Fragile

by Sarah Hilary

  Carolyn’s shoes sounded on the steps, coming down into the kitchen.

  I kept my back turned, busy with the cups. She’d seen them out of the house, insisting on it, following Joe as if sewn to him by threads. I thought of a dress I’d hemmed for Rosie, years ago. I’d put the dress in my lap as I worked and when I stood it stayed in my lap, because I’d sewn it into my own skirt. All those tiny, tidy stitches had gone through the thin cotton of her dress into the cheap fabric of my skirt. I’d had to unpick everything and start over again.

  ‘Does Robin know you have visitors?’ Carolyn perched on the corner of the table under the lamp, its heat lifting the silver scent of her hairspray.

  ‘I didn’t know myself.’ I kept my back turned.

  The darkened window gave me her reflection, watching, wondering.

  ‘You must’ve known they might come when you gave out this address.’ She coiled her body sideways, reaching to smooth a finger at her ankle. ‘You must’ve known what you were doing.’

  ‘I texted Joe, but only so he could text back.’

  ‘You’re not alike. As for your aunt . . . !’ The lamp caught her laugh and hurled it at me.

  I resisted the urge to duck. The cups were washed but I ran water to rinse the sink, putting off the moment when I would have to turn and face her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said then. ‘I nearly forgot. Mend this for me, would you?’ She reached for her bag, drawing out a piece of pale silk. Sewing, as if she’d read my mind. ‘Invisible mend, isn’t that what they call it?’ She balled the silk and set it on the table. ‘I don’t want the mend to show, anyway.’

  She slid to the floor, dusting her dress. Her movements were different since Joe, lighter and quicker, more self-conscious. As if she was telling herself, Look, I’m youthful, full of life!

  Neither of us spoke of the fact Joe had been here before, in her bed. Robin’s bed. Neither of us asked the other how it felt, to share that knowledge.

  I waited until she’d left the kitchen before I picked up the silk she wanted me to mend. It was a camisole, frothy with lace and heated by the lamp as if she’d slipped it off her body seconds before. It was like holding a hot handful of cobwebs. To make an invisible mend, you had to steal a little cloth from the same garment, from a hem or seam, and work it into the spot where the damage was. Delicately, so it looked as if nothing had been added or taken away. The camisole smelt of her. I balled it in my fist as she’d done, pushing it into my pocket.

  At least she was gone, the house was ours again for the evening, one last evening. But when I went upstairs to draw the curtains and light the lamps, she was in the garden room, waiting.

  ‘Did you find anything in here?’ She slipped her hands into the pockets of her dress, standing so narrowly against the windows I had trouble seeing her. ‘The last time you cleaned?’

  Her portrait of me, she meant. Or was she talking about the keychain? I couldn’t detect any threat in her words or in the way she stood with her head tilted as if telling herself Joe must’ve found her fascinating, that’s why he’d come back. Even though we both knew I was the one who’d summoned him. She needed to believe he’d come back because he couldn’t resist her.

  I could have told her about the things Joe couldn’t resist, but I didn’t.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Have you lost something?’

  There was a challenge in my tone. I heard it, and so did she. It wasn’t my usual tone, nor was it an appropriate one in which to address the wife of my employer.

  ‘You like Robin, don’t you?’ She cocked her head at me, pert as a bird, slim as a snake. ‘It’s why you don’t want to look too closely at the way things are here, why you were so quick to dismiss my warnings about him.’ She moved her hands inside her pockets, nails rasping. ‘You should ask him about his old housekeeper, the one before you.’

  ‘Mrs Mistry?’ I spoke the name casually, as if I knew all about her.

  ‘You saw the pictures of her girls.’ Carolyn paused. ‘I wonder what happened to them, where they ended up.’

  She wanted me to believe the worst of Robin, to think him untrustworthy. Revenge, was that it? He’d been so different this morning. Had he confronted her after her invasion of my attic, telling her that her behaviour was unacceptable, drawing a line under the last few weeks? He was ashamed of her.

  I allowed that thought to bloom in my head. The sun touching our hands, his sketch of me by the side of his bed. But then I remembered the rota, all those careful rules.

