I really hadn’t wanted to go into detail, spell out the obvious reasons why we couldn’t just carry on as we had been, as Ben seemed to think we could. But in the end, I did, citing my husband and children, his wife and child, our security and theirs, our reputations, our future, our wrongness for having let it happen in the first place; all of it. Every single cliché that applies in that situation, and believe me, there are many.
And still Ben said ‘no’. As if what happened between us was his choice, and only his.
‘I won’t let you do this, Fran,’ he said. ‘I won’t allow it.’
I began to point out, gently, that I had made my decision and he had to let me go, when I noticed a change in his demeanour. He became very still, the only visible movement in his eyes which darted over me and all around us.
‘I could…’ he began, and I was so afraid he was going to say he could tell Tessa, or even Hector, come clean and see what happened. I was so afraid he was about to say something of that kind that I backed away from him, an involuntary reaction. I stumbled on the uneven ground and he caught me, pulling me in, his arms encircling my waist. And oh, the warm, familiar feel of his body against mine almost caused me to cave in. But I didn’t. I pulled away, using as much force as I needed, and looked at him, waiting for him to speak again. I thought of walking away, getting into my car and driving off. But I had started this, and it couldn’t be left unfinished.
Ben was pointing, waving wildly towards the cliff edge. ‘I could do it. I could take us both over. You and me. A lovers’ suicide pact.’ As I stared at him, stunned into silence, he added in a voice that was more breath than sound, ‘We’d be together forever, our bones sinking into the earth, neither one of us distinguishable from the other.’
‘Oh my God, Ben!’ My voice hit a high note, almost like a shriek. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say! A terrible thing to think! You don’t mean that, you know you don’t. Just… please, Ben, stop this. Let’s go back there, yes?’
I held his arm, and after a small resistance, he let me lead him away from the edge. I was so shocked. His words were scrambled in my brain and I couldn’t work out if he’d threatened to jump or not, but I had to get him off the precipice. And then I did remember what he’d said about taking us both, and for a second, I feared for my life. But only a second, because I sensed the energy drain from him, energy which renewed itself with vigour when he shook me off, approached the wooden bench, and began kicking the hell out of it.
I stood aside helplessly while his boot collided with the leg of the bench, over and over, his body rigid with tension, his face a petrified mask of anger. He stopped as suddenly as he’d begun, turned and looked at me, then sank onto the sagging bench.
I sat down beside him, holding him, not speaking, feeling the tension in him ease.
‘Ben, look at me.’
When he looked up, his face had altered. His eyes still glittered with tears or anger, or whatever other emotions were rampaging around inside him, I couldn’t tell. But he had changed, and I sensed the meltdown I’d witnessed was over. However I’d imagined our meeting would be, it was nothing like this.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t mean it. I’d never harm you, you must know that. I was just… am just… so sad. I couldn’t bear it if you left me.’
I said nothing, thinking whatever I said might make things worse.
Ben sat up, detaching himself from my embrace and taking my hand instead. ‘You are leaving me, Fran, aren’t you? You did say that.’
‘Yes. We’re leaving each other. You know it had to happen some time. You always knew it couldn’t last.’
He nodded. ‘I know, and you’re right. We’ve come this far, and it stops here. But I’m so bloody devastated, Fran. Can’t you see?’
‘Of course, and I feel the same. I’m sad, too.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes, I’m very sad. I wish we’d never…’
Ben sat upright, squaring his shoulders. ‘Don’t say you wish we’d never started. Please. I love you, Fran. I won’t stop loving you.’
I didn’t say I loved him back. I couldn’t. For one thing, I wanted to leave him in no doubt we were over; for another, I didn’t love him. I might have thought I did for a while, fed by Ben’s view that that are many variations of love, all of them valid, but I’d known for a while it wasn’t love. Not on my side, not on his. But I was never going to convince him of that, and I didn’t try.
