Accidents Happen A Novel

CHAPTER FOUR



It was a while until Kate began to talk to Sylvia. They sat in silence, as she knew they might. It was an old-fashioned silence, Kate thought. Inside these thick walls there were none of the normal city sounds. No kids shouting in the street. No sirens. The silence felt thick and upper class and dusty.

She scanned the room. In the centre was an oversized stone fireplace, its heart blackened and empty. A Chinese urn sat on an oak table. This was the type of house a housekeeper used to run, Kate thought. Sylvia still probably had a woman who cleaned every day. She couldn’t see elegant Sylvia kneeling down and scrubbing away coal dust.

Sylvia sat opposite her on a sofa. The fabric was strewn with a faint orange-and-green botanical print. Just the right tone of faded, Hugo would have said.

Above the fireplace was an oil painting of a woman in a wine-coloured velvet dress, with Veronica Lake blonde hair, sitting with her hands in her lap, staring out.

‘That’s amazing,’ Kate said, pointing.

Sylvia smiled. ‘Thank you.’

Kate shifted in her seat. She crossed her legs, then her arms, then tried to uncross them again. That was amateur stuff. Everyone knew that. The defensive move.

Sylvia kept looking at her. She had a face both long and broad, with generous cheekbones. Her lips were painted a pale red. Kate suspected she was a woman who had grown comfortable in her large frame in later years.

She shifted in her seat, trying to find something to say. ‘It reminds me of those horror films when you were a child. Where you move around the room and the eyes in the painting follow you.’

Sylvia nodded.

Kate sighed. This was hopeless.

The ticking of a grandfather clock filled the room like a heavy heartbeat.

Kate looked out the window.

She forced her lips apart. ‘It is going to sound silly.’

‘Why don’t you try?’

Kate placed her elbows on her knees and dropped her face into her hands.

‘OK. Well. It appears . . .’

She heard Sylvia breathing steadily.

‘. . . that I am cursed.’

The word sang out into the old-fashioned room.

Kate gasped. Sitting up abruptly, she covered her mouth. But she was too late. Laughter burst out. ‘Oh God. I’m sorry. That just sounded funny.’ She pointed up. ‘You know, with the painting, and everything.’

Sylvia smiled.

‘Like I’m in a Vincent Price movie, or something . . . You know, “I’m CURSED, I tell you!”’ She rolled the syllables like a comedy horror actor, curling her fingers like talons beside her face.

Sylvia held her gaze.

‘Sorry. I’m nervous,’ Kate said. She stopped fighting her arms and let them wrap around her chest.

Sylvia dropped her head to one side, like a bird.

‘Can you tell me what you mean by cursed, Kate?’

How could she explain this? It sounded so crazy. ‘OK. Well, I mean, that I’m someone to whom bad things happen.’

She lifted her thumb to her mouth and bit the nail. It tasted gritty and the little biting noises seemed to fill the room.

‘What kind of bad things, Kate.’

Out of the blue, a tear pricked at her eye. Damn. Where had that come from? Kate swallowed hard. ‘Uh, it happens all the time. For instance, ten days ago I was burgled. They broke into the back of the house when I was out at a work meeting and stole my laptop and my son’s Wii.’

Sylvia nodded sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s not unusual to be burgled, Kate.’

Kate pushed her hands into her knees. ‘No, but it’s the second time I’ve been burgled in five months. Every time I come home, I’m terrified I’m going to walk in and find there’s been another break-in. Even if there hasn’t been, I keep thinking that things have been taken or moved. I can’t find things I thought I’d left on a table or on a shelf. I’m sure I’ve left a cupboard door shut, then I find it open.’

‘Burglary can be traumatic.’ Sylvia nodded. ‘It can leave you feeling very invaded.’

Kate threw her head back, trying not to sound irritated. ‘Yes, but it’s not just that. It’s not just the burglary. You asked for an example. I was just giving you one. No one else in my street has been burgled this year. Out of fifty houses. Just me. Twice.’ She frowned as Sylvia’s face remained impassive. ‘Oh. I don’t know how to explain it . . . OK. You know how most people will never be in a train crash, but a tiny number will be in two? Well, I’m always the person who’s in two train crashes.’

Sylvia nodded. ‘OK. Could you give me another example?’

Kate sighed. This was harder than she’d imagined.

‘OK. Well. Five years ago my h—’

She stopped. The tears were welling again. Threatening to betray her. To expose soft wounds beneath toughened bones.

She tried again but the word remained stuck in her mouth. Sylvia waited.

‘I find it difficult to say the word.’

