‘Here,’ said Rachel, throwing down the oars. ‘Are you ready?’
They heaved the mirror with difficulty, trying not to capsize because with every movement the boat tipped perilously. The mirror’s ornate frame, those grasping loops and swirls, seemed to hold her wrists and arms as tightly as she held them, and she was gripped momentarily by the panic that it had her now, like a terrible weed, and she would never be able to shake it off. But then, with a final upsurge, the hulk of it flipped over and dropped into the water with an almighty splash.
The glass drifted down as gently as snow, illuminated by the constant moon. Rachel saw her reflection in it, her lips parted, her hand reaching out, her eyes searching, until the reflection and its host was engulfed by the dark.
The water was still. How quickly and quietly the mirror was swallowed, the surface calm again, just a gentle slop and slurp against the flanks of their boat.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and strangely she felt the urge to weep. Lightness surrounded her; the fog in her head cleared. ‘We can go now.’
But Aaron was regarding her strangely.
He didn’t blink, didn’t answer. She touched his knee, and this seemed to prompt him to focus on her. ‘Aaron, I said we can go.’
By the dim torchlight she saw his distorted features.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we can’t.’
A strange feeling crept over her. ‘Aaron…?’
‘I tried, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I did try. I tried to make you see. But you still don’t see, do you?’
There was a horrible quiet, leaden with some meaning she could not decipher. Rachel thought of the mirror sinking down, down, to its final, lonely bed.
‘Why couldn’t you have made it easier?’ he said, in a weird, disembodied voice. ‘I came to Winterbourne to find you. I tried everything. I gave you so many chances, but you didn’t take them.’
‘Aaron,’ she managed, ‘you’re not making sense.’
‘I drove and drove and I thought about it so hard,’ he said. ‘And I even thought I should end it there, be killed on the road because it would easier, then, wouldn’t it? It would be revealed afterwards, of course, but there I am: a coward to the last. I wouldn’t be around to see it. I wouldn’t have to endure it.’ His eyes shone in the dark. ‘But then I saw that I could still have it, Rachel. I didn’t have to go home without what I came for, after all. It could still be mine. And I was going to get it some other way, back at the house, make it look like an accident… but this is better. Out at sea, where no one can find us. Terrible things happen at sea, you know.’
A knot of fear tightened in Rachel’s windpipe.
‘You’re scaring me,’ she said.
‘You’re my solution, that’s how it is. Or, rather, Winterbourne is. When you first told me about it, I had no idea what it was worth. But I know now.’
The marble in her throat started to roll. Their boat bobbed its lonely dance. No one knew they were here, alone…
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, her voice thick.
‘I’m in trouble,’ he said.
‘What kind of trouble?’
Stall him, was all she could think. Buy yourself time.
‘My life is over.’ There was that quiet again, like a vibrating string. ‘I’ve run my company into the ground, Rachel. The business I’ve worked to build over twenty years – it’s over. I’ve lost it all. There’s nothing left. We’re so far in debt I can’t see daylight any more.’ Suddenly he laughed. It was thin, cold, entirely without humour. ‘Nobody knows. The people who work for me, they think everything’s fine.’
Rachel was trembling now, cold and afraid. This wasn’t Aaron. This was somebody else, a dangerous stranger. She questioned if the person she’d known over the past two years had been real at all. Aaron had only ever shown her one version of himself, in business or on dates or on weekends away – not the real, everyday vulnerability of an ordinary human being. They’d never known each other like that.
‘I’ve built a career on knowing how to multiply zeros,’ he said. ‘But these last months I lost my touch. A couple of negative investments…then everything I went for crumbled. Time and again it went wrong, and the more it went wrong, the more I had to make it right; and the more I failed, the deeper in I got. I’ve always been a fraud, haven’t I? Just stolen from other people, that’s been my trade. But I was good at this, Rachel, once upon a time. Good at gambling, because that’s what it’s been, the destruction, the addiction, the impulse to keep putting your hand in the fire even though you know you’ll get burned. The higher the stakes, the better.’
