Hannah had almost forgotten about that. She was going to have to tell Briony something, and it would have to be good to satisfy her razor-sharp curiosity. Not for the first time she was going to have to get creative with the truth.
On another day, Hannah would have arrived home pleasantly full of Briony’s homemade cookies and Victoria sponge and content to have a quick nap. But today she was tense, despite enjoying her morning chat, and trying not think about what might be waiting for her when she met up with Mitchell.
When she saw the car outside, for a moment she was thrown, and felt her stomach drop away until she realised that it was Mitchell parked in front of her gate, and not the mysterious car that had been hogging the shadows every time she stepped out of her door lately. As she parked, he got out and ran towards her. Before she’d had time to speak, he’d taken her in his arms and was kissing her hard. It took her breath away – the need, the urgency, the fire in it. But whilst she felt his desire, this was a kiss of desperation, of a man who needed to be anchored. As their lips parted, he laid his forehead against hers and held her gaze as if he was trying to see into her soul. He pulled her closer, his embrace almost crushing.
‘God,’ he whispered, ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.’
‘You too,’ Hannah replied, happy but taken aback by the force of his passion. ‘You want to come in and talk properly?’
‘That would be good.’ He buried his face in her hair and pulled her closer still. ‘I’m sorry… I must be such a burden to you.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Hannah pulled away to look up at him and smiled. ‘I understand things must be hard for you.’
‘I don’t deserve you, Hannah. If only you’d come into my life years ago.’
‘Then we’d have been two very different people. I do believe experience shapes you, year on year, it changes you. Maybe we just weren’t ready to meet before now. If we had we might not have liked each other all that much.’
‘I can’t imagine that for a minute,’ Mitchell smiled. ‘How could anyone not like you?’
‘Flattery will get you everywhere, you clearly know me better than I gave you credit for. So, how about we get in out of this cold?’
‘Of course.’ Mitchell took her hand and began to make his way up the path, but Hannah stopped him.
‘Hang on, there’s something I need to get out of the car. She dashed back to collect the camera from the passenger seat.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘I’ve borrowed a video camera from Holly Farm. I’m going to set it up in the front window.’
He was silent for a moment. ‘Are you sure you’re not more frightened by all this than you’re letting on? You seem to be taking it very seriously.’
‘I’m not frightened, I’m just taking precautions; there’s a difference.’
‘Do you need some help setting it up?’ he asked, sensing that Hannah was not going to admit to being scared even if she was. ‘I could fit a bracket to the wall if you need me to.’
‘No brackets, thank you. I’m hoping it won’t be running for long and I don’t want dirty great holes in my walls for the sake of some arsehole hanging around like bad aftershave.’
‘I can fix the holes afterwards; you’d never even know they’d been there.’
‘I’m sure you could but I’ll just sit it on the sill and it should be fine.’
‘Won’t it be visible if you do that?’
‘Perhaps, but it might work as a deterrent and get him to bugger off if he can see it, so, either way I’m happy. It’s the buggering off bit that matters.’ She handed him the case. ‘Come on, you can help me set it up if it makes you feel better and you can tell me about last night while we sort it.’
‘I wish I didn’t have to,’ he said as he followed her into the house. ‘I wish we could be six months from now and all this pain would be gone.’
Hannah saw the hurt in his eyes. She wished the same for him too, but there was nothing she could do to make it better for him except be there. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
He gave her a pained smile. ‘I would if I knew where to start.’
Hannah shrugged off her coat and hung it across the back of a chair. She unzipped Ross’s case and pulled out a bulky video camera. It was a bit on the old side, as Ross had warned her it would be, but it was well maintained. She handed it to Mitchell as she rifled in the case for the charger lead. ‘How about you tell me what you remembered yesterday?’ she said. ‘Or at least the things that got you so upset. The other stuff, we have all the time in the world to talk about – at least, I hope we have.’