We left High Heaven soon afterwards. We kissed before I got into my car, and I made him promise he would leave first, and told him I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d seen him take the road.
‘It’s okay, I’m not going to do anything stupid,’ he said. ‘I’m not that brave.’ He smiled then, a real smile. And for the first time since we’d arrived, I thought, This is okay. It’s going to be all right.
I let Ben get a three-minute start on me, then I bumped down the track and onto the road, back to Oakheart, crying silent tears.
Eighteen
TESSA
I knew Fran had put a stop to it. I knew she’d left him. For the very first time, he’d let his guard down, let his emotions sneak through the façade of breezy confidence. I saw it as soon as he walked through the door that night.
Well, truthfully, I didn’t know – how could I? But I suspected, and after, when he stopped disappearing at a moment’s notice with some vague excuse he could hardly be bothered to make sound plausible, I knew it had ended. She would have ended it, not him. Of that I was certain, because that is the way Ben operates. He takes what he wants, and he wanted her. His desire was not going to end overnight. As it didn’t with Maria.
This, of course, happened long before I had my proof, in the form of that photo, that it was Fran he was seeing. But it was definitely somebody, and that night, my brain imported her name and merged it with the story. I knew that one day I would discover for certain the identity of Ben’s latest lover, for want of a better word. All I had to do was wait.
We made love that night. Ben was unusually reluctant at first, but my persuasive powers soon overrode that. Why did I want to have sex with him, knowing where he’d been only hours before? Lots of reasons: to stake my claim, show him who really needed him, remind him what real love was all about. Also, probably, to punish him, make him feel guilty, if such a thing was part of his emotional vocabulary.
And to punish her. A pity she didn’t know it, but I did. I knew it, and it made me feel a little better.
There was nothing remarkable in the way Ben and I first met. It was standard stuff; we first set eyes on each other in a pub near Oxford Circus, one of those old London pubs with dark furnishings and brass fittings that had suddenly become fashionable again and was packed to the green-tiled walls with office workers after six on a Friday – on most nights, actually. Drinking after work was a costly business, but I went along because I had nothing better to do other than return to my rented Earls Court studio flat, open a tin of spaghetti, and sit there feeling sorry for myself.
Feeling sorry for myself was not, is not, in my nature. It was a phase I imposed upon myself, thinking of it as a rite of passage, probably as a result of reading too many bad novels. It was with a kind of irony that I went through the motions of being a lonely single girl in the big city. I could have made more of an effort, had I chosen to.
The phase didn’t last; it didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t authentic. I had some real living to do but had no idea where to start, so I got myself some therapy, which took a large chunk of my salary. I was sceptical, but curious as to how it worked. The therapist, a motherly fifty-something called Elizabeth with a growing-out fringe and comfortable shoes, prompted me to talk about my home background. I’d expected and prepared myself for that, even going to the lengths of forming complete sentences in my head so that I wouldn’t be diverted from what I saw as the main source of my problems.
The talking helped at first – there wasn’
t a lot else to the therapy other than me talking and Elizabeth listening – and I’d begun to put the mess of my early life into perspective. For the price of a bottle of wine I could probably have used a friend as my sounding board instead of the therapist, but then I’d have spoiled the picture I presented to the world of the smart, middle-class girl from a boringly suburban middle-class home, coming to London in search of excitement.
I kept up the illusion when I was getting to know Ben – I’d almost convinced myself by then that the bland, commonplace background I’d invented was the real one. After we’d made eye contact across the crowded pub, he made his way over and bought me a drink. My observation of him beforehand showed several women in his thrall, over-animated in their laughing responses to whatever he was saying, surreptitiously elbowing one another to be the one by his side. I had to smile. They were beautiful women, and I could say I don’t know how he came to notice me, but that would be false modesty, something else I don’t do. I looked good; I’m tall and naturally blonde, both of which give me an advantage in a crowd.
