Beneath the Water

by Sarah Painter

  ‘Christ. I’m sorry.’ Caitlin pulled a sympathetic face. She opened a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of single malt.

  ‘Is it not a bit early?’

  ‘A nip will chase the cold.’

  ‘It’s medicinal, then.’ Stella took the bottle and splashed a little into her empty mug. Without thinking, she said, ‘Slàinte’, the Gaelic version of ‘cheers’ that Jamie always used.

  Caitlin raised an eyebrow. ‘My, we have gone native, haven’t we?’

  ‘Her name is Laura.’ Stella addressed the words to her glass, focusing on the delicious amber liquid.

  ‘Maybe it’s just a passing thing.’

  ‘Ben told me he loves her. He’s not cruel, he wouldn’t have said that if he wasn’t sure.’ She had started so she would finish. If Stella could get the words out now, then perhaps she would never have to say them again. ‘He says he loves me but that he’s not “in love” with me. Couldn’t even be bloody original in his break-up speech.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Caitlin said.

  ‘He said he didn’t love me the way I thought he loved me, but he was wrong. I didn’t think he loved me in the usual way, I always knew he didn’t have huge passion for me, but I thought we had an agreement. That’s why I feel so fucking stupid. I wasted all that time and it turns out we didn’t have the agreement.’ Stella was surprised to find that she was still angry. She thought that had burned out by now.

  ‘What agreement? I’m sorry,’ Caitlin said. ‘I’m lost. Do you mean the engagement?’

  ‘I should have got it in writing.’ Stella smiled and could feel it brittle on her face, like a china mask. She forced it wider, to show Caitlin that she was fine. That she might sound a bit strange and wobbly but that she wasn’t a victim. She was still strong. She took a steadying breath. ‘He didn’t want to have children. Definitely not yet, and possibly not ever, but he knew I did. We had an agreement that we would do up the house, and I would pay the mortgage while he finished his training. Then we would get married and try for a baby.’ Stella forced a laugh. ‘Stupid thing is, he met Laura on his bloody course. Fucking irony.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Caitlin said. ‘Is it really serious between them? I mean, are they living together?’

  ‘I haven’t asked,’ Stella said. ‘I didn’t want to know. I was hoping he would change his mind, realise what he was throwing away. And, now . . .’ She stopped, shrugging. ‘I honestly don’t know how I feel now.’

  There was a pause, and Stella could almost see Caitlin trying to work out how to respond. After a moment she settled on: ‘How long has it been going on?’

  Stella couldn’t answer. She had wondered the same thing, whether Ben and Laura had been having an affair and for how long. She had dissected every moment of the past year, looking for clues, trying to work out what she had missed. She drank her whisky, enjoying the burn as it went down her throat and the instant warm glow.

  ‘Why is he so keen to get you back now, then?’ Caitlin put a hand up to her mouth. ‘Sorry. That came out a bit too blunt, even for me.’

  Stella smiled, suddenly glad of Caitlin’s straight-talking. It was a relief to be able to speak to someone who wasn’t easily shocked. Or who would be honestly and openly shocked, not pretend they felt nothing and then stew quietly or speak behind your back.

  ‘Money, I would guess,’ Stella said. ‘He’s realised that he can’t afford the mortgage on our house. Truth is, we were struggling on just my salary and even though he qualifies next year, he won’t be earning much to start with. I kept having to borrow cash from my parents. He didn’t always pay that much attention to the finance side of things and I don’t think he realised just how much I’d been subbing him. Or how much Mum and Dad had, anyway.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not the money, maybe he’s realised that he made a mistake. About his feelings. Maybe it was a bit of excitement, a mini-panic because of the commitment of the engagement. Maybe it’s something he just had to get out of his system before you guys got married.’

  Stella reached out and squeezed Caitlin’s hand, grateful for her friend’s attempt. ‘We hardly ever had sex, you know. Even in the beginning. That should have been a warning sign, but I put it down to a low drive. Or I thought that mine was abnormally large or something. I mean, nobody really talks about that stuff. Not about not doing it, anyway.’ Stella looked down. ‘I think I knew from the beginning but I didn’t admit it. That’s on me. I chose to be with him anyway. I thought that everything else we had was enough. Everyone says that you can’t build a relationship on sex and that that side of things goes off the boil once you’re married.’