He gave a tense smile. ‘I hope so too.’ Despite his positive words, it looked as though he was finding it hard to keep things together right now. ‘Martine and I…’ He paused. ‘Bloody hell, this is hard. Well, Martine and I weren’t exactly love’s young dream, I know that. But I thought she was content; I know I was. I thought that was enough. We had a good life, enough money to live well and enjoy ourselves. But things had got difficult between us over the past couple of years – petty bickering, frayed tempers over nothing – the sorts of things that don’t come out as full-blown rows but creep in and fester and eat your love from the inside out. Eventually, we both recognised that something had to change. So we talked it through, and decided that we should try for a baby – at least, I thought we had both decided that.’
‘A baby?’ Hannah cut in. She had been listening carefully, trying to understand his past, and she thought she had until that point. She tried to damp down the incredulous tone in her voice but she was finding it hard. So much for not judging him and showing unconditional support. But this was so difficult to understand, especially in the light of her own childhood. She and Gina had been blessed with parents who took very little interest in their children and after a final and monumental family argument, they were both estranged from those parents now. Hannah could never wish a childhood like that on anyone else. She knew that it played a big part in the fact that she didn’t have children herself; for her, having a baby was the most sacred act a woman could perform, and she would have to give her all to the life she was bringing into the world. Hannah’s relationships, up until now, hadn’t shown the sort of stability that made her confident she could give that to a baby. ‘Your marriage was on the rocks so you decided a baby was a good idea?’
‘In hindsight I see it wasn’t the best,’ he replied, looking suitably shamefaced, and Hannah could tell that he meant it. ‘But I did really want a child – not just to fix the marriage. And I thought Martine did too. Over the years we’d discussed it – right from the start of our marriage, in fact – but she’d always been reluctant because she wanted to concentrate on her career. Well, now she has the practice she’s always wanted and I thought, as she has partners in it too, she was happy to turn her thoughts to starting a family. Turns out I was wrong.’
‘What happened?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘We carried on, trying to get pregnant, or so I thought. I couldn’t understand why it was taking so long but she kept telling me to be patient and that it would take a while for the contraceptive pill to leave her system. I did everything I could from my end to help – gave up drinking, ate the right foods, took supplements – but nothing worked. I began to notice that Martine had changed nothing about her lifestyle except for working longer hours than ever before. I started to wonder if she even wanted the baby at all.’
‘She would have been entitled to that choice,’ Hannah replied, aware that it sounded as though she was siding with Martine against Mitchell. She wasn’t condoning what Martine might have done; she just felt strongly that every woman should have choices.
‘Of course she would,’ he said. ‘I’m not some Victorian misogynist. But a bit of honesty might have been kinder than stringing me along. Just because I don’t carry the baby, doesn’t mean I don’t get a say, does it?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘So that’s what you argued about on
Christmas Day?’
He handed the camera back. ‘That’s only part of it. It’s bad enough, but the other part… that’s the bit I don’t want to believe.’
Hannah placed the camera on the floor near to a socket and plugged it in to charge. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘It’s not you. I don’t want to tell this bit to anyone because I don’t want to say it; I don’t want it to be true.’
Hannah’s mind went back to the previous night when she had seen Martine out with her mystery man. The words: we were on a break settled in her brain, and she had a feeling that she knew what was coming next. After all, she’d been there with Jason and she knew the signs well enough.
‘I found a condom,’ he said. ‘A few weeks before Christmas. It must have fallen out of a pocket or something because it was in the bottom of our wardrobe.’ Hannah gave him a questioning look. ‘We never used them,’ he explained, ‘and Martine had stopped taking the pill to get pregnant. Not that there was much activity in that department at the end. Suddenly it all made sense: the longer hours at work, the bad moods, the reluctance to come near me or talk about the baby. I took the condom downstairs; I was fuming.’
‘Maybe it had something to do with her work? Birth control education or something? Perhaps she’d had a teenager in the surgery and had been showing them one and it somehow got into her pocket and came home with her?’
