by Jenny Harper
‘Yes, well,’ Molly was crotchety. ‘I don’t think it’ll come to that.’
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ Lexie looked at her watch. ‘It’s only four.’
‘There’s nothing on tonight and she told me to go get some rest. See?’ She smiled briefly at Lexie. ‘She does care about my health.’
‘Oh sorry, Moll. Were you lying down?’ Lexie was stricken. ‘And I’m interrupting.’
‘You’re all right. What was it, anyway? How did it go with the woman at The Maker’s Mark?’
‘Brilliant. She promised she’ll let me know in a few days, but she loved the idea, and she adored “Charlotte”.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I’m not counting chickens. Well, I am, actually. Anyway, like I said, I went to see Carlotta.’ She glanced at Molly. ‘Sorry, Moll, I won’t bore you, I promise I won’t, but I really needed to know what was going on so that I can deal with it.’
‘And knowing what happened would help?’
‘Yes. Like it would with Jamie. Actually,’ Lexie unfastened her bag and started to rummage around, ‘it helped a lot more than I expected, because now I know why Jamie was driving that night.’
‘You do?’ Molly sounded startled.
‘When Jonas said that Carlotta had slept with half the town, I thought, that’s it! She must have been having an affair with Jamie! Look,’ she pulled out an envelope, ‘I found this in Jamie’s room, tucked into a book. It’s a Valentine’s card.’ She pulled the card out of the envelope and turned it towards Molly. ‘See the squiggle? It’s how the Spanish write their question marks. I reckoned it must have been from Carlotta.’
Molly went white. She clutched at the edge of the table, sank her head onto her forearms and started to moan.
‘What’s wrong? What is it?’ Lexie dropped the card onto the table and curled a sympathetic arm round her, but Molly lashed out sideways with such force that Lexie toppled over and lay sprawled on the floor.
‘Ow!’ She sat up, rubbing her elbow where it had hit one of the chair legs.
‘Oh God!’ Molly lifted her face at the sound of the crash. She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her jeans and blew her nose noisily. ‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to…’
Lexie scrambled to her feet, bewildered. ‘What’s going on?’
Molly wiped her eyes and took a series of deep breaths. She reached across the table to where Lexie had dropped the card and envelope, her hands trembling noticeably. She turned the envelope over and stared at it.
‘I suppose you had to know sometime.’
‘Know? Know what?’
Molly handed her the envelope. Focused on the contents, Lexie had never thought to examine the outside. She looked at the address: Mr Jamie Gordon, Fernhill, Hailesbank, East Lothian.
The handwriting was Molly’s.
‘I don’t understand. What about the Spanish question mark?’
Molly buried her face in her hands.
‘The question mark was a joke.’
The words were muffled.
‘Carlotta made a play for Jamie one night and he had to fend her off. She didn’t know about us, you see.’
She glared at Lexie as if to defy judgement, and said more steadily, ‘We were in love. We loved each other. How else can I put it? We found such joy with each other, such simple, unadulterated passion. Silly word. Unadulterated. Of course I was committing adultery.’
She smiled wanly.
‘I’d never have started seeing him if things hadn’t become so difficult with Adam. He changed. I don’t know where the man I fell in love with went to. Jamie offered me everything I wanted but was no longer getting from Adam.’
Lexie whispered, ‘Oh my God.’
‘It’s a relief to tell you, because no-one ever knew. Adam didn’t know. At least, in the end he guessed I was having an affair, he just didn’t know who with.’
‘Christ.’
‘I was going to leave Adam. Jamie and I had it all planned. We’d buy a little house in Hailesbank so that he could carry on at Gordon’s, and I’d commute into Edinburgh every day. We needed to find the right time to tell people. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for Adam, so that it didn’t affect his work, so that we could sort out the house, all those stupid, practical things. I didn’t hate Adam. I never hated him and I didn’t want to hurt him. It was just that we’d grown apart.’
‘What happened, Moll? What happened that night? Why did everything change?’
