Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Caspar cursed inventively. He was wet to the knees and Harriet’s shoes were full of sea. ‘Bloody hell, Christ,’ Caspar bawled until Harriet reminded him, ‘Brighton is essential.’ A wave of laughter as irresistible as the sea took hold of them.

  They slopped back to the hotel together and dripped across the elegant foyer, still smiling, oblivious to the stares that tracked them.

  In the lift, as they swept upwards, Caspar took Harriet in his arms again. She leant contentedly against him, thinking of her champagne, of dinner and bed, thinking of nothing.

  Fourteen

  On Tuesday morning, Harriet was up early. She had come back to London with Caspar the previous afternoon and had spent an edgy, distracted evening alone at home with her paperwork. She had left her answering machine on and had taken no calls. She wanted to work but there were too many things that needed her attention, and she was unable to focus on any one of them.

  Caspar had flown to Los Angeles. He had telephoned her from the airport, before he left. He had called her ‘babyʼ and Harriet wondered if it was her imagination or if he really did sound different, belonging already to unknown Hollywood and not to her in any way. He had told her that he would be back soon, and asked her if she would be Linda’s supporter until then.

  ‘You know I will,’ Harriet had promised.

  Now that he was gone, she resolved, she would pick up the threads and pull them tight again. She would be at her desk early, before any of her staff arrived, and she would reconfirm her empire. The intention gave her satisfaction.

  In the early morning she drew the protection of fine, dark stockings over her pale legs and buttoned herself into her clothes, as if they were plates of armour. She looked once out of her front window and saw the empty street, and then her eye caught the slow movement of a milk float rolling under the lime trees.

  When she looked again, Robin’s car stood outside.

  She took one quick sideways step, that brought her within the shelter of the curtains. She thought, Don’t hide. But her heart was beating with unpleasant insistence. She took two or three breaths, trying to make herself calm, then left her shelter to answer Robin’s knock at her front door.

  As soon as she saw him, Harriet knew that for all the seeming irrationality of it, she had been right to be afraid of Robin today. His features seemed to have hardened and sharpened, all the angles of his face slicing at her. She was aware of his height, and of the dark, stiff correctness of his clothes, different from Caspar’s rumpled jackets. Her fingers curled around the doorknob, as if she could still hurl the door shut.

  But she only said, ‘Robin? You’re very early.’

  He followed her inside. Harriet glanced at her briefcase, already packed, waiting to be taken out to her car. The cushions on her sofas were plumped up, there were flowers in a vase on a low table, the Sunday business pages, her life neatly arranged. There was nothing here to give her away, and as soon as the thought came to her there was the corollary, I don’t need to worry about giving myself away. I don’t belong to Robin or to anyone.

  She turned to face him.

  ‘Have you come for breakfast? Coffee?’ She looked at her watch. ‘I wanted to get in quite early …’

  Very softly Robin asked her, ‘Where have you been, Harriet?’

  A cold finger touched her spine. He was standing too close to her.

  ‘Working. Why? Yesterday I took a look at the prototype for Alarm. You know, I think the unit cost is going to be twelve or fifteen per cent too high …’ She was angry at her own cowardice, and the anger fought with her physical fear of him.

  ‘Not yesterday, I know where you were yesterday. At the weekend. Last week.’

  ‘I went to Brighton.’ Harriet made herself face him. The dislike that she had begun to feel, before last week, and her anger, and her fear all solidified within her.

  Robin was reaching into his inside pocket. Her eyes followed the movement. He took out a piece of paper and unfolded it, and Harriet saw the photograph from the evening newspaper. Of course. She was struck by her own stupidity in imagining that it would somehow escape Robin’s attention. Probably Robin saw everything, knew everything. It was not a comforting thought.

  ‘With Caspar Jensen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I called you, you know. I left messages. Only you were in Brighton.’ He gave the cutting a little shake, like a cat with a bird.

  ‘I should have told you,’ Harriet began. She swallowed against a hard knot in her throat. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t. We seem only to have lived together in one dimension and to break out of that, to say, “Robin, I’ve fallen in love with somebody,” seemed too hard. I suppose I thought we could go on in our single dimension. Going to the opera, having dinner together twice a week. I know that wasn’t very clever, I hadn’t even thought it out. But it is the truth.’

  She lifted her head, relieved to have worked out as much for herself.

  Robin grabbed her wrists. She might have screamed, but she did not. He was big and cold. Thoughts of assault, or rape, flitted out of sequence through her head. She looked longingly at the telephone on the low table across the room. A red digit showed in the front of the answering machine beside it, the number of recorded messages waiting for her. She couldn’t see at this distance if the number was a six or a nine. She realised that she had let the calls mount up, not even playing the tape back, because she had been avoiding even the sound of Robin’s voice. For God’s sake, Harriet thought. I’m like some stupid girl. She owed it to Robin to be honest with him now.

  ‘Please let go,’ she asked, reasonably. ‘You’re hurting me. Let go, then we can talk.’

  He drew her closer to him, instead. They stood touching, parodying an embrace.

  ‘Have you?’ Robin asked.

  Somehow she knew he meant, had she fallen in love with somebody?

