by Jojo Moyes
'That's not the point!'
'It is the point! You and Thierry come first in everything!' You don't know how much it costs me to be here, to have sacrificed my career, she wanted to add, but she couldn't cast that burden on to her daughter.
'I know!' Kitty yelled. 'I know about Mr Cartwright. I know you could have sold the Guarneri and we could have stayed in our home!'
Isabel blanched. She had almost forgotten about that, so thoroughly had she immersed herself in the Spanish House.
'You lied to us! You told me we couldn't afford to stay in our house, the house we loved, with all our friends and Mary. You said we had to move here - and all the time you could have sold that violin and we could have stayed at home with the people we loved. You lied!' She drew breath, then hit Isabel with the killer blow. 'Dad wouldn't have lied to us!'
Thierry pushed back his chair and sprinted out.
'Thierry - Kitty - I'm not even sure that if I had--'
'Don't! I heard what Mr Cartwright said!'
'But I--'
'This isn't a bloody home to you! It never was! It was just a way for you to keep your precious violin!'
'Kitty, that's--'
'Oh, leave me alone!'
Kitty flung her schoolbag on to the table and stalked off, rubbing her face with her sleeve. Isabel wanted to follow her children, try to explain, but she saw it was pointless. Because Kitty was right. And there was little she could say to defend herself.
Supper was a subdued affair. Thierry said nothing, but ate the macaroni cheese, refused an apple, then disappeared to his room. Kitty kept her head down, and answered Isabel's questions monosyllabically.
'I'm sorry,' Isabel said. 'Really, Kitty. I'm so sorry. But you have to know that nothing is more important to me than you and your brother.'
'Whatever.' Kitty pushed her plate away.
She and Thierry went to bed without protest, which was disturbing in itself, and Isabel was alone in the drawing room, with the lights flickering and the wind whistling through the undergrowth outside.
She built up the log fire, drank half a bottle of red wine too quickly, and found that even the roaring flames offered little comfort. She noticed with relief that there was a comedy programme on television. But as the opening credits rose, there was a sudden clunk. The pixellated picture shrank into a white dot and disappeared. Simultaneously the lights went out, leaving her cloaked in silence and darkness. It felt almost like an insult, as if the house itself was laughing at her. Isabel sat immobile on the sofa, illuminated by the embers of the fire. Then her face crumpled and she was sobbing.
'Bloody house!' she yelled. 'Bloody stupid house!' She stood up and fumbled for matches, then searched for the candles she had not thought to put in a particular place, still swearing, her voice muffled by the wind outside, and by despair.
Matt had spent the evening at the Long Whistle. He had been avoiding Theresa who, picking up on his lack of interest with finely tuned antennae, had become irritable and petulant, flouncing around behind the bar and casting meaningful looks in his direction. He had met her flashing eyes and attempts at intimacy with indifference. There was nothing he liked less than a desperate woman who couldn't get the message.
Besides, his mind was on other things.
He had come to the pub, rather than going home, because he knew that, while she chose to ignore much, Laura could not ignore his obvious and growing disquiet. He felt uncharacteristically at odds with himself. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Byron's face as he looked at Isabel. He had caught in it something raw and unguarded, and slowly it had dawned on him that it had reflected something in himself. When he closed his eyes he saw not Theresa or his wife but the pale expanse of Isabel Delancey's collarbone, the scattering of freckles where her chest had been exposed to sunlight. He saw her smiling and swaying up to him, her hips undulating, her self-consciousness lost in sensuous appreciation of her music.
Byron's response had been right. She did not belong to anyone. She was not tethered, as he was. The thought of Byron going near her made his beer taste sour. The thought of anyone else with her in that house, the house that held his imprint on every board, made his jaw set in a determined line.
'Going to be a wild one tonight,' said the landlord, his eyes on his crossword.
'Yup.' Matt downed his drink and put his glass on the bar. 'You might be right.'
