The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  She barely shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything. This … nothing like this has ever happened to me before.’

  There’d been a police raid on one of Nick’s clubs a couple of months after they’d started going out. He’d been called out at three in the morning to deal with it and had come in again pale and tight-lipped as she was getting out of bed, making coffee. ‘Bastards,’ was all he’d say. She’d been at that club with him the night before: it was a classy place, restored to the original Edwardian fittings, tiny tables round a polished dance floor, each one with a little lamp and an old-fashioned phone.

  Little booths upstairs: she could remember it as if it was yesterday suddenly, though she hadn’t thought of the place in years. They’d sat in the gallery looking down on the dancers, with champagne in a bucket, and he’d told her about his plans. He’d gone to talk business with someone in the office and she’d gone down to the dance floor. An hour or so later she hadn’t stopped, flooded with the feeling and forgetful of where she was or why she looked up and there he was. Watching her from above the carved wooden balustrade, and when she looked up he had smiled.

  Nick wouldn’t let her near the club while the police were there – it was closed for eight days. He’d gone voluntarily to the police station to talk to them but he wouldn’t let her come and collect him when they’d finished. She’d never even talked to a policeman, but was that a brush with the police? She’d forgotten all about it, until now. They’d dropped the charges eventually, whatever they were.

  They’d walked past that club one day, she and Nathan, with a newborn Emme in the buggy. It had closed down and he watched her, as she paused to examine the fly-posters that plastered the boarded doors. She had never talked to Nathan about Nick, or about how it had ended, but he had put an arm out, around her shoulders as she stood there. ‘You don’t mind,’ he said, ironical, ‘your boring married life?’ She’d leaned her head against him. He had known, without her having to tell him. It seemed so comforting.

  Gerard was looking at her, as if he could see the thoughts in her head. Nathan’s arm around her. Their boring married life, far off as if through the wrong end of a telescope.

  ‘Of course,’ Gerard said, ‘we’ll also need to talk to you about your husband’s own contacts, social life, work … his movements last night…’

  There was a tap at the door and Carswell’s head appeared round it. He looked like a teenager. Gerard nodded to him and he slipped inside. ‘Detective Constable Carswell,’ he said, bobbing his head to her.

  Fran made as if to get to her feet but Gerard put a hand on her arm in a second. ‘He can make his own.’

  ‘Little one asleep?’ said Carswell, his back to them at the kettle. ‘My sister’s got one tharr’age.’ He didn’t seem to expect an answer.

  ‘Did your husband have friends out here?’ Gerard asked. ‘Old friends? Lads he went to the pub with?’

  She shrugged, helpless, yes, of course. Nathan must know people, he at least left the house every day, he visited sites, worked on estimates. Overhead came the sound of Emme’s footsteps, and she set up a tuneless singing. ‘He went to the pub for a bit of peace and quiet,’ she told them, and DS Gerard nodded.

  ‘New baby and all that,’ he said, sympathetic. ‘It’s a difficult time, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re … we were…’ She started again. ‘This was what we wanted. Kids. Getting away from London. We were happy.’

  ‘But no friends yet?’

  ‘There’s Rob, Rob Webster. An old friend of my husband’s, he lives out here. The other side of Oakenham.’ Gerard nodded to Carswell, who wrote in a notebook, painstakingly. ‘He works at the hospital, in some lab or other. His number’s on my phone, only I don’t know…’ She looked around, wildly. ‘I think Nathan put it up there by the landline when we moved.’ She’d insisted, remembering her mother’s scrawled list when she was a child. What parents did: doctor, dentist. Gerard nodded and Carswell got to his feet and was behind her at the phone. She didn’t turn to look.

  Rob was tall and awkward, his skin almost blue-white for an outdoors type, his knuckles raw from mountain-biking. Still a boy, he seemed to her. ‘This … all this…’ She had her hand to her mouth suddenly. ‘He’s Nathan’s … he was our best man.’ And all she could remember was Nathan’s hand falling on Rob’s shoulder, introducing him. I’ve known this guy for ever. His best friend.

  ‘I’d better call him,’ she said.

