Most of the time I was certain there was something between Alexander and me, something unresolved.
I felt it. It was strong as the tide.
Still, in darker moments I had my doubts.
The bottom line was that, if there was no seduction while Jamie was with his grandparents, there never would be. The stakes could not have been higher and the anticipation was thrilling and terrifying.
During the afternoon, I made a tagine, slicing the onions and peeling tomatoes, garlic and peppers. While the meat simmered and tenderized I opened a bottle of red wine and left it in the pantry to breathe.
When Alexander brought Jamie home from school, I gave the boy a tuna and mayonnaise sandwich and a glass of milk, and made sure he changed into decent clothes before helping him pack his rucksack. Jamie was nervous about staying away from Avalon and his father. He had never been separated from both parents at any one time and was concerned about practical matters such as where he should brush his teeth and what he would be given to eat for breakfast.
‘I don’t like eggs,’ he said, as I tightened the straps on his rucksack.
‘Don’t worry, Daddy will tell Grandma,’ I promised.
‘I might be sick if I have to eat eggs.’
‘You won’t have to eat anything you don’t want to.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
It would have been easy for me to exacerbate Jamie’s anxiety and persuade him that he should not go, but I didn’t. I was kind and reassuring. I imagined his grandparents would be nervous too and it would be best for everyone if the visit was a success.
When he was ready, Alexander drove Jamie up to Eleonora House. I waved them off. Then I checked the dinner, ran upstairs and made up my face, sprayed perfume on my wrists and throat and threaded silver hoop earrings through my ears. I didn’t change into anything tight or sexy. That would have been too obvious, but I put on a clean top and my favourite jeans.
By the time Alexander returned, I was curled up on the kitchen settee with a glass of wine in one hand and a paperback in the other.
‘Hi,’ I said, smiling and swinging my foot prettily. I had painted my toenails. ‘Whatever that is,’ Alexander said, crossing straight past me and opening the oven door, ‘it smells bloody fantastic.’
‘It’s spicy lamb casserole.’
‘My all-time favourite. How did you know?’
‘Because last time I made it you told me.’
‘Oh yes.’
He shut the oven door, turned to his right and opened the fridge door. He had not looked at me once.
‘Do we have any beer?’
‘There’s wine.’
‘Yeah, but I feel like beer. I was going to go up for a bath.’
I fetched him a cold beer from the rosette room, handed it to him crossly and sulked in the living room while he went upstairs. I heard the noises of the bath filling, and Alexander scrubbing the grit from his fingernails in the bathroom sink overhead. I switched on the television.
‘Sarah!’ he called down.
‘What?’
‘Would you bring me a glass?’
‘What did your last servant die of?’ I muttered.
I didn’t move for a few moments.
‘Sarah?’
‘All right, I’m coming.’
I stood up, fetched a glass from the kitchen, and went back upstairs.
The bathroom door was open and I could hear the splashing of the water from the taps, but I couldn’t see Alexander.
‘Where are you?’ I called, turning the glass between the palms of my hands.
‘Just put it on the window ledge, would you?’
I stepped forward and put the glass down. Night was falling beyond the window and the pane was misty with condensation. I rubbed a little circular gap in the chill moistness with the palm of my hand and felt, more than heard, the sudden movement behind me.
I didn’t have time to work out what was going on.
Alexander lifted me up from behind and dropped me like a child into the bath. Water and foam slopped over the side and I laughed and squealed as he, naked and unrepentant, climbed in on top of me.
I was so relieved. More than anything, I was relieved.
He did want me; he wanted me. I hadn’t been mistaken, it was more than business between us, and the relief I felt was overwhelming. Inside my head was a profound joy: I should not have doubted Alexander, I should have trusted my instincts from the start.
It had taken so long for this to happen because this was the first time we had ever been alone together, the first time we had had a chance to drop our reserve. We made the most of it. Every moment of the propriety with which we’d behaved up to that point fell away as we splashed and kissed and explored one another in the bath. Alexander peeled wet clothes from me, his hands, at last, were everywhere, and he, being naked, was entirely accessible to my mouth, my tongue, my fingers. He held my face between his hands and kissed me this way and that and in those warm, wet moments with my eyes closed and heat everywhere I lost track of what was me and what was him and what was the fabric and water between us. And all the time we were laughing, smiling, delighting in one another. I had never been happier; it far surpassed anything I’d ever experienced with Laurie. If there was a slight shadow in the sunlight of my joy that evening, it was the conviction that I never would feel quite this way again.
‘I’ve never seen you with no clothes on before,’ I whispered as we were lying, uncomfortably, side by side in the bath, which was, by this time, almost empty. The bathroom carpet was sodden and I feared for the living-room ceiling below. I shivered a little, and ran my fingers down his chest, through the curly hair at the centre of the breastbone, to the scar beneath the ribcage that had, once again, scabbed over.
‘What do you reckon?’ he asked, making a fist and flexing his arm.
‘You’ll do,’ I said.