Rachel fought to twist her head around his admission. Aaron was a billionaire. His family had houses in the Hamptons and LA and Texas. He was from one of the finest dynasties in America and stood as one of the richest men in New York. But he couldn’t go to his family: a man like him would never admit defeat.
She touched his arm. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she forced out.
It was the wrong thing to say.
‘How?’ Aaron rasped; he was possessed by anger, a wild anger that knew no reason. ‘Aren’t you listening? If this comes out I’m as good as dead. What will people say? What will they think? I’ll be the joke of the century. I’ll go to prison for what I’ve done: I’ve done things I can’t tell you, things I’d never tell a soul. I won’t do it, Rachel. I won’t let it happen to me. I’m better than that. That’s where you come in.’
‘I’m here for you,’ she told him. ‘We’ll face this together.’
But Aaron shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not enough.’
Then time seemed to creep out of kilter, for the next few moments slipped and slid over each other so that she couldn’t be sure what happened first or by whom. She went to take the oars but Aaron beat her to it. One toppled into the water and the other he clasped in his hands, raising it like a batsman ready to take a swing. Idiotically Rachel felt for the sides of the boat, as if such a thing would save her, and she thought, No. Not now. Not this. He said: ‘Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry. I really am.’
‘Aaron—’
‘It’s too late,’ he said, clutching the oar with frightening determination. ‘With you gone, I can sell on my own. I’ve talked with my people. You signed the document giving me power of attorney.’ He smiled at her incredulous expression. ‘Don’t you remember all that paperwork? By the end you didn’t know what you were looking at, or what you were signing. You trusted me with everything. It was easy.’
Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. It couldn’t be true.
‘Winterbourne might not solve everything,’ he said, ‘but it’ll start me off. It’ll be the injection I need to keep my head above water.’ He looked down at the glinting sea. ‘Which, I’m afraid, will be more than can be said for you. And I’ll be depressed because of what happened, won’t I? That’ll work in my favour, buy some time and get some sympathy. And I will be sad, Rachel, you know. I will miss you. We’ve had fun and for a while I did have feelings for you; I thought you could be it for me.’
‘I still can, Aaron,’ she pleaded, ‘if you give me a chance.’
‘Sorry. I’ve given you enough chances.’
Before he could act, she lunged for him, thinking if she could just kick him off balance she could grab the oar and knock him out with it. But it didn’t happen that way. The boat rocked; she struck him to his knees and for an instant they were both going into the water, surely they were, but then something hard hit Rachel’s head, a cracking, solid blow that sent her crashing to the deck, choking freezing air. Warm liquid trickled into her ear. She couldn’t see. Then his arms were round her, cradling her, and she felt like a beached fish, all flesh and wetness, slippery, and just like that she hit the wetness of the water as he flipped her over the side and the depths consumed her whole. She was under for a moment before her legs dragged up a last vestige of strength and propelled her to the surface. She gulped air. It was bitter in her mouth, compact as ice.
A hand pushed her down. All was black and green, roaring in her ears and eyes and throat, her body blazing with the effort of survival. She flailed and gasped, grasped at nothing and inhaled everything, salt, water, weed filling her lungs and every part of her. Her muscles drained. She was dizzy, and tired, so tired…
She thought of Seth, smiling at her over the breakfast table on the last day she’d known him. She thought of Jack Wyatt, his big hands and the grey above his ears. She thought of his dogs snoozing in his farmhouse, on rugs that smelled of corn.
She opened her eyes underwater, and let go.
A green-eyed woman took her hands and pulled her down.
Chapter 39
Westward, Cornwall, 1948
Jonathan never took me to Paris. For a while I thought we were there. I could see the Tour Eiffel glittering in the purple night. I could feel his hand in mine as we walked the Champs Elysées. We were far away from Winterbourne, in glorious Paris, but of course that was not true. I drifted in and out of reveries, punctuated by brutal, white-hot pain, needles, voices, fastenings, and my limbs flailed as I tried to fight them off.
