Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  Anton is a patient man. And there is an art to this sort of thing – a method. He recalls his approach from years gone by, how so much of it involved hanging back and waiting, always leaving the door open for an experience. The initial connection made, the pilot light of desire lit, he would hold himself back from acting upon it, knowing that this was the way to fan the flames. Sometimes it would happen by chance. He had met Gail before a flight from London, idling in the airport lounge when it was delayed. Maria worked for a telecoms company and had called to the office to try to sell him a new communications package. Louise and then Anne-Marie, both babysitters for his children. Hilary had rented the flat downstairs.

  In each of them, he’d seen a want, like a small hunger, they kept hidden inside them. Good girls who secretly yearned to transgress but needed persuasion. And that was half the fun – the game they made of it. The way he had to coax and cajole, deploying his classical education to good effect – all those Greek myths, coming in handy in a way he hadn’t considered as a boy. How they lapped it up when he likened them to Helen and Persephone. To Artemis and Demeter and Ariadne. Perfect pleasure to watch them wilt and surrender themselves to him. Fun while it lasted, but he always went back to Charlotte. That was a given. A non-negotiable.

  For two days Leah has been in his house, her sleeping form occupying the room upstairs. On that first morning, he had gone down to the basement flat for her toothbrush and some of her things. A laundry basket with neatly folded fresh clothes was on the floor beside her bed, and he had carried it up all those flights of stairs to Charlotte’s bedroom, not saying a word, just leaving it in the curve of the bay window, the toothbrush in a glass on the nightstand. She hardly stirred. Tea trays were brought up during the day and left untouched. In the evening, he had stood in the shadowy darkness behind the door left ajar, watchful of her movements, her breathing. Sometime in the night, a noise like a whimper, but when he tiptoed across the landing to check, there was only silence.

  She is a broken bird, Anton thinks, as he turns now on to Wyndham Park. A bird fallen from the nest, and he has picked her up and taken her into his home. Gently, he will wait on her, slowly nursing her back to health. But a bird like that won’t ever return to the wild from which she came. Those injured creatures we take into our homes grow dependent, he thinks, putting his key into the lock, their natures changed by the very fact of our nurturing, our care, so that they become tied to us. Without us, and he pushes the door open, they cannot survive.

  He closes the door behind him, pauses to listen, to judge the air. Silence fills the hall. Since she has become ensconced in the room upstairs, the atmosphere in the house has changed, grown peaceful. For the first time in months, he cannot hear Charlotte’s voice. He resolves to go upstairs and check on her, but first he will put together a tray with his purchases from the market. A smorgasbord to tempt and delight her. He has a half-bottle of Viognier cooling in the fridge and thinks about persuading her outside into the garden. Anton carries his shopping into the kitchen and stops dead.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  Mark looks up from where he is sitting, and Anton feels a sharp announcement of nerves, like acid rising from his stomach. This is quickly followed by a rush of concern. ‘What happened to you?’ he asks, putting the cloth bag on the counter and coming closer, the better to see his son’s face.

  There’s a crust of blood around Mark’s nostrils, a bulbous look to his nose and cheek. A bruise blooms over his left eye, the lid puffy and swollen. And, from the way he is sitting in the chair, a hangdog look about him, a guilty air.

  ‘You should see the other guy,’ he says, with a feeble laugh that quickly falls away.

  ‘You’ll need ice on that,’ Anton tells him, then opens the freezer and takes out a bag of frozen peas, wraps it in a tea-towel. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asks, keeping his voice light. His mind is upstairs in the bedroom with Leah, wondering whether she is awake and listening. How will he explain her presence if Mark finds out?

  ‘I got here a few minutes ago. You don’t mind me letting myself in, do you?’

  ‘Of course not. This is your home too.’ Words said without much conviction, for in truth he is irritated by Mark’s intrusion. Anxiety flickers within him. What if she comes downstairs? What then?

  Mark watches impassively, accepting the bag of peas and placing it against the side of his face.

  ‘Who did this to you, son?’

  ‘Jason.’

  A quick calculation in Anton’s head – Jason is Mark’s flatmate.