Then I said, ‘What if inviting Jamie to stay the night was just a ploy by Virginia to see what we would get up to if we were alone? What if she’s lurking outside with a crack team of police and any minute now the house is about to be raided?’
‘Shut up,’ he said softly, kissing my hair.
‘What if she’s got the place bugged? Hidden cameras?’
‘I told you to shut up.’
‘How did you get that?’ I asked as I fingered the edges of the scab. ‘Was it an accident?’
He reached backwards, awkwardly, with his hand and moved my fingers from that place. He lifted them to his mouth and kissed them, gently, one by one.
‘Don’t let’s waste time talking about the scar,’ he said.
So we didn’t.
We never ate the casserole. By the time we went downstairs it had dried out in its dish, the lid fused to the base by charred juices. The jacket potatoes were withered and hard as stone. I was wrapped in one side of the duvet, Alexander in the other. He was a new Alexander to me, that night. He was a relaxed, funny, charming Alexander who joked and laughed and who made cheese and crisp sandwiches entirely nude, having relinquished the duvet, in a gentlemanly fashion, to me while I lit the fire in the living room. I watched him covertly, enjoying the way his muscles moved beneath his skin and the shape of his thighs and his buttocks and his back.
We never made it to the freshly laundered and aired sheets and pillowcases of my bed. We fell asleep on the settee, watching the flickering of the fire, our bodies touching all the way down, his front fitting into my back like we were two halves of the same something, something that was better intact than it was when it was the two of us, apart.
I was certain then that May was wrong, Virginia was wrong, anyone who doubted Alexander’s integrity was mistaken. How could a man who held me so close, who laughed so long and so openly, who kissed me so gently, be doubted? How could he have done anything to hurt anyone?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ALEXANDER WENT TO pick Jamie up after lunch the next day. While he was gone
I chipped pieces of desiccated lamb from the casserole dish. I was interrupted by the telephone. I answered, and a female voice said: ‘Hi. Is that the nanny?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Phoebe here, Gen’s friend. Could I speak to Alexander?’
‘I’m sorry, he’s not here at the moment,’ I said. ‘Can I take a message?’
‘Yes. Ask him to call me, would you? Tell him our new au pair has let us down …’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry.’
‘Silly girl. Ukrainian. I knew we should have stuck with a German. But in the meantime, I wanted to ask Alexander if we could use you for a few hours a week, come to some sort of nanny-share arrangement?’
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
‘It’s so hard to find decent help,’ Phoebe continued. ‘At least we know you’re reliable.’
‘OK,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ll pass on the message.’
I replaced the receiver and took a deep breath.
Jamie came running in soon enough. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were bright and he looked as healthy and as happy as I’d ever seen him.
‘Hello, you!’ I said. I did not hold out my arms to him in welcome; he had made it clear from the start that such familiarity was inappropriate except when he decided he needed some kind of physical comfort. I respected his boundaries.
This time, however, he ran to me and launched himself at me, so I had to catch him. He wrapped his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and said: ‘Sarah, guess what? Guess what?’
‘Ummmm … You had a nosebleed?’
‘No!’
‘You were allowed to stay up to watch a film?’
‘No!’
‘I give up.’
‘I got a pony!’
I pulled my face back to look at his face. Close up, the blueness of his eyes was astonishing; it took me by surprise like a sunset sometimes does, or a birdsong – something routine but extraordinarily lovely. Those fair, almost-white lashes that blinked at me were always unfamiliar, so unlike his father’s dark ones.
‘You got a pony?’ I repeated stupidly. I couldn’t take my eyes from his face.
‘Yes! He’s exactly the same as the one Mummy learned to ride on. And Grandma says I can go there every Friday and ride him and when I’m good enough I can go to competitions with my cousins!’
Behind Jamie’s back, Alexander came into the kitchen carrying his bag and raised a lascivious eyebrow at me.
‘A pony! Jamie! You are so lucky.’
‘He’s called Luc,’ said Jamie, wriggling out of my arms. ‘Short for Lucozade, which Grandma says is a drink the same colour as him. The proper word for it is palomino. And already I can make him walk and stop and he knows he’s mine.’
‘Of course he does,’ I said.
‘And Grandma says if I work hard I can be as good a rider as Mummy and then when Mummy comes home she’ll be proud and we’ll be able to go riding together.’
He went to the fridge and pulled the door open.
‘What can I have to eat?’ he asked.
‘Whatever you want,’ I replied.
I worried about Virginia’s true motives for buying a pony for Jamie and I’m sure Alexander did too, although, as was usual with uncomfortable subjects, it was not something we discussed. Perhaps we were being overly cynical. Certainly his paranoia was rubbing off on me. Maybe all Virginia wanted was to encourage her grandson to share his mother’s passion for riding. But I wondered if she was subtly making Jamie feel that Eleonora House was his home, at least as much as Avalon, so if ever he should go to live there, for whatever reason, it would not be too much of an upheaval. My main concern was that she might be planning some kind of legal action to remove the child from his father’s care. In the end, this possibility worried me so much that I called Neil, who knew a little about law, to ask his advice. He said there was no reason at all why a child would be removed from his natural father simply because his grandmother suspected the father might be sleeping with the housekeeper.