  She told him, ‘Yes, I have. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘But I love you,’ Robin said.

  Then she saw hurt in him. The coldness, the violence in him was because of the hurt. Harriet shook her head, unused to the spectacle of his vulnerability.

  ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t done any of this intelligently. I met Caspar, and that was all, somehow.’ She tried to twist her wrists in Robin’s hold, but he would not let her go.

  ‘You started seeing him because of the child?’

  ‘Linda.’ She remembered Robin’s indifference, his reaction to her simply as a nuisance. Not very nice, either of us, she thought. ‘Yes. He came to thank me. He took me out to lunch, the same day, when that picture was taken.’ We deserve not each other, but better. Then we would be better ourselves, perhaps. Was that how it worked?

  ‘And then?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, except that it happened.’

  ‘I want to marry you.’

  ‘I couldn’t have married you, Robin. I tried to be honest about it. I couldn’t have married you even before this.’

  She looked at his face. In the silence that followed Harriet imagined the toys and the pets and the treats that had been lavished on the small Robin, and the promises that must always have been kept for him, and the cars and the deals and the profits that the grown man had wanted, and won. It was bizarre that she had become one of Robin Landwith’s targets, unfortunate that it was apparently the first denial he had ever suffered. She could not work out, from his face, whether he was about to cry or to break her in half.

  Harriet’s anger began to gain the upper hand. She knew this body, the shape and the weight of it, like her own. It was sufficient violence that she should have felt threatened by it. Her submission was over.

  ‘Let me go, Robin.’

  His answer was to jerk her head back and begin to kiss her, kisses that were more like bites, with teeth that scraped her skin. Harriet breathed in sharply, twisting her face away, struggling as if she was drowning. The disconnected images of assault came back to her, but she was not frightened any longer.

  Sh
e lifted her foot, in a grey suede shoe with the sides sculpted into a suggestion of tiny wings that made her think of Mercury’s sandal. The shoe had a high, slim heel. She brought the heel down with all her strength on to Robin’s black brogue. Linda had kicked him, she remembered, with a stout school sandal.

  He gasped, and lurched backwards, but Harriet was not nearly quick enough. Robin came back at her at once, with a wide swing, palm open, that smacked her jaw, knocking her head backwards and rattling her teeth. She half fell against the open door, more stunned by the ringing noise of the blow than by the slap itself. The door supported her and rage inflated her again. She would give no more ground. She stood up, square to him.

  ‘Is that it? Is that one of the family secrets? Does Martin knock Annunziata around, down there among the cushions in Little Shelley?’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, panting for breath. ‘Like father, like son, is that it? You want to be like him, don’t you? Are you afraid you won’t measure up?’

  ‘Harriet.’ His expression had changed. His face looked puffy now, his eyes fixed on her. ‘Harriet …’

  ‘Don’t hit me again. Don’t touch me again. You are …’ she searched for the word but she could only come up with – like Linda’s schoolmates – pathetic, and he was pathetic, watching her, ‘… like a little boy. A spoilt little boy, turned class bully.’

  Only then she saw something else. Robin was coming at her again, but this time it was because he was excited, the violence had excited him. His mouth hung a little open and she could hear his breathing.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ His hands groped for her. She was caught against the door, with nowhere to escape to. He held her with one hand and the other pulled at her blouse, tearing the buttonholes. He gave a sharp jerk and her breasts were exposed. He put his face down, biting and sucking.

  Harriet looked down at the crown of his head. It was very familiar, the way the hair grew in dark whorls. She had looked down like this at other times, willingly, when he had given her pleasure. Anger gave way to deep, smothering weariness.

  She said very quietly, ‘I don’t want you to do this. You make yourself seem disgusting. Please, Robin.’

  He stopped moving, seemingly frozen. At last, very slowly, he lifted his head, but his eyes never met hers. His fingers groped, clumsily, drawing her clothes back over her reddened skin.

  ‘I want you,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I’m not a Porsche, or a property deal, or a hot share, Robin.’

  She thought that he might hit her again and waited for the blow, but it didn’t come. Harriet lowered her arm that she had involuntarily lifted to protect herself.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ he agreed, the mildness of his tone surprising her. She caught a glimpse of the old, assured Robin. The mention of familiar totems must have revived him. ‘My father never hit my mother, you know. Or me.’

  ‘I wonder where you acquired your taste for it?’ The reemergence of the other Robin did nothing to lessen her distaste for the darker man.

  He looked levelly at her now, seeming to appraise her as his father had done at the very beginning, weighing each of her attributes in fine balance.

  ‘Don’t make an enemy of me, Harriet.’ His voice was smooth. It was difficult to tell whether he was threatening or offering advice.

  Harriet smiled, ‘I can’t make an enemy of you. Only you, and your responses, can do that. I would like us to be friends.’

  The level stare again. ‘We can be lovers, but I don’t think we can be friends.’

  ‘In that case, I’m very sorry.’ Harriet spoke coldly.

