Home Truths

by Tina Seskis

  ‘Chocolate,’ she lied.

  ‘Oh,’ Alex said. He tried to disguise the annoyance in his tone. ‘I’ll call you soon, princess. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too,’ she said, but it was an automatic response. A ritual. Afterwards she sat for ages glaring into her phone, willing it to tell her something . . . but no matter how hard she stared, the answer wouldn’t come.

  39

  CHRISTIE

  As Christie swung the car round the corner into her road, she could see the lights of the Christmas tree all the way down the street, and she smiled at the fact that she knew her husband so well. Thank God for Paul, she thought, as she parked up, watching the lights softly dimming and brightening through the open curtains. The decorations made everything feel more normal, and it would be nice for Daisy and Jake too, even if they pretended to scoff at the Home Alone look. As she pulled on the handbrake, she felt so tremendously grateful to Paul, to be coming home to him, her heart almost felt as if it would burst.

  Christie got out of the car and approached the house. A wreath had been hung on the sage-green front door, and it was the one they’d had for years, with a fluffy owl in the middle that Daisy had always loved, and there was something about that gesture that made Christie’s eyes smart again. What was wrong with her? She’d been frozen for weeks, and now it seemed that she was crying at bloody everything. She rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. Normally she wouldn’t bother with her house keys because Paul would let her in, but now she scrabbled in her bag for them. Oh good, she thought, as the door opened with just the Yale key – he was home. He always double-locked the door when he went out, even if he was just popping out to the shops for five minutes.

  It felt cold in the house. The hallway had a faintly musty, earthy smell to it. A stillness. There was a neat pile of unopened cards on the hall table and that was typical Paul too. He always left them for her to open, even though most were addressed to them both. ‘Hellooo!’ she called. She plonked her bag on the polished floorboards and poked her head into the sitting room. The Christmas tree was in its customary position, in the window, and he’d done such a good job with it. The lights were set to her favourite twinkling position and there was barely a bauble she would move. She smiled when she saw the kids’ stockings hanging on the mantelpiece, yet still she felt uneasy. Where was Paul? It was almost as if something had become unplugged inside her, and on top of the crying jag in the car the world felt dangerous, and unstable, as if something was terribly, irrevocably wrong. She left the living room and went out into the kitchen, her heart thumping now.

  ‘Paul!’ she called. Maybe he was hiding in there for some unfathomable reason, to surprise her yet further – but no. The kitchen was empty, and in a mild state of disarray, although normally Paul would have been sure to have cleaned it up before Christie got home. There was no sign of dinner on the go either. Something must have happened. Perhaps he’d gone out after all and had forgotten to lock the mortise for once. Christie shrugged off her coat, hung it over the back of the chair. Her legs felt jumpy, as if she were standing on hot coals. For a moment she wanted time to stop right there, as she fidgeted in the kitchen, in her oldest jeans, her most comfortable jumper, her battered Converse. She didn’t want the future to come at her. She wanted to hold it back, stay here in this moment, in the ‘before’ time . . .

  Christie forced herself to stand completely still. She held her breath. She listened. But of course you can only hold back time for fractions of a millionth of a lifetime . . . and now it was coming. It was coming. Suddenly the future was crashing towards her, bringing with it the past and the present and the whole fucking shebang, and it was all mixed up and it was impossible. Impossible to stop. Impossible to start. Impossible to ever go on. And yet time stops for no man, and she had no idea who had said that, but it seemed it was true. Time was, right now, inevitably, racing towards her at top speed, like a double wave on the beach, coming, ever coming, and it was horrible and ghastly and nightmare-inducing, and too, too sad.

  Christie leant against the worktop, her head feeling as though it were caving in, cracking from the enormity of the suspicion. Maybe he’d left her. His absence felt concrete, a permanence, as if he were never coming back.

  Once more she called out into the silence, despite knowing it was hopeless. Eventually she moved. She needed to check for herself, look for the pulled-out drawers, the empty coat hangers, dangling like implements of torture. There was no time to lose.