‘You know, once the dust had settled, that’s exactly what she said and, gullible twat that I am, I believed her.’ Mitchell grimaced. ‘Such an obviously lame excuse and I swallowed it.’
‘So you let it lie?’
‘Yes. I wanted things to go back to what we once had. I wanted us to have a baby and be happy.’
‘So what happened on Christmas Day?’
He paused, turned his gaze upwards as if steeling himself. ‘Christmas Day. Where do I even begin? I suppose I’d been rooting around ever since the condom, trying to find something that would tell me I was right to be suspicious, but even more than that I wanted to prove to myself I was wrong. I shouldn’t have looked, but her coat was just there on the bed and she was downstairs doing something else. It was weird, because she is always so careful to hang up her clothes. It was almost as though she was daring me to look. God, I wish I hadn’t. Stuffed in the pocket was a letter…’ Tears sprang to his eyes, and he sniffed hard.
‘Jesus, Mitchell, what did you find?’ Hannah asked, desperate to pull him into her arms and comfort him, but knowing that she needed to let him finish first, no matter how hard it was.
‘A letter from a private clinic confirming an appointment…’ He turned his gaze to her and his eyes were so empty, his expression was so hollow that it made her go cold. ‘She’d been pregnant. The thing that we’d been desperate for. And she paid to get rid of it.’
Hannah’s mouth fell open. ‘Martine had an abortion?’ she squeaked. ‘You’re kidding?’
He shook his head. ‘Christ, I wish I was. It floored me. I couldn’t get my head around it. I confronted her. I wanted her to tell me I was wrong, but she refused to give me anything. She can be so infuriating and so bloody self-righteous and I know that when she’s like that it’s because she’s been caught out. I’ll admit I lost it. I came this close to hitting her and…’ His words faltered and Hannah could see that he was fighting to keep his emotions under control, even now, at the memory of it.
‘It’s okay,’ she said gently, reaching for him, ‘you didn’t… did you? You know you can tell me anything.’
‘I wanted to slap her; I’ve never felt that way before, no matter how infuriating she’s been. I was afraid I’d lose control – I could feel reason slipping away from me. She could see it too, and she was goading me, like she wanted the confrontation; she was almost enjoying it. How could she do something that massive without telling me? I could have believed that there was a good reason, that maybe there was a problem with the baby or something, but the way she reacted to me when I confronted her told me everything I needed to know.’
‘Which was what?’
‘That she was having an affair. Either the baby was his or she didn’t want it because it was mine and she couldn’t have that tie to me. Either way, she’d been cruel in a way that even I had never thought she was capable of, and I know she can be a heartless bitch when the mood takes her. I had to get out before I did something I’d regret for the rest of my life. God, Hannah, I swear I could have killed her at that moment.’
‘That’s when you left?’
‘I just walked out. I had to, I was too dangerous in that mood. I couldn’t get my head straight and I didn’t really notice the snow at all. It was like the outside world had been sucked away and I was left in this vacuum of hurt and anger and all I could think about was how Martine had betrayed me. I kept on walking, trying to calm down before I went back so that I wouldn’t hurt her. I was so scared to go back in the state I was in, in case I couldn’t help myself.’
‘Didn’t she come out after you?’
He shook his head. ‘She’d never do that because that would mean her accepting some responsibility for what happened.’
‘Do you remember how you injured your head?’
‘I think I must have stumbled. I really wasn’t equipped to be tramping about in the snow and before I knew it I was head-butting someone’s gatepost. I must have blacked out… I don’t know how long for. It was on the road between here and Chapeldown, and you know how deserted that stretch can be, especially on Christmas Day when everyone is inside celebrating – it’s no wonder I wasn’t found. When I came to I was shivering and I felt dreadful. I couldn’t understand what I was doing out there but I knew I had to get help. I tried the house of the people whose gatepost had done the damage, but there was no reply –’
‘Where was the house?’
