by Jojo Moyes
And then the ringing stopped, and a woman's voice - well spoken, unremarkable, probably not that different from her own - said, 'Hello?' And after a pause: 'Hello?'
And Isabel, a woman who considered life empty if her own head was not full of glorious sound, found she could only listen in silence.
On the third evening the heat wave broke. The sky grew dark abruptly, with a rumble of thunder, like timpani warming up for a big finale, and then, following mucky clouds that scudded towards them, in an impatient rush, a torrential storm. It sent the creatures in the grounds scurrying for shelter, and rivulets of water gurgling towards ditches.
Byron sat under the house and listened, first to the exclamations of Isabel and Kitty, who were running to the washing-line, squealing and splashing as they gathered in the laundry; then, with a wry smile, to Thierry, who was singing to himself as he passed the boiler room. 'It's raining! It's pouring! The old man is snoring!' joyfully unselfconscious. The dogs sat alert, their eyes switching from the door to Byron, waiting for a signal, any signal, that they, too, could run outside, but he held up a hand and, with a groan, they settled.
'He went to bed and banged his head and couldn't get up in the morning.'
As the footsteps disappeared inside, Byron stood up slowly. He had packed his belongings neatly into two bags. When the rain slowed a little, he would walk through the woods to where he had left his car and go.
A door banged. Above him, abruptly, the air was flooded with music. A whole orchestra - something dramatic he had heard before. He heard Kitty's voice, pleading, 'Oh, not this,' and then the sound was muffled as someone closed a window. He could just hear whirling violins, voices, escalating to a frenzy.
Byron pulled out a pen, and wrote a short note, folded it neatly and placed it on top of the boiler. Then he sat, in the encroaching dark, and waited.
'Nicholas?'
'Did you get them?' He didn't ask who it was.
'They're beautiful,' she said softly. 'Absolutely beautiful. They came just before tea.'
'I was worried. I thought perhaps he'd want to know where they'd come from. But you said--'
'He's not here. I don't know where he goes, but he's rarely here now.' She didn't tell him she had seen her husband's car parked in the woods when she was out walking the dog. Why not park outside the widow's house? she had asked him silently. At least then you'd be honest.
'I wanted to send roses, but I thought they'd be too obvious.'
'Most roses don't have any fragrance now, anyway.'
'And the woman suggested lilies. But aren't they a bit overpowering? And funereal?'
He wanted to show her how much thought he had put into buying the flowers for her. She was touched by this. 'Peonies are my favourite,' she said. 'You're so clever.'
'I suspected they might be. I wanted you to know . . . that I think about you all the time. I'm not pressuring you but--'
'I will decide, Nicholas.'
'I know--'
'It's just that it's all moving terribly quickly. I promise it won't be long.'
She sat on the side of the bed and gazed at her left hand, the diamond-cluster ring her mother had considered vulgar. Was a vulgar ring preferable to an adulterous daughter? 'It's complicated. With my son and everything.'
'As much time as you need.'
She wished he was there. She felt certain of everything when he was with her, when she felt his hands on hers and could see the sincerity in his face. When she was alone, with Matt's absence casting a shadow over her home, and the Spanish House making her imagination run riot, she felt wretched. Was he there now? Laughing at her? Making love to that woman?
She could barely show her face in the village. The Cousins' shop was still closed. Since Matt's fight with Asad people had barely looked her in the eye, as if she were blamed by association. She could not see her girlfriends: she was not ready to tell anyone the truth of what was happening to her marriage. What had happened to her marriage. She had lived there long enough to know that her life would be conversational currency before long.
A tear fell, unexpectedly, leaving a dark stain on her trouser leg, spreading outwards.
'Can I still see you on Tuesday?'
'Oh, Nicholas,' she said, wiping her face. 'Do you really have to ask?'