  ‘Why on earth –’

  ‘I deserved it, okay?’ The defiance in his voice dies, a shame-filled tone slinking in as he admits: ‘He caught me on the couch with his girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  ‘I know, I know. Stupid, right? But I just –’

  He breaks off, shaking his head, and Anton sees how close to tears he is, and softens towards the boy. How lost and confused he looks.

  ‘Let me make some tea,’ Anton says gently.

  As the kettle boils, it all comes spilling out: how Mark had stupidly, recklessly fallen for Katya with her Slavic beauty, her shrugging coolness, her unattainability. Unrequited love was bad enough but it was agony when the object of your desire was sleeping with your flatmate. He described the mornings, after Jason had gone to work, how he’d loiter in the kitchen waiting for her to appear, talking for a few minutes over coffee and then she’d leave. Those few minutes were all he had to feed his desire and sustain him through the cold loneliness of his one-sided romance.

  ‘I felt she understood something,’ he tells Anton now. ‘Like I could talk to her about anything, stuff I never shared with anyone.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’ Anton asks, wary of the answer.

  ‘About you. About where you’ve been.’

  They are dangerously close to touching upon Anton’s years of incarceration, a no-go area for both of them. It has been an unspoken contract between them – a tacit agreement not to discuss prison, or the reason why Anton was put there. Without ever articulating this need, it was nonetheless agreed that both of them would maintain the fallacy that his prison stay was without violence or personal danger. A fallacy bolstered by Anton’s insistence on substituting ‘hotel’ for ‘prison’. Whatever nightmare scenarios Mark had dreamed up over the years about prison brutality, they never discussed them. In the same way, they avoided discussing Mark’s mother. What happened to her.

  ‘I told Katya I was the one who found Mum that morning,’ Mark says now, and Anton can hear him fighting the emotion that’s rising in his voice. ‘But the thing is I can’t actually remember it. The memory is just gone. Have you any idea how frustrating that is?’

  ‘Son –’

  ‘It kills me to think that I was there but I just can’t remember. Katya suggested I try hypnotherapy to try to access that memory, and do you know what? I did. I went to see this hypnotist, told him I wanted to try to get back to that moment so that I might understand it better – accept it, even. But when he brought me back there, that point evaded me.’

  Anton listens to this, full of fear. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, frightened of what he might blurt out.

  ‘I was trying to find Mum in my memories, but instead I kept finding you.’ Mark’s tone is weighted with accusation. ‘Every time, I’d go under and he’d bring me back to that night, I kept seeing you in your shed at the end of the garden, and I was locked out, looking in. You were with a woman, but it wasn’t Mum. It was someone else. I don’t remember much more, but I remember that feeling of being locked out – like I couldn’t get to you. Like I was shut out.’

  ‘Oh, Mark.’ It’s too much. All of this is too much.

  ‘They asked me afterwards whether you had any special hiding place. That’s one of the things I do remember – some detective crouching beside me, asking me to point out anywhere in the house or garden where you might tuck things away to keep them hidden.’ Mark’s
eyes shine too brightly in the gloom of the kitchen. ‘I thought of your shed. I thought of you and that woman and what you were doing in the shed. So I didn’t tell them. I thought I was protecting you.’

  Anton cannot look at his son as he says these things.

  ‘It was only later – years later – that I realized they were looking for the knife. They wanted to know where you had hidden the knife.’

  The air between them has grown very still. In the silence, Anton knows that Mark is waiting, and when he looks up, he sees the expectation in his son’s face.

  ‘Well?’ Mark asks, impatience, desperation in his voice, which trembles now as he adds: ‘Where did you hide it?’

  ‘I didn’t … You couldn’t possibly think –’

  There’s a sudden bang from above their heads.

  Mark’s eyes move towards the ceiling. ‘Is there someone upstairs?’ he asks, incredulous.

  Anton watches with alarm as Mark gets to his feet. ‘Just hang on a second, son!’

  But Mark is already out in the hall, taking the stairs two at a time. He stops at the return and stares up. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks.