  Punishment. Joe said I was obsessed with punishment.

  Why are you punishing us, Nell? When he knew. He knew.

  ‘You should sleep with him.’ Carolyn took her hands from her pockets. ‘Why not?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Robin. Sleep with him.’

  I didn’t speak. My mouth was dry and cracked.

  ‘It would be a relief. I can’t any more. Well, look at me.’ She spread her hands as if she were so beautiful she dazzled even herself. ‘How could I?’

  I forced myself to speak: ‘I’m the housekeeper. I’m his housekeeper.’

  ‘Oh, I think we both know you’re more than that.’ She let her eyes glide around the room, at the specking of soil on the tiles under the plants, stubborn grime on the windows. ‘And less.’

  One after another, I lit the lamps in the house. Robin was particular about this, an extravagance in a man who hated waste. Unless he hated the dark more. Or, like me, he loved the Villas at night, its lamps burning like small fires.

  As I switched on the last one, I paused in the doorway to his library before turning towards the stairs. He still wasn’t home. I wondered if he’d changed his mind about sandwiches for supper and was eating in a restaurant, or a hotel. Of the boxes stacked around the library walls, a few more had been emptied of their contents and flattened for recycling. Carolyn had told me to look inside and see what secrets they held. But Carolyn said a lot of things.

  Sleep with him, so dismissively, as if she were making a gift of an old mattress she’d jumped on so often its springs were sprung, but maybe I could get a good night’s sleep out of it. Hadn’t I slept under bridges? An old mattress was five-star luxury to me. She imagined she was insulting me, calling me a whore on top of everything else, but if Robin was attracted to me it was because I’d made his house into a home, something she’d failed to do. I wanted her gone, for the house to be warm and quiet when he returned. Being responsible for another human being’s comfort in the way I was for his can warp your sense of security, make you fear every little thing. I wasn’t to disappoint Dr Wilder or I’d lose my home. His tea mustn’t ever be too strong or too weak, or the bills too high, but nor must the house be cold or the lamps unlit after sunset. His meals must be edible despite the paucity of the allowance he tendered for their ingredients. For weeks, I’d lived in dread of breaking a cup or saucer, spilling butter on his soft furnishings. All that had changed, this morning. His kindness towards me, she knew nothing of that. Standing among the ugly plants, offering me sex with her husband while her unwashed camisole was festering in my pocket. Sleep with him. Why not? She picked that moment because of Joe. He’d done as I’d asked, riding to my rescue, seducing her a second time with his smile, all of it agreed in texts between the two of us. But I’d bargained without him bringing Meagan. He must have worked hard to find her, been determined to go back, in spite of everything she put us through. Had she intercepted our texts, or did she get the story out of Joe some other way? Because clearly she knew everything: the house, Carolyn, the night she and Joe spent here together. Perhaps Meagan sent the texts herself, forcing Joe to hand her the phone. No, not forcing him. He’d have given in without a fight. Without stopping to think what it would mean, for the four of us in this house. Meagan knowing everything. He’d brought her here, threatening all that I had. It was hard to forgive him for that. As I knelt to turn on my attic lamp, my hands shook.

  Meagan, masquerading as my aunt. Carolyn had seen that lie
for what it was, but she hadn’t cared. I suppose we were beneath her notice and her contempt – just two cheap young people, easily bought. She used this house for sex, that much was clear. It had no other attraction for her. She didn’t even seem interested in why I’d brought Joe back, except that it suited her purposes to be in a position to sleep with him again. And I was to sleep with Robin. She’d be able to make sense of it, then. My presence in this house, his toleration of it. We would be playing their game, according to their rules. I knew she longed for Robin to prove himself the predator she said he was, longed for him to slip back into that role. She didn’t believe him capable of change. I think the idea of it scared her, because it left her too exposed. Alone. As for me, she was probably thinking that at last I was to be put to some proper purpose. Perhaps she even thought this had been my intention all along: a ménage à trois amidst the orchids and amateur artwork.

  Show some emotion, for God’s sake.

  Clumsily, I dropped onto my mattress, knocking one of the brass camels. It lay on its side on the strip of tapestry, looking lost. I reached to lift it back onto its feet, but what was the point? It didn’t belong to me, nothing here did.

