‘Why don’t you keep it on,’ she suggested.
I lurched back into the real word. I had a feeling it was not a good idea to confront Carl so unexpectedly with my total transformation. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ encouraged Mariette, apparently reading my mind. ‘There’s not a man in the world who wouldn’t be bowled over. Carl’ll love it, you’ll see.’
The three of us trailed off to a nearby pub and shared a bottle of white wine. I felt sure everybody would stare at me in my new orange suit, but of course nobody did. Given some courage by this and the wine, probably, I finally agreed to keep the outfit on. I should have known better.
Carl called down to me from our upstairs room when I arrived home.
‘Don’t come down, I’ll come up,’ I called back. ‘I’ve something to show you.’
But as I started to clump up the stairs I tripped over my strange new shoes and almost fell backwards. I recovered myself without injury, but not without making a terrific noise. By the time I reached the top of the stairs Carl was standing there looking at me.
I was still on a bit of a high. I smiled and threw my arms open wide. ‘What do you think?’ I asked, doing a kind of twirl for him.
He didn’t show any anger. He didn’t shout. He didn’t say I looked like a tart. He didn’t say anything like that. He just looked disappointed and a bit sad. ‘I think you look like somebody else,’ he said eventually.
‘You d-don’t like it?’ I stuttered.
‘What’s to like?’ he asked mildly. ‘I can barely recognise you.’
I felt terrible. I went straight downstairs to the bathroom, kicked off the silly shoes and scrubbed every vestige of make-up off my face. I combed down my hair and flattened it against my head, making it look as long and as much the way it had before as possible. Then I took off the tarty orange suit and let it fall carelessly on to the floor. There were a pair of jeans and a sweater in the airing cupboard. I put them on and went back upstairs to Carl.
He smiled at me and touched my cheek. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I know who you are again now. It’s you I love, Suzanne. Not some creature created by your friend Mariette.’
And that was that. He hadn’t liked Mariette’s make-over, that was for sure, but he didn’t create a fuss. Indeed, by the time we went to bed that night it was almost as if it hadn’t happened.
I was just sorry I had wasted so much money on the orange suit. And, of course, I never wore it again.
One way or another, I really had more or less forgotten our vandalised van when two days after my unfortunate shopping expedition, a letter arrived.
The words and letters were cut out of a newspaper. The message was stark and chilling. ‘I SAW YOU TOGETHER LAST NIGHT. I WATCHED YOU IN BED. HOW LONG DO YOU THINK THIS CAN GO ON? HOW LONG CAN YOU LIVE A LIE? FACE THE TRUTH, SUZANNE.’
The post had arrived while Carl was in the bathroom. There were three pieces of mail, one obviously junk, the electricity bill and the offending letter. The address was carefully printed using letters from one of those stencil kits you can buy in Smith’s, and although with the benefit of hindsight it did look a bit odd, I did not initially study it very closely and no particular warning bells rang as I put the mail on the rickety old dining-room table and sat myself down to open it.
My shock was total. My cup of tea grew cold at my side as I stared dumbly at the letter on the table before me. This was nothing like the scratched words on our van, which surely could have been the work of kids. Someone out there was definitely threatening us. Or, more particularly, me. It was quite terrifying seeing my name there on the page. ‘FACE THE TRUTH, SUZANNE’, made my blood run cold.
My first instinct, of course, was to shout for Carl, but then, for once, I decided it was my place to protect him. I wouldn’t show it to him, wouldn’t give him more to worry about. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs I slipped the letter quickly back into its envelope and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans. Then I forced myself to appear bright and normal as Carl ruffled my hair in passing – if he minded it being so much shorter he never passed comment – and went into our tiny kitchen to pour himself his breakfast coffee.
He was particularly buoyant and energetic that morning, the way he always was on those good days when he couldn’t wait to get to work. Encouraged by Will’s reaction to the paintings we had delivered to him, in particular Balloons, he was working on another even bigger abstract inspired by the kind of shapes we saw daily on the yachts out in the bay. Carl liked best of all to use the things he saw in our everyday life in St Ives in an innovative way. He soon retreated into his studio, humming something indecipherable. It was probably his great favourite, Leonard Cohen, but you couldn’t really tell. Carl was a hopeless singer, quite incapable of carrying a tune. His attempts did invariably make me smile, though.
But that morning I felt I had little to smile about. When I was sure Carl was safely engrossed in his work I took the envelope from my pocket and looked at it again without opening it. I told myself that what I should do was to rip the thing to shreds, dump it in the bin and force myself not to think about it. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Instead, I hid it in the cupboard under the stairs, tucking it into a crack in a bit of old broken brickwork.
The day passed slowly for me, although Carl was in his element. He barely emerged from the studio. I made him some egg sandwiches for lunch but he seemed almost unaware of my existence when I took them to him.
‘It’s good, Carl,’ I told him, peering over his shoulders. The colours were more muted than Balloons, but the shapes even more clearly defined and dramatic.