He ignored Theresa's frantic attempts to get his attention. He was not sure what excuse he was going to use to explain how late he was. But driven by something he did not entirely understand, fifteen minutes before closing time, Matt found himself in his van, heading towards Little Barton.
Down in the boiler room, Byron settled the dogs, turned off his radio, and prepared to read his book by the light of the candles he had bought that morning. It was odd how quickly you could adapt to your surroundings, as long as you had the barest of home comforts. To his new home under the house he had now brought a chair, his battery-powered radio, the dogs' baskets and a camp stove. Having washed in a cleaned sink, eaten proper food and drunk a mug of tea he was feeling, if far from cheerful, at least more even about his fate. It was only three weeks until the puppies could be weaned. One of the farmers on the other side of the church had already offered to pay him a couple of hundred for the boldest. If all of them fetched that much he'd be well on his way to a deposit.
When he was more stable financially, he would set about finding a job somewhere else. He was increasingly uncomfortable about Matt's involvement with this house. There was nothing he could put his finger on but he had felt in his gut that all was not right, that Matt had not given up on owning the Spanish House. It would blow up at some point, or Mrs Delancey would be forced to move on, and Byron did not want to be around when either took place.
It was almost ten to eleven when he heard the boiler click off. He glanced at his watch, puzzled. The timer was set for eleven thirty. He climbed out of his sleeping-bag, ignoring the hopeful glances of his dogs, and went to the door. Every light was off.
A few minutes later he heard sobbing. 'Bloody house,' she was yelling. 'Bloody stupid house.'
The power was down. He froze. It might be a fuse, but she might not know where the fuse box was. He could turn it back on for her, but then he would have to explain how he had come to be so close to her house.
Byron stood still, and Meg whined, picking up on his discomfort. He shushed her.
He listened in the dark to Isabel Delancey tramping up and down and felt a deep disquiet. None of this was right, yet he was powerless to do anything about it. He heard her violin start up and her misery transferred itself to the strings. He was no connoisseur of music, but even he thought he had never heard anything so sad. He recalled her earlier that day, approaching Matt McCarthy with her well-thumbed book of figures, her sleep-deprived face. So, even those who appeared wealthy could be teetering on the edge of debt. In some respects, she was no better off than he was.
It was this that drove him from the boiler room - that and the observation that it might have been his sister and Lily in Isabel's place. He could hear her, preoccupied by her instrument on the other side of the door, playing her melancholic song in the dark. He would walk to the front of the house, see if the coach-house lights were on, and knock on the door. He would say he was just passing. He would feel better knowing that she and the children had light.
He was just closing the door when he heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel. Without his own car there, he had no convincing explanation for his presence. He could certainly not afford to be seen. He reopened the door silently, and withdrew back into the space under the house. Then he sat in the dark, waiting.
There were no lights on at the house, and for a moment he suspected she and the children had gone out and felt something like disappointment. Then, as the wind dropped momentarily, he heard her violin, and guessed that the electricity was down. Perhaps because he had downed several drinks, or because the last few months had endow
ed him with some appreciation of this kind of music, Matt McCarthy remained where he was and listened. His window open, the cool wind on his skin, he let the music match the anguished, riven mood of the weather whistling around him. He sat outside the house that should have been his and let himself feel something alien to him.
The lights stayed out.
He didn't know what finally drew him in. Later he thought it might have been the desire to help, perhaps to check the fuse box. Or it might have been the music. In neither instance was he being honest with himself. The front door, as was common, was unlocked. He walked in and closed it softly behind him, and stood for a moment as the house creaked gently around him, like an old ship on high seas. He wondered whether to call out, but part of him sensed that this would halt the music, and he found, to his surprise, that he did not want it to stop. So, he walked stealthily along the hallway, then down the staircase to the kitchen corridor, and there, in the doorway, he saw her. She was playing, tears rolling down her cheeks, her eyes closed.
