“Jesus,” Cliff says, rubbing his brow.
“What?”
“If you’re not even going to deny it...”
“Deny what?”
“That you wanted to,” Cliff says.
Hannah laughs falsely, and stands. She crosses to the window and looks outside. “I don’t even remember,” she lies. “It was so long ago.”
“And now?” Cliff says, sliding off the bed and following her to the window.
“Now?” Hannah asks, glancing at him and then returning her gaze to the olive tree outside. It’s covered in tiny green fruits. She hadn’t noticed before.
“Yes, now,” Cliff says sharply.
“I like James,” Hannah says. “I like him a lot. But the question of whether I want to sleep with him doesn’t even come up because I’m married to you.”
Cliff snorts. “So I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ then, shall I?”
Hannah glances at Cliff again. “Oh, take it how you want, Cliff,” she says. “I’m getting to the point where...”
“I should have let him stay,” Cliff says, cutting her off and taking her arm now in an attempt to make her look him in the eye. “I should have let him have what he wanted fifteen years ago.”
“Well, thanks,” Hannah says, furious at the implication that this was somehow an option within Cliff’s control, but unable to find a way to put that specific outrage into words.
“He would have had his fun and thrown you away like a used tissue,” Cliff says.
Hannah shakes her head. “How foul you are when you want to be.”
“That’s all he wanted,” Cliff says. “It’s still all he wants. It’s just because you’re mine, you know.”
“I’m not yours,” Hannah says even though she realises that it’s open to misinterpretation and risky. “And stop squeezing my arm! You’re hurting me,” she adds, as she attempts to prise his fingers from her.
“That’s what you just don’t get about James,” Cliff says. “You like the idea that James thinks you’re special. But he doesn’t. James isn’t interested in you. The only thing he ever liked about you was that you were mine.”
Hannah shakes her head. Some line is being crossed here, and she’s beginning to doubt if they will ever find their way back. She turns her body to face Cliff now. “That’s enough,” she says. “You’re just going to end up saying things that you’ll regret because you’re angry. And get your hands... off... me.” She shakes him free. “And stop talking about me as if I’m one of your things.”
“Why don’t you go and fuck him now?” Cliff says.
Hannah stares deep into her husband’s enraged eyes and doesn’t recognise him at all. “God, have you been drinking? Is that it?”
“No, seriously,” Cliff continues. “Why don’t you just go and get it out of your system?”
“How dare you!” Hannah spits.
She turns and starts to walk towards the bedroom door, but Cliff follows her and grabs her arm again, spinning her around and pushing her back against the door. “Where are you going?” Cliff asks. “To James?”
His face is too close to hers now. In this instant, she hates him as much as she ever has – as much as she hated him that night fifteen years ago in fact. Everything’s the same, she thinks. We’ve come full circle, and we’re back here again. Everything’s exactly the same.
“What’s the matter, Hannah?” Cliff asks, his voice now a revolting sneer. “Married life getting you down? Think you want a bit of variety? I wonder if he’s still interested. You have aged a bit, put on a bit of weight... but maybe...”
“I can’t deal with you when you’re like this,” Hannah says. “Let me go.”
“Why should I?” Cliff says. “You’re my wife, aren’t you? Surely this is within my marital rights?”
“You’re hurting me again,” Hannah says, her voice now trembling as the first inklings of physical fear hit her. “Get off me!”
“Let her go, Cliff.” James has appeared at the window and is looking in at them.
“And here he is,” Cliff says. “The knight in fucking armour to the rescue.”
“Let her go,” James says again, his voice still calm.
“Fuck off, James,” Cliff says. “This is between me and Hannah.”
“Fuck off?” James says. He sounds amused. “Again?”
“You’re hurting me, Cliff,” Hannah says again. “Will you just stop...”
“Tell him to leave,” Cliff says, “and I’ll let you go. Tell him to fuck off.”
Hannah thinks about this for a second, then decides that it’s worth saying anything right now to end this crazed conflict. “Leave,” she says. “Cliff’s right. Please, just go.”
But it’s too late, because James is climbing through the window, and Cliff is already releasing her and lurching towards him.
Hannah watches in horror as Cliff scrambles over the bed and throws a punch at James, who, still off-balance from climbing in, stumbles against the bed, loses his balance, and falls to the ground.
“Stop!” Hannah screams. “Please Cliff, stop!”
He throws himself on top of James, now sprawled on the floor, and lands a single punch to the side of James’ face before his brother manages to seize both of his hands.
“Ha!” James laughs, as he rolls Cliff onto his back and pins him to the ground. He looks totally un-traumatised by the whole thing, thoroughly amused about it all.
“You’re a worm, James,” Cliff says, dominated yet un-cowed by his brother’s physical strength. “You’re a fucking worm, and you always were.”
“Not so tough now, are we, mate?” James says.
“It was always the same,” Cliff spits. “Anything I had, you stole. When we were kids, it was toys. When we were teenagers it was my records. Every fucking thing I ever had... Well, you can’t have my wife, you cunt.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up, Cliff,” James says, now managing to pin down both of Cliff’s arms with a single hand. “You sound like a fucking three year old.”
