by Karen Swan
The girls heard the engine too underwater and lifted their heads quizzically, forcing Bell to grab them around the waists as they kicked about excitedly, almost sinking themselves.
‘Mamma!’ Tilde yelled, the mouthpiece still in her mouth so that her voice trumpeted. ‘We’re snorkelleers!’
Bell smiled at her description as Hanna just waved, unable to either hear or understand their garbled shouts. Max let the boat glide in to the shore, nudging the sand just enough for her to jump out onto the sand, before he circled back to the buoy where he would tether up and swim back in himself.
‘Mamma! Mamma!’
Bell waded back to the beach, a twin on each hip, putting the girls down when it was shallow enough for them to stand again. They ran ahead comically through the water, arms lifted to their heads and hair tangled in their mask straps, running into their mother’s arms as though she had been gone three months and not just for the weekend.
A lot could happen in that time, though. So much had. Families could be unpicked in mere moments. Had theirs? She watched as Hanna grabbed her daughters to her, the doting mother. The unfaithful wife.
‘My babies!’ she was laughing, holding them close to her, eyes closed in bliss as she sank down in the sand with them, not caring that her shorts were getting wet.
‘Hanna, I’m really sorry, I totally forgot about the boat,’ Bell said as she approached. ‘I should have brought it over for you. I could easily have kayaked back here.’
‘No,’ Hanna said quickly. ‘It’s perfectly fine. It was no problem for Max to collect me.’
Bell caught something in her voice – an obligingness that seemed almost too ready, an eagerness to please. Appease.
‘And how’s Emil?’ she asked dutifully, refusing to let her voice or face betray how even just his name made her feel. Max had backed off as soon as she had mentioned quitting: she would look after the girls for the rest of the summer, and then they would be back in the city. Normal life would resume, Emil would be forgotten.
‘He would be fine, except for those headaches. Cathy’s coming back later to give him another once-over.’
‘Right.’ Bell nodded briskly. ‘Well, hopefully it’ll all settle down soon enough.’
‘Yes.’
She heard splashes behind her, and turned to see Max wading in. ‘I’ll make some coffees, shall I?’ he asked as he passed, not stopping, his mouth set in a grim line.
‘Sure.’ Hanna watched him go, her gaze cautious, and Bell wondered what had happened when he’d glided up to the jetty to collect her just now. Had Emil been waiting there too? His old friend, his new foe.
Bell felt a knot of tension tighten in the pit of her stomach just at the thought of it all – the chaos Emil had shaken loose from the fibres of this family crossing the lagoon and following them back here, the lies and secrets pinned to them like shadows.
‘Well, it’s been non-stop here all morning,’ she said with forced brightness, refusing to get drawn in again. Their problems weren’t hers. They weren’t her family and this wasn’t her life. She had sympathy with them all – it was an impossible situation to be in – but it was a job, nothing more. She had to remember that. She was just the nanny, here for the kids. ‘These two have become expert snorkellers—’
‘Snorkelleers,’ Elise corrected her, sitting between her mother’s legs now and letting wet sand drizzle through her fingers.
‘Sorry, snorkelleers, in the space of one morning. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they have mermaid genes.’
‘I want to be a mermaid,’ Tilde said sadly.
‘I know, honey, we all do,’ Hanna said, kissing her head and speaking into her hair.
Bell thought their shoulders looked pink. ‘I’d better get more cream on them,’ she said, wading out of the shallows. The sand was hot underfoot and she jogged lightly up onto the deck, rifling through the beach bag for the bottle.
‘Girls, go and rinse off the sand first,’ she heard Hanna saying behind her and moments later, the squeak of the pipes started up as the twins stood under the outdoor shower, just past the steps.
Hanna grabbed a beach towel and came and sat beside her on the chairs, both of them watching the girls shriek and play, droplets of water catching the sun’s rays and sparkling like crystals. It made for an idyllic image. The radiance of summer. The innocence of childhood.
‘Just look at them. So close . . .’ Hanna murmured wistfully.
