‘Do you have your mobile with you?’
‘No, I left it at the flat.’
‘Good.’
He turned his mobile off and took the battery out.
‘I won’t be long. I’m going to walk down to Deal to get some food for us and a newspaper. I need some coffee.’
‘Won’t you take your car?’
‘Best I leave it here.’
I heard him leave the cottage. I got up and found my handbag. In the inner pocket was a small tin. It was one of those tins that used to hold gramophone needles. It was a gift Markus had given me years before, when we were students. He said he found it in a junk shop. On the lid was a picture of the His Master’s Voice dog. He will do it for me, I know he will. He has come this far.
It was about two hours later when I heard Markus unlocking the front door. I was in the sitting room, wrapped in a blanket, and as he walked into the room he brought a blast of sea air in with him. He looked so healthy and so vital.
‘I got us four beautiful fresh mackerel. A fisherman was selling from a kiosk on the beach. He wasn’t doing much business today,’ he said.
We spent a quiet afternoon together. The mist did not lift all day. We did not talk much about what we were going to do next. Markus had been thinking about options and wanted to discuss them, I said tomorrow, it can wait till tomorrow. We talked about the years we had been apart. I told him about Arvo Talvela and how in my greatest trouble he had helped me. And then Arvo had died suddenly and I knew that I had to find Markus again. Arvo had always said that I had to tell Markus about our baby. I was sorry I had taken so long to tell him. We did not mention her or Billy once.
Later he ran a bath for me and I lay in the warm water for ages, hoping it would bring more feeling back into my legs. I had not dressed all day. That is the kind of thing an invalid does, stays in their night things all day. Tomorrow I will get dressed. No matter how weak I feel, I will get dressed. I went downstairs to the kitchen, carrying my little tin with me.
Markus had the news on and I just looked at him and he knew what I was thinking and said, ‘No mention of us. I’m going to cook us those mackerel, with lots of lemon and pepper.’
I put my little tin onto the kitchen table.
‘You’ve still got that tin I gave you.’
‘Yes, and this little tin is a great comfort to me.’
I opened it and showed him the small white pills it contained.
‘There are enough strong painkillers in here to finish me off.’
‘Oh, Heja...’ He hugged me tightly.
The next morning dawned mild and golden, the kind of day you long for in the dark days of winter. The sun had burned off the sea mist. The trees at the edge of the field were a palette of russet, amber and ochre. Markus made green tea for me and coffee for himself and brought it up to the bedroom. I sat up against the pillows.
‘I’m going to make us a picnic and take you to Dungeness today,’ he said.
‘Is that one of your frontier places?’
‘Yes, a particular favourite of mine. Put on two jumpers. It’s milder today and I want us to sit on the beach.’
He drove us along the coast road and we reached Dungeness and a great expanse of shingle opened up in front of us. I had not been there before. The distinctive bulk of Dungeness A and Dungeness B stood to our left, bunker style with no windows.
‘Only you could find beauty in a place that has two nuclear power stations!’ I said.
‘That’s not fair; it’s an amazing place. Look at those houses.’
He had slowed right down and he pointed to some small wooden houses on the shingle. He said they were converted railway carriages. They looked like houses until you looked at the windows and then you could tell that once they had indeed run along railway tracks. Now they were moored on the beach. He said they belonged to the local fishermen. There were a few small boats pulled up on the beach nearby. I saw a sign in front of one of the railway houses that said Brown Shrimps for Sale. He parked the car right by the beach.
‘How I wish I could run over that shingle and down to the sea. My legs are bad again today. I can hardly feel them.’
‘I’ll carry you,’ he said.
He’d brought a thick blanket with him and he wrapped me in a cocoon of wool and carried me down to the water’s edge. Then he walked back to get our picnic. We sat hunched together on the pebbles and I rested my head on his shoulder as we listened to the surge and the suck of the waves. It was so peaceful there, all sea and sky and just the two of us with some gulls wheeling on the up-drift of the gentle breeze. I sat up and started to look at the pebbles around me.
‘I’d like to find a completely round pebble,’ I said.
‘Ever the purist...’
‘This is such a Markus place. Did you ever come here with Kathy?’
‘No, never...’
‘You weren’t suited, Markus.’ I said it gently, without malice. ‘She doesn’t have your amazing clarity.’
‘I’ve never met anyone except you who had my love of clarity! Some people might call it obsessive.’
‘It can be a bit of a curse.’
‘Yes.’
I continued looking for a perfect pebble among the grey, brown and white stones. There were small pieces of green glass among the stones that had been rubbed to a smooth opaqueness by the motion of sea against sand. Markus picked up a piece of driftwood that was lying on the shingle. He looked at it closely with his architect’s eye, tracing how the water and the weather had rotted the wood. There were pieces of driftwood all over the beach and some lumps of rusted scrap metal. A few hardy salt-loving beach plants held their place among the pebbles.
‘I’m so frightened of losing it, though,’ I said after a while.
‘Losing your clarity?’
