Ursula's Secret

by Mairi Wilson

  The door burst open, knocked Jenny hard and she stumbled, fell to her knees, dropping the gun, sending it skittering across the floor, stopping as it collided with Ross’s foot.

  “Danny!”

  He spun round to where Lexy was standing behind the door, reached towards her.

  “No – her!” Lexy shouted as Jenny lurched to her feet, went for the gun. Danny hesitated for a second, then roared and flung himself towards Jenny, but Helen was faster, threw herself in front of her son, pushed back at Jenny and then there was a bang and everyone, everything, stopped.

  “What the …” Danny was the first to come to, turned and grabbed Lexy, pulled her in to him, as he searched her face.

  “I’m fine, I— Oh God!”

  Blood was spreading like an emerging star from the centre of Helen’s chest, her face registering surprise, disbelief and something else: a calmness, a stillness. Her hands fell from Jenny’s arms, and then she was falling, slumping to the ground, revealing Ross sitting on the sofa behind her, the gun hanging limply from the fingers of his left hand.

  “Jesus!” Jenny pushed the injured woman away from her, sending her sprawling onto her back, stepping over her to grab the gun from Ross.

  Danny roared again, flung Lexy aside and caught Jenny in a rugby tackle, bringing her down, cracking her head on the coffee table as she fell.

  “Gun, Lex, get the gun.”

  “Drop it, Ross,” she shouted and he did, shuffling back into the cushions, hugging himself as the gun bounced on the carpet and disappeared under the sofa.

  “Good boy, Ross, that’s right, just sit still.” Lexy put one hand out to pat his shoulder as she shuffled past to get to Helen, lying on the floor, the faintest of smiles on her face.

  Behind them, Danny was struggling to get Jenny under control, sitting on her back, grabbing her wrists and pinning them down above her head. Jenny was trying to resist as she came to, kicking and fighting as she recovered from the knock to her head, gaining strength and raging at finding herself captive.

  “Get off me, you bastard, let me go!” Jenny was screaming, gasping for breath as Danny threw the full force of his weight onto her.

  “Lexy, do something! This is … like riding an effing … bucking … bronco … here.”

  But Lexy was trying to stem the bleeding from Helen’s chest, to keep Helen awake.

  “I can’t, I … Ross! Ross, help us. Help Danny. Sit on her, you sit on Jenny too, you can do it, she won’t hurt you now, she can’t. Go on, that’s right,” she encouraged, trying to keep her voice steady and soothing. “Good, Ross, yes, that’s it.”

  Danny reached a hand up quickly and pulled the heavy man down. Jenny grunted loudly as the air was forced from her lungs by the extra weight, but not before she’d managed to reach up with the hand Danny had released and scratch the side of his face, drawing blood and making Danny roar again with a rage Lexy hadn’t known he had in him. But Helen’s gasp drew her attention quickly back to the woman she was kneeling beside.

  “Helen, don’t close your eyes. Look at me, please, Helen. Oh God, don’t … you can’t … I’ve only just found you …” Lexy was crying now, as she stroked the woman’s forehead with one hand, keeping the other pressed to her chest to staunch the flow of blood, her hand sticky with the warmth of the life slipping away beneath her palm. Helen exhaled, inhaled shallowly; her lips formed shapes but no words emerged.

  “What? What are you saying? Helen, please. Don’t … You can’t do this to me!” Lexy’s fury, frustration at the discoveries and lies and betrayals and shocks of the last few weeks welled up and she was shouting, shouting at a dying woman, shouting at her grandmother to stay. She felt a hand on her shoulder, looked up into Danny’s worried face, saw Ross beaming proudly as he sat on Jenny’s back, her hands and ankles tied with curtain cords, her struggles ineffective and losing momentum.

  “Danny, she’s … Don’t let her …” Lexy was sobbing as she looked into his concerned face, then turned her gaze back to the dying woman.

  “Ah … lexis.” The voice was a breath, a sigh. “My Izzie’s … girl … her little … Lexy …”

  Lexy’s sobs stalled in her throat at the words, the acknowledgement, the relief.