‘Yeah . . .’ Bell felt herself stiffen at Hanna’s proximity. She didn’t want to be this close to her, the woman who – unwittingly – had what she herself wanted, even though Bell knew she had no rights here. This was Hanna’s family, her life, her mess, her husband . . . She couldn’t imagine how Hanna would react to learning that Bell had fallen for him, been with him too. Not that she ever would; that secret, at least, would be safe. Emil had far more to lose than she if the truth came out. God, what a mess though. She and Hanna had both trodden on each other’s toes without even knowing it and it occurred to her that this was how Max must feel – caught in the web of someone else’s story, an unwitting bystander become collateral.
‘How was Linus when you left?’ she asked, stepping onto safe ground.
Hanna’s mouth turned downwards and she lifted her gaze off her daughters, staring out to sea, a flock of scolder ducks coming in to land on the water in a riotous chain of splashes. ‘So-so. I think he would have liked to come back here with me. But then Emil offered to take him on a helicopter ride around the archipelago later, so . . .’ She shrugged.
‘Wow.’
‘Mmm . . . He’s spoiling him, of course.’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew he would.’ She clicked her tongue against the top of her mouth, still watching the girls. ‘I don’t suppose I can blame him, though. I would do the same. I would do whatever it took to make my child love me again.’
Bell didn’t comment. She would not be drawn. She was the nanny. This was a job.
Hanna sighed, clasping her hands together between her knees and dropping her head. ‘Listen, Bell, Max told me what you’d said, about not going back there. You don’t want to deal with Emil.’ She pinned Bell with her customary cool stare. ‘And I think I know why.’
Bell felt her blood freeze, her cheeks burn. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Emil had told her the truth about them?
Hanna glanced around, checking they were still alone. ‘You know, don’t you?’ she whispered. ‘About the other night.’
What? Bell blinked back, heart thudding as the confusion cleared. Her secret was still just that? He hadn’t said anything about them? ‘. . . Yes.’
‘That’s why you didn’t want to go back – your loyalty is with Max.’
Bell looked down at the deck. ‘Yes,’ she lied.
Hanna leaned in to her, urgency in the movements. ‘Bell, it was never my intention to drag you into this. I would never knowingly put you in a position where you had to lie for me, or felt like you had to choose.’ Hanna glanced at her askance. ‘You must think I’m a terrible person.’
‘Of course I don’t. I . . . I don’t know what I’d do if I was in your shoes.’
‘I love Max. You have to believe that.’
Bell looked sidelong at her, sensing a ‘but’.
Hanna dropped her head, nodding ashamedly. ‘But, yes, I love Emil too. As much as I wish I didn’t. As much as he doesn’t deserve it after the things he’s said and done.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe part of it is guilt, I don’t know.’
Bell looked at her. ‘Why would you feel guilty? He’s treated you appallingly.’
‘But he doesn’t deserve what’s happened to him. No one does. No matter how vile his behaviour, he’s still lost more and suffered more than the rest of us put together. I can understand his rage, even if I don’t like it. He’s a desperate man.’
They watched the girls together in pensive silence, both knowing there was no easy answer, no compromise, no kind solution to their problem. Someon
e had to lose. Someone had to get hurt.
‘You know you will have to choose, though,’ Bell murmured. ‘Sooner or later. Everyone’s suffering this way.’
‘I know, but how?’ Hanna asked, her voice a desperate whisper. ‘How do I choose between the father of my son and the father of my daughters?’
Again, it was a question with no answer. ‘Does Max know?’ Bell asked instead, keeping her voice down, glancing back to check he was still in the kitchen. She could see him through the glass door, scrubbing the perfectly clean worktop, his muscles flexed and tense.
‘He hasn’t said anything outright, but I think . . . I think he suspects there’s something.’ She gave an unhappy laugh, rubbing her face in her hands. ‘He’s feared it from the first day.’
Bell well remembered his haunted look when she’d come into the kitchen that early winter’s morning. He had looked . . . not defeated, but somehow resigned to that eventuality, as though he expected to always lose out to Emil.
