The Phantom Tree

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘I love it.’ Adam’s tone was warm. ‘So often, modern places can be a bit soulless but this has so much character.’ He turned slowly, taking in the high ceilings and the big windows, the oak bookshelves and the glass wall through to the kitchen. ‘You’ve got such an eclectic mix of stuff but somehow it works.’

  ‘I love picking bits and pieces up on my travels,’ Alison said.

  ‘You should have been a designer,’ Adam said.

  Alison shook her head. ‘Travelling is my thing. I don’t settle well in one place.’

  ‘And the drawing?’ Adam was looking at the picture. ‘Yours?’

  Alison nodded.

  ‘I remember you were always good at sketching,’ Adam said. ‘You were studying art at Summer School the year we met, weren’t you, along with tourism?’

  ‘I was,’ Alison said. The memory unsettled her. She already knew that inviting Adam here had been a dangerous mistake. She realised she had not wanted the day to end. She didn’t want to lose what felt like the beginnings of intimacy between them. The instinct was so strong and yet it was an illusion. She could never truly be herself with Adam, or with anyone.

  Adam followed her into the galley kitchen. ‘Do you live alone?’

  Alison glanced at him over her shoulder. ‘Yes. It suits me.’

  ‘But are you seeing anyone?’

  ‘No.’ She snapped the kettle on.

  ‘That’s it?’ Adam sounded amused.

  Alison turned to face him. ‘What else is there to say? No, I’m not seeing anyone. Are you?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you asked me.’

  ‘Interest, courtesy or objective curiosity?’ He was moving towards her. She felt an uncharacteristic flutter of panic.

  ‘The latter of course.’ She moved away from him, towards the window. It was a small kitchen but it had never felt this small before.

  ‘Of course.’ Adam smiled. It was devastating. ‘Well, my work doesn’t leave much room for relationships. I’m always travelling, or writing or filming.’ He cocked his head, looking at her. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  ‘I don’t need an excuse not to date,’ Alison said. ‘I did all that stuff when I was young.’

  Adam raised his brows. ‘There’s a difference between dating and being in a relationship.’

  ‘Generally, you’ve got to date in order to find someone you want to be in a relationship with,’ Alison said.

  ‘And you’ve sworn off both?’

  Alison shrugged. ‘For now. Who knows about the future, though?’

  The silence tingled. The kettle clicked off, sounding very loud. Alison opened a cupboard and took out two mugs.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Coffee, thanks.’

  Alison splashed hot water into the mugs and dumped a couple of spoonfuls of coffee in the cafetière.

  ‘You make proper coffee,’ Adam sounded pleased. Then his voice changed. ‘Ali—’

  ‘No,’ Alison said, anticipating him. ‘Let’s not make the same mistake twice.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘Broadly speaking, yes,’ Alison said. ‘I’m sure that there are hundreds of women who would give a lot to be in my place right now, thousands, maybe…’ She stole a glance at him. He was smiling.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Alison said rapidly, ‘but—’

  ‘You’re not interested.’ Adam closed the space between them.

  Alison shook her head. ‘It would be a mistake, just like it was last week.’

  ‘Because we both fell under the spell of the moment? That doesn’t make it a mistake.’

  ‘We’ve been here before, Adam,’ Alison said. ‘Why go there again?’

  ‘We were eighteen and nineteen,’ Adam said. ‘We were too young to work it out.’

  ‘It was ten years ago,’ Alison said. ‘I don’t see any point in going over old ground. Relationships end for a reason.’ She swallowed hard, reaching for the cafetière, pressing down the plunger. It was probably too soon to have brewed but she needed something to do to distract her from how acute her emotions were.

  ‘I’m surprised you’d consider it for one minute,’ she said, her back turned to him. ‘I treated you very badly.’

  She felt his touch on her shoulder, light but insistent. She didn’t want to turn around to face him. She was afraid.