It was the first time it had rained and nothing had leaked, and Isabel, who no longer took such things for granted, considered that a small miracle. Perhaps Matt had his uses, after all. The storm had lifted something, bringing a different perspective, so that briefly she could forget bills, betrayal, Laurent, and instead relish the shrieking lunacy of the children in the rain, and the rainwater on her skin after days of sticky heat. She had listened to their chatter that evening, not complained when they threw wet socks at each other, causing the puppy to bark. She had slept that afternoon on her unmade bed, and woken calm and cool, as if a fever had passed. They had all been lightened by the storm.
She went to Thierry's room. He was in bed now, the dog on the duvet. She would not scold him: if it made him happy, a few muddy footprints were a fair price to pay. Isabel drew the curtains, hearing a distant thunderclap, seeing the strange blue half-light as the storm moved east. Then, as she bent to kiss him goodnight, he put his arms round her neck. 'I love you, Mum,' he said, and the words sang in her head.
'I love you, Thierry,' she said.
'And I love Pepper,' he said.
'Oh, me too,' she said, firmly.
'I wish Byron wasn't going.'
'Going where?' She was tucking him in now, one eye on the map of the constellations that covered a hole in the plaster. Another job that hadn't been completed.
'He's got nowhere to live,' he said. 'He's got to move away to get another job.'
She remembered, with shame, how she had raged at Byron. She remembered the letters in her hand, the scent of warm mould rising from a rotten tree-trunk. The sick flood of adrenalin that accompanied an unwanted discovery.
She had been so maddened that she couldn't quite remember what she had said to him.
'Can you give him a job? He could look after our land.'
She kissed him again. 'Oh, lovey, if we had the money I would . . .' She would go and apologise, she thought. She didn't want Byron to leave on those terms. All the things he had done for her, for Thierry. 'We don't need your protection,' she had snapped at him.
'I'll talk to him. Where's he staying?'
Some pauses are weightier than others. He looked at her, as if judging something, and she realised with some shock that her son had been holding more than one secret. 'Anything, Thierry. Remember? You can tell me anything. It's okay.' She reached out a hand for his, trying not to let her voice betray her anxiety.
The briefest hesitation. Light pressure on her hand. 'He's under the house,' he said.
Isabel walked silently down the steps, her bare feet splashing on the York stone paving. She had been so stunned by what Thierry had told her that she had forgotten she wasn't wearing shoes until wet gravel had met the soles of her feet. By which stage it had seemed hardly to matter. The light was failing now, and thin rain continued to fall, long after the storm had passed. She walked round the house, ducking to avoid the scaffolding, treading carefully in the places she knew there might still be shards of glass among the stones. Eventually she came to the stairs that led down to the boiler room. She had never thought to use them.
She saw a faint light, and hesitated briefly. Then she heard a dog growl. The door creaked as she opened it and at first she could make out nothing, but her ears, acutely sensitive to differences in sound, detected movement.
Her heart was thumping. And then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and partially illuminated the man at the back of the room. She let her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, vaguely aware of his dogs at his feet.
'How long have you been here?' she asked.
'A couple of months,' he said, from the shadows. And as she digested this: 'I'm sorry. I'll be gone at dawn. I
've got a couple of possibilities over at . . .' He tailed off, as if he were not even capable of convincing himself.
Outside the rain fell, a faint hissing in the trees, a distant rushing as the run-off from the fields met the ditches. She could smell the drenched earth, the warmth sending its moist scents into the still air.
All this time, she thought, he has been here, beneath us.
'I know it must seem . . . I needed a roof over my head.'
'Why didn't you ask me? Why didn't you tell me you had nowhere to go?'
'What Matt said. I don't want you to think I've been down here and . . .' He stumbled. 'Christ. Look, Isabel, I'm . . . sorry.'
She left the door open and went into the room below her house, conscious not of alarm but an unexpected comfort that over these last lost days she had not been alone.
'No,' she said. 'I shouldn't have listened to Matt. Whatever he said, it's unimportant.' She shook her head.
'I need to talk to you about him.'
'No,' she said firmly. 'I don't want to talk about him.'
