Deep Blue Sea

by Tasmina Perry

  By the end of it Diana felt almost too weak to stand, and when Adam and Charlie, who had been on either side of her during the service, got up to lift the coffin, she had to be helped out of church by Elizabeth and Sylvia like two stiff sentries.

  Two generations of Denvers were buried in the grounds of St Michael’s church. The graveyard was overflowing, but the family had apparently purchased a parcel of surrounding land to ensure that they could all rest in peace together.

  It was a warm, sunny morning that half made Diana wonder whether Elizabeth’s money and contacts had been able to wangle the weather. There was a low breeze that infused the air with the smell of honeysuckle and roses. They walked behind the coffin to the grave, Diana dodging the patches of grass to avoid her heels sinking into the soil. Only close friends and family had been invited to watch the burial, but there was an enormous trail of mourners behind her – clearly this congregation did not consist of the sort of people used to being excluded from anything.

  There was a row of chairs for the family at the graveside. Diana sat down, hot in her fitted black Balenciaga suit, fixing her eyes on a point on the ground. After a while, her gaze wandered to the crowd of people assembling around her. There was no one here from the climbing club.

  Across the coffin she could see Patty Reynolds smiling sadly at her. Her husband Michael, one of the pallbearers, retreated to a spot next to his wife, and as he clasped her hand, Diana felt a sharp stab of injustice that the Reynoldses could share their grief together. In fact she felt envious of all Julian’s friends around her. Today they would be sad. Today they might even cry. But tomorrow they would all go back to their normal lives, and that was something Diana could never do.

  Why are we here? She almost wanted to ask everyone the question out loud. Why was he taken away from us?

  Behind Patty she could see a face she didn’t recognise, but one that stood out because of its obvious beauty. Blond hair, fine-boned features.

  Someone knows something . . .

  The phrase was going over and over in her mind as the casket was finally lowered into the ground and the vicar said a few last words.

  Charlie led her away, although the walk to the car was slow. Everyone wanted to stop and offer their condolences, but Diana just wanted to get out of view. As Charlie moved away to talk to Adam, she began to feel dizzy and undid the top button on her silk blouse, which had started to claw at her neck.

  The Mercedes was in sight when a tall blonde woman approached her. Diana saw immediately that it was the woman who had been standing behind Patty. Up close she was quite beautiful, although she was doing what she could to disguise her looks. Her pale hair was tied back and her face looked free of make-up, not that anyone with such remarkable bone structure needed war paint. Diana did not know the woman, but she recognised the look in her eyes: grief.

  ‘I’m sorry to approach you like this. I don’t think we’ve met before.’

  ‘We haven’t.’

  ‘I’m Victoria Pearson. I’m so sorry . . .’

  She’d heard the words a hundred times in the past ten minutes. The last thing she wanted was to hear them again, but she knew the woman was just being polite.

  ‘I’m an old school friend of Julian’s,’ Victoria continued quickly.

  ‘I thought Harrow was an all-boys school,’ replied Diana. It came out more curtly than she’d intended, but she felt suddenly threatened.

  ‘A turn of phrase,’ the other woman said awkwardly. ‘We go back a long way. Twenty years, which makes me feel rather old.’

  Diana did the sums in her head. Julian had left Harrow twenty-three years ago, which didn’t make them school friends.

  She felt on heightened alert. Her mind searched the photographs she had spent hours and hours going through. Had this woman featured in any of them? She couldn’t be certain.

  ‘Had you seen each other recently?’ She offered the question as casually as she could, but her stomach had begun to turn over.

  ‘Not in a year or so.’

  ‘Strange we haven’t met.’

  ‘He was a wonderful man.’

  Diana’s heart was thudding. Who was this woman? How well had she known Julian? Suddenly she had to know everything. She began to feel faint. The sun was directly overhead and seemed to be burning her head. She held an arm out to steady herself. The world seemed to spin, and like a dull noise travelling through water she heard a voice calling for help. Her knees started to buckle, but before she hit the ground she felt two arms catch her.

