The Love Letter

by Fiona Walker

  Poppy had reached the butterfly picture. ‘One really has to stand at the back of the room to get the full impact of this. It’s why we hung it here so it’s the first thing one sees coming through the doors from the main hall. Hector loves to shock.’

  ‘Oh, those poor, pretty insects!’ Gayle lamented, standing so close that she couldn’t see the overall picture, only its delicate media.

  ‘They would have been trapped at least fifty years ago,’ Poppy insisted coolly.

  ‘Shame the artist didn’t capture Poppy in the nuddy then, too,’ Francis muttered to Legs. ‘Everybody comes in here with their eyes closed to avoid seeing it, except Poppy herself who is so short-sighted she can’t see her ancient carcass pinned to the wall, just the seductive blur of its outline.’

  ‘She is still a beautiful woman,’ Legs pointed out, amazed to find herself defending Poppy, but equally appalled by Francis’s venom. Had she forgotten how much he loathed his stepmother, she wondered, or had that enmity deepened during her absence? ‘If you hate her so much, why do you want her to get back together with your father?’

  ‘Status quid pro quo.’ He turned to her. ‘And there’s a lot of quid at stake.’

  ‘So it’s really all just about money?’

  ‘I want you back, Legs.’ His fingers traced the underside of her arm, making it burn with fear and longing. ‘We both know that’s more important than anything.’

  She stepped away, pressed up against the sculpture’s steel ribs now. ‘Not until you deal with the Kizzy situation.’

  ‘Already done.’ He tapped a finger impatiently on the rusted metal bars beside her. ‘She’s gone, or haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘She’s really left Farcombe?’ she baulked, realising that the note must have been a tearful farewell. ‘In the middle of supper?’

  He nodded, tapping gaining velocity.

  ‘But where? Why so suddenly?’

  ‘Funnily enough, we didn’t ask for details or a forwarding address.’

  That unexpected cruelty again; it shocked her. Just as much of a shock was the attraction she still felt hardwired through her. His hand was on her arm again. This time the heat scorched through her body, and Legs knew she couldn’t trust herself at all. It was as though a chemical reaction was taking place inside her, converting all the guilt and regret and nostalgia into lust, rekindling that old spark. She’d laid off the wine all night, yet the room was spinning.

  Deep in her fickle heart a voice was singing victoriously, knowing that Kizzy was no longer a threat. Her suspicions seemed entirely justified. Why, then, did she also feel like she was in a speedboat travelling far too fast into the gathering storm, with no life jackets and one man already overboard?

  ‘Are you going to say the word?’ he breathed in her ear.

  She was faintly aware of Byrne still watching her at a distance, and of Poppy far closer at hand telling her guests about the Richard Deacon sculpture. ‘You’ll all recognise this. We bought it long before the artist was as sought after as he is now. Alas, it got rather bent when some drunkard at Hector’s sixtieth climbed on it to shout at the sea.’

  ‘That would be Hector himself.’ Francis’s fingers traced their way across Legs’ back and beneath her hair to the nape of her neck as he whispered in her ear again. ‘Stay here tonight.’

  They both jumped as Yolande Hawkes struck the rusty stretch of steel on which they were leaning so that it hummed and reverberated.

  ‘Marvellous piece this, Poppy!’ She had a voice like Brian Blessed. ‘One of Kizzy’s favourites. The sculptor won the Turner Prize the year that she was born.’

  Legs frantically did her maths. That would make Kizzy no more than twenty-four, she realised. Poor kid. Life with the Protheroes must have aged her despite the raw fish diet. It was telling that since arriving back at Farcombe, almost everybody who had known Legs here had told her how much younger she looked. Instead of keeping portraits in the attic, Francis and his father kept women ageing wearily alongside them, she thought. She didn’t want to find herself immortalised on a wall in dead butterflies one day.

  Suddenly the room stopped spinning. She had to get out, she realised with mounting panic. If she stayed, she’d never escape. She needed more time to think.

