The road rose and narrowed out of the village, but I was sure I knew this stretch.
I was wrong.
The blind rise I’d forgotten about fell away, and the other car was coming right at us. It was too late to stop. If I braked hard, I would probably still hit him, and I’d lose control. I held my breath and jinked the car just a little to the left. I swear there was an inch between him and me as I passed, the other side of my car rasping on the hedgerow. The Doppler blare of his horn fell away behind me. I glanced at him disappearing in the mirror; then my eyes were back on the road.
The next seconds hit me like a series of static images stuttering together. The cyclist in front coming from nowhere, shiny in Lycra; my foot onto the brakes; the road suddenly a little slick in the cold; the loss of control and the car sliding out; fighting the wheel as the back end twisted behind me. I felt I had it, but I was still moving at the cyclist. He must have heard me, because he looked up and back. I thought he was going to tumble off for a moment, but he managed to brake hard and skid to the side of the road. My car was still twisting. Down on the brakes again, skidding right round, and finally we were still, sitting right across the road.
In the cottage, Amber took her hands back from mine and put them over her own mouth.
‘Look, we’re okay. I’m sorry.’ I almost tried to justify myself again, but I stopped. Still, she had been enjoying the ride. She couldn’t deny that. She bunched her shoulders and moved away from me. ‘Please, let’s not… I didn’t bring you here to argue.’
‘Bring me here. Huh.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Never mind. Just… maybe I shouldn’t have come. This whole thing is… Whose is this place anyway, if it’s not yours?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that. Look, we should have that drink.’ And I fished out a bottle of wine from the box.
‘Yeah, okay.’ But she walked further away from me, towards the big windows that looked out to the sea.
I knew what was going on. This mood of hers wasn’t just about our near miss on the road. It was because this was our first time away together. There had been a few nights in hotels, but one of us would always arrive late or leave early. Never at the same time.
I knew this weekend was taking things up a notch, and it was registering hard on the Johnny-meter. That was my little name for how much she talked about her boyfriend. I never spoke about Gen when I was with Amber — why would I? But she spoke about Johnny. I suppose it was her way of keeping me at a safe distance. A little mention here and there didn’t bother me. But the more she spoke about him, the bigger I knew her doubts were.
Johnny was a musician: piano, trumpet, guitar. Taiwanese nose flute for all I cared. The type of smug bastard everyone groups round at the end of the night, smoking joints while he strums away in the corner. He was a little older than Amber, but still much younger than me. They had been together for a couple of years, but she liked to downplay it. She wasn’t sure their relationship was going anywhere. He was off touring with his band again. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was playing around as well. She said if the band got signed by a proper label, that was bound to be the end of her and Johnny.
I recognised this kind of talk for what it was. All the things she said were probably true, but they were excuses too. They were her attempt to justify our affair in that part of her moral universe. I didn’t really see the need to do that on my part. I knew I was doing the wrong thing by Gen, and so did Amber. She knew I didn’t intend to leave my wife, and she knew she was free to walk away at any moment.
The trouble was, I didn’t want her to. I felt that more strongly all the time. Of all the girls, all the women, I didn’t want her to go.
I wished I was free, but knew I wasn’t. I was being squeezed out of shape, but I couldn’t break away. I wished I could keep her, and I wished I could hold onto everything I already had. I’d do anything to make that possible, anything.
5
Amber
Amber often wishes that she never met Benny. And if she could not have that wish granted, she wishes that the last time she had anything to do with the Raine family was the day she came back from that cottage by the sea. Her bloodstained jumper stuffed in the bottom of her bag, she stumbled into her flat and never wanted to hear the name Benedict Raine ever again.
But here she is, turning into the driveway of his farmhouse.
It has been a little over half an hour’s journey to get here, just on the edge of the Chiltern Hills. Even as she drives up to it, Amber can feel that farmhouse is far too modest a word for this place. At the end of a well-maintained drive is the main building on the estate: three floors of sandy-grey stone, a mossy slate roof, and the spent tendrils of wisteria spreading along almost the length of the building.
