lover, Faith. Do you understand that? Do you?'

  'I don't have a lover, Ross.'

  He set down the basket, took out a petal and crumbled it in his fingers. 'Helicopters don't fly over Knightsbridge, Faith. They're not allowed to.' He picked up another petal and crumbled that one too.

  'Helicopters?'

  'When I rang you on the mobile, and you answered, I heard a helicopter. You weren't in Knightsbridge, Faith. Where were you?'

  'Is that why you cancelled my credit cards? Because you heard a helicopter?'

  'Don't ever think that because you have a mobile I don't know where you are. I checked with Vodaphone. They have cells all over the country, did you know that? I connected to you through their cell in Winchmore Hill in north London. Who were you with, Faith? Dr Oliver Cabot? Is that what you call being a good mother!'

  She stared back at him, floored. How the hell did he know that?

  Suddenly he scooped up a whole fistful of the pot-pourri and walked over to her, his face livid. This wasn't her husband, Ross, this was some demon. The demon said, 'You've lost your scent, too, you fucking whore.'

  Then he flung them at her so hard they stung her face, strode out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

  29

  Faith sat, listening to Ross's footsteps receding down the landing.

  Bastard.

  She brushed some leaves and petals off her chest and lap, wondering how to respond to his accusations.

  And then she thought, Hell, Faith, you are thirty-two years old, you don't have to account to anyone for what you do or where you go, not even to your husband.

  But it was easier to think it than say it to his face. There was something about Ross that scared her.

  Scared of my husband?

  Lots of women were. There were stories all the time in the press, of women who had married monsters — and sometimes of men who had married monsters.

  She was frightened that sometime Ross was going to go too far during their lovemaking and kill her. Increasingly, in the past few years, he had seemed to get aroused by roughing her up. He was terrifyingly strong, and sometimes when he was fooling around with Alec, swinging him around or wrestling him on the ground, she was certain that he did not realise his own strength.

  She stood up, more debris dropping away from her jeans on to the floor, walked across the room and checked her face in a mirror. There was a trickle of blood on her left cheek from a razor-thin cut.

  She dabbed the wound with her handkerchief, then dug out a leaf that had lodged in her hair and put it in the waste-paper basket. The floor around the armchair was littered with leaves, petals and strips of dried orange peel. It could stay there. Ross's problem.

  How the hell do I explain the helicopter?

  She didn't need to. He'd known where she was.

  They have cells all over the country, did you know that? I connected to you through their cell in Winchmore Hill in north London. Who were you with, Faith? Dr Oliver Cabot?'

  The cut hadn't begun to clot yet, blood still trickled and she dabbed it again. How the hell had he known she was with Oliver Cabot?

  Then it came back to her. Ross in the car after the dinner at the Royal Society of Medicine. The quiet but chilling way he had said it.

  I saw you.

  Had he put two and two together? The phone company telling him she was speaking from Winchmore Hill, and finding out — or knowing — that Oliver Cabot worked in Winchmore Hill? Was he having her followed? She had learned never to rule out anything with Ross. But asking her if she had been with Oliver Cabot had to have been a guess. All she had to do was deny it, and come up with some other good reason for being there.

  Or tell Ross to go to hell.

  And that was what she decided now, anger emboldening her. Go to hell, you bastard. She stormed across the room and opened the door. You think you can pull a stunt like cancelling my credit cards and making me look a fool? Well, maybe in a parallel universe there is a Faith Ransome who'll accept that, meekly, without saying a word, but not in this one.

  You're on the wrong planet, Ross.

  Alec howled, suddenly, as if he had had a terrible accident.

  Faith sprinted down the landing, her stomach clenched. The child was screaming now, with pain and fear. She could see him lying on the flagstones curled up in a bundle, holding his head in his hands.

  As she reached the bottom of the stairs he looked up at her, clutching his head, his face contorted. Kneeling down, putting her arms around him, she said, 'Darling, what's happened?'

  He just continued the terrible bawling.

  'Darling? Please tell me — did you fall down the stairs?'

  'D-D-D-D-Daddy hit me.'

  And she could see now, the mark below his left eye, the traumatised skin, the bruising.

  Her worst nightmare. Ross harming Alec. Ross had often told her how his own father had treated him. And Faith knew from what she had read that those people who were abused by their parents often went on to abuse their own children.

  Choking back her fury she checked Alec's head carefully to make sure nothing felt broken, then scooped him up in her arms and carried him through to the kitchen. She sat him down in a chair, then ran over to the freezer, jerked open a tray and pulled out a pack of frozen peas. She wrapped them in a kitchen towel, and pressed the bundle to his face.

  He turned away, rejecting it, but she persisted, and slowly he calmed down.

  'Why did Daddy hit you, darling?'

  'I— I — I —' He began sobbing uncontrollably.

  On the kitchen television, Bart Simpson was standing in front of a policeman, getting a severe dressing-down.

  'It's bedtime, Mummy'll take you up.'

  Near hysterics now. 'No-no-no-no-nooooooo,.'

  She carried him upstairs, screaming and protesting. Talking to him tenderly, trying to soothe him, she ran his bath, undressed him and got him into the water. He stopped crying.

  'Tell me what Daddy did, darling.'

  He sat in the bath in silence as she soaped him, then rinsed him and dried him.

  'Tell me, darling.'

  But it was as if a switch had been thrown inside him. She carried him to bed and tucked him up. He lay there, sullen and uncommunicative. Faith found that spooky: she could see Ross so clearly reflected in Alec now, that same sullenness and silence when he was angry or hurt.

  She tried reading to him from his favourite book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but he turned away with his thumb in his mouth. Finally, exasperated now, she put the book down, kissed him goodnight and turned out the light.

  Instantly he began screaming.

  She turned on the light again. 'What's the matter, darling? Do you want me to leave the light
on?'

  He stared at her in silence, with wide, fearful eyes, the left side of his face swollen and puffy.

  'Light on?' she repeated. 'Talk to me, darling. Say something, please.'

  Suddenly he was whispering something to her.

  'I can't hear you, darling.' She stepped closer.

  'Please don't let Daddy come in here and hit me again.'

  'He won't,' she said. 'I promise.'

  She switched off the light, closed the door and stood outside. When she was sure he had settled, she went downstairs to look for Ross.

  He was in his study, seated in front of his computer, suit-jacket on the back of his chair, cigar burning in the ash-tray. Tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  She went in, closed the door behind her, then stood with her arms folded, a volcanic fury erupting inside her. 'You bastard,' she said. 'How dare you?'

  There was no response.

  Raising her voice, she shouted, 'You hit my child, you bullying bastard.'

  Still no response.

  'I'm giving you ten seconds to tell me why you hit him, or I'm going to call the police,' she said. 'And I'm going to divorce you.'

  Without replying, and without turning his head from the screen, he tapped the keyboard. A second later, she heard her voice, crystal clear.

  'Hi, Oliver? It's Faith Ransome.'

  And then, equally clearly, she heard Oliver Cabot's voice.

  'Faith! Hey, this is a surprise, great to hear you! How you doing?'

  Ross turned towards her as she heard herself again.

  'Fine, thanks. How are you?'

  'Doing great. All the better for hearing from you!'

  'I — I was wondering — is that offer to show me around your clinic still on?'

  'And lunch? I said it was conditional on you letting me buy you lunch.'

  Trying to look anywhere but at Ross now, she heard herself laugh warmly, and say, 'Lunch would be great!'

  30

  It was the silence that got to her. Those moments after Ross switched off the playback and leaned on his desk on his elbow, eyes heavy and red from crying, looking desperately, desperately hurt.