  Looking frantically around the room to assess her best escape route, she found her gaze drawn to Byrne, who was still watching her, his dark eyes fierce, his face now almost returned to its usual chiselled proportions and drawn with desolation. Despite welcoming her son’s surprise return with dramatic and open arms, Poppy had talked over him all evening, Legs reflected. They hadn’t shared more than a scrap of time together and she was still largely ignoring him. He must be bitterly disappointed. He could have just weeks left to live, perhaps less.

  ‘Stay with me.’ Francis was breathing in her ear again, one hand slipping beneath her arm and caressing the edge of her breast. ‘This dress is exciting the hell out of me. I know you wore it for me; I am a lucky man.’

  She guessed she should feel victorious, but her panic just mounted. She’d wanted to recreate the love they’d felt at that May Ball, but all she’d recaptured was his desire to bed her. It was all happening too fast.

  ‘I really don’t feel very well,’ she said in a frozen voice, ashamed at the lie.

  Francis’s handsome face was suddenly all contrite concern. ‘Darling, why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I think I should just make my way to the Book Inn if that’s OK.’

  But Francis had no intention of letting her go now that Kizzy had cleared their path. ‘If you’re unwell, you must lie down upstairs, darling.’ He hooked her arm caringly in his.

  Poppy, standing behind them, was determined to get the party going. ‘It’s still early. I thought we’d have a little recital. Such a shame Legs is feeling ill – she sings rather sweetly – but the rest of us can still enjoy the power of the voice. And don’t tell me you can’t hold a tune, Jamie; you had a glorious descant as a boy.’

  Shooting a panic-stricken look at Byrne over her shoulder, Legs reluctantly allowed herself to be spirited through to the main hall and up the dramatic sweep of stairs lined with vast pop art canvasses, to the landing decked with early examples of the Glasgow School where Francis steered her into the Lavender Room, a seductive dusky mauve guest suite that took up the entire West tower and looked out to sea. Despite the whimsical name, it was no innocently flower-scented bed chamber, and was crammed with the most graphic of the Protheroes’ nudes, swathes of canvas depicting pink genitalia in every medium and texture, parted legs, lips, and labia, erect nipples and cocks, rounded buttocks and wanton copulation. As teenagers, she and Francis had stolen in here at every opportunity, their sex manual painted across the walls, guiding them through their carnal education as they recreated every pose with stifled giggles and mounting self awareness.

  Now, averting her gaze from the walls like a WI stalwart faced with a copy of Big’uns, Legs stared fixedly out of the tall mullioned windows, where the last cross hatches of a red sunset were fading in the night sky, and a quarter of moon rose like a tattered ensign flying over the embers of a burning battleground.

  ‘Why did Kizzy go so suddenly, Francis?’ she demanded as he closed the door behind them. But he was intent on one thing, his hands already exploring her body and reclaiming lost ground.

  ‘Let’s not worry about that now.’ His cheeks were even higher with colour, his blue gaze eating her up. His lips met her left ear and the excited breath filling its tiny hollow almost made her melt with déjà vu desire despite her squirming shame.

  ‘Yes, let’s worry!’ she bleated, backing away. ‘What if she’s done something silly?’ Legs the detective was still trying to put in a noble fight for answers, even if she was clueless what the questions should be.

  Reluctantly, he stepped away. Sitting down on the vast carved oak bed, he patted the counterpane beside him.

  Legs chose a deep window-seat instead, eyeing him warily.

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sp; His fingers tapped out a tattoo on the raw silk as he let out an impatient sigh. ‘The only silly thing Kizzy did was to assume that I would choose her above you. As soon as she realised that was patently absurd, she took her leave.’

  Suddenly it all made horrible sense. ‘She thinks she’s letting you free?’

  ‘I told Kizzy I wanted an open relationship, which suited her just fine. Only now you’re back, it’s closed.’

  He sounded frighteningly like his father, Legs realised with a shudder.

  ‘What do you think she’ll do now?’

  ‘Hard to tell. She’s pretty unstable,’ he admitted.

  ‘So she might do something silly?’