‘Losing control of my body. Tanya died at forty-seven. She was in a wheelchair for ten years and gradually every muscle wasted away until she could do nothing.’ I shuddered ‘Not even swallow.’
He hugged me closer to him then.
‘You wouldn’t let a dog suffer like that, would you? You’d put the dog out of his misery.’
‘You would,’ he said, stroking my face.
‘It would have been such a kindness to help Tanya out of her misery. No one had the courage to help her die. No one loved her enough to do that.’
I looked at him as I said this. He kissed my lips.
We sat on the shore in silence then and later he unpacked our picnic. He had made cheese sandwiches and brought apples and nuts and raisins. I ate a little. Then a group of three birdwatchers came into view. They had binoculars with them. They seemed to be very excited about a bird they had spotted at the water’s edge. We watched them watching the bird.
‘It is beautiful here,’ I said. ‘Bleak but beautiful...’
We sat for a while longer. We didn’t want to leave until the light had faded from the sky. I felt so calm as I looked at the bowl of the sea and the darkening sky with Markus at my side. Arvo Talvela had been right. My body was weak and my mind had never felt clearer. Nothing would stop me from being true to how I had lived my whole life.
He carried me in his arms back to the car. On the way home we passed one of those small convenience stores that is part of a garage.
‘Can you get some milk and a jar of honey, please?’
‘You don’t often drink milk.’
‘I like it warm with honey and some cinnamon sprinkled on top. I don’t think you will find cinnamon in there.’
‘No chance.’
It was dark as we turned into the road that led to our cottage. Everything I had looked at on our journey back that evening was charged with beauty and meaning in a way I had never felt before. Even the most mundane sights moved me. I noticed the lighted windows of the houses on our road, squares of warm light, the rooms ready for the evening ahead. When we got out of the car I asked Markus to wait a minute and we stood in the garden together and looked up at the sky
. I was so glad it was a cloud-free night and that I could see the stars clearly. Then I walked with difficulty into the kitchen. I found my little tin of pills and pressed the tin into his hands.
‘Help me get into bed now, please. I’d like some warm milk and honey. Please grind them fine so they dissolve.’
‘Heja, no!’
‘You said you would help me.’
‘Look after you in your illness, yes.’
‘I won’t get better, Markus.’
‘I know.’
‘I cannot bear a slow lingering death.’
‘Don’t ask me to do this.’
‘It’s been a perfect day. Perfect. Please, help me. Don’t make me argue.’
He carried me up the stairs and undressed me like a child. I wanted to wear the white T-shirt he had been wearing that day so he took it off and put it on me. It swamped me and I could smell a trace of him. He helped me into bed and then he went down to the kitchen.
He seemed to be a long time down there. He won’t let me down. I was sitting propped up in bed as he carried the glass to me. His face was pale and I think he might have been crying.
‘Heja...’
I looked at him.
‘I am sure, my love. It is what I want.’
I took the glass and he plumped up my pillows and put his arm around me. I drank the milk slowly, carefully, and drained the glass. Then I lay back against the pillows. He got under the covers next to me and we both lay there, looking at each other. He stroked my hair and my face, knowing how I love that and remembering, I am sure, how I longed for my mother to do that when I was a child. We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. I felt no fear, only the blessing of Markus being there with me.
Later I started to feel waves of deep nausea, one after the other, like very bad seasickness. It brought me to the brink of vomiting. I would not be sick. Somehow I would hold it down. I closed my eyes and made myself breathe slowly and deeply and brought to mind the image of a waterfall, a great rush of clean water splashing into a pool. The nausea went on for ages but I held the sick down. It was my last battle with my body. Then at last the sickness subsided and I felt myself getting drowsy.
‘Love you always, Heja,’ he said.
I pulled my eyelids open, they were so heavy now. ‘Love you always, Markus. Thank you.’
‘Rest softly, darling...’
What peace to know that nothing else is ever going to happen to me. So many images, such colours: the sun-splashed strawberries in grandfather’s garden; my pale pink ballet shoes when I was nine; my father’s fishing rod lying on the wet grass; a bowl of oranges and lemons; the light on the river.
Kathy
OCTOBER
After Markus left the flat to join her I just stood there in the hall, holding Billy. My heart was unbearably full at that moment. I had my precious boy back and I also knew that Markus and I could never be together again. We were finished. These two extremes of emotion were colliding inside me and I slid down the wall and sat on the floor and sobbed while I held Billy tightly against me.
Jennie arrived several hours later and the next morning my parents joined us. We were joyful to be reunited as a family and I don’t think Billy was put down once over the next few days; we all needed to hug him and kiss him and hold him close. I gave my parents the master bedroom and made up a bed for myself on the floor in Billy’s room. I kept waking up those first few nights to check he was there, lying safely in his cot. I wondered if he would have any memory of the events of the last week. He had been taken out in that great storm by a stranger. What had she done to him? I scanned his sleeping face and he looked peaceful and unchanged.
The next morning I told my father that Heja must have gone through my bag to steal my keys. That was how she had got into the flat. And she came to the flat while we were out, more than once, I was sure of that.
‘That thought chills me so much, Dad; her walking around the flat; going through my things.’