  Without looking up, she began to sob, deep gulps of breath and noise so loud they didn’t sound as if they came from her fragile body.

  ‘Easy, easy, easy.’ The familiar voice was soothing and the arms around her felt strong.

  ‘Take me out of here,’ she whispered, as Adam helped her to her feet. She knew that people would be watching her like some stricken caged animal.

  ‘It’s okay. The car is just here,’ he reassured her, guiding her into the Mercedes.

  She sank back into the leather seat, glad that the blacked-out windows had shut out the world. Adam followed her and slammed the car door behind them.

  ‘What happened back there?’

  Her eyes were like two thin slits, barely open wide enough to see him.

  ‘Who was that? Who was that woman?’ she stuttered.

  Adam looked confused. ‘Victoria. A family friend. What the hell did she say?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all.’ She screwed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers against her temples. ‘I can’t cope, Adam. I’m going mad.’

  ‘You’re not going mad. You have lost your husband.’

  She opened her eyes and looked at him through her tears, and for the first time noticed how pale he was. It was a standing family joke that Adam was always tanned and sun-kissed from somewhere glamorous, but today he looked as drained as she knew she did.

  A sharp rapping on the window startled her and she turned to see her mother’s face pressed up against the window.

  ‘Can’t we just get out of here?’ she whispered.

  ‘I was going to say the same thing,’ he replied as he instructed the driver to take them back to his parents’ house.

  6

  Hanley Park – the main house, as Barbara Denver liked to call it – was just a couple of miles away from the church, although the actual boundary of the property was practically next door. Diana had always thought of the Denvers’ collective portfolio of homes as a set of Russians dolls, a series of ever-larger properties each designed to make the last one appear small. Hanley Park made Somerfold look like a doll’s house. One of the biggest estates in the entire country, it was just a shade smaller than Castle Howard, with the same grand and chilly beauty – a slate-coloured dome that soared up into the sky and vast baroque-style gardens designed to impress the highest of society. In the 1940s it had been used as a military hospital and still had room to spare, before it was sold to an American entrepreneur and finally to Julian’s grandfather, which made it, by the skin of its teeth, an ancestral family seat.

  Quite why anyone needed a property this size was beyond Diana, although she recognised the irony in even thinking that. Growing up, she had always thought their three-bedroom house in Ilfracombe was perfectly sufficient for the Miller family, provided she wasn’t allocated the box room, and yet she had twisted Julian’s arm to buy Somerfold.

  As the car proceeded down the avenue of lime trees she watched Hanley Park get bigger and bigger. She knew it wasn’t the ideal place to seek refuge. Diana just wanted to curl up somewhere warm and cosy, to pull a soft blanket up to her chin and sink into a silent, untroubled sleep. But coming here was better than staying at the funeral. On the journey over, Adam hadn’t discussed her panic attack any further. She couldn’t even make sense of it herself. But her cheeks w
ere still hot from the embarrassment of it all.

  The car stopped outside the impressive pillared entrance. As her foot crunched on to the gravel drive, a fleet of butlers appeared from nowhere, like genies from a lamp, clearly anticipating the arrival of the first guests for the wake. Adam straightened his thin black tie and waved them back inside.

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered Diana, grateful that Adam had read her mind that she wanted absolutely no fuss. Behind them they could hear another car speeding down the driveway. She tensed, and knew she should have insisted on being taken back to Somerfold rather than the closer Hanley Park.

  ‘This will be Elizabeth’s event planners come to tell me off for running away. Tell me you’ve got a secret passageway we can escape into.’

  Adam put his hand on her shoulder in reassurance.

  ‘Funnily enough, there’s a priest hole in the kitchen. It takes you to the catacombs beneath us and comes out by that woodland over there. I used it plenty of times when my mum and dad were on the war path.’