He looked at her, and something in him short-circuited. Her mouth was slightly open, her head tilted forward, shoulders back. She was lost in something he could not own. She bit her lower lip, wincing as the music reached a crescendo, as if the sound caused her pain. He could not tear his eyes from her. He felt like a boy again, as if he were watching something he was not supposed to see, something beyond him, something he could not have for himself, and his throat caught. And as he stood, frozen, her eyes opened, and widened slightly as she saw him through the gloom.
He made as if to speak, but she carried on playing without a break. She was watching him now, her eyes fixed on his, her arm working as if she was incapable of halting the flow.
'You have no power,' he said, as the music quieted briefly.
She nodded.
His eyes were locked on hers. He moved closer to her, drawn to the rise and fall of her chest, the juddering movement of her body. Her utter self-containment, set against what he suddenly saw in her eyes - something raw with need, with physical loss.
She dropped her hands to her sides before he reached her and made a faint sound, as if in surrender. He had his arms round her waist, half folding her body backwards, crushing her to him, pushing her through the door into the kitchen. She scrambled to place her violin on the table, and then her pale, cold hands were in his hair, her mouth open against his. He heard her gasp, felt them against his skin, the shocking warmth of her thighs as he pushed his hands up her skirt, the sweet, gratifying melding of her body against his. Something inside Matt McCarthy sang, loud and piercing, became deafening, as she pulsed against him, and something low and gutteral escaped his chest.
They slid inelegantly to the floor and he had her beneath him, where he needed her, where he had needed her to be since he first saw her. And he knew he wanted ownership - not just of the house but of this woman. He bit her neck, made her submit, felt her surprisingly strong fingers clutching at his skin, and his last thought as the wind rumbled against the windows, as the house groaned like a living thing around them, a faint surprise that her eyes were tight shut when his own were open, wide open, as if he were seeing a whole universe for the first time.
He was not sure how long he had been asleep, possibly hours, possibly minutes. When he opened his eyes, his exposed skin protesting at the cold of the flagstone floor, there was a quilt half over him, scattered items of clothing beneath his head, and the deep black of the small hours cloaking the windows. He tried to work out where he was, what he was doing there, and then he saw her, her clothing intact, as if nothing had happened, seated on a chair, watching him, her silhouette black against the dim light.
He raised himself, smelling the faint scent of her on his skin, and the answering echo of his immediate arousal. His mind was flooded with images, the sensation of her on him, around him, her cries in his ears. And he lifted a hand. 'Come here,' he murmured, 'where I can see your face.'
'It's nearly two,' she said. 'You need to go home.'
Home. Oh, Christ, this would take some explaining.
Matt stood up, letting the quilt slide to the floor. He refastened his jeans and belt. The air was cold, but he hardly felt it. Something astonishing was moving through him, as if his own blood had been washed, renewed. He walked up to her, still unable to see her face clearly. But he touched the hair that he had grasped earlier.
Everything had changed. And he was strangely glad, accepting this.
'Thank you,' he said. He wanted to tell her what it meant. How it had altered him. And then he realised, as he drew his thumb across her cheekbone, that it was wet with tears - and he knew suddenly that he could remedy this. 'Don't be sad,' he said softly. 'It'll be all right, you know.' She did not reply.
'Look,' he said, wanting her to smile, wanting to lift her unhappiness, 'about the money. Forget the next instalment. We'll work something out.' For an insane moment, he thought he might confess to her how things might change. But even he was not disoriented enough for that. 'Isabel?'
He felt, rather than heard, the new quality of the silence. She had stiffened, drawn back from his touch.
'I have never done this before,' she said, and her voice was cold.
'Done what?' he said, trying to see her face.
'I'll pay you everything I owe you.'
He was dumbfounded, as the true nature of their exchange struck him. 'Look - I didn't come here tonight because . . . I . . . Christ.' He was half laughing, unable to believe what he had heard. 'I wasn't suggesting--' He had been wrong-footed. 'I've never . . . paid for it in my life.'
'And I've never offered it.' Her tone was icy now. 'I'd like you to go.'