  ‘We can do that,’ said Gerard. ‘Don’t worry. It might be better, coming from us. He might know something.’ He tilted his head. ‘What about any other friends? Of your husband’s?’

  She shook her head, uncertain. Rob, Nathan’s only friend. Was that unusual? For a man to have just one? At the wedding, along with a handful of girls from the magazine, she’d dredged up three or four from school, they’d turned up dutifully. She hadn’t seen any of them since, maybe she’d never see any of them again but she’d been glad to have them there. When she’d been going out with Nick, he seemed to have dozens of people he called his mates. Nathan had had Rob, and a couple of people he worked with. Julian Napier, he was one of them. Her brain wasn’t working.

  Watching her, Gerard hesitated, the mug between his hands. ‘Tell me something,’ he said, his voice level, calculating, to the sound of Emme’s footsteps coming back down the stairs. ‘I’m interested.’ He was almost a head taller than her, and stood between her and the door. ‘You’ve been married how long, four, five years?’ She nodded. ‘Why did you come here, you and your husband?’

  ‘Why?’ she said stupidly, hearing in his cool tone, Go back where you came from.

  He smiled then, as if to reassure her.

  ‘I mean,’ he said patiently, ‘why here?’ Tilted his head. ‘Why now?’ He left it a long moment before saying, ‘More space, was it?’

  She just stared. ‘For the kids?’ he said, prompting her.

  ‘My husband’s from round here. He grew up not far away.’

  They’d visited the bleak little village with its boarded-up shop only once since they moved, at Emme’s insistence, to see the house he’d grown up in. It was a small cottage with moulting thatch almost down to the ground, tiny windows and low ceilings, and Nathan had stood a moment with his hands in his pockets, frowning at it before saying, ‘That’s it. Nothing to see really.’ And marched them back to the car.

  ‘And we love it here,’ she said. ‘The house, and everything.’

  Gerard was watching her.

  ‘So that explains why your husband wanted to come here. What about you?’

  Chapter Five

  They hadn’t come here for more space: they’d only had Emme when they moved. And she didn’t think they’d have another child.

  ‘Everything all right, otherwise?’ said her GP at the six week check. ‘You and your husband?’ The health visitor had asked the same question after going through a questionnaire with her when Emme had been a week old. ‘What are your feelings about the way the birth went?’ A neat blonde woman with a bouncy stride, she read the questions from a clipboard, intended to check for post-natal depression, though she never said so, and Fran had answered everything with determined cheerfulness. ‘Yes, yes. Fine.’

  And unless they meant, are you having sex again yet, it was fine, wasn’t it? She couldn’t imagine having the conversation with anyone but Jo, but Jo didn’t come, she sent an expensive dress with a card tucked into the tissue paper: Congratulations!! Two exclamation marks, which was so not Jo it was as if she’d been made to write it at gunpoint and was sending a covert message. Love, Jo. X.

  Her mind wandered, late at night, on the brink of sleep, or sometimes if they were watching some movie or other, it didn’t even have to be a sex scene though the first time it happened that was what it was. A man kneeling in front of a woman was all it took, her hands on his shoulders, stroking his neck, his face turning up to look into hers and Fran had to close her eyes a second, so vivid was it, so sudden. A hote
l bedroom with a long window open, rain outside on a dark lake and the exact feel of Nick’s hair between her fingers. Hearing the pleasure sound, some explicit gasp from the box, Nathan had glanced up at the television screen from his laptop then back down while Fran had just kept still, the heat rising at her neck.

  Then there’d been a night when she reached for him in the dark where he lay with his back turned to her; sliding an arm across she felt the muscle of his belly go taut. His hand had come up quickly and taken hers, holding it still. He had murmured something like a warning and when she understood she had pulled the hand back and lain flat, her heart thumping.

  ‘Let’s go shopping,’ she said to Jo on the phone, trying for cheerful. ‘Nothing fits at the moment.’

  She’d thought, when they were alone together, squeezed into a changing room on Jo’s lunchbreak and laughing at some terrible outfit, it would come naturally. It would be like old times. But with Emme parked in the corner gazing at the bright lights and Fran frowning down at her little soft roll of belly and at the buttons on a pale, soft, perfect, beautiful silk shirt that, besides being dry-clean only, wouldn’t do up over her chest, she couldn’t quite come up with the right words, somehow.

