‘I’ll make some breakfast. How do pancakes sound?’
She nodded, and waited until he had left the room before she got out of bed herself. Her chiffon knickers were still on the floor. She picked them up and noticed that they were ripped, which sent another surge of lust around her body. Part of her was embarrassed, ashamed for feeling like this. It had been a careless, drunken encounter, but unlike those she had had in her more wanton youth, she wanted it to happen all over again.
She could still taste him in her mouth, smell the lingering scent of their blended sweat. Last night had been a revelation. It was shocking and exciting that her body could feel all the things it had done, and it had been wonderful and terrible in equal measure. Oh yes, she knew it was forbidden to sleep with her husband’s brother – and so soon after his death, too. But the truth was, Diana felt liberated. Overnight she felt a woman again. Sexy and desired and beautiful.
Julian’s infidelity hadn’t just been a blow to her marriage; it was a snub to her personally. Couples’ therapy had brought their relationship back on track, months of individual and joint sessions where they talked about the problems and frustrations in their lives. But the sex had never recovered. Not that it had ever been as good as last night, even in the early days, when they used to meet in car parks after work and steal kisses in the lifts. On one occasion they’d had sex in the boardroom. It had been fantastic, wild, abandoned, but the heel of her shoe had scratched a ten-inch mark down the Biedermeier walnut table, almost giving Julian a heart attack and making him paranoid for weeks that they had been caught on CCTV. Then later on in their marriage, sex had been something with an end in sight. Having a baby. It was a reproductive process, not two people wanting to bring pleasure to one another.
She took a white towelling robe off a hook on the back of the door and put it on. When she went down into the kitchen, Adam was standing at a clean, unused-looking stove, flipping pancakes. She watched him for a moment, the unlikely chef at work. His shirt, which was only half buttoned up, stopped at the base of the boxer shorts, showing off his long legs, sprayed with fine light brown hair. He had good feet – always a potential turn-off – and his shirt sleeves were rolled back, showing off firm, muscular forearms.
For a second Diana imagined herself as one half of a young married couple in some glossy, glamorous sit-com. Part of her yearned for that nice, comfortable normality. So far her life had been full of extremes. She had been the struggling single mother, and then the pampered wife in her gilded cage. But New York had always been her city of dreams, and now here she was in the middle of one: a sexy man cooking breakfast for his girl in his stylish, bright Brooklyn brownstone.
She hadn’t imagined that Adam would be a good cook. Okay, pancakes with blueberries and maple syrup was not exactly beef Wellington, but they were hot, fluffy and delicious.
They made small talk about the weather, and she noticed that he was eating quickly and looking at his watch, which he seemed to do a lot when she was around.
‘I should go and jump in the shower.’
‘You have to go?’
He nodded as he finished his fresh orange juice.
‘You mean I should go.’ She was not naïve. She knew the etiquette of these situations.
‘No,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s just that I’ve got back-to-back meetings in the city.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but she didn’t know what to say. About last night . . . She almost winced at the trite, inadequate cliché on the tip of her tongue.
Instead, silence filled the room.
‘You are very beautiful,’ he said finally. He was looking at her, really looking at her, and it made her feel as desirable as she had done last night.
‘I can sense there’s a but,’ she said softly.
‘The problem with having a big brother like Julian was that he always got there first. First to ski a black run, first to learn to sail, first to work at the company and make my father proud. I was always swimming in his slipstream, always racing to catch up. Sometimes it didn’t matter. I became a better skier, a better sailor, but there were other things where he had got there ahead of me and it meant I could never go there. I couldn’t be head of the company, I couldn’t be with you.’
Tears prickled in her eyes.
‘Julian isn’t here any more,’ she whispered.
She saw his eyes close momentarily, as if he was wrestling with a host of emotions he didn’t understand. When he opened them, he looked more steely. He stood up, and took his plate to the sink.
‘I have to go. I can give you a spare key. You can return it to me in London.’
‘When are you going back?’ she said with as much dignity as she could muster.
‘I fly back tomorrow on the jet. Do you want a lift?’
Of course it was tempting to say yes. The back seats of the Denver corporate plane converted to a bed.
‘No, my flight back to Heathrow is for this evening,’ she said, lying about her flexible ticket.
He came round to her side of the table, cupped his hands around the back of her head and kissed her hair right at the crown. As his lips lingered, she wondered what he was thinking. It was not a kiss that said rejection, but nor was it one that held any definite promise.
‘Let’s talk when we get back to London,’ he whispered. She nodded, not daring to think how this was all going to pan out.
36
Tempting as it was to stay at the Round Hill resort, Rachel and Liam left for Heathrow the following afternoon. The weather had turned by the time they got back to England, making Rachel wish even more that they had stayed a day or two extra for the seafood BBQs, the tennis, and the snorkelling in the electric-blue Caribbean sea. Then again, their trip to Jamaica had not been without its awkward moments. She and Liam had got on well, falling back into their easy companionship that had prompted half a dozen people to ask whether they were on their honeymoon, so from that point, she was glad to be back on safer, less romantic ground.