  ‘That’s true,’ she heard him say, after a moment. ‘It did hurt. And perhaps I don’t understand the impulse myself. All I know is that it feels…’ He paused. ‘Important, significant in some way. I want to be with you. I don’t know why but I want to find out.’

  She did turn then to find him watching her with the kind of intensity in his dark eyes that made her breath catch. She remembered how she had felt when she had stumbled across Mary’s portrait in Richard Demoranville’s gallery and had gone in to find that Adam was there. That had felt significant too, as though it were part of a pattern, but she had interpreted it in a different way, seeing Adam’s role only to help her find Arthur. She was using him. Yet that was also disingenuous. It might have started that way but now her feelings were more complicated.

  ‘It was lovely when we were together,’ she said slowly, ‘and I was entirely swept up in it, but it wasn’t real.’

  She poured a mug of coffee and pushed it towards Adam.

  ‘Why wasn’t it real?’ Adam took his mug and wrapped his hands about it. ‘Just because we were young doesn’t make what we felt any less valid.’

  ‘No,’ Alison said. She remembered this about Adam now, the way in which his straightforwardness made her feel she had to be honest in return. It had been inconvenient for someone whose life had been based on a lie.

  She picked up her mug and led the way through to the living room.

  ‘You were quite guarded in your emotions in those days,’ she said. ‘You were good at debating, but only about facts, never about feelings. You’ve changed.’

  ‘I was a typical boy.’ There was a rueful smile on Adam’s lips. ‘I knew how I felt about you and it blew me away, but I couldn’t articulate it. I went to a school where emotions are repressed, even these days, where they teach you how to hide how you feel behind good manners and charm. My family is the same.’

  ‘Well you learned that lesson extremely well,’ Alison said dryly.

  Adam laughed. ‘Thank you—I think.’

  ‘What changed?’ Alison sat back on the sofa. ‘I mean, I saw your family with you when you did the talk in Marlborough. They were so proud of you. It was obvious and they made no attempt to hide it. There was no stiff upper lip on show.’

  A shadow crossed Adam’s face and she felt a chill. ‘My father was killed,’ he said. He put his mug down with a soft click and sat forward. ‘It… made us all reconsider what was important, I suppose. It could have gone either way—we could have withdrawn into the familiarity of silence or we could reach out to each other and in the end that was what we did.’

  The familiarity of silence… Alison knew that well.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. She found she wanted to touch him, to offer comfort but she did not reach out. ‘You said he was killed,’ she said hesitantly. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a hit and run,’ Adam said. He didn’t look at her. He was studying the coffee in his mug. ‘Just before Christmas. A drunk driver on his way back from the pub one night.’

  ‘When?’ Alison asked.

  Adam didn’t misunderstand her. He looked up and held her gaze. ‘The year we split up. I was down from my first term at Cambridge.’

  ‘Oh, God, Adam…’ Alison felt a flare of misery.

  ‘Yeah.’ Adam gave her a lopsided smile. ‘It was a tough time but—’ He shrugged. ‘We came through, you know.’

  Alison did know. She knew how it felt to lose everything that was important and yet to have to keep moving forward. There was a cold, hard weight of unhappiness that she had kept locked
inside ever since she had lost Arthur. It had eased a little when she had had Diana to talk to but now, Diana, the only person who knew her secret, was dying. At the same time, she was digging into the past, exposing those scars she had done so much to hide. It was no wonder she felt vulnerable. And that was why this was so dangerous, she and Adam, talking about their brief, shared history. Yet ignoring it was no longer an option.

  ‘Are you angry with me?’ she said directly. ‘Did you blame me for hurting you too? Is that the real reason you’re here? For some sort of closure?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Adam looked startled. He held up a hand. ‘That’s a lot of questions.’ He sat back with a sigh. ‘I was angry at the time,’ he said at last. ‘Hell, I was furious with you, Ali, for being the personification of everything I had ever wanted and then taking it away from me and refusing to talk about it.’ His hand clenched the handle of the mug. ‘I didn’t know what to do so I threw myself into my studies and then my father was killed…’ He hesitated. ‘I suppose that eclipsed everything else for a time and when I came out the other side I’d changed, and I moved on and didn’t think about you any more.’