  Caitlin shook her head. ‘I always thought you two had the perfect relationship.’

  ‘We did,’ Stella said. ‘In a way, it really was. We got on so well. We loved each other so much.’

  ‘I know,’ Caitlin said. ‘It was almost painful to be around you two sometimes.’

  Stella wasn’t sure what to say to that. Caitlin and Rob were the golden couple, always had been. ‘Are you and Rob okay?’

  Caitlin looked down. ‘We’re fine. It’s just life, you know. You get busy and you hardly see each other and then you’re picking up their dirty socks and you can’t quite remember why you ever thought it was a good idea.’

  ‘It must be hard. I know you’re tired at the moment.’ Stella carefully didn’t use the word ‘hormonal’.

  ‘Yeah,’ Caitlin said. ‘And it’s this time of year. We all go a bit stir-crazy. I mean, I’m lucky that I’m outdoors so much.’

  Stella privately didn’t agree that it was ‘lucky’. Still, it was true that Caitlin had always been the hardy, physical type. She had loved hillwalking and rowing at university, had surprised exactly nobody when she got a job as an estate worker after her course in Environmental Science, rather than staying on to do her masters.

  ‘I mean, I was. With work.’ Caitlin’s mouth twisted. ‘And it’s so dark all the time.’

  ‘And cold.’

  ‘I don’t mind the cold. I can’t wait for it to get colder, to be honest. Get rid of this bloody wet.’ Caitlin wrapped her hands around her mug of tea. ‘People go a bit funny over winter, though. The house seems smaller than usual and moods get low. Rob will be happier after the solstice. Anyway, that’s enough of that. I’m not complaining to you.’

  Stella tried not to be hurt by her tone. She didn’t want Caitlin to see her as ‘poor delicate Stella’ or ‘poor broken Stella’ or ‘poor rejected Stella with the messed-up life and no fucking idea what she’s doing’, but she couldn’t really blame her. ‘Complain all you like,’ Stella said. ‘That’s medicinal, too.’

  Caitlin managed a watery smile. ‘You’re a good friend.’

  ‘The best,’ Stella said. ‘And I’m not running back down south, so anything you need . . . Anything.’ She clinked her glass against Caitlin’s mug and threw back the last of the whisky.

  Back at Munro House, Stella sat in her office and tried to work. She checked her mobile and, sure enough, there were several missed calls from Ben. The first message he had left just said: ‘Please call me.’ The second was the same, but with a big, hitching breath after, as if Ben was trying not to cry. That wasn’t like him. The third said: ‘I’ve made a huge mistake—’ Stella pressed the disconnect button before listening to the rest.

  The whisky that she had drunk with Caitlin had worn off and she had already eaten the second chocolate muffin Caitlin had given her ‘for the road’. Stella thought about taking the dogs for a walk but instead she sat on the bed and pulled the blanket up, paralysed by indecision. The Stella of three months ago would have been in the car and driving south. She had wanted so very much to hear Ben say those words, had dreamed of it. For the first while after Ben told her that he had fallen for Laura, she had wished for it so hard that she had hardly been able to think of anything else. But she hadn’t been entirely open with Caitlin.

  There was one more truth that she hadn’t been able to say out
loud. A rectangle of white card which had changed everything.

  There was no excuse, really. You shouldn’t open another person’s correspondence, and if you did it was snooping and you deserved everything you got. Nobody would feel the slightest compassion for Stella, she was well aware. But she had seen the NHS logo on the brown envelope and panicked. Now that she had finally escaped from under her own sword of Damocles, here it was again, aiming for its new target. She felt the punch in her stomach. Not Ben, she’d thought. Please, not Ben. Stella didn’t want to die, but she’d had plenty of time to think about the possibility. Now that she had her own life back, it seemed the height of cruelty to snatch Ben from her. She tried to stop the litany of terrors, but they advanced across her mind. Cancer. Brain tumour. Heart disease. Tropical parasite acquired on his gap year.

  The paper of the envelope was already torn. Stella couldn’t exactly recall the moment she slipped her finger into the gap at the edge of the gummed flap, but she remembered the paper ripping, giving way.