  ‘Pauuuuul!’ she yelled, as she rushed back into the hallway and started up the stairs, two at a time, her footsteps thudding and rhythmic and ominous.

  40

  ELEANOR

  The demands of Alex’s job were beginning to have an effect on their children, Eleanor was sure of it. It had been hard to witness Brianna’s disappointment that her father had missed her Christmas show, even though she’d done her best to make light of it. Brianna was a daddy’s girl, and would never hear a word said against him. But her husband’s absence had been tough on Eleanor too, and she hadn’t expected that. She’d hated sitting in the audience alone, and she’d wanted to turn around and reassure people that Brianna did indeed have a father, but that he was away on business – very important, secret business – but of course she hadn’t. There had been something about the hall, and all the other parents, that had triggered memories of Eleanor’s shame when her father had failed to come to her recitals. At least Alex had rung Brianna – her own dad would swear blind he’d be there, and then just not show up. That was partly why Eleanor had first been attracted to Alex – her future husband’s devotion to her had been the diametric opposite of how her father had ever been. There had been something very secure about marrying a policeman, and it had suited her, at first.

  Eleanor’s breath was labouring as she marched up the hill towards Crouch End. Crappy hills, she thought. It hadn’t been like that in Maine, where everyone drove everywhere anyway, nor in Manhattan, where at least the walking had been flat, punctuated by block after block, numerical proof that you were getting somewhere. In this part of North London there was barely a horizontal route to be found. She would have loved to have moved out to a nice Home Counties town, like Lizzie had, but Alex hadn’t wanted to leave the city, had preferred to stay close to the action. Of course, Eleanor admired his commitment, but things had felt different in London lately. It wasn’t merely the heightened security threat. It was also the fact of the family having to play second fiddle to it. After all, one day it might be Brianna’s wedding that Alex failed to make, or the birth of his first grandchild – and Eleanor and Brianna both knew it. Only her son seemed genuinely sanguine about the situation.

  ‘It’s his job, Mum,’ Mason had said, when she’d retorted this morning that the reason the bathroom door lock was still broken was because his father was never around to bloody well fix it. And then she’d felt mad at herself that she’d said ‘bloody well’, like an English person, and it had made her feel unfathomably homesick for a second. For America. For her mom. For an American summer camp where she’d fallen in love with—

  Eleanor pulled herself up. She had to stop thinking about Rufus like that. It was hardly surprising, given recent circumstances, but still – it wasn’t on.

  She crossed the side road, strode up past the hairdresser’s and the art gallery, and hurried along the crowded street, head down, trying not to be noticed. It seemed like wherever she went she’d know someone, and there were advantages and disadvantages to living in the same place for years on end. The middle-aged woman in designer gym wear passing her now looked familiar, but then most of the women from her spin class looked the same – thin, honed, hard of face. The well-dressed woman with the round pretty face just coming out of Waitrose loaded down with shopping looked like one of the mothers from back when her kids had been in primary school – or maybe her familiar, homely features meant she was someone off daytime telly. It was hard to tell sometimes, whether you knew them, or they knew
you.

  Eleanor stopped a few yards from the coffee shop, breathing heavily. It was the place of the moment and invariably rammed, despite being decked out like an old lady’s house – and Eleanor had no idea why that would be trendy, and it seemed she still struggled with the idiosyncrasies of English culture.

  She peered in through the lace curtain. The man with his back to the window looked just like Rufus, and her heart jammed, and then jolted. She dithered, thought about fleeing – and then took a sharp, sniffy kind of a breath, and told herself to get a grip. When she entered, she saw that the man wasn’t Rufus at all. Despite his dark hair and somewhat louche demeanour, he was clearly far too young. He must have felt her staring at him though, as he cast a brief uninterested eye over her, before returning his attention to his MacBook.

  Eleanor realised that Rufus himself was in the far corner, beyond the serving counter, and it was still the weirdest thing, seeing him again after all these years. She felt naked, and devious, and utterly disloyal to her husband – and then she reminded herself that it was only a coffee with an old friend, and it was the middle of the day in the middle of Crouch End, and so there was no harm at all to be done. Besides, she was here now. She swallowed hard, gave her demurest smile and approached the table.