  Robin was in control of himself again. He walked away from her, and as if he was in his designer-masculine bedroom at home he checked his tie and smoothed the cuffs of his shirt. Harriet thought of all the things she knew about him: that the shirt was Turnbull & Asser, made to measure, and that under the dark suit he wore boxer shorts from another shop in Jermyn Street. That he liked Verdi, chocolate, and conversation in the bath. That he could assimilate a page of figures more quickly than anyone she had ever met, and, the latest tiny piece of the mosaic, that he was sexually stimulated by a touch of violence. It seemed such a small, insignificant catalogue of data to have accumulated from all the time they had known each other. Harriet felt profoundly depressed as she thought of it. By contrast, Caspar seemed both infinitely mysterious, and warmly expansive.

  She wondered what he was doing now, at this moment, while Robin Landwith smoothed his hair in the gilt mirror that hung over her marble fireplace.

  It was clear that there was no more to say. Robin looked out of the front window, to check on his car. Harriet turned sharply away from him and went into her kitchen. She heard him going out, closing the front door behind him, and after a moment came the rumble of the car as it pulled away.

  She found that she was shaking. Her hands trembled uncontrollably. She made an effort, setting a coffee cup down on the work-top and pouring coffee from the jug.

  She drank it standing at the window, looking down into the garden and trying to think of nothing. After a moment or two the shaking stopped. Harriet left her empty cup in the sink, changed her shirt and gathered up her briefcase and went out to her car. She didn’t look at the space in front of it, that Robin’s had occupied. She drove off, heading for the Peacocks’ office, using the white noise of early morning radio to suppress unwelcome silence.

  On the same Tuesday morning, while the streets were still empty of traffic and before the weekday surge to the station began, Simon slipped out of the house in Sunderland Avenue

  He walked down the slope of the drive to Ken Trott’s blue-painted gates, passed through and closed them carefully behind him, then went down the hill past the slate or wooden tiles that announced the names of the detached houses behind their flowering hedges. He didn’t glance back at the Trotts’ house, nor did he seem to look ahead of him to see where he was going. He walked slowly but steadily, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

  Simon walked a long way without varying his pace or looking up to determine the direction of his march. He moved purposefully, but at random. Once, by taking a series of right turns, he covered an approximate square and returned to the point he had already passed twenty’ minutes earlier. He gave no sign of recognising the street corner but simply walked on, looking fixedly at the ground in front of his feet.

  The roads became busy with traffic and the pavements filled up with hurrying people. Simon seemed unaware of the streams of cars and buses passing within inches of him, but when a large man in builder’s overalls jostled him as he passed, calling jocularly, ‘Sorry, mate,’ as he hurried on, Simon looked round in bewilderment, then shrank against the wall on his right hand that offered no protective niche in which to shelter.

  He stood quite still for a moment and then began to move on, much more slowly. He was visibly tired from the long walk. Once or twice he put his hand out to the wall, supporting and steadying himself, before trudging on again. A girl passed him and then turned back to watch him, frowning, as if deciding whether or not he needed her help. Simon sensed her eyes on him. His hand, dragging along the wall, suddenly groped in emptiness. He had come to a corner, an alleyway that led down a slope. He turned the corner and half stumbled downwards, between high brick walls. The girl watched the mouth of the alley to see if he would reappear. When he did not she hesitated, then shrugged a little and walked on.

  The alley ran between the high sides of two dingy factories. It was mounded with rubbish, peeling cardboard boxes and polystyrene blocks that shed white pellets like hailstones.

  Simon made his erratic way between the heaps of refuse. He raised his head just once, and saw what lay at the end of the alley. Beyond the walls of the factories there was a small patch of waste ground, where panels of rusted, misshapen metal stuck up between swathes of rank, green weeds. The far side of the waste land seemed to dip sharply downwards, before rising again to the walls of more factories on the other margin of the
deep gully.

  The patch of ground was fenced off with sagging loops of barbed wire. Simon seemed to have found a reserve of strength as he pushed through the wire. A strand of it caught on the arm of Ken’s jacket, much too big, that Kath had given him the day before. The sleeve tore almost right off as he freed himself. He brushed forward through the weeds, holding the severed material tidily in place with his other hand.

  There was a metal footbridge ahead of him, spanning the divide. The bridge was fenced off with rolls of wire too, the old right of way from the alley and across to the other side clearly disused. Simon hauled the wire to one side, scratching his hands but not noticing the blood that sprang from dotted perforations. The jacket sleeve flapped down again and he held it up, glancing down briefly and frowning at the sight of the unfamiliar cloth.

  He walked on to the bridge. There were blue-grey iron parapets on either side of him, their broad, flat tops at chest height studded with big rounded bolts. Simon ran his hand over the bolt heads as if admiring the solid Victorian construction.

  Then he heard a sound behind him. He cocked his head to it for a second, then leaned forward, hooking his arms over the parapet. His feet scraped against the metal as he clawed upwards, the final effort bringing his legs after his torso, up on to the flat ledge. He lay still, gasping for breath, and then hauled himself precariously to his feet.

  He stood upright at last, his hand groping at the drooping sleeve, pulling it back into place. He looked down, then, at the rails running through the cutting.

  He waited until the sound at his back had swollen to a pounding roar, and then he jumped.

  The driver of the London Bridge train didn’t even have time to touch his brakes.