I missed my foliage at Winterbourne and wanted to go back. I decided to imagine it on the wall in my new, empty room, painting it diligently in my mind.
They told me what had happened. I didn’t believe it at first. Jonathan drove you to us, they explained. Not to Paris, never to Paris. We arrived at this place of doctors and medicines, a place where I am called ‘dear’ and spoken to like a child.
The Priory of St Josephine’s is a hospital, they say. I do not need a hospital. I need Jonathan. But when I protest, they think I am mad. When I cry, I am hysterical. I cannot win, happy or sad, frightened or resigned, once they have decided I am mad. Even when I tell them that I killed a girl, they say I am mad. I am too mad to confess, too mad to be trusted. I tell them that that is what brought me here: my guilt over Ginny Pettifer, my murderous heart that I tried to hide and tried to heal. I thought that if I loved enough, if I tried to do the right thing, then my heart would mend itself. But it wasn’t to be. In the end, I am mad. And it is possible, of course, that they are right.
They try peculiar machines on me. Some of them hurt. The one I like best is a drug that floats me to faraway places, sideways, like driftwood on the sea. I used to see things floating from my bedroom window at Winterbourne, floating on the water.
*
In July, I give birth to a girl. She is the light of my life, the softest thing, the sweetest thing, and her head smells to me of the purest joy I have ever known. I call her Sarah. She has Jonathan’s eyes, blue and bright. When I look at her, I see him and wonder.
I know I cannot keep her. They have told me so. Each day I stare out of the window and wish for Jonathan to come and claim us. But he does not come.
She is the last person I will ever love. On the morning they come to take her away, I dress her carefully, gently, wrapping her in a blanket, touching her nose with mine and kissing her downy cheek. Her fingers are tiny and perfect. I hope she has a happy life. I hope she loves fiercely and is fiercely loved in return. I hope one day she has children of her own and she keeps them closer to her than her own skin.
After she is gone, I am only half alive.
I breathe, I sleep, but I am only half alive.
It won’t be long now.
I am ready.
In dreams, I visit Winterbourne. I see a woman there, myself, Alice Miller, sitting on her bed and looking at the little painting of the cottage on the wall.
Beyond, through the window, just out of reach, is her daughter. Her daughter is waiting, her beginning and her end, a girl she knew for the shortest of times and yet also for ever, a candlelit part of her that will never know the dark.
I touch the woman’s neck and feel the life go out of her.
I feel her heart stop. I make it happen.
The heart that was mine, I stop; it goes cold, goes hard, no longer lives.
Chapter 40
Cornwall, present day
She would always go back to Winterbourne. Just as she had been drawn here for the first time weeks ago, she would always go back to Winterbourne. Just as from the moment she’d been born their destinies had been entwined, she would always go back to Winterbourne. Just as, tonight, she was scooped from the water and carried to the beach, gazing up at the shadow of the house on high, she would always go back to Winterbourne. Night. Stars. Heaven. And warmth on her lips…
Him.
His hands held her face. She knew those hands, recognised them as integral to her; she wanted to hold them for all time and to have them hold her.
Jack.
How had he found her?
A man and a woman hovered above, kind faces, saviours.
She was lifted, carried, weightless.
‘Jack…’ she whispered. But it hurt to speak.
‘Shh,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
Chapter 41
Two months later
Nothing shone as brightly as a sun-soaked Cornish day. The sea dazzled and the sky shone. Gulls swooped. Sands were golden and the waves eased happily on to shore.
Rachel took delivery of the first lorry-load of exhibits. As the paintings were unloaded, carefully parcelled and bound, she felt a homecoming more profound than a hundred return trips to America. It was the perfect solution. She had spoken to Paul last week and given him the promotion: he’d earned it. He would take over the New York space, she told him, while she set up a new gallery here. It meant she was able to expand at the same time as staying in England. She didn’t know yet what the future held, but there was too much possibility here to turn her back on.
