by Clare Boyd
I addressed my mother, as though my father hadn’t spoken. ‘But he’s not The One.’
‘The One! Och, child,’ Mum cried.
‘I do hope this hasn’t got anything to do with Lucas Huxley?’ Dad said, crossing his arms over his chest, tucking his hands into his armpits.
‘He had absolutely nothing to do with my decision to end it with Rob.’
It wasn’t a complete lie. He had been a catalyst, perhaps, rather than the cause, if there was a difference.
‘Rob’s a good lad,’ Dad continued, in his lecturing voice. ‘He’s a bit unfocused, I grant you that, but he’s stood by you and put up with all your little obsessions. I can’t understand why you’d suddenly change your mind.’
‘It hasn’t been sudden,’ I said.
‘You’ll regret this decision in years to come.’
My mother nodded, bunching her chin.
Dad continued. ‘For starters, what are you going to do with all the stuff you’ve bought together for the flat? You won’t be able to afford anywhere nice to live on your own, will you? I wonder if you’ve thought this through properly.’
Mum nodded again. ‘I have to agree with your father. It’s a rash decision, love.’
I felt tired all over again. The worry that was twitching through their faces made its way inside me. I tried to expel it. Couldn’t they help me along and throw out some optimism for a change? Give me a positive outlook for my future? A bit of blind faith? Paint a rosy bloody picture? Did it always have to be worst-case scenario? Their expressions reflected their vision of me as an old spinster with no husband, no job, no children, no home, spending her days thinking back decades to the one shot she’d had of happiness, with Rob Hensher, the happy-go-lucky ex-kite-surfer from Rye, and how stupid she had been to walk away from him.
‘Could I have some time alone?’
I didn’t want any more of their wisdom, fearing I would be hypnotised by their projected fear, enough to call Rob back to beg for his forgiveness.
‘Yes, love, okay. You have some time on your own,’ my mother said, patting the duvet.
‘Time to think,’ my father added, before closing the door.
Or what? I wanted to ask. If I didn’t change my mind, would they throw me out on the streets? Was my father capable of turning his back on me forever?
My mind slipped back to an afternoon with Lucas. We had lain on the grass, entangled in our towels, entwined in each other’s arms, staring into the dying light of the domed sky above us.
‘What’s that flower called?’ he had asked.
‘Exidopilopidus parrilibillillibus,’ I had answered.
And he had laughed – which had felt like winning a prize – and kissed my pruned fingers and told me they would never be green. And I had been terrified because I had known then and there that I would never follow in my parents’ footsteps, that it was not the life I wanted, and that my father would reject me unless I did.
Gordon Shaw – my proud, stubborn, self-righteous father – held onto his principles of family loyalty with claws of steel, and I feared this latest disagreement could break us. He might turn against me and never speak to me again.
When I had turned down the place at horticultural college to start my sports science degree, the heel of his hand had met my left ear with a dull thud. It had been a small price to pay for choosing a future that made more sense to me. During that time, Lucas had become the positive voice that I had used – still used – to drown out my father’s lack of faith. My respect for my father was belittled by the passions that Lucas had set off inside me, by that unique feeling of moving through water, by its healing qualities, by the ocean and its possibilities.
I loathed this power tussle between me and my father: his ruthlessness, his sporadic violence, that old-fashioned side of him that believed in a short, sharp shock of pain to knock some sense into me, to keep me in line. I guessed he would be waiting for me to fall flat on my face, looking smug at being proven right; more satisfied with this outcome than if I had found genuine happiness by following my own dreams.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help seeing it from his point of view too. There was selfishness attached to a dream, in spite of its idealist, romantic connotations. If Lucas was the dream, or part of it, the consequences would wriggle into my parents’ lives, affecting their livelihood and ruining my relationship with them. Or certainly with my father.
I knew how much Dad loved me. Aside from the outbursts, he was a good father to me and a good man who gave back to society. When I thought of pushing him too far, of losing him forever, I felt abject terror. I didn’t want to experience that rejection. Without siblings, or even an extended family, my parents were all I had. I loved them, I needed them. Didn’t I?