Molly sniffed, but found enough self-control to carry on.
‘I think Adam had become suspicious that I was seeing someone else. Jamie and I tried to be so careful, but something had alerted him, I don’t know what. It wasn’t a receipt or a note in my diary or anything tangible, maybe it was just some small change in my behaviour, like dressing with more care or getting my hair done more. That night, he confronted me. I was so shocked I guess I didn’t do a good enough job of denying it. Adam was incandescent. I thought he was going to hit me.’
‘Adam? Adam was going to hit you?’
‘You wouldn’t ever have imagined it, would you?’
Again the wry smile.
‘Quiet, civilised Adam, pillar of the Edinburgh legal establishment. But he just lost it, he became a different person completely. I was scared. Then his phone rang and he saw it was some urgent call from his office he’d been waiting for and he stopped to take it. I grabbed my bag and ran for the door. He was torn between carrying on with the call and abandoning it to stop me escaping. Business won.’
She grimaced.
‘Business always wins with Adam.’
‘You got out?’
‘I dashed out the door and called Jamie. We were so careful, I never used his main mobile, he’d got another one just for me to call, and I used another phone so Adam wouldn’t accidentally find any record of calls or texts to Jamie.’
She started to shake uncontrollably.
‘I’d never have phoned him, Lexie, if I’d had the slightest idea of how he’d react. I didn’t know he’d had too much to drink. I was frightened – and I felt guilty, because I knew I’d wronged Adam, everything had moved on in way I never intended it to. Suddenly I was in a situation I didn’t know how to control and I was in a mess. I’d got my bag, with the spare phone in a zipped pocket buried under a load of tampons, but my car keys weren’t in it, so I couldn’t just drive off. I was frightened that Adam would come rushing out at any minute and run after me and I needed time and space to think about what to do. Jamie was brilliant. He just said, “I’m coming. I’m coming. You’re not to worry. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’m going to look after you.”’
The shaking had become a violent shivering. Lexie’s mouth was dry, she could barely swallow. She wanted to stuff her fingers in her ears, but Jamie’s voice started whispering inside her skull.
Hear her out.
‘But he never came.’
Lexie imagined Molly cowering somewhere in the street, hiding from Adam and waiting for a lover who never came. Perhaps dialling his special mobile again and again, growing more and more desperate as the hours went on. Not knowing until Lexie phoned her early the next morning, distraught by the news of Jamie’s accident.
Lexie tried to recall how Molly had reacted that awful morning, but she couldn’t remember. She’d been too distraught herself, too bound up in the news that Jamie was in a coma to think about others. Aghast, she said, ‘Oh my God, Molly. How awful. How truly, truly awful.’
‘I’m so, so sorry. If it hadn’t been for me, Jamie would still be alive. If I hadn’t called him—’
Lexie said, ‘You’ve lived with this for a whole year and you’ve never said a word?’
‘I’m so sorry.’
The confession became a wail.
‘You can’t imagine how guilty I feel. I watched you all suffering, I watched Jamie die, for God’s sake, and I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t let your last memory of Jamie be the knowledge that
he’d been scheming and lying and plotting to break up my marriage.’
‘But that’s not what it was like. Was it?’
‘No! But what would you have thought if I’d barged in while he was lying there and moved the focus onto myself? While he couldn’t even tell you about how he felt? I couldn’t do it, Lexie, don’t you see? I just couldn’t do it.’
‘So you had to suffer alone. Oh Molly!’
There was a long silence. Outside a car drove onto the gravel and there were voices – the gardeners, perhaps. A bird called to another with a song that was achingly sweet. Overhead, the distant growl of an aeroplane passed into the ether.
‘I can’t ever forgive myself, Lex. I don’t expect you to forgive me.’
‘Forgive you?’ Lexie was astonished. ‘You silly cow, don’t you see? It’s a relief.’
‘A relief?’