‘I’m not sure… maybe the next one up the lane…’
‘It could have been my neighbours; they were in Greece.’
‘Lucky for me really…’ His features softened. ‘Because if they’d been at home, I wouldn’t have found you.’
Hannah wondered what might have happened if Mitchell had never landed on her doorstep. How different would her life be now? It was strange how life turned on the tiniest twists of fate. She frowned. ‘Last night… what happened with Martine? You were gone all night and I didn’t hear anything from you; I was worried sick.’
‘I’m sorry about that; it wasn’t my intention to worry you. When I got home, Martine was there having tea with Graham. They said he’d come round so that she could ask him to talk to me, make me see there’d been a huge misunderstanding and that she wanted me back. When I told her I could remember everything that had happened on Christmas Day, I must have been in a state. Graham scarpered pretty quickly, just left his tea and went. I can’t say I blame him. I needed time to get to grips with things and I needed Martine to give me answers. It was so late by the time we’d finished and you had your sister here so I didn’t like to disturb you.’
‘And did you get your answers?’
‘We went round and round in circles as usual.’
‘You left it then?’
‘I didn’t have a choice, did I? So I’m still none the wiser – at least not from the horse’s mouth, anyway.’
Hannah was silent for a moment. ‘Graham?’ She asked finally. ‘That’s your business partner, isn’t it?’
‘Not yet. We’ve been talking about it, but at the moment he just manages the business for me. I think, with my brain as it is at the moment, and him doing such a good job of running things, I might as well let him have the whole damn thing.’
‘Don’t say that! You’ve worked hard to build that company up!’
‘I know, but it doesn’t seem important right now. I just want to get better…’ He tapped his head, ‘in here, you know?’
Hannah nodded, but she was still troubled by what she had seen of Martine. ‘Were they eating chips when you arrived?’
>
Mitchell stared at her. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I saw them together in the chip shop when I went to get ours. I saw Martine with a man, anyway.’
‘It must have been Graham. He’s a good bloke; I don’t know what I’d do without him.’
Hannah recalled the scene from the previous evening. They might have been two friends seeking solace, but their body language said otherwise to Hannah. She was beginning to wonder if Graham was hiding secrets of his own. ‘So you don’t know who the other man is?’ she asked.
Mitchell was thoughtful for a moment. ‘It could be anyone, quite honestly. She’s involved in a ton of committees and health groups and she’s got plenty of opportunities for nights away. I might never know if she refuses to come clean. Anyway, she told me it’s over and she wants me back.’
‘So she’s admitted the affair?’
‘She didn’t exactly admit it but she said I didn’t have any more to worry about on that score and she wanted to make our marriage work.’
Hannah stared at him. ‘Is she mental? What about the baby?’
‘It’s unforgivable, isn’t it? How could I want her back after that?’
Hannah could understand his anger but she found it hard to be convinced. He was angry and hurt, but Martine was still his wife and she couldn’t help feeling threatened by that bond, even though she knew it was an irrational fear. ‘What do you want?’ she asked. Her heart was thumping in her chest as she waited for his answer. If they wanted to save their marriage, did she have any right to interfere? But she was still troubled by Graham too. If there was something going on between him and Martine, now that Mitchell had left, why didn’t they just come clean? What did they have to gain by keeping it secret now? And why was Martine still trying to get Mitchell back when she had treated him so appallingly? What could she possibly gain by it?
He held her gaze and her worries melted away in an instant. ‘I want you.’
‘But –’
‘I knew you’d have a but,’ he smiled, ‘because you always do the right thing. You think we ought to put our feelings aside because a marriage is owed some loyalty, and you’d be right. There is nothing more sacred than marriage, and I would have been with Martine to the end, come hell or high water, no matter how strained things had got. But I don’t love her anymore after what she did. And in all honesty, the love had died even before Christmas Day – so that’s got to be real, hasn’t it?’
Once Upon a Winter: A totally perfect festive romantic comedy Page 22