‘But it wasn’t from the first day, was it?’ Bell hardly dared ask, a quaver in her voice. She didn’t want to hear the details and yet, perversely, it was all she wanted to know. Whatever else had happened between her and Emil, there had been no lies between them; he had never deceived her. He had been upfront and direct about his plans to win his family back from the start.
‘God, no. It’s been a long, slippery slope.’ Hanna sighed and gave a weary shrug, looking worn down. ‘I tried hard, so hard, to keep the boundaries clear, but . . . there’s history there, you know? And as Linus’s father, we had to create some sort of new partnership together; I couldn’t cut him out of our lives . . . I just never realized how difficult it would be – to be together but apart.’
‘I’m sure,’ Bell murmured. Together but apart was precisely what she’d had to navigate with Emil for the last two weeks, too. ‘You took vows together, and he’s still your husband at the end of the day.’
‘He is, yes,’ Hanna said slowly. ‘But he’s not the man I married, if that makes any sense.’
Bell glanced at her, confused.
‘The accident has changed him . . . The Emil I married was . . . different. Repressed, I guess you’d say.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘His family are so prominent, their views can change the stock market fortunes of companies, alter careers of politicians . . . so he learned never to speak his mind, never to really show how he was feeling – which didn’t always make him the world’s best husband.’ She sighed. ‘But now, he’s different. He’s more quick-tempered, volatile . . .’
‘And that worries you?’
‘If I’m being honest . . . it sort of excites me,’ Hanna whispered confidingly, eyes shining with her guilty admission. ‘He’s passionate now. Unpredictable. If anything could ever be said to be a positive outcome of a traumatic brain injury – it’s that he has no filter.’
‘That’s not necessarily a good thing,’ Bell murmured, having been on the wrong end of it herself. Opportunity. Lust. Relief . . . Just the nanny . . .
‘I know. But now he just says what he feels, and when a man wants you and tells you like that –’
His hand in her hair. ‘Bell.’ A fragile sound giving shape to a wish.
Hanna gave an involuntary shudder, and Bell knew she was right. She clearly remembered how he had looked at her in the moonlight too, that same night; the same way he had looked at her on Midsommar’s . . . It had been the abandonment in his eyes that had undone her.
‘Bell.’ A shape to a need.
‘When I went to check on him, he was already waiting for me –’
‘Bell.’ An apology, regret. Conviction.
‘– I knew the moment I walked in . . . All those months, I’ve been trying so hard to resist what we both knew was there, circling around it, trying to deny it . . . I just couldn’t pretend any more.’
‘I’m awake.’
Bell felt a hollow in the pit of her stomach, every word a knife to her heart. She had confused his feelings for Hanna as feelings for her. Or he had. She wasn’t sure – everything was so tangled, pulled and tugged into a tight, hard knot. ‘Well,’ she managed, her words little more than a mumble. ‘You’d both had another scare. You thought you might have lost him again. That’s bound to focus the mind.’
‘It did. I’ve been living on my nerves for months and I’ve been so frightened, so confused—’
‘Coffees, as promised.’ Max’s voice startled them both, and they looked round to see him coming through with the mugs on a tray. ‘Apologies if you’ve been waiting for it, but I thought I’d give you both time to talk through the happy news.’
‘Happy news?’ Bell asked after a beat, hearing his wry tone as Hanna physically straightened, composing herself back into his capable, loving wife.
‘Thank you, darling,’ she said with a tight smile as he handed her a mug. ‘I was actually just about to get to that bit.’
Happy news? After being ‘frightened’ and ‘confused’?
Max frowned as he set the tray down on the wooden cube block that served as an outdoor table. ‘You mean you haven’t told her yet? What on earth have you been talking about for all this time then?’
There was a startled silence, and then –
‘Linus,’ both she and Hanna said together.
‘Oh.’ He sat down on Hanna’s other side, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, and lifted the binoculars he had brought out with the drinks. ‘Think I just saw some eider ducks,’ he murmured.
The women exchanged looks.