  41

  CHRISTIE

  It had been impossible to stay in the house for a single second longer once Christie had found her husband. She’d run from her home, shrieking, her hair flying, her arms flung wide, like an aeroplane. She’d never known whether to be disappointed in herself, for not going to him, or whether that was the normal response to happening upon such a scene. Beyond that single grisly image, imprinted on her consciousness forever, she had only fragments of memory, intermingled and broken, like crushed shells on the beach, about what had happened next. She recalled a blanket being wrapped around her, and she could still feel the scratchiness of it against her cheek, as if, despite the horror of what she had witnessed, all that could get through to her now were physical sensations. Rough wool on skin. Hot, sweet tea. She knew that someone must have called the police, because she could recall blue lights whirling and swirling, intermingling with the fairy lights. She’d heard sirens wailing too, although that might well have been the noise she’d been making. Daisy had turned up at some point, but Christie couldn’t remember seeing Jake. Had Jake come? She didn’t know. All she knew was that the people opposite must have taken her in, as she was upstairs in Karen Sampford’s house right now, and there was someone in the bed behind her, and it couldn’t be Paul, because he was dead.

  As Christie continued staring out of the window, it felt like she was watching a scene from the twenty-four-hour news, about their street, their house, them. Blue-and-white fluttery tape had been wrapped around the house, as if it were a Christmas present to the local press, as well as to those neighbours who lived vicariously through other people’s tragedies. The sight of the tape, juxtaposed against the soft-glow tree lights that no one had thought to turn off, made Christie’s legs give way. As she clung to the window ledge, the shock was filling up her whole vision, leaving no space even for grief. It was as if she were sinking, and the water was coming over her head, and she couldn’t breathe . . .

  ‘Mum?’ came a voice, and it sounded too old for its body. ‘Are you OK? Come and get back into bed.’

  Christie dropped to her haunches on the carpet, which was as soft and springy as moss, and put her head in her hands. Poor Daisy. How could they have done this to Daisy? Her daughter was still only twenty-one. She didn’t deserve to have that note of despair in her voice, as if nothing would ever be right in her world again, no matter how hard she tried to disguise it. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair, but for this to happen to her children . . .

  Christie heard Daisy get out of bed and come over to her. She felt her lie down and put her head in her mother’s lap. Christie smoothed Daisy’s hair, stroked her forehead, as if her daughter were a little girl again, and the connection was not a relief exactly, but at least a reminder to Christie that she was alive. That she was real flesh and blood still, and so was her daughter. That had to mean something.

  ‘Jake,’ Christie said now. Her voice was that of a stranger’s. ‘Daisy, love, where’s Jake?’

  She could feel her daughter cease breathing for a second or two. The waiting was stressful, but somehow Christie didn’t want to know the answer either. Maybe it was better in this in-between time, before the facts unfurled themselves, as they surely would.

  ‘He’s . . . he’s in Turkey, Mum,’ Daisy said at last. ‘He’s on his way home.’

  ‘Turkey?’ Christie couldn’t compute it. ‘What’s he doing in Turkey?’ In her mind’s eye she saw a puffed-up black-and-brown bird with a beady red eye wearing a festive hat, and then she saw the machete coming down, slicing through air and feathers and bone, and then just a body, running in circles. It was Christmas, after all.

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure, Mum. He’s coming.’

  ‘OK,’ Christie said. Her brain felt curiously adrift from her emotions, as if none of this was real. But it was real, which meant it must all be true. The realisation knocked the last of the strength out of her. Gently she shifted Daisy’s head off her lap and shuffled herself down to lie on the carpet, with her arms round her daughter, and the two of them remained there, mute and unmoving, until the house grew quiet again and their bones ran cold, but not as cold as Paul’s.

  42

  ELEANOR

  ‘Nelly!’ said Rufus, standing to greet her, and even that made her cringe. She shouldn’t have come. Rufus held out his hand formally, and she held out hers. The touch of his skin was like a memory, a creeping, insidious impression of the past. ‘Thanks for coming. How are you?’