‘Look at this place,’ he said as they rounded the corner and Somerfold appeared.
Rachel knew that Liam was from the sort of upper-middle-class family that had friends with country piles. He never boasted about his background, although he couldn’t help the occasional reference to things in his past that gave clues about the sort of world he was from. The public school and Cambridge education, the gap year in South America, the nostalgic mention of a holiday cottage in Dorset. But even he couldn’t help but look impressed.
‘Don’t get too excited, this is where I’m staying,’ she said, bringing the hire car to a halt.
‘A boathouse, but not as we know it,’ smiled Liam, grabbing their bags from the boot.
‘Actually, Diana did mention I could move up to the big house.’
‘Promoted?’
‘More like the end of the Cold War, although I’m still on icy ground. What do you think? Want to stay here, or play lord of the manor?’
‘This place is great,’ he said, looking around the Lake House as they stepped inside. ‘Let’s stay here.’
Her heart fluttered. ‘I’m glad you said that. My mum is up at the house a lot, and she might start asking difficult questions.’
‘You mean she might take me to one side and assess my prospects.’
She tried not to read too much into his comment, but it still made her smile to herself.
‘Someone’s been in here,’ she said, glancing around the place.
‘It’s certainly tidier than your usual style,’ said Liam.
‘All my stuff’s gone . . .’
Rachel began to panic. She certainly felt vulnerable in the Lake House sometimes. At night, if the blinds were not drawn, the large glass window surrounded you with blackness and made you feel as if you were floating in space. Sometimes it was inc
redibly relaxing – like one big personal flotation tank; on other nights she felt quite afraid.
‘You settle in,’ she said distractedly. ‘I’m going up to the big house. I want to speak to Mrs Bills. See if she knows what’s happened.’
She stuffed her hands in her pockets as she marched up the path. It was drizzling, certainly not the weather for the little denim shorts she had been wearing since Jamaica. A disturbing thought flickered in her brain. Had she been burgled, she wondered, remembering that Diana had once commented that Julian sometimes worked in the Lake House. Had someone been in there, rifling through the place, looking for something she had not yet identified?
She confronted the housekeeper as soon as she saw her. ‘Mrs Bills, has someone been in the Lake House? My things have gone missing,’ she said, aware that she was nearly panting.
‘Mrs Denver said you were coming to stay at the main house. I packed up your belongings and put them in the Green Room in the west wing.’
‘So it was you,’ she laughed, with a sense of relief.
‘What did you think had happened?’ the older woman asked with surprise.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said with a wave of the hand. ‘Actually, there’s been a change of plan. My friend has come to stay with me, so I think it’s best if I stay in the Lake House until he goes.’
‘I’ll get Mr Bills to bring your belongings back down, then.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it. Where is Diana?’
‘She’s just landed at Heathrow, so she’s due back in the next couple of hours. Your mother went to pick her up. Your friend, will he want something to eat?’
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, remembering that they had both slept through breakfast on the plane.
Rachel ascended the stairs to the Green Room, a beautiful space on the top floor. It had a four-poster bed, soft jade-green silk wallpaper and a vase of fresh flowers on the windowsill. The sight of her old canvas duffle bag on the velvet chaise longue made her laugh – it was like a crude interloper in an oasis of luxury. If someone had broken into the Lake House, they would have found slim pickings indeed, she thought, looking at her old biker boots and a wash bag that had seen better days.
Rubbing her eyes, she realised how tired she was. Jamaica had been a dead end, and Liam’s seven-day deadline to return to Ko Tao was certainly tempting, especially on a day as grey and miserable as today. Her bare forearms had become flecked with goose pimples. Somerfold must be an unwieldy place to heat even with the Denvers’ extravagant budget, she reflected.
Her thoughts turned to the Lake House, with its four exterior walls constructed largely of glass. When it was hot, it was as toasty as a greenhouse but she could only imagine how cold it would be when the weather dipped. In fact, that evening, it was going to be freezing. It would be the perfect excuse to cuddle up in bed with Liam, but she supposed he would welcome that cold-weather survival tactic like a hole in the head.
When Diana had first shown her around the house, she had pointed out a storage room on this floor. ‘It’s where we chuck all the winter stuff,’ she had said at the time. Deciding that it would be a good idea to take some blankets to the Lake House, she went to find it.
Rachel’s storage place in her Ko Tao apartment was a broom cupboard overspilling with rucksacks, flippers and boxes of nostalgia but this place was more like Selfridges. She could see shiny leather boots, furry moon boots and smart skis stored in a rack. There were coats, parkas, boxes of mittens and expensive candles, hotel slippers unused in their cellophane and a tall pile of cashmere blankets. There were Vuitton trunks and leather suitcases. On the top shelf was a row of handbags clearly not in current rotation, but Rachel was fashion-savvy enough to recognise one as a Birkin, another an expensive Goyard.