  “Don’t go … Not yet …” Lexy’s voice was tight, her throat aching as she held the woman’s hand, felt Danny lift her other hand away, replacing it with his own in pressing on the wound, the flow of blood undiminished, seeping into clothes and carpet as Helen slipped out of Lexy’s reach.

  “Ross.” The word was sibilant, no more than a wisp of air released from her slack mouth. “Please … lexis … Ross.”

  Lexy was nodding, stroking Helen’s face, smearing traces of blood on to the loose, weathered cheek, but then she felt the fingers she held in her other hand relax, saw the eyes cloud over, dim. And she knew her grandmother had gone.

  They heard it then, the sound of a car, a siren, then another car coming up the track, fast, but for Lexy, as she looked around the room at the farcical staging of her grandmother’s demise, the cavalry was arriving too late.

  Aftermath

  Lexy watched Danny cross the room and sit down opposite her. They were alone in the tiny hotel bar. The German tourists had long since retired ready for another epic climb the next morning and the barman had returned to the front desk leaving them instructions to ring if they needed him, after Danny had persuaded him to leave the bottle on the table, in exchange for a credit card.

  “Did you get through to him?”

  Danny shook his head. “No. He’s at the hospital. I spoke to David, though. He’ll pass the information along.”

  “To Robert? Since when did they become such great buddies?”

  “David’s agreed to compensation for the mudslide victims.”

  “He has?”

  “You persuaded him, apparently.”

  “Me? I only spoke to him once, and it wasn’t exactly amicable.”

  “Well, seems you can be very convincing when you’re unfriendly. David took Robert to meet his lawyers to get things started.”

  Lexy remembered the car at the hospital, seeing Robert get into it, her suspicions. “I thought David was trying to kill me, you know. That Robert was in on it too, somehow.”

  “Nope, that was all down to cousin Jenny and her sidekick Pendleton.”

  “Just Pendleton, actually. She’d ditched him by then. Probably thought his snake trick would get him back into her good books.”

  “There has to be an easier way to impress a woman.” Danny picked up the whisky bottle, turned it to the light to check the level of its contents. “Do you want something to eat?” Lexy shook her head. “I think you’d better, if you’re going to keep on drinking at that rate.” Lexy threw Danny a look. “Okay. Just saying. Look, I’m just going to see if I can get us some sandwiches or something. For later. Just in case.”

  Lexy watched him disappear back out into the lobby, curious to know if he’d fare any better than she had. She couldn’t face tinned tomato soup again. Red, thick, congealed. She shivered, drained her glass, clattered it down on the table and looked down at her hands. They’d been covered in her grandmother’s blood a few short hours ago. Blood is thicker than water, her mother’s voice whispered in her head. It certainly was.

  By the time Danny returned, empty handed but for a wrinkled apple and a blackened banana he’d found in a bowl in the deserted hotel kitchen, Lexy was deep in thought, the whisky bottle considerably lighter, and her mood considerably darker. She took the banana, peeled it, then dropped it uneaten on the table between them.

  “Come on, Lex. You have to eat something.”

  She ignored him. “You know, I’ve been thinking. Everyone I’ve ever loved, everyone I trusted, lied to me. How can I believe anyone again?”

  “That’s a little overdramatic, Lexy.” Danny pushed the banana to one side, went back to nursing his whisky. He didn’t like whisky, but Lexy had insisted he join her and for once he hadn’t argue
d. She hadn’t wanted to drink alone.

  “And you’d know, would you? You with your comfortable Cheshire family, stretching back to Magna bloody Carta, your predictable WI chairing, home-baking mother and your … and your … your … I don’t know! But you have no idea—”

  “Don’t be angry, Lexy.” This didn’t sound like one of his lectures. The patronising tone was missing. “You have to start forgiving.” Oh, wrong. Here we go, she thought. “If you stay angry with everything and everyone, you’ll destroy yourself, and it won’t change anything.”

  “You would say that, wouldn’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re just trying to get off the hook. You betrayed me, too, didn’t you? You lied.”

