Home Truths

by Tina Seskis

  And yet, as the minutes dragged on, and she still hadn’t heard from him, somehow Eleanor knew. She could feel it. Something was badly, mortally wrong – but she just didn’t know what to do about it. All she could do right now was try to keep the hard, tight ball of panic in her stomach contained, keep checking the news, keep waiting. Keep hoping. What other choice did she have?

  67

  CHRISTIE

  Lonely. That was how Christie was feeling, and it was such a strange sensation. She’d got married today, and it had been idyllic, and she was in a place akin to paradise, and her handsome new husband was lying snoring softly beside her, and they’d drunk champagne and made incredible, passionate love. And yet now she felt lonely. The answer was gut-wrenching in its obviousness.

  She missed Paul. It was a terrible, terrible realisation. Australia had always been their one-day destination, when the kids were through university, when the mortgage was paid off (or at least before Paul’s business had taken off, and they’d had one to pay off). They’d planned to travel around in a camper-van. Paul wasn’t meant to have found her old suitcase, and then fallen out of the loft and killed himself. Jake and Daisy were meant to be safe and secure still, with parents who loved each other. They weren’t meant to be hurt and upset by her actions, by her going to the other side of the world to marry someone she’d met in a car crash.

  What on earth had she done?

  Christie sat up in bed, her heart racing. She didn’t know how it had come to this. On the beach earlier, the moment had been gloriously azure, and perfumed, and Piers had gazed into her eyes and made her feel so special, and she’d felt truly grateful that happiness had come for her again. And now she felt like a traitor. It was as if her first marriage had ended so suddenly, so abruptly, so violently, that even though nearly two years was a just-about-acceptable amount of time to wait, the guilt refused to leave her. It had followed her here, to the other side of the world, to her second honeymoon. Grief and joy. Joy and grief. The polarity of her position was killing her.

  As Christie got out of bed, she could feel the soft swoosh of her silk nightgown as she walked. It was the most decadent item of nightwear she’d ever owned and she’d loved it. She’d felt like a forties movie star. Now she felt like a silly middle-aged woman in a negligée, bought for a husband she barely knew. Mutton dressed as lamb. A pig in lipstick.

  Christie walked on to the balcony and gazed out to sea. The moon shot slivers of light across the water’s shimmering surface and the wind was so light and warm it felt like someone was out there, whispering to her.

  Paul. What was he trying to say? The feeling of dissociation was searing. She turned sharply and went back inside. She found her iPad by the side of the bed, locked herself in the bathroom and typed in: ‘guilt at remarrying when husband has died’. A host of articles popped up about how normal her feelings were, how there was room in her heart to love both men, how what she had done wasn’t a sin. It must be true, she told herself. It said so, on the Internet. Yet still she remained sitting on the edge of the bath, her mind in overload, her memories flicking back and forth between the past and the present, trying to understand every last thing that had led her to here.

  ‘Till death us do part.’

  And that’s when Christie realised it. Death ended a marriage – that was the vow. She needed to pay heed to it. She came out of the bathroom and stared across the room to the bed, watched her new husband sleep. He looked so innocent, and it was endearing. It was done. She had him, and he had her. Everything would be all right. Everything would feel better in the morning.

  Christie slipped back into bed, and instinctively put her hands to her new husband’s face, kissed him gently. He jolted, and when he opened his eyes in the half-light he looked panicked, as if he didn’t know where he was for a second. And then he smiled sleepily.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Romaine,’ he said. He yawned. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Hmm, so you thought you’d wake me up?’

  ‘We-ell . . .’ said Christie. ‘We are on honeymoon.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ said Piers. His voice had a gentle mocking tone to it now. He reached across and pulled her to him. ‘We-ell . . . I suppose if you’re going to insist . . .’

  68

  ELEANOR

  Anxiety was infecting everyone, making the whole world nervous. It was three and a half hours since Eleanor had first heard the news, and she still hadn’t heard from Alex – and she’d long stopped believing that everything would be OK. Now she was certain that the news would be bad . . . she just needed to know how bad. It was no good. She couldn’t wait any longer.

  The odd thing was, it was only once she’d finally decided to do it that Eleanor realised she didn’t have a clue how to contact her husband at work. All she knew was that his office was based somewhere near London Bridge and that he worked in counter-terrorism. When she tried googling it, no numbers came up, but she supposed that was hardly surprising. It wasn’t as if they were going to advertise their services. In the absence of any other ideas, she called 111, the non-emergency public number.

  ‘Hello, Police.’ The voice was distinctly London, coarse, no-nonsense, female.

  Eleanor tried not to sound out of breath. She deliberately slowed down her words, so they wouldn’t run into each other, become blurred. She adopted the most English version of her accent.

  ‘Hello, I’m trying to track down my husband. I’m . . . I’m worried that he might have been caught up in the recent incident in the West End.’

  The woman didn’t skip a beat. ‘Madam, you need to call the victims’ helpline.’ She started to rattle off a long freephone number.

  ‘No, my husband’s a police officer. He was on duty, and I can’t get hold of him.’

  ‘Oh.’ The woman paused. ‘What division is he in?’