“So Hannah,” James asks, “what do you want me to do with this...” His voice trails off as he looks up, because he sees that Hannah has gone. “Hannah!” he shouts. “Hannah? Shit!”
He slaps Cliff hard across the cheek. “That’s for being a wimp,” he says, and then, a little unsettled by the fact that Cliff now starts to cry, he releases him and stands. “Hannah?” he shouts. “HANNAH!”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Hannah opens the gate, closes it quietly behind her, then runs away from the house as fast as her legs will carry her. She doesn’t know where she is going and she doesn’t have a plan. Pure instinct is driving her actions – she’s scared and she needs to escape. If she can just get to the corner, she thinks, glancing back, if she can just get out of sight, then no one will know where she is.
As she reaches the broken streetlamp, she notices a track to her left leading into the forest, so with one last glance back at the house, she ducks down it and out of sight.
Doubled up, she pauses to catch her breath. Sweat is dripping into her eyes making them sting. Her t-shirt is clinging to her chest. The stormy heat of the day is unbearable.
When her heart has slowed, she starts to stride on into the trees, a cloud of flies buzzing irritatingly around her. The stupid men can beat shit out of each other for all she cares. She has had it with them.
As the neighbours’ houses vanish into the greenery behind her, her fear turns to anger, and then as this too wanes, tears start to flow instead. After another twenty yards, her vision is so blurred that she is stumbling, so when she reaches a clearing, she pauses and sits on the trunk of a massive fallen tree.
Her thoughts are a swirling mess. She is thinking about seeing the two brothers together fighting like children. She is thinking about the fact that this fight has – and, in a way, Cliff is right about this – nothing to do with her. It really is all about sibling rivalry. It’s all a childhood ritual played out because that’s what these t
wo brothers do when they’re together.
From feeling special and loved by both men, she has gone, in a day, to feeling unloved by either of them, and to feeling stupid for having been duped in the first place. Cliff’s remarks have hurt her so badly she feels – even though experience tells her that she is probably being over-dramatic – that he may never claw his way back from them. And James? As far as James is concerned, she fears that Cliff may be right. The way he sat on him; the way he pinned him to the ground and gloated about it – maybe it was all about competition, about domination, about possession. Maybe she has wasted her life dreaming about something that was never entirely real. And maybe, yes, he would have used her and tossed her away like a used handkerchief once he had demonstrated his superiority over his brother.
A second wave of tears hits Hannah, and she lets it happen, lets the tears slide unhindered down her cheeks. It feels like release, and there’s no one here to see anyway.
She has had this thing stuck deep within her for years, she realises, a doubt, a fear, pushed aside and squashed down, and compressed until it was an almost unnoticeable lump of darkness, a tiny manageable chunk of coal squashed deep within her chest. It began, she remembers, even before James came on the scene. It began because even compared with selfish, impossible Ben, life with Cliff seemed dull, and that made her doubt her choices, that always made her wonder.
James was a brief gust of oxygen that made that coal burn bright, and for a moment, for those few hours he was in the house all those years ago, she had been able to see clearly that she was making a mistake, that she was living a mistake, and that this was not how her life was meant to be. And even after James had left, that doubt had stayed, even after he had “died” it was there, ever present, because during those few hours she had spent with him, she had learned that true love really did exist, that passion and almost irresistible sexual attraction were real things, not fiction, and that this being the case, the train she was on – to Surrey, and marriage, and motherhood and a part time job in a school – was the wrong train to the wrong destination.
But she never found the courage to get off. That was her crime. She had never had the courage to face that doubt. Because what she had felt for James had seemed so rare, so unlikely – so unreasonable – that she feared that if she chose it, she would end up with nothing. Had he come back for her she would have perhaps had the courage to jump carriages. But he didn’t come back, so she squashed it down, became expert at compressing, at containing, at dousing that doubt, and ultimately became so expert that she managed, for the most part, to pretend that it didn’t exist at all.
And now, today, it has expanded again. It has exploded and tainted everything leaving her life suddenly dark and polluted and dirty and wrong.
She thinks of Luke and wishes she had her phone with her. She feels a profound need to hear his voice, to know that he’s OK. Wonderful, beautiful, innocent Luke, the diamond in her life. And how can she allow herself to even think that her relationship with Cliff has been a mistake when something so beautiful has come from it? But they say that coal and diamonds are the same thing, don’t they? She read that somewhere – that diamonds are just coal compressed even more tightly.
Hearing the crack of a twig, Hannah turns to see James coming along the forest path towards her.
“You’re here,” he says breathlessly as he reaches her.
“Yes, I’m here,” she replies, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her t-shirt. She’s pretty certain that she must look shocking.
“I was worried about you,” James says, swiping at the sweat trickling down his own brow. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“I needed to get away,” Hannah replies. “I needed to be alone.”
“Should I go?” James asks. “Do you want me to leave you in peace?”
