by Laura Elliot
Twenty-Four
The Past
They talked about starting a family but they had careers to build before committing themselves to nappies and feeding on demand. Amelia’s public profile had grown after she successfully completed the interior design of a US multinational tech company with a base in Cork. The project attracted the attention of the editor of an architectural magazine, who was interested in doing an interview with her. Other media features followed. So, also, did commissions. Exciting opportunities that reflected her growing reputation. Nicholas’s star was also rising and he appeared regularly on television to discuss investments and the stock market. His down-to-earth approach to the intricacies of choosing the right investment portfolio made him a popular business pundit and he, like Amelia, had acquired a public persona. They were admired for their style and elegance at business functions. Gloss, glitz and colour – they made it look as though it was easy to maintain an idyllic marriage and two demanding careers.
The only problem was Nicholas’s insecurity, living as he was on Amelia’s charity. He had tied up his capital when he sold his apartment to buy into the junior partnership with KHM and it would take another two years before he would see a return on his investment; only then could they move to a new house that was not steeped in another man’s history.
But selling Woodbine was unthinkable to Amelia. Her desire to leave the old house after the death of her father had passed and her love for her childhood home had grown stronger. She wanted their children to play in its spacious rooms and leafy garden, climb the old trees, explore the surrounding fields. After long discussions with Nicholas, who admitted that, despite his reservations, he had also grown fond of Woodbine, they made an appointment to see David Smithson, her father’s solicitor, to have Nicholas’s name added to the house deed.
‘I’m afraid it’s not possible to do that, Amelia.’ David tapped his index nail against his office desk, then, noticing, relaxed his finger. ‘Your father added a codicil to his will. The ownership of Woodbine must remain in your name only.’
‘But that can’t apply to Nicholas.’ She was more surprised than shocked. ‘Why would my father add such a stipulation? I can’t understand his decision.’ But she knew the reason, as did Nicholas, who sat stiffly beside her.
‘He didn’t confide his reasons to me,’ David replied. ‘It wasn’t my business to ask why. The codicil was only to be revealed to you if you made the request you’ve just outlined to me.’
‘Can it be challenged?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Anything can be challenged,’ David replied. ‘But, as the law stands, it was John’s property and he was within his rights to make that decision.’
‘The ownership of our home doesn’t matter,’ she assured Nicholas when they left David’s office. ‘A piece of paper, that’s all it is. Woodbine is our home. It’s as much yours as it is mine.’
‘They’re just words, Amelia.’ Nicholas’s hurt was palpable. ‘They mean nothing. I’d be afraid to put a nail into a wall for fear you’d object.’
‘That’s silly,’ she protested. ‘Maintaining Woodbine is a full-time job. Your input will be just as important whenever we decorate it together.’
Unknown to him, she contacted David to check the date on the codicil. Her father’s signature had been added shortly after that awful night when she had sullied his love for her. How bitter he must have been, how shattered. This guilt, her caul, was she to be bound for ever by its constraints?
She returned from an overnight business trip a month later and discovered that in her absence Nicholas had organised the refurbishment of the old-fashioned bathroom. The antique slipper bathtub with its claw legs had been removed and replaced by a whirlpool bath that bulged outwards from the corner where the spindle-legged cupboard for storing towels used to stand. State of the art, Nicolas said as he bent to demonstrate its swirling effects. The familiar linoleum had been torn up and replaced by shiny marble tiles. A new power shower unit had been installed, along with wall tiles and a panel of blue lights that shone directly on the bath and added a chilling effect to this now unrecognisable bathroom.
Her shock quickly turned to outrage at the decision he had made without consulting her. She would never have agreed to any of this. She shouted him down when he tried to reason with her. Never once losing his patience, he explained how he had hoped to surprise her on her return home. The slipper bath was chipped and fit for nothing but the scrapyard. This new bath with its jacuzzi effects was exactly what they both needed after a stressful day at work. Room for two, he added. If they could bathe together, Amelia would soon overcome her fear of water.
She had climbed mountains, zip lined and bungee jumped, parachuted for charity, hot-air-ballooned for pleasure, but, since her mother’s drowning, she had never gone near the sea. When she was younger, hanging out with Leanne and their wider circle of friends, she would accompany them to the beach on condition that they sunbathed on the sand dunes where the long marram grass hid her view of the waves. Standing under a shower, even all these years after the tragedy, she averted her face from the water; and she kept her hair short so that she could shampoo it as quickly as possible. The idea of sitting in a bath with water gushing from whirlpool jets appalled her. How could Nicholas be so insensitive to her feelings?
He was hurt by her reaction, and bewildered, also. Why was she so annoyed? She had told him to make whatever changes he believed were necessary to Woodbine, and he had believed that the bathroom with its cracked tiles and woodwormed furniture was the best place to begin the renovations.
‘So much for allowing me to hammer a nail into your precious walls.’ His disappointment was acute but Amelia was beyond caring.
