by Louise Voss
‘You smell fantastic,’ she muttered, just stating a fact, but he must have construed it in a different way because he pulled away and kissed her on the lips, so lightly at first that she saw it only as a gesture of affection. She responded…
… And that was the point of no return.
There was always a point of no return.
A minute later they were kissing, properly, and it was lovely. He no longer remotely felt like her dad. He was a really good kisser, just the right amount of pressure and tongue action, and his hands began to roam around her body, rubbing her back at first, then along her thighs, and up over her breasts, where they stayed, squeezing gently until she felt a corresponding thrill between her legs. She wanted to stop but found herself pressing closer to him, sliding out of the chair and onto her knees so that their torsos were pressed tightly together.
‘I want you,’ he murmured, and in the heat of the moment it didn’t seem ridiculous or at all inappropriate. She just nodded, kissing him again. ‘I always have. Can we go back to the cottage?’
Meredith hesitated, reality creeping in for a moment. She didn’t want to sleep with Ralph in her bed or on her sofa. Somehow that felt worse than anything that happened here. Like calories in food not counting when it was eaten from someone else’s plate.
‘I can’t wait that long. And someone might see us walking over there,’ she said. ‘One of the gardeners might be working late.’
‘Do you want to?’ His hand was inside her bra, rolling her nipple between his fingers.
She nodded again.
‘You know what else I’ve always wanted to do,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘Have sex in the Gilt Room.’
‘Ralph! You dirty bugger. With me, or just anybody?’ She couldn’t help laughing. The Gilt Room was as it sounded – the house’s formal drawing room on the ground floor, a chandelier the size of a baby elephant in the centre and the walls and ceilings entirely covered in ornate gold leaf. ‘There’s CCTV in there; we can’t.’
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ he said, dragging her to her feet and handing her the bottle of Jack. ‘With you, of course, in answer to your question,’ he added, as Meredith took a swig, grinning at his answer. They had dispensed with the formality of mugs.
‘Surely you know where all the CCTV is? You’re estates manager!’ she reminded him, feeling naughty and rebellious. ‘And if there is a camera in there, deal’s off.’
Meredith was fairly sure there would be a camera. The room was stuffed with valuable vases, oil paintings and objets d’art. But as Ralph said, they didn’t have CCTV in every room. She started visualising where they might do it. On the rug? Best not on the rickety old brocade sofa; that was an original piece from when Lady Wilmington lived here. That would be hard to explain, if they broke it.
They adjusted their clothing and Ralph finished the bottle, putting it back in his desk drawer, and then they walked down the back stairs together from the converted servants quarters. He squeezed Meredith’s arse on the way. ‘No cameras down here,’ he said cheerfully.
She thought later that it was strange she hadn’t come to her senses in the brief hiatus, while they tried, like teenagers, to find somewhere exciting and forbidden to shag. But, she supposed, she was so aroused by then that not doing it didn’t feel like an option anymore.
They reached the ground floor and cautiously emerged through the Staff Only door into the public areas of the house. It was still and quiet.
‘Where’s Leonard?’ she whispered.
‘His shift doesn’t start till nine-thirty,’ Ralph whispered back. ‘And George is over at the stables this evening. He told me earlier he was going to go and change all the lightbulbs in there because Fred’s on holiday. I think we’re alone.’
Had he planned this? Meredith doubted it. He was too pissed. But he was right about Fred the handyman being on holiday.
He did seem very aware of the timings … but she soon stopped thinking about it. They were in the long, dark corridor leading to the Gilt Room, four vast six-foot-tall Chinese vases acting as sentries as they passed by.
‘Dammit, look,’ Ralph said, jerking his head up towards the doorway. The small shiny black dome was affixed to the ornate ceiling just inside the room; a CCTV camera. ‘Kind of spoils it, doesn’t it?’
Meredith didn’t know if he was talking about the architecture or the moment.
‘Follow me,’ he added. ‘I have a plan B.’ She laughed and did as he said. This was crazy, but it was fun.