  Diana managed a smile at the thought of the young, mischievous Adam Denver, whose boyhood and teenage antics were the stuff of family legend. Flushing his nanny’s slippers down the toilet, poking beehives to extract his own honey, taxiing his friends to the pub on a tractor liberated from the estate’s farm.

  ‘Do you think there’s time to make a run for it?’ she grimaced.

  ‘Not in those heels. Come on, let’s get inside,’ instructed Adam.

  They made it as far as the entrance hall, resplendent with huge vases of lilies, before they heard a car stopping on the gravel. Diana sighed with relief as Charlie ran through the door towards her.

  ‘Mum, what happened?’

  ‘It’s fine, Charlie. Really . . .’ she began.

  Without hesitation her son hugged her as tightly as he could. The gesture took her by surprise. Charlie was now of an age when any affectionate contact with his parents was decidedly uncool. He must have been concerned about her to have her practically in a headlock.

  Adam returned from the drawing room and handed her a whisky.

  ‘Drink that,’ he ordered.

  ‘I’m not going back to school,’ said Charlie suddenly, breaking away from her and meeting her gaze levelly. Since starting boarding school, he had become increasingly headstrong. Julian said it was his burgeoning confidence, but Diana was convinced he had the Denver genes if not the Denver blood.

  ‘Of course you’re going back. Granny and I are driving you there tomorrow.’

  ‘How can I leave you like this? You fainted. You can pretend that everything is all right, but it obviously isn’t.’ His voice was loud, firm, protective. ‘I’m staying with you. School’s almost finished anyway.’

  ‘You’ve got three weeks left of term,’ she said feeling some maternal steeliness returning to her body. ‘Besides, there’s your exams.’

  ‘Stuff exams.’

  ‘Charlie!’

  ‘Uncle Adam. Tell her that exams aren’t important.’

  ‘You don’t want to take a leaf out of my book,’ said Adam sheepishly.

  ‘Please tell her.’ Charlie looked across at his uncle, willing him to back him up. They didn’t see each other very often, but they always got on like a house on fire when they did. Diana would have preferred that her son hero-worship a less mercurial member of the family; Adam sent wholly inappropriate birthday and Christmas presents – a gift-wrapped gold Dunhill cigarette lighter had arrived when Charlie had turned thirteen – but right now he was the only ally they had.

  ‘I think you should listen to your mother. She always knows best,’ he said, shooting Diana a look of complicity, and she was grateful for his support.

  The front door swung open again and Sylvia Miller walked into the house, her lips pressed into a thin burgundy line.

  ‘You just ran off!’

  ‘I didn’t run off. I had to get away.’

  ‘What on earth happened?’

  ‘Charlie, come and help me make sure there’s enough food and drink,’ ordered Adam.

  ‘It’s a wake, not a party,’ the boy replied quietly.

  ‘Charlie, go with Adam,’ said Sylvia. She wanted to get to the bottom of what had gone on.

  They moved into the study and shut the door. It was a glorious room, flooded with light, which bounced off the leather-bound books. Diana leant back on the huge mahogany desk, waiting for her mother to interrogate her.

  ‘I know this isn’t easy for you . . .’ said Sylvia finally.

  ‘But what?’ said Diana, sipping the whisky. ‘You know this isn’t easy for me but I shouldn’t just run away from my husband’s funeral like that?’

  ‘You gave Victoria Pearson the fright of her life. We all care about you. We’re here to help you get through this. But you can’t just be rude to people and then collapse, and expect us not to ask questions about whether you should see someone. A doctor, a counsellor.’

  ‘I was not rude to Victoria Pearson,’ Diana said quietly.

  ‘Barbara said she heard a few sharp words between you. What was that about?’

  She had to tell someone. The words were bursting on her lips and she just needed to hear that she was being ridiculous.

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought . . . I just thought Julian might have been having an affair with her, or something.’