  Jo caught her looking down at herself, and cleared her throat. ‘Fran,’ she said, wary.

  Fran hadn’t been bothered by the belly, those first weeks and months, it was part of the deal. Then one evening she’d been reaching up for something in the kitchen and her shirt had come untethered from her jeans and there’d been something behind her, a sound, from Nathan, and she’d had to sit back down, tugging at herself. Although when she looked up he was only smiling. Loving.

  ‘Fran,’ said Jo. ‘Look. Is everything all right?’ And at the reluctance in her voice Fran had to look away, grabbing her trousers from the floor. She was going to be asked something she didn’t want to answer, or told something she didn’t want to hear.

  ‘All right?’ she said, dressed and decent again. ‘Oh yes,’ and then, stupidly bright, ‘It’s been so lovely, doing this, even if … well, the weight’ll come off, I just have to relax. It’s been just like old times.’

  She geared herself up to talk about it. But he watched her so closely, he knew her inside out, and hanging up his jacket when he came in from work he seemed to know what she was going to say even before she finished the sentence. ‘We need to…’ she began. And suddenly he was there, right up against her, Emme between them, her small downy head turning, eyes looking unblinking from one of them to the other. He stroked Fran’s hair.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know, I know. I’m not sleeping. And it’s work.’ And he sighed and subsided on to the sofa, patting the space beside him.

  ‘What about work?’ said Fran, leaning against him. He rested his chin on her head.

  ‘Oh,’ his voice had a grim edge, ‘just … well.’

  ‘What?’ she said, keeping still.

  He sighed. ‘A project I’ve been after for … oh, years now. Lots of bureaucracy, you know, all the permissions. I’ve put a lot of work into it. Putting together a tender, and someone’s thrown a spanner in the works.’ He took his chin away from her head and tilted her face up to him, looking into it, frowning. ‘Some jobsworth in the planning department. These people.’ And he got up quickly and got a bottle of wine that had been in the fridge for months. They hardly ever drank, these days. ‘So,’ he said when he came back, handing her a glass, taking a big gulp from his, ‘how was the baby clinic?’

  He did seem interested, to give him credit, or at least he sat and listened while she talked, gaining in confidence, although she could hear herself, talking on. Moving from Emme’s weight and the health visitor’s approval to her own childhood, bedsits and head lice and moving schools. ‘Mum specialised in evading the authorities,’ she said at one point, and he let out a laugh, surprised.

  ‘She did love me,’ Fran said. ‘It was mostly the money, and having to manage everything on our own.’ Carefully she set her empty glass down. ‘It makes you think, though,’ she said, not nostalgic exactly but softened towards her exasperating mother by Emme. ‘Having her. Don’t you find yourself remembering stuff? Things you thought you’d forgotten.’

  He poured himself another glass of wine, and before he’d taken a sip was ready with how dull it had been, his parents were so quiet, his father so strait-laced, his mother uptight. Fishing trips along the fen, a wistful story about squatting in a derelict house with mates, a long, last summer, swimming in an icy flooded quarry. Leaning back on the sofa. ‘It seemed to last for ever,’ smiling. And then an offer, college or something like it. ‘As soon as I could get away, I was out of there. I didn’t need to be asked twice. I never really went back home after that.’

  After so long without it the wine sent them both off to sleep unresisting – she even heard him snore as she dropped off, woozily content that something had been said, at least. It was only when she woke, before dawn and with a little knot of hangover forming behind her eyes, that she felt obscurely wrong-footed. It took her longer to realise that nothing had changed, except that the conversation couldn’t be had again. When he turned over to her a week later she held her breath but he just said, reasonable but no kinder than that, no sweeter, ‘Can’t you sleep?’ and then ‘Should I get you something?’

  DS Doug Gerard was watching Fran across the table. He was watching her mouth. Her eyes.

  He’s out there. It drummed in her head. He’s still out there. The man I saw. She wanted to tell them. He’s going to come back. But Gerard spoke first.