When, after several months of dating, Ben opened up and told me his own story, it seemed as if it was meant to be. We were two people who had faced tremendous challenges in their lives and emerged all the stronger for it; it seemed right that we had found each other. But although the scars had faded, we still bore the imprints. There was always the possibility that the damage would erupt, burst through the surface, and poison our carefully constructed lives with its lava.
We were on the brink of moving in together, flat searching whilst spending part of our time at my place, most of it at Ben’s, which was where we were when he told me his story. He was in a house share in Islington at the time; the other four occupants were never around much, which suited us well. It was a Saturday night, we’d been out to a restaurant, and hadn’t held back on the wine as there was no work the following day.
Back at the house, Ben opened another bottle. The alcohol must have loosened his tongue – he’d been vague and dismissive about his past until then. He told me his mother had suffered from depression almost all her adult life, and when Ben, the only child, was eight years old, she took a bottle of whisky and an accumulation of sleeping tablets to bed with her and never woke up.
‘How could she do that? How could she just go and leave me? I was only a little kid, for Christ’s sake!’ Ben’s face showed anger and confusion, no trace of sympathy. A twitch set up in the corner of his right eye. I tried to hold him, but he shrugged me off. ‘No, let me finish.’
My heart raced as I heard how Ben’s father, the CEO of a company that supplied industrial catering equipment, went straight out and hired a live-in nanny, a sullen Spanish eighteen-year-old who neglected the child in her charge and eventually took off, leaving Ben alone in the house for twelve hours.
‘God knows where he dredged her up from. She must have been all he could get at short notice,’ Ben said, smiling grimly. ‘He didn’t want to risk hiring another nanny – which I suppose I should have been grateful for – and tried to look after me himself, farming me out to other parents at school, the neighbours, anybody who was willing. It was all a bit erratic, and I never actually felt I was in a place where I was truly wanted, not even at home – mostly at home. He blamed me for my mother’s death, you see. It was never going to work, him and me, living in the same house.’
‘Why did he blame you? How on earth could it have been your fault?’ I was incredulous, full of anger on Ben’s behalf.
‘The depression got worse after I was born. She couldn’t cope, so neither could he.’
‘But…’
‘I know. That’s how it was, though. Then, eighteen months after my mother’s death, my father was killed in a car accident. I only found out years later, when I was old enough to ferret out the details, that there was no other vehicle involved, no person or obstacle, apart from the tree he ploughed into at the side of the road.’ Ben made a sound, half laugh, half snort. ‘He couldn’t live without my mother, that was the truth. I wasn’t enough for him.’
‘It was suicide,’ I whispered.
‘Accidental death was the verdict, but yes, I reckon that was it. I went into care, got swallowed up by the system. I was unlucky and it wasn’t the best experience, but I survived. You have to, don’t you?’
‘You do,’ was all I said. Ben’s faced had closed down. Nothing more was required of me.
I told him my own story, not at the same time, but much later, after we’d moved into our first flat together. He didn’t show much reaction, just scraped the surface with platitudes. But that was fine; I imagine my life, though less traumatic than Ben’s, brought back memories too painful for him to handle.
Then, early one morning, I crawled off a work friend’s sofa after a night’s clubbing in honour of somebody’s birthday, and arrived home to find Ben slumped on our own sofa, a depleted bottle of vodka tilting in his hand and several open packets of co-codamol on the floor. At first, I thought he was dead, until my shocked mind detected a shallow rise and fall of his chest. He hadn’t taken enough tablets to do serious harm, and I managed to rouse him without help. Afterwards, he said he was sorry, he didn’t know what made him do it. He didn’t need to; I knew.
Neither of us referred to the incident again. I went on loving Ben, showing him he would never be alone again as long as I had breath in my body. And all the time I held onto my private fear that, eventually, I would lose him.
Back then, Ben and I were the broken ones.
Not any more.