  ‘You still read too many bad thrillers.’ He looked up at the nudes on the walls. ‘Kizzy’s harmless, and terribly eager and sweet under all those shiny emotional scales; I really did want to make it work with her. I thought it might take away some of the pain of losing you.’

  ‘Oh God, Francis, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ He stood up and crossed the room, eyes blazing. ‘I have more than my fair share of consolation at hand. Christ, Legs, I’ve missed you. I’ll wipe out anyone that stands between us.’ He took her face in his hands and bent his head down to kiss her.

  Legs’ lips longed to soften and yield, but her mind buzzed madly, her head full of images of heartbroken Kizzy and trepidation at what she might have triggered. Falling back into his arms would be easy comfort, but it felt rushed and deceitful. She was certain she was only getting half the story, the romantic subplot within a far more political family drama.

  ‘No!’ she bleated, turned her face away from him and encountering a cold window pane. ‘I mean – hell, Fran, I do feel really quite ill. It’s my period, you see – awful cramps. Yuck.’ That had always been guaranteed to back him off, along with bats, Marmite and power ballads.

  ‘Poor you.’ He predictably dropped her like a stone.

  ‘Do you mind if I lie down just for a bit?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he sighed, retracing his steps towards the door. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour to see how you’re doing. Listen for three knocks. Don’t let in anybody else. Trust nobody here tonight, Legs.’ And he disappeared out into the landing.

  At first just desperately relieved to be alone, Legs slumped on the window seat and took a few deep breaths. Then she started to feel anxious, Francis’s warning ringing in her head: trust nobody. She certainly didn’t, least of all herself. If she shared Francis’s bed tonight, there’d be no going back. She wanted to escape as soon as possible.

  She hurried to the door, intent on leaving the hall by the quickest exit.

  But however much she rattled and tugged at the handle, it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. Peering through the keyhole to find a pawn of golden light, Legs realised that Francis must have taken the key with him, so there wasn’t even a chance of pushing it through to extract from beneath the door with a wire coat-hanger as she’d read in her beloved crime thrillers. She was captive.

  Whimpering, she scuttled to the window and threw open the ancient casements. She could hear the sea crashing against the rocks close by. The storm was brewing ever faster, electric crackling in the sky a few miles off the coast, distant thunder rolling towards land, stampeding rainclouds blotting out the moon’s crescent.

  Looking down, Legs sited the terrace at least twenty foot beneath her, with no helpful Virginia creeper or decorative fretwork forming footholds on the bare stone walls this side of the house. There was no escape this way.

  She ran to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, determined to calm herself down. But her heart raced on, that shameful longing for Francis combining with remorse and fear.

  She curled up on the bed’s coarse silk counterpane and chewed at several nails, trying not to look at all the heavenly bodies depicted on the walls around her, unashamed and carnal. So many breasts and phalluses, legs and fingers. She could so easily remember Francis’s fingers first exploring between her legs, marking her sexual awakening, almost before her own fingers had ever crept there. They’d both been so tentative at first, then increasingly expert and daring. His glorious young erection had been examined from every angle, squeezed, prodded, tasted and even flicked with a teasing fingernail before it found its way inside her. She had been so familiar with its shape and feel by the time they’d lost their virginities together – under canvas on a night just as stormy as this – it was as though a long lost part of her was coming home, yet at the same time so alien and interesting and exciting that no amount of repetition ever seemed to take away the novelty.

  The newly chartered romance of it all had underpinned those first explorations, lending them a magic quality she’d thought totally unique to her and Francis. She’d written long, impassioned poems describing the shards of her heart breaking with each coupling, revealing an unhealable wound of love and desire which they only needed to breathe on to make sting and sparkle. Tonight, she felt that romantic teenager inside her hurting again, the wound once more as bright and salt-seared as the shingle outside, a tide of pleasure and pain dragging her memories across the shore.