  “That’s different. I … Yes, I slept with Fizz, but …”

  “Don’t make excuses.”

  “But I didn’t stop loving you and I never lied.”

  “Oh don’t be—”

  “No, I didn’t. There was no affair, really, no secret love nests, no pretend conferences or out-of-town seminars. I’d slept with her precisely once before you found out. And to be honest, if you hadn’t found out, I think I would have slept with her only once. Ever. I didn’t love her, Lexy. You knew that.”

  “I … Only once? I didn’t know … but that’s not the point! The point is you betrayed me.”

  “No. The point is I was angry. And I did something I regretted more than I can tell you because I was angry.”

  “You were angry?” Lexy laughed bitterly. “You don’t know how to be angry, you don’t have the passion.” Even as she said it, though, she remembered his roar as he flung himself at Jenny, her astonishment.

  “Well, it seems I do. And it seems I have a very self-destructive way of expressing it.”

  “So this is my fault.”

  “No, I’m not saying that. We were … broken. Fractured. I wanted to make it right and I couldn’t. You shut me out. Sniped at me when I tried to get close. Oh, I don’t know. This isn’t about who did what when. Recriminations. I know I did wrong and I’ll have to live with that. But I didn’t lie, Lexy. I didn’t lie to you.”

  “Bloody nitpicking academic. It comes to the same thing. Betrayal. Just like my new-found family, my murderous, conniving, lying—”

  “Don’t, Lexy, let it go. Forgive—”

  “Forgive? Who? Oh, I suppose I should start with you, should I? The hero rushing in to save me. Is that how you see it? Don’t think I don’t know what you were doing. Trying to get back into my life.”

  “You didn’t need me, don’t need me, to save you. But would that be so wrong, anyway, wanting to look after you?”

  “You betrayed me!” She wouldn’t listen to this, wouldn’t let him distract her from her anger, this rage bubbling like lava, desperate to erupt, escape, be purged.

  “Fine. Forget about me. But forgive your mother. Your grandmother. All those people you’re so angry with. You’re angry because you loved them, you know. So angry you can’t see what’s clear as day.”

  “Oh yeah, and whaz that, Mr Smartass?”

  “That they did what they did because they loved you.”

  “Oh, can’t listen to any more of this. Really, Danny, for a supposedly rising star in academic circles you do a good line in Jemy … Jeremy Kyle melodrama. What d’you know about any of this anyway? You’re such a cliché, but for all your degrees and journals and … and stuff, you know nothing! Such a fool, such a … an innocent, falling for the ‘little pregnant woman’ thing.”

  “That’s enough, Lex.”

  “No it’s not. Not even nearly enough.” She grabbed the bottle and poured herself another healthy slug, drops splattering the tabletop around her glass as heavily as monsoon rain.

  “This isn’t my fault, Lexy.” Danny screwed the top back on the whisky bottle, put it on the bar behind him, out of reach. “You’re angry because you think you’ve been betrayed, but—”

  “You did it too! You betrayed me. You left me—”

  “You threw me out, Lexy. I’ve told you. If you hadn’t made me leave, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere with Fizz. As it was—”

  “As it was you were quite happy to believe you’d got her pregnant and play happy fam—”

  “I most certainly wasn’t happy. I was just trying to do the right thing.”

  “Oh, right. Only you. Only you would fall for the oldest trick in the book. Always the honourable man.”

  “What’s so wrong with that?”

  “How could you be so gullible? How? I mean surely you …”

  “Lexy, does it matter? I’ve no idea. You know more about the gynaecology of it all than I do. What did you expect me to do, ask her for proof?”

  “Yes!”

  “I’d slept with her and she was pregnant and what else can I say? It doesn’t matter. It was all a huge mistake, anyway. I’m … I’m relieved.”

  “But the child … your child. You wanted—”

  “You’re such an idiot at times, Lexy. Yes, I wanted a child, I want a child, but not with Fizz. Never with her. With someone I love. With you.”

