by Frances Vick
‘Oh, did he?’ Freddie told her. ‘It’s nice to know that both of you have a firm handle on my feelings.’
There was a pause. Jenny sighed. ‘I should have told you earlier. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sprung it on you.’
‘I’m not pissed off because you sprung it on me!’ Freddie told her. ‘I’m pissed off because you lied to me.’
‘It wasn’t really a lie, though,’ said Jenny. ‘I just didn’t tell you the whole truth, that’s all.’
‘What’s the difference?’
Jenny left a long pause. When she spoke again her voice was quiet, flat. ‘All I can say is sorry, Fred.’
‘No, why’ve you been hooking up with some guy you know nothing about and—’
She raised her voice. ‘I don’t have to tell you everything! And we weren’t hooking up, we were messaging each other, which is exactly what you and Ryan did, and I didn’t get all snotty about it.’
‘I didn’t lie to you about it, though,’ Freddie said. ‘I didn’t worry you.’
‘And I’ve said I’m sorry, but I was trying to do the right thing! What was I supposed to do? Just say: “Oh, I’m sorry your relationship with Ryan has gone south, but mine with his friend might be just beginning, please be happy for me?”.’
‘Yes! And I would’ve been happy for you, too!’
‘I doubt that,’ Jenny muttered.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Nothing. Look, I’m tired, you’re tired.’ There was a resigned anger in her voice.
‘No, what did you mean?’ Freddie tried to keep his voice even.
‘I mean that misery needs company, Fred.’ She sounded so cold all of a sudden. ‘If I’d told you about David, you’d have tried to make me feel guilty. I don’t know if it’s conscious or not, but that’s what you do. That’s your default mode. You make everything about you; you’re doing it right now.’ Her voice didn’t rise, but that low growl was back. ‘I’ve sat here, listening to you slag off my boyfriend; I’ve explained to you, reassured you, told you everything, and it’s still not enough. You want me to apologise for being happy. That’s what it comes down to.’
Freddie stared at her, at the concentration comma between her brows, as if it and it alone could tell him exactly how the conversation had got to this point. ‘Why’re you being like this?’ he managed eventually.
‘Like what?’
‘Like this? You’re not being you.’
‘I’ve got to go to work. I’ll call you when you’ve calmed down.’
‘Wait, I am calm!’ Freddie said, not calmly. ‘Hazlewood. What about that place? He hasn’t told you about that, has he? Ask him! Go on, ask him about Hazlewood!’
Jenny gazed at him. ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No. It’s his business, it’s not mine or yours.’ She frowned again, opened her mouth, hesitated and shut it.
‘Well if you don’t ask him, I will!’ Freddie said recklessly.
Jenny flinched. ‘David is very… valuable to me,’ she said softly. ‘I’m not going to harm that for anything in the world, and neither are you.’
‘If you don’t ask him, it’s because you’re afraid of what he’ll tell you,’ Freddie replied.
She got up. ‘Grow up, Freddie,’ she said, and swung out of the door.
26
David was waiting for her in the lobby of a venerable old restaurant in town.
‘You look beautiful,’ he told her.
‘Oh, no, really?’ She touched her hair. ‘I think I look frazzled. It was so hot in that office. Stuffy.’
‘I thought we’d have a drink before the meal.’ David led her to a table tucked beside a covered baby grand piano. They were the only people in the room, bar one horse-faced waiter.
He helped her off with her coat. ‘So how was work?’
She made a face. ‘Too dull to talk about.’
‘Here.’ He passed her a glass of white wine.
‘Anyway, I only have another week and then I’ll have to find something else. The temp agency is useless, but Andreena told me that there’s a job going in her department, so, there’s that, I suppose. If I got that, it’d be permanent. I’d even get holiday pay.’ She waved an imaginary flag.
‘I can tell you’re not happy,’ David said after a pause.
‘I’m just a bit tired. Tired and overworked that’s all. And Freddie—’ She stopped, smiled and shook her head ruefully. ‘No. I’m going to stop moaning.’