‘Now I know what happened, it’s not just some awful, endless mystery. And I know that Jamie had found real happiness with you. I’d guessed, in a way, that he must have fallen in love, because he was so relaxed in those last months. I just wish you’d both been able to tell us earlier.’
‘Do you think I haven’t thought that a hundred times? The “if only” game is endless.’
Lexie reached out and laid her hand over Molly’s.
‘It’s okay, Moll. We can’t change what happened, but it’s going to get better now, for all of us. I promise.’
She couldn’t hear Jamie’s voice in her head, but there was a caress on her cheek, so faint that it was barely there.
Jamie’s farewell.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Catalogue number 34: leather shoes, notable not for the shoe itself, but for the repair. Donor: James Andrews, Guildford. ‘Spare a thought in your work for the craftsmanship of the shoemaker and shoe repairer. My grandfather submitted this pair of shoes for a Gold Medal competition for shoe repairs in 1934. You can see how exquisite his work is. The winner, however, topped him with an ornamental repair involving an astonishing 38,947 brass nails!’
The effects of Molly’s confession were immediate – it was as if someone had eased the tight lacing on a corset that had prevented breathing almost completely, and then let out the laces a fraction more, so that a small gasp was feasible. In time, with more laces loosened, it might be possible to breathe normally.
Lexie and Molly went together to tell Tom and Martha and, although it was difficult, they were not nearly as judgemental as Molly had feared. Tom merely nodded, but he took her hand.
‘We’d have welcomed you, lass,’ he said, ‘If Jamie loved you, that’d have been good enough for us.’
Molly could barely hold back her tears at his generosity.
Martha, in tears herself, hugged Molly tightly.
‘You should have told us, Molly. You should have told us.’
Lexie said, ‘She couldn’t Mum, not then. And later – it was too late.’
‘I know.’
Martha released Molly and cupped the girl’s damp face in her hands.
‘I respect your sensitivity, Molly, just as I respect your honesty now.’
The next night Lexie was lying in her bed at the cottage, unable to sleep. She remembered the painting she’d been working on when Jamie’s accident had happened. It was still standing in the garden room, its face to the wall.
She climbed out of bed and pulled on a sweater. It was October now and the nights were cold. When she flicked the switch the light was reflected in thirty panes of glass, bright and unforgiving. There would be no hiding from the truth here.
She pulled at the corner of the huge canvas and dragged it into the middle of the room. It wasn’t easy to turn it, but eventually she managed. She propped it against the sofa and stood back.
Face the truth. It wasn’t Jamie’s voice she heard, Jamie’s voice had faded, as if he has found peace at last. It was her own. Face the truth – because otherwise how can you move forward?
She examined the painting again.
The sense of desolation was overwhelming. It was certainly evocative (as it was meant to be) but the disgust Lexie had begun to feel after Jamie’s accident roared back towards her. It was so, so wrong.
At last she understood why she’d felt compelled to withdraw from the exhibition. It had been more than the dishonesty of the work – it had been an irrational but overpowering feeling that somehow the fraudulence and the darkness of her subject matter had combined to cause Jamie’s death. She had foreshadowed the accident in some way that had actually made it happen.
Lexie spread her hands and laughed.
How ridiculous. How stupid.
She hadn’t caused Jamie’s death. Someone else had started a trail of actions that had led to that, it hadn’t been her at all.
She kicked at the canvas, once, twice. A dent appeared, then a tear. She ripped at it with her hands, overtaken by frenzy. When it was well beyond repair, she smiled at the wreckage with satisfaction. There. Another barrier had been removed. Perhaps tomorrow she would paint.
But it wasn’t that simple. Lexie slept soundly but not for nearly long enough, and when she woke she knew she had to move aside another stone in the bumpy road she was travelling.
It was still only six thirty. If she reached Cameron’s cottage on the farm early enough, she’d be sure to catch him. She had to exorcise the ghost of their relationship.
She shoved Carlotta’s red stilettos into her bag and mounted her bike.