  ‘Look,’ he said, firm but reasonable, as if it was the most straightforward thing in the world, ‘I think it would be useful to get you down to the station. Interview you and get this all down on paper, cover all the bases, put you in touch with the team.’ Behind them Carswell shifted, but Gerard went on, smoothly, ‘And while we’re at it, talk about sorting out somewhere for you to be while all this is going on. You’re naturally feeling highly vulnerable…’ But his eyes said something different, they roamed the room, inquisitive. He smiled. ‘Alternative accommodation, if you remember, last night—’

  But he stopped, an eyebrow lifted, because Fran was shaking her head. She wanted to shove them to the door and slam it and bolt it. If she told this man, this DS Gerard, The man I saw is coming back, what would he say? Would he look at her and ask, so gently, so reasonably, Why would you think that? As if she was crazy. As if she was suspect. In her head she saw something that was growing, pushing its way through a rotten window frame. Because he was still here. Because I saw him. Because …

  And if she did what the policeman wanted, if she left? If she gathered the children and went to hide in some safe house, some miserable bedsit? He’d still be out there, and instead the police would be in this house, with this man, this Doug Gerard opening her cupboards. And then she was on her feet, still shaking her head, stubborn.

  ‘We’re not leaving here. This is our home.’

  Gerard looked at her a long moment, severe. Carswell had moved around from behind her and was next to him now.

  ‘All right,’ Gerard said carefully, and he was standing, zipping his fleece. ‘So why don’t you show me where you think you saw this man?’

  And there was something in the way Gerard was looking at her that brought a sweat out under her arms, as if he knew what kind of woman she was, what she’d done, what had brought them here. As if he already knew the exact chain of events and he was just waiting to see if she’d tell him.

  Chapter Six

  We love it here.

  That had been a lie, too.

  On the drive up, she had felt a sinking as she registered the landscape flattening, emptying and London was left behind. They had passed the grey spires and towers of Cambridge, a smudge on the horizon, then a famous cathedral rising like an island, some old flint churches hiding among trees and, increasingly, nothing. The road had dwindled to an arrow-straight single carriageway with fields butting dead-level
up against it: not even a hedge, barely a tree to soften it, and landmarks turned into outlandish things, nothing natural or old or familiar. A single wind generator, vast up close, like something from space; a concrete silo as big as a tower block sitting alone in a field ringed with wire fencing; a stretch of shiny solar panels all tilted towards the flat grey sky.

  A truck had passed them going the other way at speed and it hadn’t slowed or conceded room on the narrow carriageway, roaring by so close the car shook and as Nathan at the wheel wrestled them back off the verge they could see the mud crusted on its big tyres.

  When they had got out of the car, finally, the first thing that had struck Fran was the noise: it was empty but it wasn’t quiet, and walking into the lee of the big house, the agent walking towards them, she could still hear it. A distant roar that must have been traffic on some far-off invisible motorway but felt like something stranger, diffusing uninterrupted across the plain like smoke.

  Beside her Nathan spread his arms like a king, looking up. ‘All this space,’ he said, and she had seen the wide pale sky reflected in his eyes, a great barrelling mass of cloud building along the horizon.

  Emme was in her room. With Gerard standing behind her Fran called up the stairs, sharp and urgent, and Emme appeared at the top. Her small face was pale.

  ‘I need you to wait up there for a bit, sweetheart,’ Fran told her. ‘I’ve just got to show the man something.’ She felt abruptly breathless, her heart speeding in her chest just at the thought of stepping back outside, as if he was still standing among the poplars, waiting. Someone killed your daddy.

  Who? Who? Who would kill him? Nathan, steady Nathan, husband and father, always in control, Nathan who never lost his temper. Did people die for barely any reason, on no provocation? She knew they did: a botched burglary, an idle beet-picker high on GHB, road rage. Spill the wrong man’s pint in a pub and he follows you home. But Nathan got back, he parked the car, he came inside our house and wiped his boots on the mat and hung up his coat. He came to bed. That was the part that made it her fault, she couldn’t get rid of that thought. If she’d done something different in bed, if she’d said the right thing, if she’d turned and held on to him, in the dark.