'Then I need you to know,' he said. 'I'm not a violent person. That man - the man Matt talked about - he had been beating up my sister. She didn't tell me, but Lily, my niece, did. And when he found out Lily had told me, he went for her.' His voice hardened. 'She was four.'
She winced. 'Byron, stop. You don't have to--'
'But it was an accident. Really.'
She heard the pain in his voice.
'I lost everything,' he said. 'My home. My future. My reputation.'
She remembered something he had once told her. 'You couldn't be a teacher.'
'I'd never hit anyone before that. Not in my whole life.' His voice dropped to a whisper: 'Nothing is the same after something like that, Isabel. Nothing. It's not just the guilt. It's the shape of things. The shape of yourself.' He paused. 'You start seeing yourself as other people see you.'
She stared at him.
'I don't,' she said.
They stood in the dark, neither quite able to see the other. Two outlines. Two mere shadows of people. For months, she had seen Laurent everywhere, in every man. She had seen the shape of his shoulders in those of strangers and heard his laugh on crowded streets. She had murmured to him in her dreams and wept when she couldn't make him real. In a fit of madness, she had imagined him in Matt. Now, finally, she knew he was gone. There was a sense of absence now, rather than loss. Laurent had ceased to exist.
But who was this man?
'Byron?' she whispered, and lifted a hand, unsure what she was doing. What did these fingers know of anything? The music they had conjured was false, a distraction. She had placed her trust in something she knew now to be an illusion. 'Byron?'
She reached out until she found his hand, which closed on hers. The skin was roughened, warm in the night air. The world swam. Her mind closed on the damp air, the scent of evening primrose, the sulphurous odour of the boiler. A dog whined, and Isabel gazed through the dark until she knew his eyes had lifted to hers.
'You don't have to stay down here,' she whispered. 'Come upstairs. Come and be with us.'
His hand lifted, and slowly, gently, his thumb wiped the damp from her face. Her head inclined towards it as her other hand reached up to press it to her skin. And then, as she took a step closer, a voice whispered, 'Isabel . . . I can't--'
Isabel, flooded with shame at the memory of Matt's hands on her, her own complicity, leaped away from him. 'No,' she said, quickly. 'I'm sorry.' She turned away, slipped back up the stairs and out, too swift even to hear his own stumbling apology.
Twenty-one
Eleven eggs, and one still warm. Kitty pressed it to her cheek, her hand encircling the fragile shell. There would be enough for breakfast, and a half-dozen to take to the Cousins. Asad was returning to work this morning, and over the past days she had prepared four boxes of eggs for him. 'You'll be short of stock,' she had said, sitting by his bed two days ago, the pastel floral curtain against her back.
'Then we will only open for conversation, not food,' said Asad. He still looked tired. His collapse had bruised the areas under his eyes, made his angular face appear cadaverous. It was only over the last couple of days, Henry had grumbled, that he had been eating properly.
She had been afraid that neither man would speak to her, given her part in that terrible afternoon, but when she apologised, Anthony standing awkwardly behind her, Asad had pressed her hand between his long, leathery palms. 'No, forgive me, Kitty. I should have warned you of my suspicions long ago. It has taught me a lesson. I suppose it is good to find I am not too old to learn something.'
'I've learned to carry a big stick. And a spare inhaler.' Henry fussed with Asad's pillow. 'He won't be able to lift anything, you know. That man . . .'
'Is he still working at your house?'
'I haven't seen him.'
'I don't know where he is,' said Anthony. 'Mum saw him the other day but she said he didn't say much.'
'I don't know how he can show his face.' Henry gave the pillow a final, too vigorous pat. 'He's probably steering clear. With a bit of luck your mum won't have to pay any more.'
Asad had glanced at Anthony. 'I'm so sorry you have to hear us talk about your father in this way.'
'Nothing I haven't heard before.' Anthony shrugged, as if it didn't matter. But Kitty knew it did, and later on when they sat on the plastic visiting chairs she had squeezed his hand to tell him she understood.
Thierry walked in through the back door now, and peered over her shoulder as she arranged the eggs in the boxes. 'How many?'