David’s face tightened He poured himself another glass of wine. ‘What’s Freddie done to upset you now?’
‘Nothing. We had a bit of a row, that’s all.’
‘Was it something to do with me?’ His smile was pained.
‘David—’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
‘It’s his problem, not yours or mine. It’ll blow over.’ She frowned at her wine.
‘If he’s upset you, I’d really like to know.’ He spoke softly, insistently. ‘I don’t care what he’s said about me, but if it’s hurting you, or-or us, then, please, tell me.’
Jenny took her time undoing her topknot, shaking it out and pushing a hand through the sudden cloud of her hair. ‘Freddie’s just… protective of me, that’s all. Like you are.’
‘I wouldn’t call it protectiveness. I’d call it…’ His expression hovered between fear and distaste. One finger tapped on the tablecloth. ‘I bet I know what he told you.’
‘David—’
‘No. Let me speak. I need to… tell you something,’ The pale oval of his face was damp. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long.’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything. There’s nothing to—’
He interrupted her again. ‘There is. I do. I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.’ The handsome planes of his face seemed to shift and blur with the effort of telling this truth. ‘I feel terrible. I have all along. The thing is, I’ve not been entirely honest with you. Not just you, but… everyone. I’ve lied.’ These words drifted into the quiet and hovered. ‘And I can’t lie any more, especially not to you. Even if it means I lose you, I have to tell the truth now.’
‘David—’
‘School. I lied about school. I didn’t go to boarding school, I went to… well, a hospital, I suppose you’d call it. When I was sixteen, I had a breakdown.’ He let out a long shuddery breath. ‘That’s why I didn’t go to Sixth Form. There. That’s it. I should have told you, but the longer I didn’t, the harder it got.’ He paused, put one hand over his face, and rubbed hard, leaving a red glow on his pale forehead. ‘I’m guessing that that’s what Freddie told you?’
‘Yes,’ Jenny said softly. ‘He wasn’t being horrible though, he was just—’
‘Concerned.’ David twisted the word, making it sound false, bitter. ‘I knew that if he found out, he’d be “concerned”.’ David rubbed his face again, and then dropped both hands onto the bar. He looked exhausted. ‘So that’s the deep, dark secret. And if, you know, you want to stop seeing me…’
Jenny shook her head. ‘I don’t want that. I don’t want that at all.’ She watched as his hands crept together, his right thumb pressing into the knuckles of his left, hard. ‘Do you want me to tell you exactly what he said?’
‘Please,’ David said shortly, and she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see if he was close to tears.
‘He said that you’d had some therapy. In a place called Hazlewood.’
‘I did. And also in The Wolsey Clinic. After Dad died a year ago, I had a relapse. I-I loved my father.’ And here his voice did break. ‘When he – passed – so suddenly, knowing that it was just me and Mother left, it-it hit me hard. I checked myself into The Wolsey, almost expecting to get… ill. Just as ill as before. But I didn’t. It turns out that I was a lot stronger than I gave myself credit for. I only stayed at The Wolsey for a few weeks, and then left, came back and looked after Mother. Listen, I want you to understand that this latest stay at The Wolsey, it was more of a prevent
ion-as-cure stay. I was struggling with depression and grief. I wasn’t mad or anything.’ He laughed nervously.
‘Shhh.’ She put one firm hand on his. The thumb stopped moving but his hand still shook. ‘Of all the people in the world, I’m going to understand this, aren’t I? Look at me.’ She raised his chin with firm, cold fingers. ‘I love you, David. You believe that, don’t you?’ She smiled at his grateful, tearful nod. ‘So, maybe it would help if you told me exactly what happened? About Hazlewood?’
And he began to tell her.
Catherine and Tony. Had Freddie mentioned Tony?
‘Yes, he was the man in the photograph; the family friend. Mother’s friend anyway, and an artist. Of sorts. He plugged away. He taught in schools and colleges, but then his contract wouldn’t get renewed, and he’d travel for a while – Mum gave him money to do that; I don’t think Father was very happy about it. Then he’d come back and get another job, and the whole thing would start all over again. He never had anywhere to live, so he always stayed with us until he got on his feet, but—’
‘He never got on his feet?’