‘I’m going to change the locks,’ he said.
He was as good as his word. He went out straight away to a locksmith’s shop in Marylebone and bought replacement locks for me. When he got back he asked me for a screwdriver and some pliers. I went into Markus’s workroom to get his toolbox. It was a large metal box and, as you would expect, every tool sat in its allotted place, ready for use.
As I bent to pick it up I felt a tremendous sense of loss. Markus would never work in this room again; he would never sit with the light shining on to the plane of his drawing desk while I sat in the armchair, watching him. He would come and take away all his books, his plan chest and his table. The room had become so much his domain that I could not imagine what I would do with it. Heja had wanted to break us up and she did break us up. I couldn’t stop the tears that welled up then. I carried the toolbox to my father and he got to work.
‘She won’t get in again,’ he said when he had finished.
I hugged him tightly.
‘Why the tears, darling? You’re safe now.’
There was joy but there was also anger and incomprehension that Markus could have left me to go to Heja after all she’d done to us. My mother in particular was very angry. Jennie and my father tried to rein her in but she had to give voice to her feelings; she has always had to do that.
The second night Mum was in the kitchen, making chicken with black olive sauce for us. I was in there with her, ironing some of Billy’s little T-shirts. She asked me about Heja. I was reluctant to talk about her because I knew it would make Mum agitated. She pressed me for details so I told her some of the things that had been going on and I saw how angry it was making her. I watched her tearing hard to pull the skin off the chicken breasts.
‘Don’t you need a knife for that?’
‘No, it’s OK.’
She dropped the skinned chicken breasts into hot oil and started to brown them, moving them around the pan with a wooden spoon. She said she couldn’t understand it. Markus was my husband and he owed it to Billy and me to stay with us. She reached for the onions and was slicing them ferociously on the chopping board as she said that Markus should renounce that evil woman! I imagined my mother confronting Heja – what a scene that would be.
Finally I had to say, ‘Mum, we can’t ever be together again. Surely you can see that?’
Mum believes that marriage is for life and I know that all she has ever wanted for me deep down is to have a good marriage and a family. I am not my mother and her manifest anger and disappointment wasn’t helpful. I didn’t want to stay the angry bitter woman I’ve been ever since finding that photograph in Botallack. I was sad and hurt yet my overpowering feeling was one of gratitude that Billy was safe.
Jennie had gone back to Cornwall. My parents were with me when Nick came to the flat the next day. I opened the door to him and he asked me how Billy was and I said just wonderful. Then he came in and I introduced him to Mum and Dad and offered him coffee. He said, no, thanks, could we all go into the sitting room as he wanted to update us on developments. I noticed that he was being quite formal with us.
We all sat down in the sitting room and Nick leaned forward and, looking directly at me, said that Heja was dead. I was stunned. I had started to believe that Heja was invincible, that she was capable of anything. She was such a strong, powerful presence so how could she be dead? She had got what she wanted – she had got Markus back. So how could she be dead so quickly?
‘How can she be dead?’ I finally said.
Nick said that Heja and Markus had been staying at a house in Kent. Markus had contacted the police. She had not died from natural causes.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘It’s an unexplained death. It’s not exactly clear what happened. We know she drank a lethal drink.’
‘So it was suicide?’
‘We can’t be sure of that. As I said, it’s an unexplained death and we need to investigate it,’ he said.
My parents looked worried then.
‘I’m not saying that, Kathy. We don’t have the full picture yet. There is evidence that he was there when it happened.’
‘Is he in trouble?’
‘We have to carry out a detailed investigation into how Heja died.’
‘But he won’t be charged with anything?’
He looked at me almost sternly then.
‘I can’t tell you any more, Kathy. It would be wrong for me to say anything else. I just wanted to update you before it reached the news.’
So Markus was in trouble and the nightmare wasn’t over. I should have known that even when she died Heja would not leave us in peace.
Kathy
ONE YEAR LATER
Last night Heja appeared before me. It was as if she was standing in my bedroom at the foot of my bed. I saw her face so clearly: her blonde hair scraped back into a severe French plait; the fine bones of her face that the cameras had loved; and that inscrutable expression when she looked at me across the office. I struggled into wakefulness and felt afraid. I tried to piece together the dream before it melted into the shadows. What had she been doing to me? The details had fled and I was left with an angry heart and a dry mouth.
Why could I never understand that expression in her eyes? There were so many clues I missed. The way she looked at my pregnant bump the very first time we met, on the afternoon Philip and I interviewed her for the job. There was her profound reticence whenever I tried to talk to her. I was an open book then and she was a mystery. I do know that she made me feel inadequate and lacking in finesse and in those early weeks of meeting her I often felt the need to apologize or to appease her.
And then I remembered that today is the actual day in October that she died one year ago. What funny tricks our minds play on us.
The last time I saw her alive was that day she came into my office to resign. She looked so in control and so elegant in her black suit. She walked out of my office but not out of our lives; with her death has come a mountain of trouble.
The Lie of You: I Will Have What Is Mine Page 25