'Eleven. Would have been twelve but I dropped one.'
'I know. On the steps. Pepper ate it. Guess who's in the bedroom?'
She closed the lids carefully. 'Which one?'
'The master bedroom. The one Matt did up.' He grinned. 'Byron.'
'What? Working?'
Thierry shook his head. 'Sleeping.'
'Why is he staying in our house?'
Thierry gave an annoying flick of his head. 'It's just temporary,' he said. 'Until he sorts himself out.'
Kitty's mind leaped forward. Rent! Perhaps they'd have some more money coming in. She thought of her birthday lunch in a few days' time, to which she had invited Asad, Henry and almost half of the village. She had not yet told her mother how many were coming.
It would be useful to have Byron here - he could help set up the heavy stuff, maybe move the furniture outside. As the dining room still had holes everywhere, and the forecast was fair, she and Mum had decided it would be best to hold it on the lawn. She could picture it now, a fluttering white tablecloth laden with the things they had made, their guests admiring the view across the lake. They could swim, if they wanted. She would tell her friends from school to bring their costumes. Kitty hugged herself, suddenly glad to be living in this strange house. Somehow, in the warmth and the sun, the chaos of the building work seemed not to matter any more, the scaffolding and the dusty floorboards. If it wasn't for the lack of a proper bath, she could probably live like this for ever. Her mobile phone rang.
'Kitty?'
'Yes?'
'It's Henry. Sorry to call so early, darling. You wouldn't happen to know where I could find Byron, would you? We've got some bits need doing and we're hardly going to ask You Know Who.'
Kitty heard unfamiliar footsteps making their way across the floor above. 'Funnily enough, yes, I do.'
Byron lay in the soft double bed and stared at the immaculate white ceiling above him. For two months he had woken to the sight of a dirty floor, the hiss and thump of the boiler as it kicked into life. This morning he woke to peace, bright light flooding through restored windows, birdsong - and, somewhere below, the aroma of coffee. He padded barefoot across the sanded wood floor and stretched at the window, admiring the spectacular view of the lake.
His dogs were flat out on the rug, apparently reluctant to rouse themselves. As he stooped to stroke her head, Meg thumped her tail lazily.
Isabel h
ad shown him into this room the previous night, still awkward with him after their near-encounter in the dark. 'It's finished,' she said. 'I'll make up the bed for you.'
'I can do that.' He accepted the neat pile of bedlinen, flinched as their hands touched.
'Just . . . treat this as your home,' she said. 'Help yourself to what you want. You know where everything is.'
'I'll pay you. Once I find work.'
'Really. Just get back on your feet before we worry about money.' She had a way of blinking hard when she was embarrassed. 'Help out with the food. Look after Thierry when I have to go out teaching. That'll be enough.' She smiled wryly, finally lifting her eyes to his. 'There are enough things that need doing here, after all.'
It was as if she trusted him completely. Byron sat on the bed, marvelling at his luck. Isabel would have been justified in accusing him of trespass or worse. Anyone else would have done.
Instead she had opened her home to him, invited him to sit at her table, entrusted him with her children. He rubbed his hair and stretched again. Then, gazing at Matt's handiwork around him, he wondered briefly what had taken place between the two of them, but forced away the thought. Isabel had freed him of the burden of his history; the least she could expect was that he would do the same for her.
Besides, thinking of them together made something in him tighten uncomfortably. Thinking of Matt exploiting her, like he did everyone else, brought back feelings he had long made sure to smother. How much damage could one man be allowed to do?
Staring at the ceiling, he was struck suddenly not by its beauty, but by the vast gulf that existed between this house, its owner and his own life. She had let him in, yes, but this was a temporary measure. Staying in this house, in this room, was not the same as belonging here.
His darkening thoughts were disrupted by a knock at the door. Thierry's face appeared, a smile breaking across it. He looked, Byron realised with rare pleasure, overjoyed to find him there. 'Mum says there's breakfast downstairs.' He wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve. 'And Kitty says can you call the Cousins? They've got some work for you.'