  ‘An affair? With Victoria?’ said Sylvia incredulously.

  ‘It’s not so hard to believe, is it? Look at her. Elegant, beautiful . . . and she looked so upset.’

  ‘Diana, I don’t know how you could think such a thing . . .’

  Diana gave a low, soft snort. Of course it was easy to believe that Julian was having an affair. They’d had sex just once or twice since Christmas, since they had lost the baby. Both had been awkward and painful experiences which Julian had treated with his usual diplomacy, making all the right noises about ‘easing ourselves back into it’. She had counted her blessings that she had such an adoring, supportive husband, but deep down she wondered if his patience, his understanding had a darker truth. That he was simply getting his sex elsewhere.

  ‘It would all make sense,’ she said, voicing the fears that had been nagging at her since the day he died. ‘Julian didn’t kill himself for nothing. Something drove him to it. A feeling of the situation being out of control, guilt, I don’t know, but it wasn’t something that he could talk to me about.’

  ‘And you think he had a mistress?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she whispered.

  Sylvia hesitated before she spoke again.

  ‘But he had had an affair before,’ she said softly. ‘He dealt with it. You both dealt with it. That wasn’t the sort of thing that would have made him do what he did.’

  Diana tipped the entire contents of the whisky glass down her throat as fat tears began streaming down her cheeks. She could feel them making rivulets down her thicker than usual make-up.

  ‘I could see people at the funeral thinking, speculating what drove him to it. Drugs, marital problems, financial ruin, another terrible scandal that would have dragged him back into the papers . . .’

  ‘Diana, you’re being paranoid,’ Sylvia scolded.

  ‘No I’m not. No one said anything, of course. They are far too polite for that. But it’s human nature, isn’t it? To wonder.’

  She clasped the empty crystal tumbler to her chest. It felt cold through the thin fabric of her blouse.

  ‘So imagine how it feels for the person who knew him better than anybody. Or who ought to have known him better. Imagine how it feels for me, wondering what could have been so wrong in our perfect lives, wondering what I could have done differently, wondering if I could have saved the man I loved.’

  Her mother came over, took the glass out of her hand.

  �
�You couldn’t have done anything differently. Depression isn’t a rational thing . . .’

  ‘So Ralph told you he was depressed?’

  ‘And you don’t believe him?’

  ‘There’s another reason, I know it,’ she whispered through bursts of sobs.

  ‘And if there is, the inquest will find it out,’ said Sylvia calmly.

  ‘No they won’t.’

  Her mother looked as if she was beginning to lose patience.

  ‘You should sleep this off. Barbara’s doctor can be here in twenty minutes with one phone call. I believe temazepam is very good . . .’

  ‘I want to see Rachel,’ Diana said quietly.

  ‘Rachel? What does Rachel have to do with this?’

  ‘Everything.’ She could hear her sister’s voice in her head, the voice she hadn’t been able to shake for the past few days. ‘Rachel would work out what went on.’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s good at that,’ said Sylvia sarcastically.

  ‘It’s what she does. Finding the truth.’

  ‘And the truth hurts,’ said Sylvia, curling her lip. She put both hands on Diana’s shoulders. ‘Listen to me. Getting through the next few months is going to be hard enough without turning it into a witch-hunt.’

  ‘It’s not a witch-hunt. I want to know what happened to my husband. I need to know.’

  ‘Leave it, Diana. For Charlie’s sake, if nothing else.’

  ‘This is for Charlie. For Julian. For me.’

  Sylvia stepped away and shook her head.

  ‘And what happens if you involve Rachel? Say she finds some hidden reason why Julian committed suicide. Then what? Then she sells it to a newspaper and causes you and the family more pain. Is it worth it? It’s certainly not going to bring him back.’

  ‘But at least I would know,’ Diana whispered, with more assurance this time. She blotted her eyes with the palms of her hands. ‘I have to go before people start arriving.’

  ‘Where are you going?’