‘Take your time.’

She swallowed hard and forced the syllables forwards. ‘My hus-band.’ The word came out strangled and sore.

‘Your husband?’

Kate stared.

Of course, Sylvia didn’t know.

For a second, the word ‘husband’ sounded real in this woman’s mouth. As if it applied to now. As if it were still precious and present. It was such a shock that Kate forgot about fighting the tears. One burst free and ran down her cheek.

‘Please.’ Sylvia leaned forwards, offering tissues.

‘Oh,’ Kate groaned involuntarily, taking one. She sniffed and wiped her cheek. ‘No. My husband . . . was killed.’

The flash of violence, silver and sharp. She automatically touched her stomach.

‘Oh, Kate. How terrible for you. I’m so sorry,’ Sylvia said. Kate held up one hand and took a breath so deep to control herself that she felt her lungs would burst.

‘And my parents.’

It was no good. When the breath returned back out of her lips, it had transformed into a sob. It forced its way out of her chest and burst noisily into the room.

She sat back in the chair, horrified.

‘Sorry,’ she gasped, trying to force it back.

‘Kate, it’s fine to cry.’

Kate shook her head vigorously. She tried to form the words ‘It’s not’ with her lips, but the motion threatened to allow the tears to escape properly. She shut her eyes and fought hard, focusing on the torrent that she knew was trying to force through the tunnels of her interior, weakening the walls that kept her upright and functioning on the worst days, before knocking them down with an effortless wave, to send her wearily, exhausted, to another lost day under the covers in bed.

No.

Angrily, Kate sniffed even harder.

She did not cry any more.

She would not.

‘One thousand.’ She forced herself to count internally. ‘Two thousand . . . Three thousand . . . Four . . .’

The heave of her chest settled gradually.

Sylvia clasped her hands in her lap. ‘Kate. I can see this is very difficult for you. Would you like to tell me what happened?’

‘No,’ Kate said, gratefully feeling her composure gradually return. ‘It was years ago. Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. Not right now.’

She sat up, determined, facing Sylvia. It was time.

‘I’m here because I do sums.’

‘Sums?’

‘Yes. Obsessively. All the time, in my head.’

‘Could you tell me what kind of sums?’

Kate shrugged.

‘I calculate stuff . . . statistics. Constantly. To stop more bad things happening to us.’

‘You and your son?’

‘Jack. Yes.’

‘Could you give me an example?’

‘Well, I could. But before I do, I need to know something.’

‘Please.’

Kate sat forwards. ‘If I tell you, do you have the power to take away my son?’

Sylvia blinked. Just once. ‘Kate, if I feel a child is in immediate danger, I have an obligation to take some action. But the fact that you are here, seeking help in relation to your son, makes me think you are a good mother.’

Kate nodded, surprised. ‘I try to be,’ she said, fighting back fresh tears.

‘Well, why don’t we concentrate on you? Can you tell me more about these sums?’

Kate looked out of the window. For a whole minute, she didn’t speak.

‘OK, there was a lot of traffic tonight so I decided to cycle. But before I cycled, I did a sum. I worked out that because it’s May, my chances of having a bike accident are higher because it’s summer, and about 80 per cent of accidents take place during daylight hours, but more than half of cycling fatalities happen at road junctions, so if I went off-road I could lower it drastically. So I did. And because I am thirty-five, I have more chance of having an accident than another woman in Oxfordshire in her twenties, but because I was wearing my helmet, I have – according to one American report I read, anyway – about an 85 per cent chance of reducing my risk of head injury. Then, when I was cycling I balanced my chances of having an accident with the fact that by doing half an hour of sustained cardio cycling, I can lower my risk of getting cancer. Of course, that meant I increased my chances of being sexually attacked by being alone on a quiet canal path, but as I have roughly a one in a thousand chance in Oxfordshire, I think it’s worth taking.’

She thought she saw Sylvia flinch.

‘And then when I was cycling here, I kept doing calculations. When I passed through Osney weir, I didn’t think how pretty it was; I looked for the tree I’d cling on to if I accidentally fell in, and planned how I’d swim with the current, not against it, because if you plan your escape you improve your chances of survival. And when I passed the waterside flats at Botley, I didn’t think how lovely it must be to live there, I thought about how I’d just read that three thousand properties are at risk of a one-in-a-hundred-year flood in Oxford. Same when I passed the cottages backing on to the river path at Jericho: I thought about how more burglaries take place at the rear of a house, and . . .’

Her breath ran out, as if her lungs had been squeezed like an airbed to be packed away.