Nineteen
FRAN
Caitlin was even more keen, if that was possible, to join Tessa’s art club when she found out her friend Maisie was going, too. There’s no stopping this, not that I want to for her sake, and I’ve prepared myself for more interaction with Tessa, although avoiding her altogether is the more attractive option.
‘Do you want to take Caitlin to art club?’ I casually enquire of Hector after breakfast.
He looks up from the paper he’s reading at the kitchen table. ‘Not specially. Why?’
He knows I’m not doing anything particular at this moment. Caitlin appears, dragging an overfull rucksack.
‘Oh, love, don’t take too much, not on the first day. What’ve you got in there, anyway?’
Caitlin drops the rucksack and counts off on her fingers. ‘Drawing pad, painting pad, pencils, crayons, charcoal, acrylic paints, brushes…’
‘Okay. But you have to carry it, right?’
‘Right.’ She smiles.
Kitty appears. ‘I’m off to Sarah’s. See you laters.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re going anywhere near the village hall?’ I ask, clutching at the proverbial straw.
I feel Hector’s puzzled gaze on me. ‘Nowhere near, whatsoever,’ Kitty says. Moments later, the front door bangs shut.
Hazel is upstairs, for once doing homework before the witching hour of six pm on Sunday.
‘Come on, then,’ I say to Caitlin.
‘Have a good time, Picasso,’ Hector says, giving her a kiss.
‘Who is Picasso?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way,’ I say, and we leave.
I don’t know why my stomach’s hitched a ride on a fairground switchback. It’s an art club run by Tessa, yes, but she’ll be busy. No time to spend chatting to me.
On the way, we pass Graylings, Mirabelle Hayward’s house. Could those be chilli plants? I think, as I catch sight of the rampant greenery growing inside the downstairs windows. I’d assumed they were herbs before. Herbs seem to fit with Mirabelle, chilli peppers don’t. But what do I know about her, aside from her dubious mental state?
‘That’s the lady with the cats,’ Caitlin says conversationally.
‘That’s her house, yes.’ I force aside my thoughts about chilli plants, only to see a mind picture of me racing into the school to ‘rescue’ my injured daughter, then one of the dead badger on our step. I can do without my wild imaginings this morning.
‘She was at the window upstairs, looking at us,’ Caitlin says. ‘Perhaps she wanted us to wave.’
I don’t answer, and hurry Caitlin on. We meet Maisie and her mother at the corner, and the two girls go on ahead, Caitlin struggling to keep the rucksack aloft. Afia and I are chatting as we enter the village hall, and at first, I don’t notice Ben. Then I hear his voice, and I’m stupidly wrongfooted. Tessa I was prepared for, but not Ben. He doesn’t normally put in an appearance at any of Tessa’s events – keeps a wide berth, in fact – but this is a bit different, I suppose. He is arranging Formica tables, lifting them with ease and setting them down in a semi-circle.
A woman called Cleo, whom I know vaguely as an Oakheart Academy parent and is apparently the qualified art teacher, comes to greet us. It’s not long before I’ve signed Caitlin in and paid the rather hefty sum required, but the hall has to be paid for so it’s fair enough. I see Caitlin settled, which doesn’t take long, as she is sharing a table with Maisie and clearly can’t wait to begin. Afia has already left to do some high street shopping and I sidle out of the door with others who have brought children.
Ben is standing on the pavement, leaning nonchalantly against the noticeboard of village information, arms folded. I hadn’t noticed him leaving the hall. He rights himself as he sees me.
‘Fran, hey! I’m glad you brought your daughter. Into art, is she?’
‘Yes, she’s quite talented.’ My voice comes out more curt than I intended. Or did I intend it?
‘Marvellous. Look, I was going for a coffee. Would you like to join me?’
I face him square on. ‘Ben, it’s not a good idea. You know that, so why ask? Anyway, I have to get home.’
‘And come back later to fetch her.’
‘Well, yes, of course.’ Sarcastic now. He’s annoying me, and what has that got to do with anything?
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