‘Anyway, Bell,’ Hanna said after a moment, her tone lapsing back into the brisk efficiency Bell knew so well; the mask was back on, the actors were on the stage. ‘You made it perfectly clear to Max you don’t want to have to stay at Emil’s going forward, and we respect that. Linus is bonding well with his father and, as you say, there’s no need for you to be there when you can be more valuable here, with the girls.’
Bell gave a wary smile. ‘But . . .?’ she prompted, looking between them both. She had an instinct for provisos.
Hanna inflated herself with a nervous intake of breath. ‘Well, it’s Emil’s birthday tomorrow, and clearly . . . well, clearly he’s had a rough time. It’ll be the first birthday he’s celebrated since he was . . . God . . . since he was twenty-four –’ Her voice broke suddenly, and she pressed a hand to her mouth as a sob escaped her.
Max leaned forward, rubbing her shoulder. ‘Hey,’ he shushed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, a single tear wiggling down her cheek. ‘Sometimes it just hits me.’
‘It’s bound to,’ Max murmured, glancing at Bell apprehensively.
Bell gave a worried smile back, but it was clear Hanna was buckling under the strain of pretence. She was mired in lies. Living two lives. This couldn’t carry on . . . It wouldn’t.
Hanna sniffed and tried to straighten up. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’
Bell waited, feeling her own nerves fray. She didn’t care if it was Emil’s birthday tomorrow. As long as what Hanna was about to tell her didn’t involve her in any way . . . She didn’t want to see him again; she couldn’t. The expression in his eyes as he’d looked at her across the bedroom, Hanna beside him . . . I’m awake. She never wanted to see him again.
Hanna composed herself. ‘Anyway, it’s his birthday tomorrow, and it’s only right it should be celebrated with his family. That’s what he wants, and . . .’ Hanna nodded, glancing at Max. ‘I don’t feel we can disoblige.’
‘Of course not,’ Max mumbled, patting her hand.
‘So you’re going back there tomorrow?’ Bell asked with relief. ‘Well, that’s okay. I can stay here with the girls –’
‘No, that’s the thing. He wants everyone there – including Max, including the girls.’
‘Good news, huh?’ Max said drily, his expression one of grim resignation.
‘But . . . I thought you said he wouldn’t even acknowledge their existence?’ Only the other week Emil had said to Linus that they weren’t
his ‘proper’ family. How much had really changed since then?
‘He wouldn’t – back then. But he’s had time to adapt, and I think he appreciates now that Max has been a wonderful father figure to Linus –’
Father figure? Not father? Bell saw how Max flinched at the small distinction.
‘– and Tilde and Elise are Linus’s little sisters and, therefore, an inescapable part of his life. I think he’s finally accepting the reality of the life he’s come back to.’
Bell looked between her employers as Max gave a small snort and looked away. She knew he suspected what was really behind this new beneficence – if he’d won Hanna back, Emil could afford to be magnanimous in victory.
Hanna didn’t seem to notice their mental scepticism. ‘Please, Bell, we are going to need you there too. I know you don’t like him. Emil told me you were very protective of Linus, and that you think he’s spoiling him –’
That might be true but it wasn’t his bloody parenting style that made it so impossible for her to return, she thought, looking down at her own hands, the fingers tightly interlaced, worried that she might betray herself in some way. They were, all three of them, balancing on the edge of a precipice.
‘– You’re right, of course, and it’s something I’ll have to address with him at some point. But tomorrow is going to be a huge test for our family. It’s going to be the first step forward with all six of us involved, and there’s no question it’ll be fraught. It’s taken eight months to get to this point, and we really need you there to keep a hand on the tiller – take the kids away if things start getting fractious, distract them with a game if he’s got one of his headaches.’
She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Hadn’t Emil had suggested to her he was playing up the headaches for Hanna’s sympathy vote?
‘It’s just tomorrow we need to get through. Please, Bell, help us over this next hurdle, and then I promise, I won’t ask for another thing. Ever.’
Bell sincerely doubted that.
‘The children are going to need a friendly face, someone they can escape to if everything goes sour.’