  Half an hour must have passed by as she remained trapped in the room. The storm had plenty of time to brew while she waited. Francis hadn’t yet come back to check on her. Thunder rumbled and crackled ever-closer. Her eyes were continually drawn to one of the smallest nudes, oil applied so thickly on its diminutive canvas that it was cast in high relief, depicting its subject with brutal yet sensual skill, a dark, uneven triangle of pubic hair, wide thighs dimpled with cellulite, a distant face cast behind the high relief soft belly, dark eyes limpid and lusting. This was the painting Vin Keiller-Myles coveted so much; Hector liked to boast that it had been given to him in his early Fitzroy Club days by Lucian Freud himself, although Legs had always doubted its provenance, and it certainly wasn’t signed. She’d once hated its thickly layered coarseness. Yet now it was the picture she would take home, she realised in surprise. As a teenager, it would have been the huge and naughty Erin Home over the bed. A year ago, it might have been the powerful and thrusting Jake Ince by the dressing table, with its rugby-wide muscle men primed for action. Now she was mesmerised by a horny hairy Mary. Conrad would hate it, she decided with satisfaction. But perhaps that was a part of the attraction. Conrad featured less and less in her fantasies these days. Her desire for him, so overwhelming at first, had already faded. By contrast, her feelings for Francis were so deep rooted she couldn’t hope to eradicate them, but they were all muddled up, switching between desire, guilt and affection in rapid-fire succession. Tonight, she also felt an uneasy fear of Farcombe.

  It’s dangerous sticking around here, Burn’s words repeated in her head. Yet who was she to trust a near-stranger over a man she had known more than half her life?

  Not long after the first streak of forked lightning split the sky outside, the lights in the house went off.

  They’ll come on in a few seconds, Legs told herself firmly.

  They didn’t.

  She determinedly didn’t scream. Instead, she slid off the bed and started to familiarise herself with the boundaries of blackness around her, again remembering that in her favourite detective thrillers the savvy girls who thought ahead usually lived, whereas the pretty ones with the big breasts died amid lots of blood and gore just before a chapter break. She had to summon Julie Ocean again, she realised. Julie wouldn’t let herself become a victim; she had mounting sexual tension with Jimmy Jimee after all, and sequels to star in.

  For minutes on end, she paced the ink-dark room, mapping out walls, furniture and blunt objects, alternatively whimpering and hyperventilating, but mostly remembering to keep very quiet.

  Then she heard a step outside her door and somebody tried the handle.

  Half suffocated by terror, fighting not to scream, Legs raced on tip-toes to hide behind the bed.

  A moment later, she knew somebody else was in the room with her.

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sp; The scream inside her was building, however much she kept quashing it.

  In the half light she could just make out a huge, dark silhouette between her and the door. Desperate not to be discovered, she made a strange croak as she swallowed down the blood curdling wail waiting there. Even to her pulse-pounded ears, the noise she made sounded like a startled macaw.

  ‘Allegra?’ The voice was unmistakeable in its peaty Irish softness.

  The scream turned into a sob.

  ‘Oh, Byrne. Thank goodness. Francis locked me in, and then all the lights went out.’

  ‘The door wasn’t locked just now,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Well it was when I tried,’ she said, suddenly feeling rather silly. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t really put her weight behind trying to open it, and the ancient doors at Farcombe were notoriously sticky. Very few of the upstairs locks worked, including the bathrooms, much to the consternation of house guests.

  ‘Are you feeling any better?’ he asked in that husky, melodic voice. ‘You must be terrified up here alone in the dark.’

  ‘You came upstairs just to find me?’

  ‘No, I’ve been pocketing a few jewels,’ he said idly, ‘like the tinker rogue I am.’

  Suddenly, she felt fear clutch at her throat once again. She was standing in a blackened room with a man who was dark-souled and volatile. He had already admitted to her that he had nothing to lose. He had deliberately navigated his way around an unfamiliar house in a power cut to track her down. Could he be planning to bump her off for knowing too much? She couldn’t remember him confessing any incriminating secrets during their meal together last night, but then again she had been pretty blootered for much of it.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she muttered anxiously. ‘Where’s Francis?’

  ‘In the cellar, looking at the fuse cupboard and swearing a lot.’