Equally, I couldn’t wait to see Lucas on Monday morning at Copper Lodge.
Twenty-Six
Elizabeth should have felt safe in the knowledge that Lucas would be in London all day. His study remained untouched and immaculate. He wasn’t due home until late tonight, but she locked the door anyway, terrified of being caught.
The surface of the glass desk was bare, apart from the computer and a pot holding a stock of fine-tip blue-ink writing pens that Elizabeth replenished every few months in response to his Post-it note demands.
The drawer and the filing cabinet were locked. Everything was locked.
She stood in front of the Shiro Kasamatsu print of Inubo Point in Japan that hung to the right of the desk, and removed it from the wall. The built-in safe was revealed, in gunmetal grey, with its lever handle pointing down. There was a wheel of numbers that Elizabeth began to turn, trying birthdays and anniversary, dates and ages, then random combinations, angrily, back and forth, round and round. She put her forehead to the cold, impenetrable door. It would be impossible to guess the combination.
* * *
‘Come in,’ Agata said. Her pencil-thin eyebrows were stretched high with hope. Elizabeth was here to tell her there wasn’t any.
‘No luck,’ she said.
‘Kurwa,’ Agata hissed.
Elizabeth resisted covering her nose and mouth to smother the smell of the chemical toilet. Her gagging reflex was sensitive and she worried she would retch.
Looking around for somewhere to sit, she began to panic. The claustrophobic space was a reminder of what she had seen through the window, as though she had stepped into a portal to hell.
Agata moved a rolled mattress and a duvet to free up the bench seats either side of the tabletop, and Elizabeth wedged herself in.
‘You sure?’ Agata asked, but her tone was flat. She sat down opposite Elizabeth, flipping her pink diamanté mobile phone up and down, up and down. Her long nails were painted today in blue and white stripes.
‘He must have memorised the code. There’s no way in.’
There was a delay of a few minutes, when Agata’s expression froze. Elizabeth couldn’t read it, didn’t know what to expect next from her, whether there would be a bombardment of expletives or whether she would throttle her. But Agata dug her painted nails into her cheeks and began to cry. Polish sentences flowed from her lips, mumbled as though she were praying.
‘Oh Agata. Shush. Shush,’ Elizabeth said, wanting to press on the girl’s mouth and eyelids to stop the leak of despair. ‘Stop crying now.’
Agata’s swollen eyes looked straight up at her, so big and brown, pushed together further by her dismay. ‘I want to go home,’ she spluttered.
Elizabeth felt cornered by a suffocating guilt and wanted to expel it. ‘You should never have given your passports to him in the first place then!’ she cried, impatiently, unfairly.
Agata stopped and raised her chin. ‘Your husband. So good-looking. So kind. He say he have lawyers who say this and that, but Piotr says it’s not true.’
‘He’s very persuasive,’ Elizabeth admitted, holding her breath high in her chest, almost incapable of coping with the truth in what Agata had said. How could she, of all people, judge
them for believing Lucas?
Agata continued. ‘Before we come from Poland …’ She paused and mimed driving a car, beeping the horn like a child, then said, ‘They tell us we get good jobs.’
‘Who did?’
‘The people,’ she said, tapping her fingers on the table as though it were a keyboard.
‘The recruitment agency?’
She nodded. ‘So we save up for van and we come to a house in London. Then they steal our money.’
‘They stole your money?’
‘The house is terrible. Dirty mattress. Many, many people everywhere. Piotr sleep with knife under his pillow. So many bad people. So noisy. They give us food from dustbins,’ she said, screwing up her face. ‘I clean houses. They take my money. Piotr open a bank account and they steal from us. They ask him to open many accounts. He do it. He scared.’
‘They threatened you?’
‘They beat Piotr,’ she said, shoving both arms between her legs as though protecting herself, looking around the van. ‘But Piotr is clever. He hide this van. They not find it. And we run away one night.’