  Alison tried not to flinch. It was a straight answer and she should have been glad to hear it. Perhaps it was her pride or her vanity that was hurt. No one liked to be forgotten.

  ‘So this is not about unfinished business,’ she said.

  Adam put his mug down carefully on the table. ‘No. Unfinished business implies I want it to be over and I find that I don’t.’ He ran a hand through his hair. His voice was slightly rough. ‘All you had to do was walk into Richard’s shop and I felt as though I was nineteen again. I wanted you as much as I had before.’

  It stole Alison’s breath. ‘That’s quite a statement.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Adam said. ‘It’s not a choice I would have made.’ Now he did sound angry. ‘I’m being honest here,’ he said, ‘because I don’t see any other option. I’m not playing games.’

  ‘No,’ Alison said.

  ‘Your turn,’ Adam said.

  Alison swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘There’s something… I don’t want to feel like this, but I do.’

  It was honesty, up to a point, but it was nowhere near to the whole truth. The truth was that there was no point in her embarking on any serious relationship because she felt like a traveller. She was doing no more than passing through. She always had been.

  ‘Walking away would be the best option for both of us,’ Alison said. ‘I’m going to tell you some stuff I should have told you years ago,’ she added. ‘It’s not an excuse for how I behaved towards you but it does explain…’ She paused, picking her way through the truth. ‘It explains why I’m so messed up,’ she finished.

  Adam smiled. ‘We’ve all got baggage.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ Alison said dryly. She curled her legs up beneath her on the sofa. ‘I didn’t tell you much about my family or my history when we first met,’ she said. ‘By which I mean my background, not this.’ She waved a hand vaguely towards her genealogy files. ‘I deliberately kept it from you,’ she said, ‘because it wasn’t pretty and I thought… if you knew…’ She stopped, frowning. This hurt far more than she had anticipated.

  ‘My parents died when I was young,’ she said. ‘I was sent to live with some distant relations.’

  ‘I thought you grew up in care.’ Adam was watching her closely now and she knew she had to be careful. She wanted to be open with him whilst holding back that one, impossible truth: that she had come forward in time.

  ‘That was later,’ she said. She remembered that she had talked to him a little about that, ten years before. ‘To start with I went to live with some cousins. I was about eight or so. It was a big house and a rambling family. We didn’t go to school. It was all a bit mad and informal.’

  ‘Were you happy there?’ Adam expression was still now, intent.

  Alison shrugged. It was impossible to sum up what it had been like growing up at Wolf Hall. ‘It was fine,’ she said. ‘There were quite a lot of us. People came and went. We all got on all right. It wasn’t…’ She hesitated. ‘It wasn’t a normal family in the way that you would imagine one. We weren’t close. It was more like we shared a roof and food and some experiences, but it was all very casual.’

  ‘I guess there are plenty of households like that,’ Adam said. ‘Working parents, kids essentially taking care of themselves, no time to talk or take meals together.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alison said. ‘I’m sure there are.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I think what happened next probably isn’t unusual either.’ She looked up and met his eyes.

  ‘My eldest cousin came home. He was very glamorous. I… kind of idolised him.’

  ‘What happened?’ Adam’s voice was very quiet.

  ‘I got pregnant,’ Alison said. ‘I was fifteen.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We were together for a while but I realised…’ She stopped, trying to find the right words. ‘Well, it was an unequal relationship, you know? He was older and he had money and could do what he wanted, whereas I—’ She stopped again, biting her lip. ‘I didn’t have much say in the relationship,’ she said rapidly. ‘He dominated me, told me what to do.’