  There was no lock on the attic door. Why hadn’t I seen to that when I was bringing the lightbulb and varnish, cleaning the beautiful rug and papering the walls? A simple hook-and-eye lock would have screwed into place without the need for power tools. As it stood, Carolyn could come in here whenever she chose, in the middle of the night when I was sleeping, or when I was out at the shops. Perhaps she did exactly that, or Robin did. Standing under the eaves with their feet planted on the rug, eyeing the rescued lamp, angry at my scavenging or pleased to see how thoroughly I’d been trapped into believing I had a home here.

  Nothing in the attic was mine except the clothes on my back. Damn Joe. He knew how Meagan hated me. She’d ruin everything, she always did. She already had – that look on Carolyn’s face, gloating over the introductions, ‘Your aunt’s here,’ when I had no aunt, or uncle. When I had no one but Joe. The springs in the mattress drilled like fingers. I ached all the way from the soles of my feet to the sockets of my eyes.

  Pulling my hands into my lap, I studied the calluses left by hard work, honest work. A bruise discoloured the knuckle of my thumb, my cuticles ragged from hot water. I could count the places I’d blistered or burnt on his floors and breakfasts, the shallow scratch from a corkscrew as I’d opened a bottle of wine, a split fingernail. My hands were full of him, Dr Robin Wilder.

  Joe had read my palms once. ‘Your Fire Line is broken.’ Sitting with my hand held in his lap.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  He folded my fingers. ‘It can mean lots of things.’

  ‘Which is the Fire Line anyway?’

  He showed me. ‘Most people call it the Fate Line.’

  ‘Broken fate?’ I squinted at my palm. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘It’s not.’ His face changed, as if I’d pushed too hard. ‘It means you’ll have a lot of accidents, one after another.’

  From the attic window, the night’s neon crept into my cupped palms. Joe was here in London, part of its night, but Meagan was with him. I couldn’t sleep, knowing it. The house hung about me, altered and unfamiliar. Lifting a hand to the scar above my right eye, I traced its star shape with my fingertips, remembering.

  23

  That morning, three years ago, the lake was soaked with sunshine. I’d dared Joe to climb with me. He so rarely did, preferring to stretch on the towels at the side of the water, getting brown. The sun was high over our heads, the summer swollen at full burst.

  ‘Come on!’ I urged.

  Joe twisted sideways on the towel before finding his feet. He was fifteen and I was fourteen, the pair of us invincible. Later, we’d swim, splitting the hot skin of the lake to find the cold beneath, but now we were climbing, slate slithering and skittering under our feet, seeing who could reach the summit first. It was my favourite game, scaling the slag heaps that lay around our lake. Three thousand men had mined the slate in these mountains but one by one the mines closed and now it was mostly slag, with gorse bushes erupting in prickly outcrops. You could pay to walk in the footsteps of the miners, deep underground where water dripped and the torch in your helmet carved tunnels through the dark. Joe and I preferred to climb, or I did. He was too lazy for the sport and never competitive enough to match me.

  ‘I’ll beat you!’ Breath bursting in my chest, slate sharp under the soles of my sandals. Higher and higher up the heap, kicking my toes to find footholds in the slag, spying out the safe places to slot my fingers. Slate was easy to climb if you looked where to put your fingers and feet.

  Joe was struggling, straggling behind. His legs and arms were longer, but he ran at the slag as if it were a hillside, planting the soles of his feet flat, the slate falling under him like the steps on an escalator. ‘Shit!’ Laughter panting from him, panicking when he slipped too far. ‘Nell!’

  ‘Come on! Keep going!’ Nothing could’ve stopped me in that moment, not a goat flinging itself in my path or a gull wheeling out of the sky.

  The sun struck the slate, blazing it back in a billion shades of blue. I shut my eyes to see better, using my fingers and feet, heat throbbing on my eyelids.

  It was a gorse bush that caught me, jutting at a right angle, offering its thorny branches knotted with yellow flowers. I yelped and drew back my hand, balance lost, toehold dissolving in a flood of slate. I caught the blur of Joe’s face as I fell, his mouth crooked with exertion. ‘Nell!’