‘Where did you go?’
She put her hands together in prayer and looked to the roof. ‘The Army. Very godly. With the …’ She played a pretend trumpet in the air. ‘They take us in.’
‘The Salvation Army?’
‘They say they find good jobs for us.’
‘Good jobs,’ Elizabeth murmured under her breath, hearing a loud screech of dismay in her head.
Agata shrugged. ‘It is better here.’ A lump pushed itself up Elizabeth’s throat. Agata continued. ‘Lucas give us money to fix the wheels.’ She nodded again. ‘But then Gordon say we have to pay him back and he take money away from our pay.’
‘He what?’ Elizabeth choked.
‘For a borrow.’
‘For a loan? You have a loan with Lucas?’
Agata picked at the blue polish on her nails. ‘We have a loan, that’s it, yes.’
Elizabeth began to doubt the solidity of everything around her. So often Lucas had talked about how he was moving his money around. One minute they didn’t have any, the next they did. Smoke and mirrors, Elizabeth. Smoke and mirrors.
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Lucas is better than the bad men in London.’ Agata stared back at Elizabeth as though to say, Don’t you dare judge us.
‘Your work papers. Are they legal?’
‘Yes, I think,’ she said. Her eyes shone. ‘He say he find good work for Piotr at big houses of his friends.’ She pointed towards the swimming pool. ‘He say he pay a lot of money to us when his deal go through. So we can save. We can buy a house in Warsaw. Life is good then.’
Elizabeth realised that Agata believed Lucas would come through for them. ‘It seems we’re all invested in this deal,’ she said, awestruck by how he used people to get what he wanted.
‘Tak.’ Agata nodded.
‘What about Piotr’s wages from the building sites?’
‘He give to Gordon for Lucas!’ She threw her skinny arms in the air.
‘I thought you sent the money back home to Rafal and the baby?’
‘No! We want to!’
Elizabeth sank her head into her hands, unable to bear to look at Agata. ‘Honestly, I didn’t know any of this. I thought you … I thought you and Lucas … I don’t know what I thought.’
‘You did not think,’ Agata snorted.
Elizabeth nodded and bit her lip, deeply ashamed. She remembered the healthy, pretty young girl who had arrived. The girl sitting across from her now was hollowed out, dark shadows pressed into her eye sockets, hair thinning, body emaciated. Images of starved and abused girls chained to radiators in dirty hotel rooms and gun-toting gangsters in leather jackets came to mind. It couldn’t happen in leafy Surrey. But Elizabeth had let it happen.
‘You must wish you’d never come here,’ she murmured.
‘Do you wish you didn’t love Lucas?’ Agata said.
Elizabeth had never been asked this question before, and she wondered how that was possible. Anger collected in her throat. She swallowed hard. ‘Yes,’ she said, low and cold. ‘But now we have children together.’
Agata’s defiance slipped from her face. ‘I sorry, Elizabeth.’
Was she sorry for asking her why she loved a monster? Or did she feel sorry for her? The ambiguity left Elizabeth flailing in her mind for a response. Instead, she placed her hand on top of Agata’s young one and the answer came to her.
‘I’m sorry too,’ she whispered, unable to project how truly sorry she felt, knowing she would have to show her rather than tell her that her eyes were now fully opened to the truth. ‘I’ll find a way to get your passports and your papers back for you,’ she said. And she meant it.
* * *
The colourful aisles of food were a blur of choice. Too much choice, while Elizabeth’s thoughts were taken up with decision-making and responsibility.
‘Pasta?’ Agata said, waggling a tub of pesto at her.
Crazed schemes to coerce or trick or blackmail Lucas into giving up the documents rocketed through her mind. Some of the more extreme ideas involved locking handcuffs on him until he relented, threatening him with the shotgun in the closet, or calling the police. Another involved a mass email to the party guest list outing him as a monster. They all had obvious flaws. If they called the police, Agata and Piotr would never be allowed back in the UK, or worse, the trafficking ring might catch up with them.