  Inside was a single white rectangle. An appointment card. She checked the hospital department. Not oncology. Thank God. Not cardiology. Not tropical disease or neurology. There was no time for relief, though, as her brain was trying to process something else. Pure shock that made everything go blinding white for a moment.

  Printed in impersonal black type underneath Ben’s name was the date and time for two appointments at the Urology outpatient clinic. The first, a pre-op appointment at 11.15 a.m. on Tuesday 3 October, and the second for a vasectomy under local anaesthetic for the week after.

  Stella had fallen asleep on the bed and she didn’t wake up until almost six. She still felt tired and it reminded her of the exhausted numbness of those early months after the split. She splashed water onto her face, trying to wake herself up from that unwelcome state, and went downstairs. Stella planned to have scrambled egg on toast followed by a family pack of crisps, with a glass of orange juice for the vitamin C. Jamie was usually running outside or dangling upside down at this time in the evening, so she was surprised to find him in the kitchen.

  She steeled herself for the guillotine to fall, for Jamie to tell her to pack her stuff and get out. The man was rich enough to pay for an assistant who would obey his every command, who wouldn’t obstruct him or tell him when he was acting irrationally. She wondered if he would give her a good reference and whether she would be able to get another job in the area or whether she would have to go back to London.

  ‘Join me,’ Jamie said, indicating the cooker. ‘I’m making plenty.’ He had a striped tea towel draped over one shoulder and a pair of tongs in one hand. She had never seen him look more domestic, more normal.

  It was unsettling.

  The pan sizzled invitingly as he placed the steak onto it. ‘You can dress the salad.’

  Stella wasn’t a big fan of being ordered around in the kitchen, or anywhere for that matter, but the man was about to feed her and that made up for a lot. She washed her hands at the giant butler’s sink and tried not to notice how close they were to each other. It seemed safer to move to the other side of the table in the middle of the room.

  ‘How do you like your steak? I’m having medium.’

  ‘Medium is fine,’ Stella said, relieved that he wasn’t going to try to get her to eat the stuff rare. She poured the oil mixture onto the leaves and moved them around with her hands. Some foodie people could be annoyingly evangelical. They made it their mission to make you try the disgusting things in life like squishy seafood, and you could never shake the feeling that they were secretly playing a practical joke.

  ‘I’ve got some Shiraz open, but the Malbec is good, too.’ Jamie nodded over his shoulder at the bottles of wine on the worktop. ‘Do you want to open the Malbec, then you’ve got a choice?’

  ‘Sure,’ Stella said. She knew from experience that it was easiest to agree with Jamie, especially over food and drink. Besides, drawing attention to the fact that they were just two people and they didn’t need to open two bottles of wine seemed unnecessarily parsimonious. Stella didn’t know if it was that Jamie was naturally generous or whether it came from being wealthy.

  She poured two balloon-shaped glasses with a small amount of Shiraz and passed one to Jamie. ‘Thank Christ you eat something other than beans.’

  He grinned. ‘It’s somewhat difficult to get a beautiful woman to have dinner with you if you’re offering eggs and beans with a kale smoothie.’

  ‘Where are the chips, though?’ Stella said, only half teasing. ‘Got to have chips with steak. I’m pretty sure it’s the law.’

  ‘No carbs,’ Jamie said, smiling. ‘Carbs are poison.’

  ‘Except for the ones in the wine, presumably,’ Stella said, keeping her voice light.

  ‘Well, there’s alcohol, too, and that’s a poison. I like to think they battle and cancel each other out.’

  ‘For someone who prides themselves on rational thinking, that is a truly crap argument.’

  ‘But it means I get to drink wine,’ Jamie said.

  Stella raised her glass. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘Plus,’ he said, pulling an apologetic face, ‘there is a compound in red wine called resveratrol which has been shown to extend the life of yeast cells. It’s been used in studies on mice with positive results, which might account for the French paradox.’

  ‘The French paradox?’

  ‘Yeah, you know. The way they eat a rich diet while maintaining a low incidence of heart disease.’