‘Hammer a nail, yes,’ she shrieked. ‘But not this – this monstrosity.’ She pushed him away when he attempted to reason with her. Was it that push that finally ignited his anger and caused him to slap her across her face? She struck him back, then ran from the bathroom to their bedroom and locked him out. Covering her ears, she drowned out the thump of his fist against the door, his pleas to allow him in. She had snatched greedily at happiness, believing it would compensate for the loss of her father. It mocked her now, this illusion that one would cancel out the other.
His face was blotched and wet with tears when she eventually relented and opened the door to him. They clung together, silencing each other’s apologies with frantic kisses. He carried her to their bed and promised to organise the removal of the new bath in the morning.
She was still in his arms when she awoke. How trivial their argument seemed in the light of a new day. His sense of insecurity since their marriage had disturbed her yet she had fought with him as soon as he made his first independent decision. Was John controlling her from beyond his grave? Was that why she so reluctant to change anything in Woodbine?
The bath remained in place and she eventually became used to its bulbous shape. Nicholas used it regularly in the evenings but never again suggested that Amelia share it with him.
* * *
Summer came. Jayden Lee-O’Meara returned to Kilfarran for his annual visit to his father. He phoned Amelia, as he always did on these occasions, and arranged to meet her after work for a meal in the Kilfarran Inn. Jay’s career as an engineer had turned him into a global traveller. He was much changed from the gauche teenager who had given Amelia her first kiss and left her broken-hearted – or so she had believed then – when he moved to California. Love had now turned to friendship. They kept in touch through email and phone calls, always falling back into a familiar, easy conversation when they were together again.
On this occasion, though, he was subdued. His engagement to Hailey was off.
‘Incompatible and irreconcilable differences,’ Hailey had said when she gave him back his ring. These differences had largely to do with the amount of travelling he had to do but she had also accused him of ‘mental infidelity’. A state of mind, he told Amelia ruefully, that caused both his head and his heart
to be elsewhere when he and Hailey were together. By the time he and Amelia had dissected his broken relationship and put it back together again, Jay looked more relaxed. He admitted that Hailey might have had a point about his ‘mental infidelity’.
‘I left so much of myself behind in Kilfarran when my mother uprooted me,’ he said. ‘It’s only in these latter years that I’ve understood what a wrench that was, especially leaving you. As the song goes, the first cut is the deepest.’ He smiled to show he was joking but, just for a moment, the memory of the sunshine days when they had kissed in the long grass in Kilfarran Woods, heedless and in love, kept them silent.
She had stayed later than she intended with Jay and, having lowered the sound on her phone, was unaware until she was back in her car that Nicholas had been trying to contact her. Five texts and three missed calls. She rang him but his phone went to message.
He was waiting for her in the living room, seated erectly in the armchair where John used to sit. Was he angry or anxious? Unable to read his mood, she was nonetheless filled with a sense of foreboding as he stood up to greet her. Her good humour plummeted as his questions turned into accusations. He had been expecting her home at eight. He spoke quietly but emphatically. It was now after ten. How could a meal booked for five in the evening have lasted so long? What was so fascinating about Jayden Lee-O’Meara that Amelia had forgotten to text her husband, who had spent the last two hours out of his mind with worry in case she had had an accident?
Was Nicholas her husband or her custodian, Amelia demanded. How dare he accuse her and Jay of being lovers? Did he expect her to fill out a time sheet for him to study and approve every time she met her friends? He silenced her with his fist. A blow to the side of her head that sent her reeling. Stunned, she collapsed to the floor, blood in her mouth, her hands protecting her cheeks. Ashen-faced and contrite, he knelt beside her and begged her forgiveness. She shoved him away from her. That first slap, when she had retaliated, why had she not given it more thought? She had assumed it was an aberration, just as her instinctive response had been, but this was different. Everything had changed in an instant. Like a drowning. A hit-and-run. A world turned upside down by a random act.
Jealousy was his undoing, he begged her to understand why he had reacted so angrily. It consumed him when she was with other men and twisted his feelings into a fist. An apt metaphor, she thought, and one she hoped he would never use again. They made up, of course they did. Love was not yet a choice to give or withhold. He wiped her tears and stroked her forehead until she was calm again and able to forgive him.
When, two months later, she was on the floor again, the shock was all the greater because the lull in between had been idyllic. They had loved more fervently, tenderly, determinedly. Amelia, desperate to rationalise his fury, tried to appreciate his furious response when she accidentally knocked a glass of vodka over the keyboard on his laptop. The corrosive alcohol had burned the components and wiped the contents. Nicholas did not have a proper backup system to recover his files and, he said, her clumsiness had wiped out years of confidential client information.
‘You’re wrong,’ she argued. ‘We can drive to Mark’s house straight away. He’s an expert at data retrieval―’
‘Shut up, you drunken bitch,’ he roared. ‘Have you any idea of the damage you’ve done?’
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ She reeled back from his insults. ‘I had one drink and I didn’t knock it over deliberately. It was an accident―’
‘I don’t give a fuck what it was. I warned you not to touch my laptop.’ This time he avoided her face but he still brought her to her knees.