  I thought the sound of falling slate would never end, clattering on and on, smashing and flinting, striking sparks from the mountain. We’d brought down the whole heap, that’s what I thought, me by falling and Joe who’d dropped like a stone to reach my side as quickly as he did.

  ‘Nell!’ His voice was in bits. ‘Nell, please!’

  I’d struck my head on landing. My head and a dozen places all over my body, whispering savagely when I tried to move. ‘Ow . . .’ Everything was red, the sky wobbling behind Joe’s head. There was stickiness and it smelt bad, like something burning in a saucepan.

  ‘Oh God,’ Joe said. Then, ‘Keep still!’

  I’d only moved because he looked so scared. The whispering in my body turned to shouting, mostly over my right eye. ‘Joe, it hurts.’ Self-pity swelled in my chest, sobbing. ‘It hurts!’

  ‘It’s blood. You’re bleeding.’ His hands held me down, the chill of panic in his palms. ‘Stay still. Don’t move.’ He went away, leaving the wobble of sky and a harsh bleating of gulls above me.

  I was lying on what felt like razors. Silly, it was just slate. But slate is sharp, it’s old, hundreds of millions of years old, mud and clay pressed together by the movement of the earth, layered and hardened. When I moved my foot, it made a clacking sound like geese in flight.

  Gulls brimmed overhead, wings dyed red by the blood filling my eyes.

  Meagan said gulls didn’t make their own nests until they were old, preferring to return to their parents to learn their best survival tricks. Stealing and attacking, all those vicious habits, the reasons we duck our heads when they come close.

  Joe was back at my side with a towel.

  He pressed it to my head. ‘Here.’

  I didn’t move, scared by the pain. The cut was so close to my eye and so deep, as if a piece of me had been scooped out. ‘Meagan’ll have a fit,’ I said, meaning ambulances and hospitals.

  ‘I’ll wash out the blood in the lake,’ Joe said, meaning the towel.

  ‘Stitches.’

  ‘What? Nell, keep still.’

  ‘I need stitches, it’s deep.’ I could feel the cut welling with blood. ‘Joe, you have to get help.’ He lifted the towel, speculatively. I was seeing in scarlet now, my lashes heavy with it. My blood raced through the towel, drenching the cotton. ‘Ambulance . . .’

  He stayed at my side, pressing the towel back into place, blinding me with it. He was afraid of
authority, in any form. Afraid to raise the spectre of anyone else’s curiosity. An ambulance would mean questions, probing, paperwork: ‘What were you doing out here?’ Hospital would mean no more lake, no escaping from Lyle’s for an afternoon or a night. He was seeing closed doors, captivity, prisons. His fingers were shaking.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I searched for his free hand. The bone in my eye socket was bruised by the press of the towel, my torn skin lifting and parting thickly. ‘Joe? I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Lie still,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this.’

  I lay under the circling of the gulls, letting Joe do what he could, even if it made it feel much worse. Because he was right: we’d be questioned and split up. It happened all the time to kids like us. And Meagan was looking for an excuse. She hated how close we’d become, her eyes fixing on us every time we were together. We were always together. She sensed trouble, not between us but for her. People in love were selfish, and proud. She was afraid I’d turn my nose up at her cleaning, the endless chores. I’d think myself better than that, know I was better.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said it a third time to make it true. A promise, between us.

  Slate slithered under Joe, splintering. All those layers, peppering into his skin. I’d see it later, back at Lyle’s, a blue-grey tattoo on his knees, red at the edges.

  Heat drilled down, the summer at full blast, but the pair of us were shivering.

  I’d put a plaster over the cut when we got back to the house. The bleeding would stop, bleeding always did. There’d be a scar. Rosie would ask questions but she’d be the only one. I’d make up a story, let her poke the plaster to keep her happy. As long as Joe didn’t give us away, we’d be safe. If Meagan pushed, he’d crumble. He couldn’t do silence the way I could. His fear made him obedient, eager to please. He’d dance to keep her happy, because that’s all he knew. How to dance, and how to dodge. Never to open doors until you had to, never to answer back or ask for help.