‘They just come at me like swarms. I can’t explain it any other way. They come out of nowhere.’

Sylvia kept her arms and legs uncrossed, pointed resolutely at Kate.

‘Where do you get these figures from?’

‘I Google them – I get them from insurance websites, newspapers. Every day the newspapers have new figures about how to lower or increase the chances of things happening to you – not that it’s always clear, because they contradict each other sometimes, and I get them muddled up, but . . .’

‘And you compile them, what, into lists?’

‘Yes. But when the laptop got stolen, I lost my list, so I’ve been trying to remember until the new one is delivered next week. I can remember quite a lot, roughly anyway, and I use my iPhone when I can. And I know it’s stupid, but I’m worried that I might be getting some figures completely wrong and changing my chances of things happening. Like today – I picked my son up from football because his PE teacher is in his twenties, which I think – if I remember rightly – makes him more likely to have an accident than I am. But my phone battery needed charging, and the kids were travelling in a minibus, and I didn’t know how safe that was, so I picked Jack up anyway, in front of his friends, and he just looked so . . .’

She slumped.

‘Oh God. I know what it sounds like.’

‘What does it sound like, Kate?’

‘Crazy.’ She sniffed. ‘It sounds crazy.’

‘Crazy that you want to protect your son?’

Kate looked up, surprised. She wiped her eyes again. ‘Thank you. My in-laws think I’m crazy. They don’t understand that’s all I’m trying to do. After his dad . . .’ Her voice faded away. ‘I see their faces when I talk about these things, especially in front of Jack. The thing is, I want him to know. I want him to be careful because I’m so scared of anything happening to him too. It’s my responsibility to keep him safe. And yet, at the same time, I know it worries him.’ She wiped her nose. The words she’d hidden for so long were coming thick and fast now. ‘The thing is, I find it hard to judge any more if I’m being rational or not. Like last week – I spent over a thousand pounds in a private clinic in London having a whole-body scan.’

Sylvia shifted in her seat. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Kate, are you . . .?’

Kate waved her hand. ‘No. Not at all. I do one every year to check that I’m not becoming ill. That I don’t have even the start of a tumour. Because I keep reading that catching tumours early can increase your chances of survival. I have to be there for Jack, now Hugo has gone, you see.’ She pushed the wet tissues below her eyes as if physically holding back any more tears. ‘I mean, is that normal? I don’t know any more.’ She placed the tissues on her lap and sniffed. ‘When Hugo was here he’d rein me in. When my parents died, and Jack was a baby, I was all over the place, but he never let it get out of hand. He’d let me go into meltdown when I needed to – but then he’d also expect me to be normal sometimes, too. That made me expect it, too.’

Sylvia nodded. ‘He gave you perspective.’

‘Mmm. I had bad days and good days, then eventually more good days. But now, it’s not even about bad days. It’s gone so far past that that it’s like I’m in free fall. That I’ll never get back.’

Kate put her head in her hands, concentrating on the swirl of the rug below. From between her knees, she heard the forbidden words emerge from her mouth.

‘I miss Hugo so much.’

Sylvia allowed the words to echo around the room.

Kate touched a hand to her hot cheeks.

They sat together silently for a while.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said finally, sitting back. ‘I’m all over the place today.’

Sylvia regarded her warmly. ‘First sessions can be very emotional, Kate. You’ve waited a long time to talk about some very private and distressing feelings.’

Kate nodded. ‘Thanks. You must think I’m a complete lunatic.’

Sylvia sat very still, giving nothing away with her body language, Kate noted.

‘I certainly don’t think you’re a lunatic. I think you have been very brave coming here. From the little you’ve told me, I think you are a young woman who has experienced extreme trauma and has understandably been left with overwhelming feelings of anxiety. But you’re here now, and that’s the first step.’

Kate licked her dry lips. ‘Really?’

Sylvia nodded. ‘Absolutely. Now, before we go on, can I fetch you a glass of water?’

Kate nodded gratefully.

Sylvia stood up. She walked out of the sitting room, leaving the door ajar.

Kate sat back into the comfortable chair. She looked round the room again. This wouldn’t be a bad place to sit for an hour or two a week. This woman might really help her find her way back to Jack.

As she allowed the silence to calm her, the sound of laughter drifted from a room in the back of the house.

A man laughing. Followed by a murmuring of voices.

Sylvia’s voice, and a man’s voice. Kate strained her ears to hear what they were saying.

They were talking. Sylvia and a man. He was laughing.

She sat up straight.

A second later, she heard Sylvia’s heavy step on the hall tiles. She entered the room with a glass of water and shut the door.