When people said the Raines were rich and successful, it was often added that it was Benny who was successful and Genevieve who was rich. Benny never lived within his means, but he did live within hers.
Amber passes a gardener as she finds the spot where Genevieve asked her to park. A white van is there, its back open to a man pulling out power tools. Next to the van is a vintage-looking duck-egg-blue Vespa scooter, straight out of a Fellini movie, and a small modern motorbike.
The well-tended gardens in front of the house are dotted with sculptures. They are not ones Amber would have chosen if she had the money that Genevieve does. Strange curved cocoons stand upright like alien sentinels. Giant metal mobiles twist like contortionists in the breeze. A big copper face rises from the ground and stares empty-eyed at those who approach.
Amber finds herself nagged by a sense of familiarity, as if she has been here before. But she knows she hasn’t. When she first knew the Raines, they had only just bought this place, and she and Johnny only ever went to see them at their spacious London pad. And after that, she only ever saw Benny on what was supposed to be neutral ground. She had no way of knowing that one of those places would turn out to be hostile territory.
Pushing the feeling of familiarity from her head, she checks her phone for messages. There is one from her friend Kay, but she swipes to ignore it. She’s already put Kay off once since the funeral, and she still isn’t ready to talk to her about all this. She puts the phone away and sees the front door of the house open. It is Genevieve. Her hands are open in front of her in the same way she approached at the funeral. She is sporting a well-put-together trouser suit and a crisp white blouse.
‘On your own?’ she says as Amber climbs out of the car.
‘Johnny’s coming later in the day, if that’s okay?’
‘Of course, of course. So glad you could both make it.’
‘Excited to be here,’ Amber lies. She feels she is only partly here by choice. The idea that Genevieve put to her at the funeral does hold a certain morbid fascination; she cannot hide that fact from herself. But mainly she is feeling railroaded once again by obligation and her own secrets.
She might not have wanted to hear Benny’s name again, but it wasn’t just up to her. The photography pond is a small one, and the Raines are big fish. For all the impossibility of staying lovers, even friends, after that Norfolk weekend, it was also hard to cut Benny and Genevieve out of her life completely. A sudden severance risked too much attention, and Genevieve’s hospitality and generosity made a slow move away almost as hard. Too frequent refusals created a suspicion of their own. But with each occasion that Amber accepted something from Genevieve, it doubled the guilt and hardened the secret, until they settled into a new sort of orbit. It took Amber years to fully drift away.
Amber grabs her bag from the boot of the car and is ushered inside. The hallway resembles more a lobby to a country house hotel than a home. It is spotless and perfectly ordered, with a cluster of fine art and photography prints immediately visible on the nearest wall. The wide staircase curves up ahead of them, and she can hear someone playing Chopin on a piano in another room. There is a small table with a hand sanitiser di
spenser and some art catalogues.
‘This is Sam,’ says Genevieve.
Amber looks up from the table to see a man she didn’t notice before, or hear arrive — as if he has just materialised from the fabric of the house. He is tall and slim, sporting a fashionable crest of hair and calculated tailoring. Without thinking, Amber sticks out her hand, but he keeps his to himself. Instead he gives a small namaste bow, his body moving in a fluid little dance.
‘Sam is my… well, my factotum. I’ve never liked the word assistant. If there’s anything you need, just ask Sam.’
‘Be delighted to help,’ says Sam, a lilt in his voice that Amber can’t quite place. ‘Great pleasure to meet you.’ He speaks with the kind of earnestness that can only be fake.
Amber understands now that she has not come to someone’s house — she has come to a business headquarters. This is the heart of Raine plc, the Bayard Foundation, the hub of all of Genevieve’s property, art and financial endeavours.