‘He didn’t, no.’
He told her how Tony first lived in the house, and then moved into a specially built ‘summer house’ at the end of the garden. He was only supposed to stay for a year, he said, but, inevitably, he stayed for longer than that. David had watched as the ‘summer house’ became more and more broken down and cluttered with half-finished paintings, shabby furniture that ‘just needed a bit of TLC’, and stacks of newspapers, records, books.
‘I felt sorry for my father,’ he said. ‘He was such a gentle soul, and he respected Mum so much; he worshipped her. I asked him, just once, how he was able to put up with the situation but he just said: “Tony is your mother’s guest.” And that was the end of it.’
‘So were they, I mean…’ Jenny paused delicately.
‘Having an affair? No. He was… that way. Gay. You know.’ A faint blush fanned across his taut cheeks. ‘I think Tony was her soulmate in a lot of ways, but they weren’t – involved – like that. It didn’t stop people thinking so, though.’
Jenny thought about Freddie saying village gossip. ‘It can’t have been easy for you?’
‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I coped with it by just shutting down. I pushed everything down. I tried to be as adult as possible. I thought that if it didn’t seem to bother me, eventually it wouldn’t bother me.’
‘But that doesn’t work.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Tony took over. Mother spent more and more time with him, Dad sort of retreated, and Tony…’
‘What was Tony like?’ Jenny pressed his hand with hers.
‘He didn’t like me,’ David muttered. His voice high, tremulous with little-boy hurt. ‘He was always being sarcastic about me. He’d do things to annoy me, frighten me.’
‘Frighten you?’
David nodded. ‘He’d tell me he’d been in my room, he’d read my diary, things like that.’
‘And had he?’
‘I don’t know. But it made me very nervous, because I did keep a diary and I didn’t know if he was joking or not. There was nothing awful in the diary, nothing to be ashamed of, but somehow, thinking that Tony had read it made me feel ashamed. And scared. Angry. So I began to hide it in a different place every day. I started to keep everything – store things away in hiding places – away from him. It became a bit of an obsession, collecting things, categorising things, storing them away.’
‘What kind of things?’
David blushed, ‘All sorts of things – scraps of paper, notes from Mother, things I found in the street that seemed interesting. Looking back, I think this is when I started to become ill. I know this probably makes me sound—’
‘It makes you sound like someone who developed OCD,’ Jenny told him. ‘I’ve suffered from that before too. I think it’s a control thing – I can’t control X aspect of my life, but I can control how many times I’ve checked that the door is locked, you know? It crops up when you feel helpless.’
‘Yes! That’s it, and I did feel helpless. I was helpless. Tony: he thought he was joking, but it had a terrible effect on me.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And then there was the fire.’
Tony was a smoker. Catherine worried about him, worried that he refused to fit smoke alarms in the summer house, worried that the piles of papers, brittle bits of wooden furniture and paint thinner he kept in close proximity to each other was a disaster waiting to happen. ‘Then my parents went on holiday, I was sixteen, so they thought I’d be fine on my own. Mum asked me to keep an eye on Tony, and I’m sure she asked Tony to keep an eye on me.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘But we didn’t really have much to do with each other. When Mother wasn’t there, he seemed to lose interest in… tormenting me. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, and he was always in the summer house. Then, one day, I smelled smoke.
‘I remember running down the stairs. The kitchen wasn’t where it is now in those days, so I had to go out of the front door and kind of double back to the garden. If I hadn’t taken such a long time to get there, maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad. I ran as quickly as I could, but the flames were so high, and the heat…’ His eyes were far away. ‘I heard Tony shouting, and I just ran towards the noise.’
‘That was brave,’ Jenny told him.