  ‘Anti-terror.’

  The operator seemed a little more cooperative now. ‘OK, I’ll see if I can get a number for him. What’s his name?’

  ‘Alex Moffatt.’

  ‘And he’s based at London Bridge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hold the line, please.’

  Eleanor waited, her lips pressed together, her breath edgy. She drummed the fingers of her left hand on her jeans. She knew the chances of Alex actually being dead were slim, but she couldn’t explain this feeling, of just needing to know. She felt his absence, and it was a visceral thing, as if he were far away, dead already.

  At last the operator came back on the line. Her tone had changed again, but Eleanor couldn’t pinpoint it. Was it thinly disguised sorrow? Pity even?

  ‘Mrs Moffatt? I’m sorry, but I can’t get hold of anyone who can help you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Possible outcomes danced in front of Eleanor’s eyes. Did the operator know something that she wasn’t telling? All Eleanor wanted to know was that her husband was safe.

  ‘I’ll have to give you another number to call.’ The woman’s voice had resumed its barely concealed impatience, as though her switchboard was jamming and she needed to get Eleanor off the line, no matter how parlous the other woman’s plight might be. ‘Good luck,’ the operator said, and then she hung up, leaving Eleanor staring at her useless, mute phone, bewildered and full of foreboding.

  69

  CHRISTIE

  Piers was dead to the world, post-coitally snoring, but Christie still couldn’t sleep. She was thinking about Jake again, and no matter how much she tried to reassure herself that all was well, she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that there was something badly wrong with him. Even from Australia she kept calling him and emailing, but he still hadn’t got back to her. The feeling she had was ominous, and it was similar to how she’d felt when he’d first started secondary school. A mother’s intuition was surely too strong to deny, and so it had proved back then. She’d fretted endlessly, an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach whenever Jake was out of the
house. Once she’d even gone and waited for him after school, on the pretext that she’d been passing by on the way home from shopping, and she’d parked up outside the ugly blue building and watched the children coming out, in straggles at first, and then on a wild surge of hormones and semi-hysterical behaviour. Just as she thought she must have missed Jake amongst the throng, she’d seen a group of boys, with loosened ties and scuffed shoes and shirts hanging out, laughing and joking and jostling each other as they spilled out on to the pavement. And then behind them had come Jake, alone, leaden-legged, and he’d seemed so sad and timid Christie had longed to get out of the car and rush over and give him a hug, but she’d known that would have been social suicide for him. Instead she’d waited in the car, watching impotently through the windscreen as one of the boys in the group had turned, said something unknown, making Jake visibly shrink into his blazer – and there was something about the instant and habitual manner in which he did it that made Christie realise that this was not a one-off. The other boy had proceeded to walk back towards Jake and barge into him, and Jake had cringed, tried to ignore the incident, keep on walking. Next, another of the boys had come over and grabbed Jake’s bag from his shoulder and thrown it to the ground, and then all the boys had crowded around the bag and stamped on it, laughing, before walking off without even looking back. Lastly Christie had witnessed, in the dumb silence of her car, Jake scrabbling on the ground, picking up his pencil case and wind-strewn, trampled-on papers and books, and she’d been too distraught to even go and help him. She’d always hated herself for that. That she’d let those boys do that to her son. That she hadn’t stepped in and rescued him. That maybe that might have made all the difference. But it had all happened so quickly, it was as if it were happening to another boy, one she hardly recognised. And that had made her feel even sadder for Jake – that he hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her. So when she’d finally wrenched open the car door and rushed to him, the humiliation on Jake’s blotched, teary face had instantly amplified a million-fold, that she’d witnessed it. And instead of letting his mother comfort him, he had begged her not to go to the school, and once he’d got into the car he had taken his anger out on her, yelling at her to stay out of it, turning his head towards the passenger window, his fists clenched as if ready to punch someone. Her baby. Her poor, tortured baby. Christie still felt sick at the memory. She’d never been able to get close to Jake after that, and maybe that was where this had all started.

  What had all started?

  Christie shifted in the bed, and listened to the noise outside the hotel window, where the sea was emanating its rhythmic, primeval roar into the midnight blackness. She found herself longing for everything to be all right again. But of course that was impossible. The future was out there, as sure as the sun would soon be rising, seeping its way into this little corner of paradise. There was nothing on earth that she could do to stop it, no matter what desolation it would bring. She could feel its dread thrum, coming at her.

  Christie shivered, reached out a hand to touch Piers’s firm, warm body, as if to prove he was there with her. As she felt his breath rising and falling, she did her best to convince herself that she was wrong, that more hurt and pain wasn’t due to engulf her family – and then she shut her eyes, and tried her hardest to go to sleep.

  70

  ELEANOR

  It was now more than five hours since the attack and Alex still hadn’t been in touch. Eleanor had failed to track down the unit he worked in, and no one had any news about him, and the only explanations she could think of were that he was either one of the as-yet-unidentified injured, or else he was already dead. Maybe she was being melodramatic, but what else could explain it?