‘Sorry about that.’

Kate stared. ‘Is there someone else here?’

Sylvia sat down. ‘Um, Kate, that’s something we should clarify. As you know, I see clients in the evening, but because I work from home, I should explain that there may be people around from time to time. But I can assure you that nobody can hear our discussions. Everything we say in here is confidential.’

Kate paused to choose her words carefully.

‘You were laughing.’

Sylvia folded her hands on her lap. ‘Oh. Kate. I promise you that I was not laughing. And it was nothing at all to do with you.’

‘But who was it?’

‘Is that important to you?’

‘Yes. It is.’

Sylvia kept her jaw strong. ‘It was my husband. He just walked in through the garage door talking to a colleague on his mobile. I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting him home this early. He didn’t realize that I had a client.’

My husband.

Kate flinched. When this woman said the word ‘husband’, it didn’t stick in her mouth. It didn’t hurt. It spoke of a life where husbands came home early, not of a life where they never came home.

Different.

Very different.

Same as everyone else.

Pushing her hands on the firm chair, Kate reluctantly stood up.

Sylvia blinked. ‘Kate, we still have forty minutes left.’

Kate fumbled in her pockets. ‘You know, when Hugo died, they told me not to start bereavement counselling too early. They said I needed to process things first. And by that point, it hurt so badly, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to cry any more. And I think that maybe that was a mistake now.’ She pulled out some money. ‘I came here because of the damage that decision has done to my son. And what do you do? I tell you these awful things, that I’ve told no one in five years, and you go into the kitchen . . .’ She gave Sylvia an astonished look. ‘. . . And you laugh.’

Sylvia stood up. ‘Kate. I’m so sorry. Please sit down and we can talk a little more.’

‘No,’ Kate said, placing the money on the oak table and walking to the door. She waved a hand around the room.

‘You know, I imagine some of your clients might feel intimidated by this house. But the irony is that, if I wanted, I could buy it. That’s what happens when all the people around you are killed. You’d be amazed at how much money people give you. Like this horrible consolation prize. But, you know what? I’d give it all up to escape from this.’ She pointed at her head. ‘To feel like I used to, even for one day. To be a normal person again, and a decent mother.’

A lump came into her throat. What had she said to this woman? What had she been thinking even coming here?

‘Kate!’ Sylvia exclaimed, standing up. ‘Please. I’m so sorry if you feel I’ve let you down. Could we discuss it a little more?’

Kate held up her hand. ‘If you tell anyone what I told you, or talk to anyone about my son, I’ll deny I was ever here.’

With that, she marched into the hall, picked up her helmet without caring whether it scratched the table or not, swung open the wooden door and slammed it behind her.

Saskia came downstairs, shaking head in disbelief. She walked into the kitchen. Richard was reading a newspaper. Helen stabbed potatoes with a knife.

‘Have you talked to Jack about it?’ she asked quietly.

Richard carried on reading, raising his eyebrows.

‘Dad tried, but he just looked embarrassed, poor pet,’ Helen replied. She stuck the knife in again. ‘Oh help, I’ve overdone these. Sorry, you lot.’

The dots on her cheeks were a deep raspberry now, like a Russian doll’s. Her pale green eyes were watery.

Saskia rested her hands on her father’s chair. ‘But it’s ridiculous,’ she whispered. ‘We’ve got to do something.’

‘Now now,’ Richard murmured, indicating the sitting room.

‘When then? He can’t live like this.’

‘I said, NOT NOW, darling.’

His eyes darted to the hall. Jack was sticking his head round the door frame, watching. The theme tune from The Simpsons blared behind him.

‘Five minutes, Snores,’ Saskia called cheerily. ‘Go and wash your hands.’

He nodded and disappeared upstairs.

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

‘Set the table, will you, darling?’ her mother said. ‘I’ll have to mash these over the heat to dry them out.’ As she carried the pot to the sink, Saskia could see she was struggling not to drop it.

Saskia spun round. She was sick of it. Seeing Dad, the powerful businessman who took nonsense from no one, walking around Kate on eggshells. Him and Mum summoning bright smiles and constantly calling her ‘dear’ and ‘darling’ in an attempt to diffuse the tense atmosphere their daughter-in-law created. Well, if they weren’t going to force Kate to see sense, she would.

Saskia’s eyes settled on a closed door next to the sitting room. She checked the clock. Kate would be back after seven.

That would do it. Send a message.

Quietly, Saskia took down a tray from above the fridge and placed glasses, a jug of water and cutlery on it. Then she walked past the kitchen table where her father sat, and carried it to the hallway.