Why had she not been thinking of Paula? she later thought. It wouldn’t have seemed so much like fun then. But she felt possessed, overtaken, wild with abandon.
She followed him through the public areas of the house towards the back entrance. At the last moment he dragged her in through a wide door.
‘Ralph, oh no, not the disabled loo!’ she protested, but he pushed her up against the mirror and kissed her again as he reached over and flipped up the handle to lock them in.
Her fingers went to his zip as if they were obeying someone else’s command.
5
Meredith
Dear God, thought Meredith. Why did I do that? Why? What the hell was I thinking? And with Ralph?
She was regretting this even before Ralph withdrew from her with a sticky swoosh. He turned, yanked up his trousers and leaned over the sink, his shoulders heaving. For a moment she thought he was being sick. She felt the same, wondering how she would ever be able to face Paula again. But then she realised he was just getting his breath back. In the mirror his reflected face looked a dull purple, like liver.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he panted as Meredith retrieved her knickers from the floor. ‘Spot of fresh air in order, I think.’
They slipped out of the side door of the house, and Meredith gulped down lungfuls of the summer-evening air. It always felt incredible after the musty scent of the house – furniture polish and decades of visitors’ discarded skin cells. Outside smelled of lilac and roses.
Ralph was giggling like a schoolboy, giddy with the thrill of their naughtiness, but Meredith already felt numb and horrified. She’d never even thought about kissing Ralph!
She liked him enormously, of course – it was impossible not to – but it had come as a complete surprise when he’d told her he’d always wanted her. That had probably been the whisky talking, though. He’d likely have said the same thing to Mumblin’ Mo or Ceri, if they’d been sitting in front of him half an hour ago.
Ralph was singing to himself as they strolled across the primrose-studded lawn. He tried to take Meredith’s hand, but she politely pulled away. ‘Someone might see,’ she said. ‘One of the gardeners, or someone.’
Ralph laughed drunkenly. ‘Little Miss Worried!’
She tried to turn in the direction of the rose gardens, so she could head back to her cottage and have a shower, but Ralph had other ideas. He suddenly took her hand again, and pulled her through a copse of lilac bushes. ‘Have you ever been in the ice house?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
He was already dragging her down the steps to the abandoned Victorian cellar standing alone and half buried in the grounds, which used to cater for the house’s refrigeration needs.
‘Why isn’t it locked?’ Meredith was sure it was usually padlocked; visitors weren’t allowed inside. But there was no padlock tonight; the wooden arch-shaped door cut into the small hillock was ajar. She was curious. She had always wondered what it was like in there. From the outside it resembled a hobbit house.
‘It ought to be. The surveyor was in earlier. We’re planning some renovations, making sure it’s sound, then perhaps we’ll open it up to the public – or at least reconstruct it with some plastic blocks of ice, and the punters can peer in. He’ll get the report back to me next week. Don’t want to do it if it costs a bomb, though.’
He took out his phone and switched on the torch function, pulling the door fully open. ‘Not a whole lot
to see, but interesting, isn’t it?’
‘Um…’ Meredith stepped cautiously inside. It was cold and dank, and smelled of damp stone and raw earth – how she imagined the depths of a well would be. Gooseflesh swept up over her arms and shoulders and back down her chest as the door swung shut behind them. He was right, there wasn’t a lot to see, just gracefully curved brickwork, like in a wine cellar. It went much further back than she would have thought, though.
‘Room for a lot of ice in here,’ she commented.
Ralph wrapped his arms affectionately round her neck from behind, blinding her with his torch. Meredith pushed his hand away, mostly to deflect the torch beam. ‘Gerroff!’ she said, trying to pretend they were back to normal, that he hadn’t just had his penis inside her. Sparring buddies, mates.
He turned her round and tried to kiss her again. She responded, but half-heartedly this time. ‘Ralph,’ she said, wriggling free. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. ‘We should never have done this. I feel terrible about Paula. She’s my friend. Your wife!’