Hannah swallows and turns away. She looks out at the grey skyline beyond the trees and feels ashamed because, even now what she wants, she realises, is for James to hold her. She has just seen him pin her husband to the floor and humiliate him, and still all she wants is a kiss that might prove to her that something important she once felt was real.
At the lack of reply, James sighs and sits down next to her. He lays one arm loosely across her shoulders.
“Did you hurt him?” Hannah asks.
“Cliff?”
“Yes, Cliff.”
“No,” James says. “No, I didn’t hurt him. I gave him a slap because...” He shrugs.
“Because?”
“He punched me Hannah,” James says. “He gave me a fuckin' nose-bleed.”
Hannah looks up and sees from the drying blood around James’ nostrils that this is true. She reaches out to touch it, but then stops herself in time. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“He told me not to come,” James says. “I guess I should have listened.”
Hannah nods.
“But then I wouldn’t have seen you, would I?” James says. “I wouldn’t have seen my Hannah.”
“Is it true?” Hannah asks. “Is it true what Cliff says?”
“That I’m an asshole?” James says. “Probably.”
“No, what he said about me. That it was all just to prove a point.”
“Of course not,” James says.
“It’s OK,” Hannah tells him. “If that’s it, it’s OK.”
It’s OK, but it would break my heart, she thinks.
“I can see how competitive you are,” she continues. “But if that’s all it ever was, then I’d rather know. I need to know now. It’s time.”
James takes a deep breath. “What can I say?” he says. “I fell in love with you Hannah. I fell in love with you the first time we met.”
“The second time,” Hannah says. “The first time we met you were too drunk to even know who I was.”
James shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “Nope, it was the first time, in the pub. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Really?”
James nods and squeezes her shoulder. “Why do you think I went off and hid at the bar?” he asks. “Why do you think I never came to visit?”
“I didn’t realise. I just thought... I don’t know what I thought really.”
“And then, when I came down from Edinburgh... God. Do you remember, you sat in the car with me?”
“I do.”
“I wanted to drive away there and then, but...” Something about Hannah’s expression makes him pause. “What is it?” he asks.
“You just said he warned you not to come,” Hannah says.
“I’m sorry?”
“You said Cliff warned you not to come and you should have listened to him.”
“Ah,” James says, pulling a face.
“When did he warn you?”
“I’m not supposed to...” James says.
“Not supposed to what?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you. Cliff made me promise when I arrived.”
“You’re not making any sense to me James,” Hannah says.
“I don’t suppose it makes any difference now,” James says. “You might as well know.”
“OK. Know what?”
“I wrote to say I was coming,” James says.
“You did?”
James nods and licks his lips. “And Cliff emailed me to tell me not to come.”
“So he knew you were coming?”
“Uh-uh. Well, to England. Not here, obviously.”
“But he knew the dates?” Hannah asks.
“Yes.”
“Cliff knew the dates you were coming to England?” Hannah says again.
“Yes,” James says again. “Yes, I sent him my flight details.”
“Which, of course, is why we’re here,” Hannah says. James frowns, so she expounds, “Oh, Cliff didn’t want to come to France, that’s all. But he suddenly changed his mind. And he suddenly wanted to come for two weeks, not one.”
“Right,” James says. “Well, that figures, I guess.”
&
nbsp; “God, so you were in contact with him and he didn’t tell me. That’s unbelievable.”
“The thing is, Hannah...” James says.
“Yes?”
“I wrote quite a lot actually.”
“You wrote a lot?”
“Well, maybe not a lot. But I wrote quite a few times, yeah. And I sent a card most Christmases.”
“You wrote to us every Christmas?”
“To you. I sent you a card most years. You told me you loved Christmas. Do you remember?”
Hannah shakes her head. “I don’t remember. I do love Christmas, but I don’t remember telling you.”
“Well, you did. So I wrote most years.”
“And Cliff, what? He stole them?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe they got lost. Maybe the address...”
“No, he told me, Hannah. He told me he took them.”
“He stole my letters.”
“Yes. He made me promise not to tell you. He said it might upset you. But...”
“Upset me?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” Hannah closes her eyes and strokes her eyelids as she rewrites yet another aspect of the last fifteen years. “Did he read them then?”
James shrugs. “I think so,” he says.
“So what did they say?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing really,” James says.
“Tell me what they said.”
“That I missed you. That I loved you. That I couldn’t forget you. Stuff like that.”
“God,” Hannah says.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t think he was reading them. I thought you were.”
“No wonder he’s jealous.”
“I wrote other shit too.”
“Other shit?”
“You know. About my travels. Where I was at. What I was doing.”
“Right.”
“And it was more of that as time went on, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Once I met Judy, obviously I didn’t... I mean, I wrote more ordinary stuff. I wrote about life on the farm, and about little Hannah. I wrote to tell you about...” James clears his throat. “About the accident as well. I really thought you’d reply then. I could have done with a reply back then.”
The Half-Life Of Hannah (Hannah series Book 1) Page 23