  She heard Adam swear under his breath. ‘Christ, Ali.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Alison said. ‘I’m okay with it now. I talked to someone about it. A counsellor. That helped.’

  Adam sounded grim. ‘He abused you.’

  ‘He abused the situation,’ Alison said. She remembered how Diana had helped her to see the truth of what had happened with Edward. ‘He took advantage, but I wasn’t unwilling,’ she said. ‘I was just a girl, in love with being in love. I just didn’t realise quite how much of an imbalance of power there was between us until… until he took the baby away.’

  Adam swore again, very succinct and descriptive. ‘Bastard,’ he said, between his teeth.

  Alison looked at him. She thought she would see pity alongside the anger in his eyes, but there was nothing there she could understand, no emotion at all, only darkness.

  ‘He was adopted.’ She had to finish this, quickly. Adam had never seen her cry and she had no intention of starting now. The instinct to bury her grief had started young, when her parents had died, and it was one thing that had not changed when she had entered a different time. ‘I never saw him again,’ she said. ‘In the end, I ran away and that was how I ended up in care.’

  ‘When we split up you said, “It’s not you, it’s me,”’ Adam quoted softly.

  ‘You remember that?’ Alison was startled.

  ‘I remember everything you said to me,’ Adam said.

  ‘And you can see I was right.’

  Adam gave a shrug. ‘I’m not saying you were right but I can see why you were so mixed up.’

  ‘Messed up,’ Alison corrected. ‘I was completely messed up when we met.’

  She saw the glimmer of amusement in his eyes. ‘If you like,’ he said. The amusement faded. ‘You never tried to find him? Your baby?’

  ‘I looked,’ Alison said carefully. ‘But in the end that’s his prerogative, isn’t it, rather than mine.’

  It was the first lie she had told and it was odd, as though Adam could sense it somehow in her tone. He frowned and she felt a flash of panic. She had been so careful to tell him about Arthur in a way that would not have any resonance with her search for Mary Seymour. She did not want Adam drawing any parallels. Yet now she wondered if she had underestimated him, or the ties that bound them. Adam did seem to have an uncanny knack of tuning into the things she did not say as much as the ones she did.

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I don’t suppose it was easy for you.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose, still frowning. ‘It’s a hell of a lot to take in.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Alison said. If only he knew… ‘Oh, and by the way, all this happened in 1566. My cousin, my abuser, was Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford.’ />
  ‘I’m sorry.’ Adam ran a hand distractedly through his hair. ‘So sorry for what you had to go through. God, that’s inadequate, isn’t it, under the circumstances? I don’t know what to say…’

  ‘Forget it,’ Alison said. Suddenly she was desperate for him to go. She felt horribly vulnerable. Diana was the only person she had ever spoken to about her past and that had been quite different; difficult, loaded with emotion and grief, but somehow she had felt less exposed than she did now with Adam. Her feelings felt naked.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, rising from the sofa. ‘For telling me all about the box and its contents today when I couldn’t really help you much in return.’

  Adam had got up too. She knew he had understood that this was his dismissal.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. He gave her that glimmer of a smile that always set her pulse awry. She could not understand why she simultaneously wanted him to go and yet longed for him to stay. She didn’t want to be alone to face this blizzard of memories she had stirred up, but at the same time it was the only way she knew to protect herself.

  ‘You’d better go,’ she said, when Adam made no move towards the door.

  She saw him shake his head slightly. ‘Take care of yourself,’ he said. He bent to kiss her cheek. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ There was puzzlement and anger and pity and a welter of other emotions in his eyes. Alison looked away quickly, fearing her own emotions would be too easy to read.

  She closed the front door of the flat behind him and resisted the urge to bang her head against the panels. Tears prickled her throat. She had made Adam leave, had driven him away with the truth just as she had intended to do. The secret of her past was safe at the cost it always exacted, that of isolation.

  She sat down on the second step and put her head in her hands. Dry sobs shook her whole body. She stuffed a fist in her mouth to stop the sound.