A flash of guilt passed over his features, but then he gave an airy wave of the hand, the one holding his phone, making the torch’s white light strobe round the cellar. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘She’ll never know. And she’s no saint herself, so you don’t need to feel all that bad.’
‘Really? She’s never mentioned any indiscretions to me.’ Meredith was genuinely surprised. Paula didn’t seem the straying sort, any more than Ralph did.
But then Ralph had just fucked her.
‘Anyway,’ she said decisively. ‘I’m going to go home now, and we will never speak of this again. OK.’
‘OK dear heart. One more kiss first … please?’
She did kiss him again. One for the road, as it were. It was a tender, lingering kiss that, weirdly, spoke more of their friendship than of their illicit sexual congress. She was very fond of Ralph, she realised afresh.
‘I don’t want this to ruin our friendship,’ she said, breaking off the kiss and raising her hand to stroke his face with her fingers. But he sneezed, suddenly and explosively, and as they both turned their heads away, the sharp edge of her ring caught him under the eye and she felt it drag down the flesh of his cheek.
‘Ow! Shit!’
‘Oh no. I’m so sorry. Did I get you? Is it bleeding?’
Ralph dropped the phone, torch down, and they were plunged into darkness, bar a sheet of white light at ground level. They both lunged down to get it, banging heads on the way, and started to laugh. Meredith got to it first, shining it towards him.
‘Let me see.’ There was a crimson teardrop sliding down his face. She pulled a tissue out of her skirt pocket and dabbed his cheek with it. ‘You’ll live,’ she said. ‘Now can we please get out of here? It’s horrible!’
They emerged, blinking like moles, into the welcomingly fresh evening air. Meredith could see the twisted barley-sugar chimney pots of her cottage in the distance and had a fierce yearning to be home, running a scented bath that she could lie in with a book and a glass of wine and try to forget that she’d just been hideously disloyal to a mate.
‘Right. I’m off. See you tomorrow. Don’t drive home, will you? You’re way over the limit. Are you going to get a cab?’
Ralph nodded, still holding the tissue to his face. ‘I promise. I’m just going back in to take a few photos of the big damp patch in the cellar while it’s unlocked, and those loose bricks at the back. I’m sure the surveyor did it when he was here, but it’ll be good to have a few for our records.’
‘OK. Have a good evening. Hope the hangover’s not too bad in the morning. And that you’re not scarred for life.’
Meredith set off towards her cottage as Ralph laughed and went back inside the ice house.
Walking back through the rose garden, she tried to analyse her emotions. The guilt was the worst – and she had a feeling that it hadn’t yet properly sunk in. It had been so long since she’d had sex – three years? four? – that there was also, she had to admit, a whiff of relief in the mix, if only to remind her that sex wasn’t all that. Not when it was with someone else’s husband, anyway. It would never happen with Ralph again, she was quite sure of that. A moment of madness.
She walked through the arched gateway separating the rose garden from the kitchen gardens and felt in her pocket for her front door key.
It wasn’t there. Dammit! It must have fallen out in the ice house when she pulled out that tissue for Ralph. Oh well. It was a beautiful evening, no hardship whatsoever to retrace her steps and stroll back. The bath could be postponed for ten minutes.
The sun was beginning to set over the layers of hill when she arrived back at the little grassy ramp leading down to the subterranean ice house. The hobbity door was still slightly ajar. Good, Meredith thought, as she’d had a sudden fear that Leonard on night security might have seen it flapping open and found a padlock to lock it up again; not that there was anything to steal in there. She took out her phone and activated the torch, pushing open the door ready to search the earthen floor.
Something impeded the door’s smooth opening. Weird, she thought. It had been fine just now. She pushed harder. It yielded a little way, just enough for her to squeeze through, but it felt as though an object had been placed behind to block it.
It was only when she got inside that Meredith realised. It wasn’t an object.