‘Mm,’ was his distracted reply. He ate one of the sandwiches when I actually placed it in his hand and ignored the rest. That was how it was when he was working well. Normally I would have thoroughly enjoyed watching him work like this, but on that day I didn’t even attempt to. I was completely preoccupied too, but not happily so. I just wandered aimlessly about the house. I thought about going to the library but I wasn’t up to any banter with Mariette. I hadn’t seen her since our shopping expedition and I knew she would want to know all about Carl’s reaction, which I did not want to discuss.
Later I cooked dinner for Carl and tried to chat normally while we ate but did not succeed very well. It was only because he was having one of his work-obsessed days, his mind totally focused on his latest painting, that he was not aware of my unease. Usually he was acutely tuned in to my moods.
In bed I dared not sleep. Indeed, I had been dreading bedtime all day. When I heard Carl’s steady breathing and became aware of the stillness in his body that indicated he was asleep, I climbed out of bed, went downstairs, made coffee and paced the house all night, determined to stay awake, convinced it was the only way to keep the demons at bay – just as I had done when it all began.
I also kept peeping through the curtains at the alleyway outside. ‘I saw you together last night, I watched you in bed.’ Was somebody really watching us like that? I never saw any sign of it. Nonetheless the very idea made me feel sick.
In the morning, before Carl woke, I climbed back into bed beside him and allowed him to assume that I had been there sleeping all night long.
I continued to do this for three nights. During the day it was a struggle to keep my eyes open. In contrast, Carl was working so hard that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. On the third day he finished the painting that had so engrossed him.
It was almost as if he awoke from a period of half-consciousness. I knew he was seeing me clearly for the first time in three days and became aware of him watching me acutely. At first I denied there was anything wrong, but he was not convinced.
‘You really don’t look well,’ he told me anxiously. ‘Are you sure you feel all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Really, I am.’
Again and again I tried to reassure him, but it was the wrong way round for us and I was not ve
ry effective in my new role. The way I looked didn’t help, either.
‘Suzanne, you look worn out. You haven’t been sleeping, have you?’
I knew I had bags beneath my eyes and that I looked drawn and tired. Three nights without sleep is not something many of us can survive without showing the unmistakable signs of exhaustion. ‘I’ll sleep tonight,’ I told him obliquely. ‘I’m sure of it . . .’
I didn’t, of course. I still couldn’t trust myself. And some time during that fourth night after the arrival of the letter, as I stood quietly by the picture window looking down over the rooftops at the harbour lights, afraid even to sit in case I fell asleep and entered my terrible nightmare world, I became aware of Carl standing beside me.
He reached out for me and I could no longer hold back the tears.
‘Tell me, my love, tell me what’s wrong,’ he coaxed. ‘Something has happened. Please tell me.’
I could no longer resist. I had tried to be strong, but I had no strength without Carl. I had always been weak. I had thought that maybe I would become stronger with the years but it seemed it was not to be.
I gave in. I took him to the cupboard under the stairs, groped about until I found the crack in the brickwork and removed the letter I had so ineffectually tried to hide from him.
He looked very grim as he read it, then threw it angrily on to the floor. ‘You’re completely exhausted, aren’t you.’
I just nodded.
‘You’ve been refusing to let yourself sleep. You can’t go on like that. You’ll make yourself ill.’
He led me upstairs, helped me undress, pulled back the duvet and made me lie down on the bed. Then he lay down beside me and wrapped his arms round me, giving me comfort the way he always did, the way only he could. ‘Nobody can see us, not in here, we’re quite private, you know that, really.’
As usual, he had read my mind. More than anything I hated the thought of someone watching us when we were together in bed, the way that awful letter had suggested. Of course it couldn’t be true. I held on to Carl tightly.
Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked quietly.
‘I suppose I didn’t want it to be real,’ I replied.
He kissed the top of my head, my face, my throat, my neck. ‘I’m going to make it go away,’ he told me. ‘It won’t be real for long. Nothing is going to hurt you, how many times must I tell you . . .’
I could not stay awake, then. The need to sleep overcame me. The unwelcome visitor could be kept at bay no longer.
I slept until early afternoon the next day. Carl had worked yet another of his miracles and I somehow managed it without dreaming – or certainly without any of the horror dreams.
He was sitting in our old wicker rocking chair watching me when I finally opened my eyes.
Nobody who has not suffered the kind of nightmares that have plagued me could ever understand quite how I felt at that moment. Nobody who hasn’t endured total debilitating exhaustion and yet fought off sleep as if it were his or her worst enemy, even though only sleep can bring relief, can know what it is like to have given in and to have survived a night of rest to wake in peace.
Suddenly the demons had retreated a little again. I was beginning to realise that they would probably never leave me, but the world did not look as bleak as it had the previous day.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ he asked.
I told him I was and even managed a wan smile.
‘I will find out who is doing this,’ he said. ‘And I will stop it.’
I believed him because I always believed him. Carl had never let me down in the whole of our life together.
He made me boiled eggs and toasted soldiers from good local bread spread thickly with Cornish butter, and I sat up in bed and ate.
‘Do you feel strong enough to talk about it?’ he asked, pouring me a second mug of coffee.
I nodded.
Together we tried to think of anyone who could have sent us the letter. There was no one we could realistically suspect, certainly nobody from our new life together. We never got close enough to anybody for them to learn much about us, let alone to discover the past.