  Once the steak was cooked, Jamie put it onto a wooden board and sliced it across the grain, plating it up with the dressed salad. It was delicious, but Stella couldn’t help but think that some crusty bread or a few chips would make the whole thing perfect. ‘Do you really not have bread, ever?’

  ‘Once a week, I eat whatever I want. Loaf of bread and butter, a chocolate gateau, ice cream, crisps, anything. I couldn’t stick to it the rest of the time if I didn’t.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Stella said, adjusting to this new information. ‘I had thought it was pretty impossible.’

  ‘Well, it’s still not always easy, but the results are so good.’

  ‘So, was it a weight thing that got you started?’

  ‘Fitness,’ Jamie said, mock-offended. Then, in his normal voice, he said, ‘I wasn’t overweight but I was pretty soft. I had a bit of a belly.’

  Stella sucked in her own stomach automatically and then let it go again. What was the point? She did not have an athletic figure and restricting her breathing wasn’t going to change that. ‘Did that bother you?’

  Jamie pulled a face. ‘I know it sounds shallow and I’m not supposed to care, but it did. And then I got results really quickly and it encouraged me to stick with it.’

  ‘And improve it,’ Stella said, smiling.

  ‘Exactly. Test it. Refine it. Package it for others to follow.’

  ‘The standard Jamie Munro drill.’

  They chatted over the food, Jamie telling Stella about a phone call he’d had with Esmé. She was doing well in Edinburgh and was going to stay another week. ‘She misses the dogs, but I think she’s enjoying the break. It’s good, she deserves one.’

  After, they took their wine glasses and the open bottle to the living room. The room was cosy in the lamplight and the glow from the wood burner. The curtains were still wide open, showing the moon reflecting on the sea and creating shadows in the gardens which sloped away from window. Stella looked out at the view for a while, sipping the delicious wine and trying not to get carried away. Jamie had finally chosen some music and was sitting on the sofa, one leg bent with his ankle resting on his other knee. Even sitting he seemed to radiate energy. One hand was tapping in time to the rhythm of the music and he was staring at her openly, his expression a challenge.

  ‘What?’ Stella said, crossing the room to sit on the sofa. Near, but not too close. She put her back against the arm of the seat and sat cross-legged, facing him.

  ‘I’ve
been thinking about you a lot.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘And not in a professional capacity.’

  Stella opened her mouth to reply, but couldn’t think of anything to say except ‘oh’, so she shut it again and drank instead.

  ‘I was wondering whether it was mutual at all? It’s completely fine if it isn’t, of course,’ he said quickly. ‘And I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. Please say if you want me to stop talking. Or just hold your hand up and I’ll change the subject. We can talk about the database or segmenting the mailing list or Nathan or gardening.’

  Stella smiled. ‘It’s fine. I don’t mind.’

  ‘You don’t mind that I like you?’

  ‘No,’ Stella felt the blush run up her neck and over her face. She lifted her wine glass to her lips, hoping to hide her embarrassment.

  ‘Okay, then.’ Jamie uncrossed his leg.

  ‘It’s just—’

  ‘You don’t feel the same,’ he said quickly. ‘That’s fine. Forget I said anything.’ He pulled a face. ‘Please.’

  ‘Not that,’ Stella said. ‘I thought you were going to fire me. Because of yesterday.’

  Jamie put his glass down and leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees. ‘You were right.’

  ‘I was over the line.’ He looked her square in the face and Stella felt the connection between them. The intensity she had felt the very first time she had met him.

  ‘What were you saying about not feeling professional?’

  He smiled. ‘Come over here.’

  Stella couldn’t speak. Somehow she managed to untangle her legs and make it to a standing position. She stood in front of Jamie, who was sitting up straight, then realised she was still gripping her wine glass.

  She turned and put it onto the low wooden coffee table and, as she turned back, felt his hand low on her waist, caressing her hip and then, when she faced him, tugging her closer.

  ‘Is this a good idea?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Jamie said. His pupils were dilated in the dim light and they no longer looked blue or green, just black. He looked like the devil he had been painted as by the villagers and he pulled her onto his lap, arranging her thighs in quick, matter-of-fact motions so that she was suddenly, shockingly astride him, far too much of her body pressing against far too much of his.