The past weighed on her. Lucas’s first assistant had accused him of squeezing her knee under the desk, but he had insisted she was a fantasist who was in love with him. She had signed a non-disclosure agreement. The babysitting agency had refused to send them another babysitter, but they had never explained why. He had promised her that nothing had happened between him and Heather when she was a child. A child. He had promised. How could she believe his promises now?
‘Pasta’s fine,’ she replied, mentally blowing out a breath.
‘This?’ Agata showed her two different brands of ravioli.
‘Either one, Agata. You have a brain in your head,’ Elizabeth snapped, realising as she said it that they had trained her out of being able to use it.
A mother from school whom Elizabeth vaguely recognised reached for some pumpkin ravioli. Her disapproving look – How could you possibly speak to your au pair like that? – reminded her that she had to keep her cool at all times. But her mind was too full. Too many choices. Too much change ahead.
She began dumping various packets of food into the trolley, remembering to include the ingredients for the chicken Caesar salad that Lucas wanted for his lunch: chicken breasts, cos lettuce, garlic, mayonnaise, white wine vinegar, croutons. Agata trailed behind her. She began to worry that she had forgotten what Lucas had asked her for this morning. Salted caramel truffle chocolates to eat after their supper had been one of his requests, and another had been some extra-strong coffee capsules instead of his usual medium strength. There had been a third request, she was sure of it. She racked her brain for the item he had asked for. Why hadn’t she written it down?
She called him, knowing it would irritate him, but he didn’t pick up.
In the sweets and biscuits aisle, she dumped four bags of sugar sours into the trolley.
Her phone rang; she hoped it was Lucas so that she could ask him about the third item. But it was Jude’s name on the screen. Another decision to make. To answer or not to answer.
‘Hi,’ she said, handing the trolley over to Agata. ‘We’re just in the supermarket. Can I call you back?’
‘Sure, sure. Just checking in.’
‘Everything okay?’
‘The Seacarts are being arses.’
‘About the paintings?’
‘They don’t like their adviser’s condition report, so they want an auction house guy to do some generic piece of shit, to maintain its value. Fuckers.’
‘Jude!’
‘But come on! How greedy ca
n you get? They’re billionaires, for Christ’s sake, but they’re flipping out about the difference of a few hundred pounds when the paintings must be small change to them anyway! What is up with them?’
‘Rich people are rich for a reason,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘I guess I should be flattered they care so much about my work.’
‘More like they know it’s going to be worth a hundred times more in ten years’ time when you’re a megastar.’
‘No.’
‘You will be. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’
They said their goodbyes and hung up.
Agata dropped a packet of cheese in the trolley and said, ‘The paintings. They worth a lot, yes?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Lucas want them more than he want us? Yes?’
Elizabeth processed what Agata was saying. And then she clicked. Clever girl.
‘My God. You’re right,’ she murmured. A plan so simple, she was amazed she hadn’t thought of it herself. She called her brother back.
‘Jude. Do you still have that lock-up in Clapham?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Can I borrow it?’
They passed the Greek yoghurt that Lucas liked and she remembered it was the third item. She gesticulated at Agata, pointing towards the yoghurt.
‘Why do you need it?’ Jude said.
‘I’ll tell you soon. Text me how to get in, and the code and stuff.’
‘You sure everything’s okay?’
She opened one of the bags of sugar sours that she hadn’t yet paid for.
‘I’ve got to go, I’m at the checkout,’ she said, and ended the call. She did not want him mixed up in her mess.
She chewed on her sweet. Her tongue was stinging. There were pitfalls in Agata’s idea, but it was doable. Lucas had never thought Elizabeth very bright, and right now, she wondered if the plan was more than she could manage. It was easy to slip up, say something incriminating, end up in the sort of trouble there was no coming back from.
As Agata filled the conveyor belt with their shopping, Elizabeth took her pen out and ticked through the shopping list. Except for the anchovies – which she sent Agata back for – they had everything.