A large jewellery box contained brooches, bangles and earrings – obviously not Diana’s expensive baubles; in fact this place was clearly some sort of relegation zone, a halfway house between her proper dressing room and the nearest charity shop. Rachel picked up a silk embroidered wrap and put it round her shoulders. This was her sister’s life, a life she admitted she knew very little about these days. They had been so close as teenagers, but now every item of Diana’s belongings was alien to her.
She knew she should not be rifling through her sister’s stuff; she had come here for blankets, that was all. But it was impossible not to. Rachel had never been very materialistic, but this was still a treasure trove, a pirate chest of shiny possessions that she had never had or would have the chance to own, and she couldn’t help but think that if her sister didn’t want these delicious things, then maybe she could have some of them.
A cream vanity case caught her eye. She pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open. It was crammed with sunglasses, combs, eye masks and all sorts of pointless paraphernalia. As her hand ploughed through the stuff, she felt something hard. She tugged hard and retrieved a purple hardback book, knowing before she had a chance to flip it open what it might be.
Diana had been an enthusiastic diary keeper as a child and teenager, recording her thoughts and feelings almost obsessively in those flowery notebooks. Rachel had read them a few times – it had started when she had wanted to know the truth about her sister and the fifth-form heartthrob Paul Jones, but had become a bit of an addiction, like slipping into another world that was both familiar and more exotic than her own.
Feeling a surge of anticipation and guilt, she sat down on the bed and opened the book.
6 January. Still feeling woozy from the painkillers, but feeling worse inside. It’s been three weeks, but my brain can’t seem to grasp what’s happened. How could I lose my baby? Why me? After everything that has happened? Don’t I deserve some luck? A chance? The nurse told me it was nature’s way; that there might have been something wrong and this child – she was being nice, trying to get me to see it as a positive – could have been handicapped or worse, but it doesn’t feel like that. I don’t feel lucky. I feel cursed. The doctors can take away my baby, but why can’t they take away the pain? Julian came in late again yesterday. I don’t know how he can carry on working as if nothing has happened. He reached across the bed to me, but I pretended to be asleep. I don’t want him touching me right now – not his fault, I know, but it’s how I feel.
Rachel felt cold. She didn’t want to be this person, reading her sister’s diary, intruding on her most intimate thoughts. Diaries weren’t meant to be read, not really. They were a way for the author to sort out the day’s events, to make sense of the thoughts in their head, unburdening themself to an imaginary friend or a better self, perhaps.
But then something might be relevant here, she told herself. She had spent two whole days going through Julian’s possessions, but she had not yet been through Diana’s. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might be useful. Now she leafed through the book, skimming the pages, looking for anything that might be important.
28 January. Walked to the far edge of the wood and back, killed two hours. Omelette for lunch, trying to diet: again! Didn’t even have Mrs Bills for company tonight, so watched TV in bed. I miss being pregnant. I miss the baby’s kicks in my belly.
Then, later:
12 March. Jules staying at the NH house again, so alone once more. Took a bath, then had a salad in the kitchen. Went for a ride – Clarissa was skittish. Tried to pick up the knitting as Ruth recommended, but I’m all fingers and thumbs. Besides, knitting reminds me of baby things. Blankets and booties. Things I don’t want to think about. Chances of getting pregnant again near zero as my husband feels the need to keep out of my sight.
There were pages of it. Mostly it was a list of each day’s events, which were revealing only in their repetitiveness. Rachel had always assumed that her sister’s life was exciting, glamorous, but there was page after page of emptiness and dissatisfaction with life, with her husband.
14 May. T
hird night Julian has spent in London. He says that work is busy but I’m not so sure. Anne-Marie definitely sounds embarrassed when I speak to her. Am I being paranoid, or does she know something that I don’t? I keep asking myself if it’s happening again. Those whores, those slags who think it is okay to sleep with another woman’s husband. I can’t go through that humiliation a second time. I don’t want to start hating him again, but sometimes I can’t help it.
Rachel frowned. Diana’s anger shivered off the page. Whores? Slags? This was astonishing. Firstly because she had never known her sister to use such language, and also because Diana had painted a picture of Julian being such a supportive husband in the aftermath of her miscarriages.
16 May. Julian finally home. We tried to have sex. I think he was drunk. I needed to know if he still wanted me. But it hurt so we stopped. I don’t feel like a wife, a lover, a mother. I feel a failure. I hate it. I hate this. I hate him. Sometimes I wish that he would go to London and just stay there.
And then the entries stopped. It would have been a week before Julian’s death. Rachel closed the diary and let out a long breath. ‘Shit,’ she whispered, her hands trembling as she put the book back in the vanity case.
There was a pile of blankets behind her. She scooped them up, and shut the door behind her. She didn’t want to dwell on what she had just read. In fact she wanted to forget it.
37
Somerfold was suspiciously quiet when Diana returned home from the airport. No music blared from the guest bedroom, there was no sound of heavy footsteps running around upstairs, no loud voice booming into a mobile phone, nothing in fact to suggest that her sister had moved in from the Lake House.
‘Where’s Rachel?’ asked Diana when Mrs Bills came into the kitchen from her living quarters across the courtyard.
Deep Blue Sea Page 29