  Anton listens, hears her hesitation. Then her voice comes weakly: ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb.’

  And there she is, stepping quickly and lightly past Mark, her dressing-gown clutched tightly about her chest. Her hair looks dull and messy, her face gaunt. He catches the look Mark gives her, the way he takes in her bare feet, her pale legs.

  ‘Please. Now just wait,’ Anton says, panic coming into his voice as she moves past him. ‘You’re not well, my dear. Please.’ Then, looking up the stairs, he adopts a firm tone: ‘Mark, I can explain all this.’

  But Leah is opening the door now that leads to the inner stairs.

  ‘You’ve been very kind,’ she murmurs, ‘but I can’t stay here.’ And then she hurries away from him, down into the darkness.

  There is silence in the hall. Anton thinks of the olives and the salted almonds and the wine. He thinks of the soft cadences of her voice, the cool alabaster skin. He thinks of her wrapped in Charlotte’s dress, the shy manner in which she’d looked at him in the mirror. Such furious disappointment curdles in his stomach that his fists clench and the blood rushes to his head.

  Behind him, Mark stands, waiting, by the bottom step. When Anton turns, the boy is staring at him, his face blank of expression, his eyes two hollows in his face.

  ‘Son,’ Anton says, but Mark doesn’t want to listen. He’s had enough excuses and lies.

  He turns away his bruised and swollen face in disgust. The front door slams behind him.

  24

  Leah

  Leah lies still in the bed, listening. In the course of the past few days, she has grown accustomed to the sounds of the house – the creak of a door opening and closing, the splutter of water from the tap in the bathroom, the gentle shushing of Anton’s leather slippers across the wooden boards. Sometimes, he sings lightly as he moves about the house, tunes she doesn’t recognize, his voice surprisingly sweet and low. When he makes tea, she hears the ding of the kettle and the clatter of china on the tray. There is something comforting about these sounds, about his presence, about the quiet tenderness of his care of her. Leah knows that she ought to return to the basement flat, to try to piece her life back together. She’s aware of the strangeness of their arrangement. But, right now, she’s just so tired. It’s all she can do to cross the landing to the bathroom and back again. She cannot face eating, and sleeps fitfully. Days have passed since she showered, and she’s aware of the bodily smells that thicken the air of the room. But something is holding her back. A deep fear keeps her trapped.

  She listens to the footsteps crossing the hall downstairs, hears the pause at the bottom, and then a voice calling: ‘Dad?’

  She pulls the covers up, stays very still. Her thoughts, so muddy and unfocused over the past few days, now sharpen and draw in. All at once the oddness of her presence in this room – in his mother’s bed – seems blatant. Obscene, almost. What if Mark comes up here? She cannot imagine how she would explain it, and part of her knows that explanations would be futile. A woman in her nightdress, the bed in disarray. The conclusion he would draw is obvious. And yet she does not think of Anton in that way. While not exactly fatherly, there’s a reassurance in his maturity linked to an understanding of her. It feels as if he, more than anyone else in the world, can fully understand what it’s like to be her.

  She pulls the bedclothes tight around her, slowly sits up. Her eyes scan the room, taking in the handsome dresser, the heavy mahogany wardrobe. She recalls a basket of clothes on the floor by the window, but when she looks for it now, she cannot find it.

  Mark has gone into the kitchen. From her eyrie upstairs, she hears the scrape of a chair drawn out from the table. Moments later, the front door opens and closes again, and she hears Anton’s familiar tread across the hall, then his voice in the kitchen, raised in surprise.

  Sunlight falls at a slant through the curtains. It hits the side of her face, trapping her with its heat. Her mouth is dry, her eyelids heavy, a crust of hardened tears clinging to the lashes. Fragments of thoughts and dreams stick to her – a muddied mass drifting and crowding her weary brain. She keeps thinking of her father in the car, taking her home after the police had interviewed her and she’d given her account of what had happened. The way he’d glanced at her in the rearview mirror. ‘Are you sure now, Leah, that there’s nothing else?’ Doubt in his eyes – a brief flash, but she’d caught it. Enough to pierce her heart. The same way that Jake had looked at her. A quick blaze of disbelief, followed by doubt, like a sort of shyness. Like he couldn’t bring himself to look at her properly, afraid of what he might see.