Mariette was the nearest I had to a friend, but even she was only barely a friend. You share your life with your true friends, and I couldn’t do that.
Nonetheless Carl asked me if I was sure about Mariette.
I shrugged. ‘What’s to be sure of?’ I asked. ‘I like her company. I like listening to her stories. But she knows nothing about us.’
‘She told you she was jealous of us, of you. People do strange things out of jealousy.’
‘Oh, she wasn’t serious. Mariette has men like other people have hot dinners. She has nothing to be jealous of.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Carl again. ‘From what you’ve told me, Mariette’s love life consists of a series of one-night stands. I think she has a lot to be jealous of us about.’ He touched my hand gently.
I shrugged again. ‘In any case, I’ve never told her anything about our lives before we came here,’ I said.
Carl nodded. ‘Well, all right, I suppose it couldn’t be her, really.’
I shook my head. ‘Anyway, she’s too nice,’ I said.
‘People can have more than one side to them,’ muttered Carl.
‘You don’t,’ I said.
‘Yes I do,’ he replied. ‘It’s just that you bring out the best in me.’
I smiled. ‘In any case, it just can’t be Mariette,’ I insisted.
‘No, I suppose not,’ Carl agreed. ‘But who, then?’
‘Let’s list the people we know.’
It wasn’t a very long list: Will at the gallery, our neighbours, our local fishmonger who for some reason looked after us particularly well, the boss of our favourite restaurant, a couple of local shopkeepers, the dreaded Fenella and the others we knew vaguely from the pub scene.
‘That old hag Fenella is capable of anything, I reckon,’ said Carl with feeling.
But we both knew the truth well enough. Apart from any other considerations, everyone on our rather pathetic list had one thing in common: they knew absolutely nothing about Carl and me and our past. They had no motive that we could possibly imagine and no knowledge to harm us with.
‘It has to be someone from before, that’s the only logical answer,’ said Carl.
I shrugged again. ‘But there isn’t anybody, is there?’
When we came to live in St Ives, Carl and I had discarded our old lives like a pair of worn-out shoes. For so long now there had just been each other. There was nobody left from the past, not for either of us. There could not be.
We were sitting together at the table in our single downstairs room. Carl walked to the window, which looked into the narrow alleyway outside. Only the upstairs room, that bit higher up, had the wonderful sea view over the rooftops.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said softly, almost as if he was talking to himself. I was not used to uncertainty in Carl. He always seemed so strong.
‘The police?’ I suggested tentatively.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
I shook my head. The last thing either of us wanted to do was to answer a load of questions from the police.
We were both silent for a moment, then Carl turned away from the window. He sat down beside me again and put his arm round me. I could tell that his moment of indecision was over. He seemed right back to his normal strong self. ‘It’s you and me, girl,’ he said in his lovely slow drawl. ‘You and me against the world. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it always will be – which is just fine by me. We don’t need anyone else, not now, not ever.’
He kissed me and I managed a smile.
‘C’mon,’ he instructed suddenly. ‘Let’s conduct our own investigation.’
He led me down the hill through the town to the Logan Gallery.
‘For goodness’ sake, Carl, you don’t suspect Will, do you?’ I asked.
Carl shook his head. ‘He knows everybody, doesn’t he? We need all the help we can get.’
I understood what Carl was up to. He wanted to do something, however potentially fruitless, rather than just sit around waiting for another letter, heaven forbid, to arrive.
Will greeted me with the usual bear-hug. I pushed him away more abruptly than normal and noticed a fleeting expression of hurt surprise in his eyes, but he quickly recovered and offered us coffee. Carl had no time for it that day. He didn’t mess about. He produced the letter at once and handed it to the gallery boss.
Will glanced at it quickly. He looked absolutely shocked and appeared to be momentarily rendered speechless.
‘Any ideas? Somebody scratched the same sort of stuff on the van, as well,’ Carl explained.
Will just shook his head. ‘Why have you shown me this? What does it mean?’ he enquired.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what it means, but it’s upset Suzanne terribly and it’s not doing me a great deal of good either,’ replied Carl.
Will nodded. ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said.
‘Look, Will, I have to find out who’s doing this.’
‘Have you been to the police?’
Carl shook his head. ‘I reckon I should be able to sort it out. Look at the postmark. Penzance. It’s somebody local.’
Will studied the letter and the envelope. ‘Words cut out of a newspaper. I thought that only happened on TV,’ he remarked.
‘That’s what Carl said,’ I told him.
‘It’s got to be somebody with a screw loose,’ said Carl.
Will gave a short laugh. ‘That’s half the artistic community of St Ives,’ he said.
Carl reached out for the letter. Will put his hand on my arm.
‘Try not to fret, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘I hate to think of you being upset.’
I smiled wanly.
Carl put the letter back in his jacket pocket. ‘Well, if you think of anything – or anyone – give us a shout,’ he said.
‘I can’t imagine who it could be,’ responded Will. ‘I know you get all sorts of petty jealousies in a town like this, particularly among the artists, but I’ve never heard of anything like this before. What could the writer possibly know, anyway?’
A Deep Deceit Page 6