She turned the handle of the closed door. As she expected, it was locked.

‘Sass, darling, don’t . . .’ she heard her mother whisper loudly from the kitchen. ‘You know what she’s like.’

‘I’m doing it, Mum,’ she said, reaching above the door frame for the new key. She saw her father shake his head.

She turned it in the door, and pushed it open.

It was the smell that hit her first. The smell of disuse. The odours of fresh paint and a new carpet, incarcerated for four years in this locked room. Forced to ripen into a chemical reek, now complimented by the sweet tang of fresh putty.

Shutting the door gently so Jack wouldn’t hear, she walked to the window and pushed the curtains further apart to brighten the room. It had little effect. The room was naturally sombre. Like that gloomy parlour in the eighteenth-century cottage she and Jonathan had rented in North Wales one Easter that felt as if bodies had once been laid out in it before funerals. Or perhaps it had just been a foreboding about the fate of their marriage.

She placed the tray gently on the long walnut Georgian table, one of the few beautiful pieces Kate had kept of Hugo’s. How many times had she been in here? Once? Twice? In four years? The room was painted the same white Kate had chosen for the rest the house. Not the careful shade of off-white Hugo would have spent a month tracking down. This was Kate’s white. An I-don’t-care, this-will-do shade of white. The fresh putty used to fix the window broken by the burglar was lighter than the rest. She ran a finger over it. Dry.

Curious, Saskia looked round. There was nothing in here apart from a four-drawer oak sideboard with turned legs that she remembered from the Highgate house, too. Something Hugo had salvaged from one of his restoration projects.

She knelt down on the carpet and opened a door.

A silver Georgian-era epergne stared back at her, its delicate arms and tiny bowls, once ready to shine as the centre piece of a lavish dinner party, now tarnished and unloved.

Her hand shot out to touch its cold surface. She hadn’t seen this for years.

A rush of memories came at Saskia, unexpected and pungent.

Dinner at Hugo and Kate’s.

Opening the door further, she found the sets of gold-plated bone china that Hugo collected, his exquisite silver soup terrine, found in a cellar in a derelict property in Bath and polished to within an inch of its life, now blackened and dull once again.

She shut her eyes and saw it all for a moment. Friends seated along the Georgian table, silver cutlery, laughing, eyes shining under Hugo’s prized candelabra. Hugo pouring the wine so generously that she’d find herself emptying half-drunk goblets into the sink at the end of the night, with Kate growling something about ‘there goes our bloody pension down the drain’. Hugo the fabulous host. The spirit of Hugo.

Now all hidden away in a cupboard in a locked room.

She took out a modern taupe table runner that she recognized from their casual suppers around the kitchen table in the basement. A musty smell arose from it. She ran her fingers along it, then stopped.

There was a dark-grey stain on it, the size of a two-pence piece. Red wine, perhaps.

Why hadn’t it been washed off?

A glint of glass below the china caught her attention. What was that? Kneeling down, Saskia pushed her hand into the back, trying not to knock over a set of cut-glass crystal. It was a bottle. Grimacing, she delicately placed her fingers around its neck and pulled it out.

As soon as she saw it, she knew what it was.

Saskia froze.

A dusty bottle of red wine, half-drunk, with a stopper in its top lay in her hands. Not a particularly good one. In fact, it was one she recognized as the high-end limit of the corner shop near where Hugo and Kate lived in Highgate. She had bought it in there enough times on the way to visit if she was late.

Kate had kept it. Hugo’s last bottle of wine, from that night. The one he must have been drinking when those people came to his front door.

Now left to fester. Like all of them.

Saskia opened the wine and sniffed its faint, rotten tang. She surveyed its label, sad that her brother, the generous connoisseur, had been subjected to this bottle of crap as his last.

Just as it was unfair that the son who had inherited his father’s fun-loving spirit was having it squeezed out of him, drop by drop, by Kate.

‘Hugs,’ she whispered into the bottle. ‘Don’t be cross at me. I promise you, you wouldn’t recognize her now.’

There was a noise to her right. The door was opening.

Saskia shoved the bottle back inside.

Jack appeared. His eyes were wide with surprise. He looked round the room and back at her.

‘We’re not supposed to eat in here.’

‘Snores,’ she said, standing up. ‘Leave it to the grown-ups to worry about things like that. Anyway, you know that thing we were talking about?’

His expression changed.

‘Yeah?’

‘You know what? I’ve decided to let you do it. But if you tell anyone, I will seriously kill your head.’