At the funeral, Genevieve had got straight to the point as she led Amber towards the graveyard. It was about Benny’s archive. Most of the well-known material had been catalogued for years. But Benny was a late convert to digital photography — a stubborn refusenik as Genevieve put it — and he had left a huge unsorted archive of negatives and prints that had never been absorbed into the main collection. It was a mixture of professional and personal material, and Genevieve thought it would make for an interesting retrospective of his lesser-known work. She spoke about it all in a very businesslike way.
‘Can I ask… why me?’ Amber had said, finding herself not able to look directly at Genevieve.
Genevieve paused and, as if following Amber’s eyes, looked up through the trees at the cyan sky.
‘There’s something indelible about film, isn’t there?’ said Genevieve. ‘I think you understand that. You know I’ve always rated you, and Benny always spoke highly of you. And it’s your film work that I really love.’
Amber shoots with digital cameras for her more immediate work — there is simply no other way to do the job. But for anything that requires more permanence, she always turns to film. She trained on it, and she stayed with it. Celluloid was barely dead for a decade before it started its renaissance, but Amber never let it go in the first place.
It is partly the end result that satisfies her: that texture and grain she has never quite been able to fake digitally, and those vintage lenses with all their beautiful flaws and idiosyncrasies. But it’s also the process: the slowness and precision that it requires; the knowledge you don’t have shots to waste; the preciousness of every decision about subject, light, composition. It is even about the soft mechanical clunk of the older cameras she uses. It has a physicality to it, giving consequence and permanence to each shot.
‘I’m really flattered,’ she told Genevieve at the funeral. ‘But I’m a photographer, not an archivist. I’m sure there are better qualified people.’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Genevieve, as if she agreed on the technicality, but that Amber was missing her point. ‘We can get help in if you need it. But it needs someone good to direct it. And I’d also like that to be someone Benny would’ve trusted with his work.’
‘That’s very flattering,’ said Amber, thrown into a new twist of emotions.
‘I think it’s a shame you and I lost touch. I’m glad I was able to help you when I did.’
‘And I was very grateful.’
The thing Amber regretted most in the years after the cottage was taking money from the Bayard Foundation, Genevieve’s philanthropic fund. She suspected strongly that Benny had engineered it. She assumed it was money to assuage his guilt and buy her silence. But it was also money she needed to keep going when she and Johnny were penniless, when her mind was at its most disordered, when the secret inside her was tearing up her mind and body.
‘Look, I don’t want you to feel pressured about it,’ said Genevieve, stopping at a moss-covered gravestone. ‘Why don’t you at least come and take a look? You can meet Benny’s assistant, take stock of things, see what you think. Why not come up on a Friday? Then you two can stay for the weekend. It would be nice to have some people in that big old house.’
It might have been easier to say no if Johnny hadn’t heard all this. Amber wasn’t able to invent a lie or stave off the moment when she could have mentioned it in passing later to Johnny. It was not like the days she’d had in 2001 to think of how to explain the deep cut in her hand.
And it would definitely have been easier to say no if Genevieve hadn’t next said out loud the amount of money she was offering as a consultant day rate — just to come and take a look. Amber and Johnny both knew it was money they couldn’t afford to turn down with the year they’d just had, and the baby on the way.
Johnny never made a packet from his music. His band never did get signed, and they went their separate ways after a while. But he has always been a glass-half-full type, and he talks about not getting signed as a good thing — making him abandon what he calls his rock star delusion and moving back to his first love of jazz. Since then he’s always just about got by gigging and as a session musician.
The house they live in isn’t even legally theirs. It belongs to Amber’s mum, imprisoned in a care home with early-onset dementia. Amber and Johnny do not have much. Each other. Each other and this new life.
‘C’mon, let’s at least go for the weekend,’ Johnny said at the end of an argument that Amber did not want to be having, because every sentence that continued it would contain more lies. ‘I’m sick of staring at these four walls. It feels like we haven’t been further than the Botley Road since last year. Be like a little holiday. Maybe chez Raine has big creaky beds we can have lots of noisy sex on and feel like naughty teenagers.’