  ‘I’m good, thanks. You?’

  Rufus was studying her, and it was unnerving. ‘You’re looking well, Nelly,’ he said softly.

  ‘So are you,’ she replied, but he wasn’t, not really. His face was still attractive, but it had the haunted, harried look of someone who has struggled, and Eleanor wondered with a pang how Rufus really was. She’d only ever thought of him as having made a success of his life, without her. But he’d once been a troubled youth too – perhaps he’d never managed to settle to anything. She had no idea. She had cut him from her life as ruthlessly as an infected limb in her bid to survive, and she’d been proud of herself. And in those days it hadn’t been possible to stalk people the way it was now, through Facebook, which was probably just as well.

  ‘So, what are you having?’ Rufus asked. As he picked up his coffee cup she noticed that his hands trembled slightly.

  ‘Oh, just a latte, thanks,’ she said.

  Rufus gave the tiniest nod of his head, and immediately the young waitress was there, and she took their order (two lattes, one chocolate brownie for Rufus) and then giggled. There was something about Rufus even now. There always had been, of course. He’d been Eleanor’s first love. He’d broken her heart.

  ‘So,’ Eleanor said, ‘what’s new with you?’ And then she laughed, and so did he. Where on earth were they meant to start?

  ‘Well, I got married,’ said Rufus. He put his hand to his forehead and swept his hair back on to his head, and it was an unconscious gesture, and she remembered it being one of the things she’d first noticed about him. She was glad he still had a full head of hair at least, even if it was shorter now and streaked with grey. ‘And then I got divorced.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eleanor. ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘And then I got married again.’ He grinned wryly. ‘. . . And then I got divorced again . . . And then my business went bust.’

  Well, he’s really selling himself, Eleanor thought. Maybe he wasn’t hoping for an affair after all. Perhaps he just wanted to repair old wounds, make amends to her somehow. It didn’t matter, though. It was all in the past.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ she said. ‘Do . . . do you have any children?’

  ‘Two,’ Rufus said. ‘Fr
om my first marriage. You?’

  ‘Same,’ Eleanor said. ‘A boy and a girl.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Rufus. ‘I don’t see much of them these days, though. My first ex-wife isn’t, shall we say, my greatest fan.’

  Oh God. Although Eleanor felt bad for Rufus, she wanted to get away now, reverse her decision to see him. She wanted to go home to her husband, who had saved her in her hour of need, had protected her when Rufus hadn’t . . .

  And then she remembered that Alex was away still, so there was no point in rushing home at all. That was partly why she was here, after all.

  ‘So, you’re still married,’ Rufus said, looking at her wedding ring. It wasn’t a question, and yet it felt uncomfortable as a statement, and there was something about it that bothered her. He turned his gaze upwards to her simple grey jumper, her necklace, the smooth shine of her hair, her wide-set eyes. It felt like a calculated look, as if he were deciding whether to buy her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what’s his name?’

  ‘Alex,’ said Eleanor, but she felt even more unnerved now, as if she were compounding the disloyalty. She wasn’t even sure why Rufus had asked; what was it to him? She put her hands to the nape of her neck and played with the two drop pearls of the necklace Alex had given her, for each of the children she’d borne him. She shouldn’t be here.

  ‘Rufus,’ she said now. ‘Why did you want to have a coffee with me?’

  Rufus looked wistful suddenly, and ever so slightly ashamed. And then his expression became unreadable again, and she felt the urge to reach out, touch his cheekbone, check whether he was real. She put her hands in her lap and gripped her knuckles.

  ‘Nelly, why did you leave that day?’ His voice was soft, like mud. She felt stuck in the question, as if she couldn’t escape it.

  ‘What do you mean? You told me to go.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for the conversation to end up like that. I meant to tell you that I was confused, and that I didn’t know what I wanted, but Nelly, I was wrong. I got it so wrong . . .’ His voice started to break. ‘I searched for you, but I could never find you . . .’