And I find, as I unpack my few boxes and put my clothes away, that I’m looking forward to seeing him too. He’s always been a nice man, Jon, and now he’s left his shackles behind him, he’s so much happier. More free. Free to be himself.
I’ve got a contract now at the same college, and I’m looking forward to going back. I’ve been reading some French literature this holiday for a new evening class I might teach in Derby; in particular a book called Bonjour Tristesse.
I started to enjoy it – a story about a French girl and her relationship to the various women who might end up being her stepmother – but it has a tragic end.
It was a little close to home.
Poor wicked stepmothers. They always get a bad press, don’t they?
* * *
Marlena came to stay just before Jon came back.
She’d bought walking boots and a black Barbour – although it was a super-cool, tight-waisted one of course.
On the second day the sun came out, and she suggested, to my enduring surprise, we went for a ‘proper, sweaty’ walk – so I took her to Thorpe Cloud. It was one of my favourite spots, despite its proximity to where I nearly died. The views went on forever; on all four sides of the summit you could see for miles.
But it wasn’t long before Marlena tripped and broke two of her new inlay nails (she was trying to stop biting the real ones). Then she kept moaning about the slopes being ‘vertiginous’, so we drove on to a less intimidating hill. When we walked through the first village and she spied a homely looking pub, we stopped for a drink.
‘Can’t we call an Uber?’ she joked later – and then I realised she wasn’t joking. She persuaded a local guy to give us a lift back to my car, winking at me as she jumped in the front, telling him, yes, she’d met Madonna once and Prince William – and he was tall.
* * *
We sat in the beer garden for a while that afternoon before she blagged the lift, enjoying the warmth of the last August sun.
‘So. You gonna tell me the truth now?’ she said, blowing a plume of smoke into the clear air, and I sighed.
‘He came back, didn’t he? The devil came back.’
‘Yeah.’ I put my drink down, my chest tightening. ‘He did.’
‘The bastard.’ Her face darkened. ‘I knew it was him. Why didn’t you say, Jean?’
It turned out that Ruth had called her when she was on her way back to London and had said, ‘I thought I ought to tell someone that man has been around again.’
‘Matthew? Her estranged husband?’ Marlena had asked. ‘Tallish, dark bloke?’
‘No, not him. A fair chap…’
‘Fair?’
‘Stocky; brought her a rabbit for the pot. I heard them arguing once, just before she disappeared.’
So Marlena had known all along.
‘It’s done, Marlena,’ I said. ‘It’s all done now.’
‘I know,’ she said simply. ‘I saw.’
* * *
I hadn’t thought he’d ever return. My own devil. I thought he’d had his fun, and he’d slunk back to hell.
Love of my life. I thought I was shot of him after the nightmare that was our break-up, back when Frank was just eight.
When I’d recovered, when Marlena had got me straight again, I’d taken my boy, and I’d left London, and we’d gone to the sea. I thought, He’s destroyed me once, so he’s had enough.
Simon K.
But he found me again. Last year.
It wasn’t hard, was it, when my face was all over the press about Otto? He hunted me down, and he found me, the summer I met Matthew.
He wanted money. He told me that if I didn’t do what he said, he’d take everything from me.
I told him to get lost. I gave him as much money as I had, and I begged him to leave.
For a while he disappeared again – and I thought that was the end.
You see? Daft and na?ve.
Because of course he came back again. He knew so much; too much. He knew about my addictions and my past. He knew I’d got hooked on pills after he started to destroy me the first time. And it didn’t take a genius to work out that I hadn’t been entirely honest with my new husband.
He threatened to tell Matthew everything – and I couldn’t bear it.
Only, when I left Matthew, he had no hold any more. He had nothing to blackmail me with. So then he sought vengeance.
He came to Malum House just after that terrible dinner party, when I collapsed. When Luke might have put something in my drink – or I might have just overdone it myself. I’ll never know.
I’d been paying Simon bits of money in instalments – but he wanted more, and I was scared Matthew would notice because I’d no money of my own left.
‘I’m inside – you know that? I’m inside the house,’ he’d said, and I’d looked at his wind-battered face – the face of a beach bum, a reprobate – those slanty eyes I’d once loved so, those red lips that were too full for a man, and I’d thought, How could I once have been so in his thrall?
He’d even got a key somehow.
‘You know what, Simon?’ I’d said. ‘Do your best. It can’t get any worse than this.’
* * *