Later, she listened to his apologies, his pleas, his promises. The loss of his clients’ files meant nothing in the context of what he had done to her.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry… I love you so much, Amelia. You must forgive me. You must…’
As she had expected, Mark was able to restore the files from the hard drive and he also established a backup system that would prevent a similar accident occurring in the future. Amelia had become wary of Nicholas, though. How could someone who claimed to love her so passionately abuse her on a whim? She searched for reasons to explain his sudden mood swings, his ability to freeze the air around them with a word, a frown, a body movement that could signal anything. Was it fear that trapped her? Or love? She struggled with both and, at such times, he often ended an argument by carrying her to the sofa or the bed, pinning her beneath him until she stopped resisting his kisses. The lovemaking that followed had a charged choreography; edgy with pent-up passion, fear shivering through ecstasy.
Nicholas was particularly resentful of Leanne, who, he claimed, was in love with Amelia. She heard her voice rising defensively whenever she contradicted him but he knew he had picked up on something that Amelia was unwilling to share with him. She kept her silence. What she and Leanne felt for each other could not easily be defined by a jealous husband.
‘Our feelings don’t matter,’ Leanne insisted when Amelia discussed the growing tensions she sensed between her husband and her close friend. ‘Are you happy with him? That’s all I care about.’
‘Very happy.’ Amelia wondered how Leanne would react if she revealed her bruises. The arrogance that made her believe her love would vanquish Nicholas’s insecurity. Insecurity… the word has a soft sound. Not like violence, a word redolent with danger and a growing fear; a fear that she must force herself to confront. Yet, there were spells of tranquility, even happiness, and trapped her into believing he had succeeded in managing his anger, jealously, resentment, impatience. She was never able to figure out what provoked him most, but she welcomed those interludes when it was possible to dream that all would be well between them.
Twenty-Five
Amelia was aware of the many glances being cast in her direction as they entered the Capella Hotel where the annual KHM Investments Christmas party was being held.
‘Dazzling,’ said Nicholas, stopping to admire the Christmas tree in the foyer. ‘But it’s only a pale imitation of my beautiful wife. Everyone is admiring your dress. I knew it would be perfect on you as soon as I saw it in the window of Brown Thomas.’ He basked in the fact that he had chosen it, along with the shoes, the gauzy wrap and the make-up that accentuated her cheekbones, glossed her lips and nails. His arm encircled her waist as they entered the ballroom. The dress shimmered when she moved. Silver lamé; she wore it like a sheath. She knew he would have accused her of dressing like a tart if she had bought this dress but, in choosing it for her, he had found another way to dominate her.
The ballroom was ablaze with chandeliers and the tables tastefully decorated with long-stemmed winter roses. Christopher Keogh was seated at the main table. He had arrived on his own, the first time without his wife. Rita Keogh had cancer, Nicholas had told Amelia before they left Woodbine, and Christopher was talking about taking early retirement to look after her. As Nicholas’s future would be affected by this decision, Amelia must pay special attention to him. What about your insane suspicions, she had wanted to shout at him, but she kept this thought to herself, unwilling to start another argument before they had even left Woodbine. She had stopped making eye contact with men when they were out together. The change had happened so slowly that it had taken time for her to realise she was taking precautions to avoid provoking his jealousy.
Peter Harris, the other senior partner at KHM, was also seated at the main table. A debonair father of four, he had a mistress in New York who, according to Nicholas, ensured that his business trips were always combined with pleasure. His wife Lilian had the clamped lips of someone used to dealing with lost illusions. As she air-kissed Amelia, she glanced down at her flat stomach and said, softly, yet loud enough for Nicholas to hear, ‘No news, yet, I guess.’
Amelia had no idea if this comment was deliberate or unintentional but, with it, Lilian had touched the latest bone of contention in their marriage. Nicholas had changed his mind about starting a family
and was talking persuasively about the joys of parenting together. She had not argued back, knowing that to do so would only harden his determination. Privately, though, she thought, if he was unable to endure her staying away on overnight business trips or dining with male clients how was he to cope with a baby, who would demand so much of her love and attention?
Finally admitting that what he called his ‘insecurity’ was harming their marriage, he had agreed to couples counselling. Amelia had had to cancel their first appointment when he was unavoidably delayed at work. She had made another one for next week and, afraid he would stop using condoms, she had also made an appointment, without his knowledge, at the Well Woman Centre to discuss alternative methods of contraception.
She sat between Christopher and Peter’s personal assistant, Isabelle Langdon. Sitting opposite Amelia, and looking regal in midnight-blue organza, was KHM’s contract solicitor, Rosemary Williams. Amelia had met both women at a previous function and had discussed Isabelle’s plans to downsize to a smaller house as soon as her daughter left home. She had shown Amelia photographs of a bungalow and asked her opinion on whether or not it would be a good buy. Amelia, noting the location and condition of the property, had advised her to go for it.
She was now living in the bungalow and her daughter was in Australia, she said, after greeting Amelia warmly.
‘She’s become a beach bum.’ She laughed as she clicked into the gallery on her mobile and showed the photographs to Amelia.
The Pacific Ocean, glistening. Vast waves, as curved as question marks, hurtling towards shore. A young woman soaring above them on a bodyboard, poised and assured as she rode through the froth and the fury. Amelia’s heart skipped a beat, as it always did at the sight of an untrammelled ocean.