‘It was stupid,’ David said flatly. ‘I should’ve called the fire brigade. I didn’t think, though. I panicked. When I got to Tony, I tried to grab him.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘He was beating at the flames with something, and he was screaming.’ David closed his eyes. Squeezed them shut. ‘I shouted his name, and he looked right at me. We stared at each other. His hair was on fire. He held out his hands, and I managed to grab one, and tried to pull him towards me, but the skin kind of melted, came off.’
‘Jesus!’
David opened his eyes. ‘Then there was an explosion, and I don’t remember anything else. The fire brigade found me curled up at the base of the big oak at the end of the garden. Even though I was unconscious I was still crying.’
‘Did Tony… I mean, was he…?’
‘He survived,’ David told her. ‘But he was very badly burned. He had to have skin grafts, and he was in hospital for a long time. He never really recovered. He stopped eating, stopped taking care of himself, lost weight, kept getting infections, things like that. Mother tried the best she could, but he just gave up. He died a few years later. Mother was heartbroken. And then she started showing signs of dementia. I’ve always wondered – worried – that Tony dying was the thing that ushered in her illness. If only I’d saved him earlier, she wouldn’t have become so ill and—’
‘No. You can’t think like that. You can’t,’ Jenny told him. ‘Listen to me, you’ve spent all this time telling me about how you got things wrong, but where was your mother? Didn’t she notice the things Tony was doing, how he made you feel?’
‘No.’
‘Did you try to tell her?’
‘No. I wanted her to be happy.’ His smile was sweet, sad. ‘That’s what I always wanted.’
‘And after the fire? What about you?’ Jenny leaned into him. ‘How were you?’
‘I was lucky. Minor burns to my face and arms. This hand was the worst.’ He held up one big hand. The palm was criss-crossed with tiny white hatchings, the skin stiff-looking and waxy. ‘They said that if I’d been a little bit closer to Tony, I might have died. The thing that exploded was a big can of turps, and it was a few feet away from where I was standing when I took his hand. It literally blew up in his face.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘I went to hospital. I couldn’t talk – I wanted to talk but for some reason I couldn’t. They were worried about me, Mother and Dad.’
‘Well, of course they were.’
‘And so, they sent me away. To Hazlewood. They said that going back home would be bad for me, bad for my recovery. I was there for almost a year.’ He finally me
t her eyes. His were a little red-rimmed. ‘So that’s the truth. That’s why I didn’t come back to school. Mother told me to tell people I’d had a stroke. She told me that if I said that, I wouldn’t have to be embarrassed.’
‘“Embarrassed”? That’s what she said? Wow.’
David looked down at his knees. ‘She thought she was doing the right thing. I don’t blame her. Anyway, if you want to end… this. If you feel as if I’ve…’
‘David—’
‘Lied to you—’
‘David, listen, please—’
‘I mean, I have lied. But from the moment I met you, I felt… happy. And I didn’t want anything to take it away – take you away?’ His voice cracked, shuddered.
‘That’s not going to happen, David.’ She glanced at the ugly oil painting just behind his bowed head – a grimacing Judith thrust her knife into Holofernes’s hairy neck. Her own face reflected in the glass made her smile. Love superimposed on murder. ‘You don’t have to worry, you really don’t.’
‘I’m making a bit of a fool of myself here.’ He laughed, swallowed hard. Jenny finished her drink while he recovered himself a bit.
‘I had to tell Freddie that we’ve known each other for longer than we said. That was the thing that really upset him.’
David paused. ‘Ryan?’
She nodded. ‘But I explained that I didn’t want to tell him about you when he was still so cut up about the whole Ryan thing.’
David frowned at her. ‘That’s a lot of effort just to keep Freddie happy.’
‘Well, it’s to keep all of us happy really, isn’t it? Anyway, I wasn’t very successful. He’s really angry with me.’ She shrugged sadly. ‘All I wanted was for everyone to get along, us all to be friends, but—’
‘He’s possessive.’
‘He is, but he doesn’t know the whole story. If I explained it to him – the breakdown, Hazlewood – he’d understand though, I’m sure he would, and then we could—’
‘Start afresh?’