Matt found himself outside in the chill, walking towards his van, head spinning. He had to make her understand. He couldn't believe she had thought that that was about money. But even as his feet crunched back across the gravel he heard the heavy, unanswerable sound of a door being bolted.
On the other side, Isabel sank to the floor with a silent howl of despair and self-loathing. She let her head drop to her knees, her bruised lips fall against the soft fabric of her skirt, hiding her face from her own betrayal.
Her whole body ached with loneliness, the loss of her husband, the rough communion with a man who wasn't him. She was sober and she was empty. Emptier than she had ever been.
Laurent! she cried. What have you brought me to? What have I become? The house met her with a silence that was deafening.
Fourteen
There was a train every two hours that shuttled between her new home and London, and Isabel had calculated that even if this one arrived on time, she'd be lucky to get back before the school bus. She sat, resigned, as the man opposite worked his way methodically through his newspaper and the two backpackers to her right chatted in some language that sounded harsh and northern European, letting the dull monotony of the wheels on the track lull her mind into nothingness.
She thought of Mary, who had met her for coffee, and who had commiserated about the tyranny of the school run. 'Just be glad you're not doing it in London,' she had said cheerfully. 'I spend half my life in the car.'
It had been good to see her, a reminder that Isabel had once been part of another life. Mary asked eagerly after Kitty and Thierry, told Isabel she looked a lot better (a diplomatic fib, Isabel guessed) and promised to visit soon. But it was clear that she belonged elsewhere now, that she was already at the hub of another family. She had brought one of her new charges with her, a doe-eyed baby whom she dandled on her knee with the calm confidence she had shown in dealing with Isabel's children.
'Not been shopping, then?'
Isabel glanced down the carriage and saw a woman she recognised. She took in the neat pastel mackintosh, the inappropriate hat, and the woman smiled.
'Linnet. Deirdre Linnet. You know me from the Cousins' shop. You live at the Spanish House.' She told Isabel this as if she were offering information. She gestured at Isabel's legs. 'I thought you might have gone to London f
or a bit of shopping but you've no bags.'
'Bags,' said Isabel.
'Of shopping.'
'No,' she said. 'Not today.'
'I've gone a bit mad. I only go up twice a year and I like to have a splurge. My little treat.' She patted the plastic carriers that flanked her seat, each bearing some brand name that announced to the world the avenues Mrs Linnet's savings had taken. 'My little treat,' she repeated to herself.
'I'm in a mess,' Isabel had told Mary. 'I've got it all wrong. The children are desperately unhappy and it's all my fault.' Mary had listened to almost the whole story (there was one part Isabel had deliberately omitted) and then laughed easily, as if none of this were particularly worrisome. 'She's a teenage girl,' she had said. 'It's her job to be unhappy. You've actually got off lightly so far. Thierry . . . Well, he'll find his voice in time. But they're doing okay at school. They're coming home every day. They're eating. Strikes me they're doing fine, considering. It's you who's the unhappy one.'
'Work, was it?'
'I'm sorry?'
'Work. Your trip to London.'
Isabel smiled wanly. Her eyes felt gritty with tiredness. She had spent most of the previous night awake, and the missing hours of sleep were gaining on her. 'Something like that.'
'You're a musician, aren't you? Asad told me. He's not one to gossip, him or Henry, not really, but you've probably worked out there's not a lot happens in our village that doesn't go through the shop.'
Isabel wondered dully how long it would be before last night became conversational currency.
'I saw your advert for violin lessons. I used to sing, you know. I could have done it professionally, my husband always said. But I got caught up with the children . . .' She sighed. 'You know how it is.'
Isabel turned to the window. 'Yes, I do.'
'You need to work,' Mary had said. She had paid for the coffee, which Isabel had found almost unbearably humiliating. 'You need to do a bit with your orchestra again, bring a few pounds in, restore your peace of mind. You can leave them for a day. Kitty's old enough now to look after her brother.' She had hugged Isabel, then walked off, pushing the pram, back to ease the path of some other family.