It was three miles to Cameron’s uncle’s farm, but the road was a pretty one. As she cycled, the dawn was breaking. A watery sun began to appear above the treetops so that leaves and branches were shown in spiky silhouette against its light. Birds flitted in and out of the hedgerows and the countryside asserted its right to live again as it emerged from its night time shroud. In the distance, Lexie heard a tractor fire up its engine and prayed that it wasn’t Cameron, off to work already.
She raced down a steep hill, the wind ruffling her short hair. On either side of her, the hedges of a mile back had become drystone walls. It wasn’t far now. She rounded a sharp bend in the road and saw the sign, ‘Threipstone Farm’, a hundred yards further along. The tractor was emerging. She peered up at the cab, but it wasn’t Cameron, it was a man she didn’t recognise. She acknowledged him with a wave, waited until he had turned into the road, and swung her bicycle onto the rough track up to the farm.
She’d only been here once, when she’d helped Cameron move some of his belongings, but she knew it was the third cottage in the block. She leaned her bike against a whitewashed wall and padded across the rough cobbles. There was an old Belfast sink under the window. Someone, at some time, had filled it with earth and planted it with something pretty, but now it had become overgrown and filled with weeds. Lexie couldn’t imagine Cameron tending it. She looked at it with pity, but there was nothing she could do to alleviate its suffering.
Six fifty. The sun had inched higher, but a low mist hung over the valley, lending the whole countryside an ethereal air.
She was worried about disturbing the workers who lived in the cottages on either side, but there was no other way of doing this. She lifted her hand and knocked.
No response.
She knocked again.
Just as she was raising her hand for the third time, there was a muttering and a clanking. A key turned and the door jerked open.
‘What? I did my extra hours yester— Oh. It’s you.’
Cameron was standing there bare-chested, faded navy jogger bottoms sliding from his waist across the muscles of his abdomen down onto the bones of his hips. Lexie caught her breath at the sight, but there was no way she was to be distracted. She pulled the red shoes out of her bag and held them aloft.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about these.’
He glanced quickly back over his shoulder, then stepped outside, pulling the door behind him so that it was barely open. His arms were covered in tiny goose bumps.
‘You could put som
e clothes on.’
‘I’m fine.’
He grabbed at her arm and hissed, ‘Lexie, what the fuck are you doing here? Didn’t you get my messages? You never replied. I texted you loads of times, for Christ’s sake.’
‘No need to swear,’ Lexie said. ‘I didn’t look at your texts. I wasn’t going to bother with any of your excuses, to be honest, but then I thought, why not hear what the bastard’s got to say for himself? So how about it, Cameron? How about telling me exactly what happened with Carlotta Wood and what it was you got from her that you didn’t get from me?’
‘Shh.’ Cameron looked around apprehensively. ‘Someone’ll hear you.’
‘You could ask me in.’
‘Nah, we’re all right here. Just keep your voice down, will you?’
Lexie glared at him, and waited.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Cameron said. ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you, babes, if you’d only listened.’
His voice was placatory, almost wheedling.
‘Not your fault. She seduced you, I suppose, and you could do nothing about it.’
‘That’s it, more or less, yeah. Well, it was two things, to begin with. You were so busy with your painting that you’d never come out with me anywhere. Remember? Back when you were in that studio at that farm. It got really boring, going to bloody parties on my own. I tried, babes. How many times did I plead with you to come with me to the pub, huh?’
‘So it’s my fault.’
‘No – well not entirely. Like I told you, I wasn’t very mature back then. So when you were busy all the time and Carlotta began to show an interest – well, what was I to do? You must admit she’s one sexy —’
‘So it’s Carlotta’s fault?’
‘Yeah. That’s it!’ He shook his head in sorrow. ‘She never could keep her hands to herself, that one. Jonas has got a tiger by the tail.’
‘Right.’
Lexie found she was clutching the shoes so tightly that her hand was getting sore.
‘So – let me get this straight. I was busy and boring and Carlotta was coming on to you so strongly that you were completely helpless.’