‘And is there any truth in that rumour?’ he asked in a friendly voice.
‘That’s absolutely none of your business, Neil,’ I said.
Neil put on a newsreader voice and said: ‘When asked about the relationship, Sarah refused to confirm or deny the affair, which will only lead to further speculation on her sister’s part.’
‘Stop it,’ I said, but I smiled with a pleasure that was a combination of tentative pride and embarrassment.
‘Listen, Sarah, we don’t care what you’re doing,’ Neil continued in his normal voice. ‘Well, we do, but mainly we just want to know you’re OK. We want to know that Alexander’s OK. May’s still worried about you.’
‘She’s blowing everything out of proportion. As usual.’
‘She wants you home. And she’s not the only one.’
I held the phone close to my cheek.
‘So you definitely don’t think there’s any danger of Alex losing Jamie?’ I asked quietly.
‘As long as the child is being well cared for and the wife doesn’t turn up demanding custody, then no.’
‘Thank you, Neil,’ I said.
‘You’re welcome, Sarah. You’re welcome any time.’
So I tried not to worry, and I tried not to allow myself to think up conspiracy theories. Those nights, the handful of precious Friday nights we had that autumn when Jamie was with his grandparents, Alexander and I fell into one another, and each successive Friday it was as if our relationship had intensified. Each time, I made something special for dinner and, each time, we did not eat it, we were so eager to make the most of one another. On Friday morning I washed and dried the bedsheets, and later Alexander came into my bed and we behaved with absolute hedonism, twitching and gasping and laughing and arching and groaning and pleading; I was desperate to please him and to give him pleasure and I loved his beautiful body, all its muscle and bone and hair and even the scar that never healed. He gave himself to me, he abandoned himself and I devoted myself to him, committed to making him come once, twice, three times, until we were both sticky and spent. Then we’d wrap ourselves in the duvet like we did that first night – it was our ritual – and we’d go downstairs to sit in front of the fire, picking at cold food. Eventually we would go upstairs, always to my bed, the spare bed, where we clung to one another like children. We never went to the bed he used to share with Genevieve.
I loved those nights, I loved every moment of them, but at the same time I was afraid. I did not know how they would end, or when, but I knew our Friday nights at Avalon were finite. And because of this, I could not give myself wholly to Alexander the way he gave himself to me. I held something back so that, if everything came to be lost, I would still have something of myself in reserve.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
EVERYTHING WAS MORE or less all right, we were managing, and then Claudia and Bill invited Alexander and me up to the Barn for dinner.
‘Friday …’ I said, when Alexander told me. It was impossible to keep the disappointment from my voice.
Alexander was hunched down in front of the Rayburn, which had gone out. He reached up to me and put his hand on my thigh. I slid into the warmth of his fingers.
‘Claudia thinks she’s doing us a favour because we won’t need to arrange a babysitter,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Oh.’
‘Pass me the wick, would you? That white thing there, on the table. And don’t look so worried.’
‘Why would they invite you and me? Do you think Virginia has put them up to it?’
‘You’re more paranoid than I am. No, it’s nothing like that. Claudia likes you, you know she does. She just wants to give you a nice evening to say thanks for everything you’re doing to help the family.’
‘Alex …’
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong. If Gen was here … I mean, if she knew about you and me she’d be pleased. She’d be glad I was moving on.’
/> ‘But Claudia doesn’t know that and …’
‘Claudia knows you’re doing a brilliant job with her nephew. That’s what she cares about. And how can we refuse to go? How can we turn down such a generous invitation? Think how that would make Claudia feel.’
I nodded, but I felt miserable. When I was alone with Claudia, I could be myself because our relationship was genuine. But to be with her and Alexander and to have to disguise everything I felt for him would be a travesty of our friendship. She trusted me and I would be lying to her at a time when she was being more kind to me that she ever needed to be.
‘You’ll like Bill,’ Alexander said. ‘And he’ll like you. He likes everything Claudia likes.’
‘She doesn’t know me very well, does she?’ I said.
Alexander looked up at me and smiled.
‘Claudia’s a very good judge of character,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’
I returned his smile, but it didn’t make me feel any better about myself or the situation.
‘And there’s another couple going too,’ Alexander said. ‘Somebody who wants you to do some work for them or something.’
‘Oh lord, not Phoebe? Alex, she called here wanting to speak to you about me helping out with her kids but I forgot all about it, I …’
‘All right, all right, don’t get stressed!’ Alexander said, standing to take me by the shoulders, and squeezing with his big strong hands. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell them it was me who forgot to call them back.’
Still, I dreaded the evening.
When it came, we drove again up the steep, winding lane, past the chained gates to the old quarry, up to the converted barn. The lane was very dark. All we could see was what was illuminated by the Land Rover’s headlights. When we arrived at the Barn, the fancy wrought-iron gates to its drive were closed.
The Secrets Between Us Page 12