  She wonders where he is now. He had told her he was going to his parents’ house, but she is convinced he’s gone back to Jenna and Matthew. Already what Leah and Jake had shared together has vanished, disintegrated under the heat of these revelations. He would never trust another word she said.

  ‘These things happen,’ Anton had told her, in the soft, gentle way he had. ‘It doesn’t always help to look for a reason.’

  She feels the truth in that. She has driven herself close to madness in the past, hunting for some deeper meaning behind events in her life over which she had no control.

  She puts her hands to her belly now, feels the sagging skin beneath the flimsy cotton of her nightdress. She thinks of Cian, the moment of that hard thunk on the floor. Her stomach contracts, nausea rising up her throat. Downstairs, a door closes. She knows she must prepare to leave.

  Slowly now, she eases herself out of bed. It’s an effort to move, her whole body weighted, as if it is drenched with water. The temptation to sink back into the bedclothes pulls at her, but she knows she cannot be found like this. Already, her mind is running to ways of escape. If she tiptoes downstairs, and if the kitchen door is closed, she could slip down the inner stairs to her flat without being noticed. But what if he were to come out of the kitchen and see her like this, clad in only her long T-shirt? She looks around for her dressing-gown but it’s not there.

  Opening the door carefully, she goes slowly, tiptoeing across the landing. In the bathroom, she checks for her dressing-gown. Frustrated, she returns to the landing. A murmur of voices rises up through the floorboards, and as she stands there, biting the edge of a nail, made anxious by the thought of being caught, her eyes find the open door to Anton’s bedroom, and there, on the floor by his bed, a laundry basket with her clothes. Quickly and quietly, she hurries over to it. It feels strange to be in there – in his private space – dressed only in Jake’s T-shirt. She rummages in the basket and finds her dressing-gown.

  She is slipping it around her shoulders, her gaze on the floor, when she spies the corner of a box peeping out from under the bed. A shoebox missing its cover. She leans forward to push it back under the bed, when her eye is caught by the vividness of colour – a small bright splash of reddish
-pink. Drawn to it, she reaches into the box and takes out the flower. It’s a snap-dragon, pressed and dry with age, but still a wash of bright cerise. The paper within which it had nestled is blue and dense with writing. Leah takes it out, meaning to place the flower within it, then return the letter to the box unread, but her eye is caught.

  My darling, my only love,

  My thoughts are with you constantly, imagining where you are at this moment, what you are doing. I am consumed by you – every meal I eat, every conversation I have, every place I go, it’s always you there with me in my heart. I feel you inside me, my love. I carry you around with me always, and in that way I can keep you with me. I can keep you free.

  Leah looks at the tight cursive, the letters small and wiry, the press of them through the paper, like braille. She wonders at what point in their marriage it was written. ‘We loved each other deeply,’ Anton had told her, and here is the evidence. She holds the flower to her face, feels the dry tickle of it against her skin, tries to imagine Charlotte pressing it within her note. What thoughts were flowing through her as she wrote this? Reading those words on paper, Leah is struck by the urgency – the pulse of life – within them.

  Curiosity has been growing inside her for some time, and in recent days, lying in this woman’s room, Leah has felt her questions about Charlotte moving to the surface. The space is alive with indications of a life lived – everything from the scent of her perfume still sitting on the dressing-table to the walls papered with a bright print of primroses and narcissi intertwining and spreading around the room. There is not a single photograph of Charlotte in the whole house, yet her presence is pervasive. She is there in every room.

  Leah’s eyes tip in the direction of the box. It is stuffed full of letters, documents and scraps of things. A box of nostalgia. She can see a painting done by a child, the paper hard and crinkled with ancient poster paint, daubs of yellow and brown. But she can feel her gaze being drawn to the blue sheets that lie deeper within the box. An opportunity there to discover something of the woman who was once mistress of this house. Curiosity unfurls within her, compelling her fingers to touch the blue paper and slide another letter from the box.