The orangery at Winterbourne was the ideal platform, light, bright, and with the incredible panorama of the Atlantic to offset the works. She was excited about the new direction, had already been in talks with upcoming artists and the draw of the house itself was enough to attract the more exciting names. Rachel hoped it would also be enough to entice visitors. Winterbourne had for a long time been a closed fortress, but now, at least in part, it would be open to the public. The chance to visit her gallery would be a chance to visit the grandest, and most elusive, house in the country. What’s more, if she could make money from it, she could set about repairing those parts of the estate in need of improvement. Both her passions rolled into one.
Rachel waved the delivery guys off and set about unwrapping the frames. Immediately their colours and vibrancy filled the space. She had spent all week clearing and cleaning the orangery, and was gratified at the beautiful structure hidden beneath decades of dust and neglect. It felt good to breathe life back into Winterbourne, to polish it and feel proud of it, and to set it working again.
Already she was imagining how she would arrange the prints, and what visitors and reporters would say when Saturday’s private viewing arrived. For Rachel’s own part, this fresh start signified more than success and more than money. It signified change. From now, she would do things differently. She was no longer working at the expense of her personal life, cancelling one out in favour of the other, and wondered why for so many years she had thought it necessary. Women had both the world over, not because it was easy but because it was what they did – because women were the strongest creatures alive. Rachel had come to Winterbourne to find her past, but in the end it had shown her that and more. It had shown her that she belonged to a triumphant, irrepressible sisterhood. And she could have it all.
At last, here at Winterbourne, she could be happy.
There was nothing like a brush with death to make life seem all the sweeter. Afterwards they’d told her that she’d come back from the brink, and it was a miracle she had survived her ordeal at all. When they had found her she’d been drowned, carrying only the faintest pulse that might so easily have been missed had one man not insisted on striving on: just one more breath, one more resuscitation; Rachel had to come back, she wasn’t leaving them yet… On an unconscious level she must have kno
wn that herself. She tried to remember what happened that night but events sprang up in puzzling order. Aaron and the water, the pain in her head, the fear, the pull of the mirror – and then the beach, cool and smooth on her back. And Jack.
Saved.
Her recovery, the hospital said, had been astonishing. Rachel recalled the ride in the ambulance, wrapped in a coarse blanket, and the sensation of her cold, sodden hair trickling down her back. In the ward she was treated for her head injury, shock and hypothermia. She must have fallen asleep because when she next woke she was somewhere else, cosseted in a plump, sweet-smelling bed, with a mug of hot tea at her side and the smell of burned toast seeping up from downstairs. She’d inched a hand out from under the duvet and a warm tongue licked it. Dogs. Blankets. Farmhouse.
Jack.
Rachel had turned to the man next to her and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if they had been together and married for fifty years, knowing every inch and part of the other, he leaned in and kissed her. He tasted of open air and wild oceans. Jack. She could never find the words to thank him for saving her life. It sounded so dramatic, so unreal, but there it was, what happened.
You’re lucky, she’d been told repeatedly over the past two months. It was odd to hear it after so long being affiliated with misfortune. But it was true. She was lucky that Jack had been in the Landogger Inn that night when a local had come in, saying he’d seen a pair of figures staggering down the bluff towards the sea. She was lucky that Jack had thought it unusual enough to investigate, and she was lucky that he cared enough about her, even in spite of their argument, to follow his instincts.
‘I knew it was you,’ he’d said to her in the ambulance, tightly holding her hand. ‘Whatever had been said between us, you weren’t getting rid of me. I’d have followed you across the ocean if I’d had to. I care about you so much, Rachel.’
She was lucky that Jack was a strong swimmer. By the time he’d reached the beach, she and Aaron had been far out on the waves, and he’d had to dive in without a second thought. She was lucky that the tides were on their side – as Aaron had been making his confession the boat had already been drifting closer to shore. She was lucky that by the time she went under, Jack was mere seconds away.
The Woman in the Mirror: Page 30