  Eleanor forced herself to consider other, more plausible, options. Perhaps he was somewhere where there was no access to phones for some reason. Or the monstrosity of the attack and his busyness in the aftermath had made him completely forget to contact her. If that was the case, and he wasn’t actually dead, she’d damn well kill him for it when she finally saw him.

  Eleanor looked at her watch, again, but only three minutes had gone by since the last time. Why hadn’t he been in touch? She watched the news endlessly, to see if she could spot Alex, even though she knew she was becoming obsessive.

  As Eleanor checked her phone, for the zillionth time, she found herself picturing a tiny shiny line of something that might take the edge off her extreme anxiety, and that made her think of being holed up at fifteen years of age in some squat on the Lower East Side, mooning over a Kurt Cobain lookalike. She’d only done it a few times before her father had gone mad and packed her off to summer camp, but even so. Teenagers seemed so different now, so straight almost, and Eleanor thought it might be because there was nothing to rail against any more. Her kids had been able to do pretty much what they wanted, when they wanted, and she and Alex were still together, and stable enough, to boot, and so there had been absolutely no need for Brianna and Mason to rebel like she had as a teenager. But how would they cope in this scenario, if her worst fears were realised?

  Loneliness invaded Eleanor, marbled through the fear. She tried Alex again, and then made the next call before she’d had time to think. And yet, as she waited for it to connect, she didn’t hang up. Hearing the single long beeps felt like coming home. Suddenly time rolled back, and she was desperate to talk to him, prayed he would answer. He’d saved her once. Maybe she’d misjudged him, should have asked him to help her all those years ago, after Rufus had dumped her. Or later, when she was being terrorised by a love-crazed stalker. She wouldn’t be here now if she had done, with a missing husband she was no longer sure she loved anyway.

  ‘Hello?’ said the voice.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ said Eleanor.

  71

  CHRISTIE

  Waking up on the other side of the world to find out that her capital city had been under attack was difficult for Christie to process. She’d woken early, a feeling of unexplained tension still in her chest, which had made further sleep impossible. There’d been something in the air. She’d left her new husband dozing in bed and had stepped out on to the balcony, to sit overlooking a balmy bay with a single white yacht swinging, with all the time in the world, on its anchor. She’d taken her phone with her, to check whether there were any messages from Jake, but there hadn’t been, of course. There was one from Daisy, though – ‘Mum, I’m safe’ – and that was how Christie had found out. Safe from what? Christie had immediately loaded the BBC website, and her revulsion at what had happened, the people who must have been killed, all those injured, was almost instantly superseded by thoughts about Jake. Where was Jake?

  Christie stood up, and then remained motionless for a minute, unsure where to go, what to do. She studied her hands, the new ring that blinked at her, jaunty in its insouciance. She blew out her cheeks, flattened them with her palms, like a child, covered her eyes, drew her fingers down her face, pulled her bottom lip into a comedy pout. And then she turned and walked back inside, where the room was draped with soft light, making the atmosphere gauzy, dreamy, ghostlike. Her head was pounding with trepidation. She tried to ground herself, make sense of where she was, in a honeymoon hotel on the other side of the world, with a handsome new husband in the capacious bed. It felt even more wrong to be here now, when people were suffering and dying at home. Even the hotel itself felt inappropriate. It was luxurious, in that muted way, with high-thread-count linens and clean, neat lines, and she wished that the room had more heart, more personality to it. Nothing felt real.

  Christie went over to the bed. ‘Piers, wake up,’ she said. She nudged him then, and when he opened his eyes, she got that feeling again, as if he were a sweet little fawn. It was confusing. But it was the hope in his eyes that was so endearing, that made her love him. She had to remember that.

  ‘There’s been another terrorist attack,’ she said. ‘In London.’

  Piers’s expression changed slowly, and she didn’t know the word for t
he look on his face. Horror didn’t even begin to describe it.

  ‘Shit, that’s bad,’ he said at last, the master of understatement. ‘Are your kids OK?’

  ‘Daisy’s fine; she texted me.’ Christie cleared her throat, but still her voice was low and raspy, nervy. ‘I can’t get hold of Jake.’

  ‘Oh?’ He raised his eyebrows at her, and there was something about the look that made her sure he knew what she suspected. Yet how could he know? She’d never confided in anyone, not even Daisy. The unease had grown and festered and expanded inside her like rising dough . . . and maybe it was beginning to show on the outside at last.

  Piers said nothing more. He got up and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Christie sat down on the bed and hung her head between her knees, said a prayer for the victims. She tried to call Jake again, and then she rang Daisy, but Daisy hadn’t heard from him either.

  Christie sat quietly, scrolling through the headlines on her phone. When Piers still hadn’t come out of the bathroom, she knocked gently.

  ‘Piers. Are you all right in there?’

  She heard a kind of grunt of acknowledgment, and then after a few moments Piers opened the door. He had a towel wrapped around his midriff, although he didn’t appear to have showered. His face was white.

  ‘I’m OK,’ Piers said. ‘Sorry, my stomach is a bit dodgy. Any news from Jake?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Piers took Christie by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. It was as if he were trying to convince himself, rather than her.

  ‘Everything will be all right, Christie,’ he said. ‘D’you want to go in the shower first?’ The question was a non sequitur.