It was Ralph, lying face up on the cold, damp floor. When her torch beam, shaking wildly, found his face, he was purple and distended-looking, popped blood vessels in his cheeks forming tributaries around the scratch her ring had inflicted; his staring eyes bulging with death’s outrage. She had only been gone for ten minutes at the most. How could this possibly have happened?
‘Ralph!’ She crouched next to him, ripping at his tie and shirt, squishing two fingers into the underside of his wrist to try and find a pulse. Nothing. ‘Fuck! Ralph! Wake up!’
Meredith lifted his wrist and tried again. Still nothing. She pulled his shirt out of his trousers and ripped it open from the bottom up – he was wearing a tie and it seemed too difficult to try and loosen it from the top. Buttons bounced all over the floor as she commenced CPR, her shaking fingers interlocked as she pounded his chest and breathed into his whisky-sour mouth, pounded and breathed. She needed to call an ambulance but didn’t dare stop. Oh God, this is a nightmare. She didn’t realise she was crying till the tears splashed on her locked-together hands.
She had no idea how long she tried to revive him, just that it wasn’t working. She opened the door fully to let more light in and saw that his darkened face was already settling into a kind of livid rigidity, as if preparing for rigor mortis.
‘Ralph’s dead, Ralph’s dead, Ralph’s dead,’ she chanted like a mantra with every chest compression. The house had a portable defibrillator, but it was miles away, in the ticket office, which was in the gatehouse entrance across the courtyard. It would take far too long to go and get it.
She ran outside and threw up in the bushes, vomiting Jack Daniels and guilt and horror.
How was she going to explain what Ralph was doing in the ice house? Perhaps she wouldn’t have to. Perhaps she could just tell the police that they’d both been working late and he had taken her down there to show her what the interior looked like, because she’d always wanted to see it. That was reasonable. She’d dropped her key – in fact, there it was, lying half under his right calf. Meredith retrieved it and stuck it back in her skirt pocket. She’d gone back for it, and found him like this. It was the truth.
But … but … also true were the following additional facts:
He was blind drunk.
Her DNA would be on his penis.
Her DNA would also be all over the scratch on his face, and the vomit in the bushes.
Ralph was dead.
If I tell them I was here, they might think I killed him.
She tried to stop thinking about herself and how this could affect her, but failed. It would all come
out after the autopsy, that he’d recently been having sex. With her.
But how bad would it look, if she said nothing? If he’d had a heart attack and she didn’t even call an ambulance? She could be up for manslaughter or something! At the very least, she’d lose her job, and if she lost her job, she’d lose the cottage. Of course she could afford to buy a new place, but this one was her home; her sanctuary.
Paula would never speak to her again, and rightly so.
Yet surely there was no point in calling an ambulance now. Meredith had seen a couple of dead bodies before – twice over the years, pensioners visiting the house had collapsed and died. She was head first aider, so both times she’d been called to try and revive them while the ambulance came. Both of them, a man and a woman, had looked less dead than Ralph did currently.
Meredith sat back on her heels, almost hyperventilating. Are you insane? she asked herself. Of course she should call 999, even if he was dead. She knew the drill. With shaking hands she picked up her phone, forefinger trembling over the nines.
Then she straightened up and walked away from the ice house, back towards the rose garden. He was dead. She couldn’t be near him for a second longer.
As she walked, she dialled – but it wasn’t three nines she pressed.
Pete answered instantly.
‘Hey Sis.’
The comforting sound of his voice dissolved her, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.
‘Are you there? What’s wrong? Has something happened?’
‘Pete … help me. I don’t know what to do.’ Her voice wasn’t her own, a shrill of panic.
YOU DO KNOW. CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE, NOW, her conscience yelled.
‘OK, calm down. Breathe.’
Him telling her to breathe made her think about Ralph’s failure to do so, and she thought she was going to pass out. She sank down on an iron bench in the rose garden, dizziness making the pastel petals blur into confetti.