  “Don’t you dare. No.” Lexy was finding it hard to string the words together, her enunciation becoming more deliberate as she struggled to say in control. “Danny’s dumped so he comes running back to me?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “It is. It’s very mushit from where I’m sitting. You can’t do that. You can’t betray me and then walk right back into my life and ’spect me to—”

  “I don’t expect anything. I just want you to know I love you. That I’m here. And that I didn’t sodding lie—”

  Lexy cut him off as she stood up, pushing over the little table, and stomped out, slamming the door behind her.

  There was something satisfying about stomping along a pebble beach. The groan and crunch of the stones under her feet were like the screams she was screaming in her head, the blows she was aiming at imaginary punchbags. She was slowing now, though, her calves protesting at this unusual punishment. She stopped, hands on hips, breathing heavily, and looked back at the mountain towering above the beach, the hotel a Monopoly piece dropped from its board.

  How dare he. How dare he. But already it was slipping away from her, her anger. What was she so angry about? The fact that Danny had slept with Fizz? The fact that he was a gullible idiot? The fact that he still loved her when she’d behaved like a first-class b—

  Her phone, her own phone was beeping. She pulled it out of her pocket. Robert.

  “Hello?”

  “Lexy?”

  “Yes. Robert—”

  “She’s dead.”

  Lexy sank down onto her knees on the unyielding pebbles, oblivious to pain.

  “Lexy? Are you there?”

  “I … Oh God, Robert, I’m so sorry.”

  “So you bloody should be. You with your histrionics and making her drag up the past like that. She was in no state to go into theatre in the first place.”

  “No! You can’t blame me for this. You’re the doctor. If she wasn’t up to it why did you let her—”

  “And then the news about Helen, it was all too much.”

  “But I thought the operation was straightforward—”

  “It was, but she was too weak. You made her too weak. She couldn’t fight the infection and … and …” She could hear his voice crack, knew he was crying.

  “Robert. I’m so very, very sorry.” Evie. Oh good God. Evie was dead. And Lexy had left in such a rush, let Robert hustle her out when she should have taken the time to say a proper goodbye, to wish the old woman well. Evie had helped her so much, and Lexy knew it couldn’t have been easy for her to trawl through the past like that. She’d never even told Evie how grateful she was. Hadn’t thanked her for telling her what she needed to know, probably would have been happier not knowing, but yes, needed to know. But it wasn’t just guilt Lexy felt, it was loss. Another thread connecting her to her mother’s life had been cut. And sh
e knew, had she had the chance, Evie, her mother’s godmother after all, was someone she would have grown to like, even perhaps to love.

  “You should never have come here, Lexy. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been so determined to rake it all up. Well, I hope it’s worth it. I hope your new-found wealth, your precious family, are worth getting Helen killed for. And Gran …” She heard him choke, struggle for breath. “I hope you can live with that, Lexy.” The line went dead.

  Lexy crumpled forward, curled into a ball, feeling the pebbles hard beneath her now, relishing the pain, no more than she deserved, as she started to cry.

  Cold and aching, head thick and heavy now that the buzz and fire of the whisky had abated, Lexy trudged back up the path to the hotel. Relieved to find the door unlocked, she slipped in past the empty reception desk in the dark hall and up to her room. She shut the door softly behind her and slid down to sit on the floor.

  She watched Danny sleeping, his chest rising and falling, its steady rhythm mesmerising, the soft murmur of his breath as soothing as a lullaby. Tears welled in her eyes, again. Now that she’d let the tears begin, she wasn’t sure they would ever stop. She knew Danny loved her. He’d proved that beyond any doubt over the last few days. The question was …

  She shut off her thoughts, blinked and wiped away the tears. She stood and tiptoed over to the window, peeped out from the side of the chintz curtains to watch the dawn spread its green tinge across the blank canvas of an empty sky. She’d always loved sunset more than sunrise, but as she watched the clearer yellow of the morning sun push its way over the summit of the mountains in the distance she realised it was every bit as beautiful, the palette every bit as rich and complete as the hotter shades that heralded the coming night, every bit as exciting. Just different. Dawn and dusk, light and dark. Both had their place.