The first time, he’d still been himself, though. He’d cried in the night, shaken like a man with a fever. He told her he couldn’t go back, he was too afraid. The night before he was due to return, she found him by the river and dragged him home. (She should never have done that. She should have let him go then.) It had been selfish of her to stop him. Now look what she had wrought.
The second time he came home, he didn’t cry. He was silent, shuttered, barely looked at her, except slyly, side-on from under hooded lids, and never when they were in bed. He turned her over and didn’t stop even when she begged, even when she bled. He hated her then, hated her already; she didn’t see it at first, but when she told him how sad she felt about how they were treating those girls up in prison, about the conscientious objectors and all that, he slapped her face and spat at her and called her a traitorous fucking whore.
The third time he came home, he wasn’t there at all.
And she knew that he’d never come back now. There was nothing left of the man he had once been. And she couldn’t leave, she couldn’t go and fall in love with someone else because he was all there ever was for her, and now he was gone … Gone, but he still sat by the fire with his boots on, and drank and drank, and looked at her as if she was the enemy, and she wished he was dead.
What sort of life is that?
Anne wished there could have been some other way. She wished she’d known the secrets that the other women knew, but Libby Seeton was long dead now and she had taken them with her. Anne knew some things, of course, most of the women from the village did. They knew which mushrooms to pick and which to leave, they were warned about the beautiful lady, belladonna, told never, ever to touch it. She knew where it grew in the woods, but she knew what it did, too, and she didn’t want him to go like that.
He was afraid all the time. She could see it, could read it on him whenever she sneaked a glance: his eyes always on the door, the way he looked out at dusk, trying to see beyond the treeline. He was afraid and he was waiting for something to come. And all the time, he was looking in the wrong place, because the enemy wasn’t out there, it had already come inside, into his home. It sat at his hearth.
She didn’t want him to feel afraid. She didn’t want him to see the shadow fall across him, so she waited until he was sleeping, sitting in his chair with his boots on, the bottle empty at his side. She was quiet and she was quick. She put the blade against the back of his neck and drove it in hard so that he barely woke, and he was gone for good.
Better that way.
There was a hell of a mess though, of course there was, so afterwards she went to the river to wash her hands.
SUNDAY, 23 AUGUST
Patrick
THE DREAM PATRICK had of his wife was always the same. It was night, and she was in the water. He left Sean on the bank and dived in, he swam and swam, but somehow as soon as he was close enough to reach out for her, she drifted further away and he had to swim again. In the dream, the pool was wider than in real life. It wasn’t a pool, it was a lake, it was an ocean. He seemed to swim for ever, and only when he was so exhausted that he was sure he’d go under himself did he eventually manage to grab hold of her, to pull her towards him. As he did, her body rotated slowly in the water, her face turned towards his, and through her broken, bloodied mouth she laughed. It was always the same, only last night, when the body rolled in the water towards him, the face was Helen’s.
He woke with a terrible fright, his heart pounding fit to burst. He sat up in bed with his palm flat against his chest, not wanting to acknowledge his own fear, or how it was mixed with a deep sense of shame. He pulled back his curtains and waited for the sky to lighten, black to grey, before going next door to Helen’s room. He entered quietly, gently lifting the stool from beside the dressing table and placing it at her bedside. He sat. Her face was turned away from him, just as it had been in the dream, and he fought the urge to put his arm on her shoulder, to shake her awake, to make sure that her mouth was not full of blood and broken teeth.
When she finally stirred, rolling over slowly, she started when she saw him, jerking her head violently backwards and banging it on the wall behind her as she did.
‘Patrick! What’s wrong? Is it Sean?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing’s wrong.’
‘Then …’
‘Did I … did I leave some things in your car?’ he asked her. ‘The other day? I took some rubbish from the cottage and I meant to throw it away, but then the cat … I was distracted, and I believe I left it there. Did I?’
She swallowed and nodded, her eyes black, the pupils squeezing the irises to pale-brown slivers. ‘Yes, I … From the cottage? You took those things from the cottage?’ She frowned, as if she was trying to figure something out.
‘Yes. From the cottage. What did you do with them? What did you do with the bag?’
She sat up. ‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘It was rubbish, wasn’t it? It looked like rubbish.’
‘Yes. Just rubbish.’
Her eyes darted away and then returned to his. ‘Dad, do you think it had started up again?’ She sighed. ‘Him and her. Do you think …?’
Patrick leaned forward and smoothed the hair back from her forehead. ‘Well, I’m not sure. Maybe. I think maybe it had. But it’s over now, isn’t it?’ He tried to get to his feet, but he found that his legs were weak and he had to haul himself up with one hand on the bedside table. He could feel her watching him and he felt ashamed. ‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked her.
‘I’ll make it,’ she said, pushing back the covers.
‘No, no. Stay where you are. I’ll do it.’ At the door, he turned back to her. ‘You got rid of it? That rubbish?’ he said again. Helen nodded. Slowly, his limbs wooden and his chest tight, he made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. He filled the kettle and sat at the table, his heart heavy in his chest. He had never known Helen to lie to him before, but he’d been fairly certain, back there, that she had.
Perhaps he should have been angry with her, but mostly he was angry with Sean, because it was his mistake that had led them here. Helen shouldn’t even be in this house! She should be at home, in her husband’s bed. And he should not have been placed in this position, the ignominious position of cleaning up his son’s mess. The indelicate position of sleeping in the room next door to his daughter-in-law. The skin on his forearm itched beneath his bandage and he scratched at it absent-mindedly.
And yet, if he was honest, and he always tried to be, who was he to criticize his son? He remembered what it was to be a young man, rendered helpless by biology. He had chosen badly for himself and he still felt the shame of it. He chose a beauty, a weak, selfish beauty, a woman who lacked self-control in almost every regard. An insatiable woman. She had set herself on a self-destructive path and the only thing that surprised him now, when he thought about it, was that it took as long as it did. Patrick knew what Lauren had never understood – just how many times she had come perilously close to losing her life.
He heard footfall on the stairs and turned. Helen stood in the doorway, still in her pyjamas, her feet bare.
‘Dad? Are you all right?’ He got to his feet, prepared to make the tea, but she put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Sit down. I’ll do it.’