‘You’re such a romantic.’ But she liked that bit of this idea.
She knew she should close her eyes to all this. She should run away.
But she knew too that Genevieve’s request was made in innocence. And Benny is dead now. He is gone. He cannot touch her. He cannot be allowed to take any more from her. She decided she would inch towards it, her eyes wide open.
6
Amber
Genevieve leads on down the hallway into the house. Amber misses what she says next because on the wall she sees a huge face looking down at her.
The black-and-white print almost fills the wall, top to bottom. It’s of a teenaged boy. Grubby, pockmarked cheeks, tatty clothes and eyes burning. The subject is in command of the picture, the lens a little underneath him so the viewer is defied to look squarely in his eyes. There is none of the sentimental voyeurism of a lot of photography of street kids. His name is Luiz. Amber knows this because she took the photo. Behind him are more faces, younger children, and the whole scene is caught in the inner frame of a halo of a broken chain-link fence. It looks staged, as if the figures behind Luiz have been choreographed to perfectly fill the space around him. But Amber knows it is a real moment — the result of trust, patience, and quiet observation.
‘Benny always loved that one,’ Genevieve says, seeing Amber has stopped. ‘That whole series, in fact.’
Amber finds she cannot respond. She feels slightly hijacked by the emotions the image is stirring in her. She thinks about Luiz from time to time, about the fact she tried to draw attention to his world, about how the series won her awards and was displayed in prestigious galleries. And how she donated a sizeable chunk of the money she made from these shots to a project helping Luiz’s barrio. But none of that helped Luiz. He was shot dead by the police less than two years after the photo was taken.
‘There’s something so truthful… so forgiving about that series,’ Genevieve is saying.
Truth. Forgiveness. The thoughts stab at Amber, and she looks away from Luiz’s eyes. She sees those other eyes briefly in her mind — the ones from all those years ago that will not leave her — then they are gone as the two women move on through the house.
Genevieve sh
ows the way into a large stone kitchen, warm from a deep red AGA in the corner, full of the clutter of normal life, and Amber finally feels she is in someone’s home. At the kitchen table, there is a form of long hair and a onesie slumped over a mobile phone.
‘This is my daughter, Yvette,’ says Genevieve.
The onesie slowly unfurls, and Amber recognises the young woman from the funeral. Wide grey eyes under full brows and the sulking pout of a bored teenager. When she registers Amber, she looks embarrassed to have been interrupted in this state, and her movements quicken. She is upright, flicking her hair from where it has settled on her shoulder.
‘Yeah, hi. It’s Yvey,’ she says pointedly, then adds, ‘as in ee-vee,’ stressing out the length of the syllables, as if this is very important.
‘Hello, Yvey. Amber. Pleased to meet you.’ There is a dry silence between them. ‘I’m very sorry about your dad.’ The words clunk in Amber’s head, and she is glad that Genevieve rescues her from further conversation by telling her daughter to go and get dressed.
Genevieve offers Amber a coffee, and they sit for a few moments. Amber is lost for anything to say. She wants to ask about Benny’s death, but doesn’t dare to. She has gleaned he crashed while out riding his motorbike, but that’s all that has made the news. She didn’t even know he had a bike. Was he going too fast? Was it a hit-and-run? She remembers the drive to the cottage with Benny: tearing along, adrenalised, out of control, their near-death experience.
‘Let me show you the studio,’ says Genevieve finally.
Amber is expecting to be led back into the house, but Genevieve goes out through the large French doors at the back of the kitchen. Amber follows, and they are in a cottage garden glowing in the morning sun, busy with early flowers. A path runs across the garden and into the green-brown stripe of a young beech wood. Genevieve leads further into the trees and, as the trunks thicken with age, the light becomes less. The path starts to wind, but it is still well-laid stone underfoot. Then the beech gives way to a patch of silver birch, and the sun is on their faces again. They are in a large round clearing, a reservoir of light cut from the gloom of the woods.
All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end Page 3
