The Perfect Betrayal Page 2

  No jumper.

  I don’t remember if I washed it. I don’t remember if I hung it out to dry. It’s another memory lost to the fog I’m living in.

  Across the hall to the main living room that overlooks the garden, and another fireplace; the oriental rug with scorch marks dotted at the edges from years of spitting fires. I wanted to bin the rug but you wouldn’t let me.

  It suits the room, Tessie.

  Maybe it does. I can’t say I care much now. The black corner sofa from our old living room doesn’t look right in here though, does it? It’s too small, too modern, like the flat-screen TV on the glass stand. Perfect for the square living room in our Chelmsford semi-detached, but not for here.

  I expect to find Jamie’s jumper in a discarded heap by the PlayStation, but it’s not and I carry on going. Along the hall and around the main staircase, to the rooms beyond: the library crammed with old copies of Reader’s Digest; the other living room, or parlour – whatever it is – stacked with boxes. Half of them filled with the things we still haven’t unpacked, and the other half full of your mother’s stuff.

  Up the narrow stairs at the back of the house, I peer into the bedrooms. All but ours and Jamie’s are filled with seventy-two years of your mother’s life, and the dirt and grime of a woman who thought herself above cleaning.

  She did go a bit doolally in the end.

  Oh Mark, that’s an understatement if ever I heard one, but who am I to comment on mental health? According to the doctor I’m depressed.

  I check the bathroom. Gold taps, a cream suite and aubergine tiles that stretch floor to ceiling, but no jumper.

  I find it in Jamie’s room. His bedroom is a mix of colours – red and blue Spider-Man bedcovers, green Ninja Turtle figures on the bookshelf, black and yellow Batman curtains, and the car rug he’s had since for ever that I can’t bear to part with.

  The jumper is hanging in Jamie’s wardrobe. It smells of lavender fabric conditioner. I must have washed it and forgotten; hung it up on autopilot when I was thinking of you, of us.

  ‘I found it,’ I pant, dashing back into the kitchen.

  Jamie pulls the jumper over his head without a word.

  ‘Ready to go?’ I ask, looping my hair into a bun as I shuffle around the kitchen table to the nook by the side door where we keep the coats and shoes. Don’t roll your eyes, but I’m still wearing a pair of your red tartan pyjama bottoms.

  Oh, Tessie. Really?

  With the wellies and the long winter coat, it’s not that obvious. It’s only the school drop-off.

  I know if I drive the few minutes down the lane to the village and the school, then I can stay in the car and wave Jamie in, and no one will see the pj bottoms, but I also know that I’m in no fit state to drive this morning. I’m in no fit state to walk either. My feet feel as though they are filled with lead, my legs with jelly.

  The sun is a pale yellow but bright – a spotlight – and I squint, dipping my head and focusing my gaze on the road.

  As the engine of a car roars by I have that split-second flash again, that heart-stopping what-if moment where I think about diving in front of the engine so we can be together. The feeling is gone so fast I can almost pretend it was never there. Almost.

  I tuck my body nearer to Jamie, moving us both closer to the prickly hedgerows bordering both sides of the lane. The days of scooting ahead with his friends on the estate and waiting at every third lamp post are long gone.

  I wish there were pavements.

  ‘Stop, Tessie. Stop worrying,’ you said on Jamie’s first day at his new school, and anytime in fact that I worried about all the things that might happen and all the things I had no control over, like pavements and plane crashes.

  You took the day off and we all walked together, remember? ‘It’s the countryside,’ you said, nudging Jamie so that both of you were laughing at me. It was a laugh to say: silly Mummy doesn’t like walking in the road next to the cars. Silly Mummy would like pavements instead of bushes. Silly Mummy wants housing estates instead of rolling farmland thick with dark mud.

  ‘Today, Clarke Tours will be taking you on a tour of the village on your journey to school,’ you said, making Jamie and me laugh with your silly tour guide voice. ‘There is approximately a mile between our house and the church, Hall Farm and the old school building at the other end of the village, where I went to school before they built the new one on the estate. The old building is still there but it’s an accountancy firm now, I think. The village also boasts a post office, a vet’s, a playground and a new housing estate.’

  ‘New?’ I scoffed. ‘Our Chelmsford house was new.’

  ‘OK, so it’s not new new, but new for the village. It was built in the seventies. The not-so-new estate runs parallel to the old road where the Tudor houses like ours are.’

  ‘And the cottages with hay for roofs,’ Jamie piped in.

  ‘It’s called thatch,’ I said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze.

  ‘And if you’re very lucky then I’ll take you for a packet of overpriced crisps and a hot chocolate in one of the three pubs after school.’

  I rolled my eyes at Jamie’s cheer and your boyish grin.

  ‘Try an overpriced glass of wine,’ I said.

  ‘I like your thinking, Mrs Clarke. And if you’re very good,’ you added, leaning so close to my ear that the heat of your breath tickled my skin, ‘I’ll let you kiss me behind the bus stop in the exact spot where I had my very first kiss. It was with a rather buxom girl by the name of Kerry Longston.’

  ‘Oh Mark,’ I laughed. You always made me laugh.

  As we near the corner I catch the distant smell of a bonfire drifting in the wind. It’s just a whiff, a trick of the mind perhaps, but it still tickles my lungs, and before I can stop myself I see the TV footage, I see the plane in the clear blue sky, I see the fireball. I scrunch my eyes shut as tears prick the skin beneath them. My breath comes heavy and fast.

  A few more steps and we’re around the bend and the smell is gone, replaced by the dewy cold morning.

  ‘Mum?’ Jamie’s voice floats in my periphery, distant and soft.

  ‘I’m fine, baby,’ I whisper the umpteenth lie of the day.

  ‘Where’s my book bag?’

  ‘Oh.’ I stare at my hands as if I don’t already know that they’re empty. Where are Jamie’s book bag and water bottle? I look at the empty hands of our son and just like that the anger is back.

  ‘We’ve forgotten it,’ I hiss through gritted teeth. It’s your sodding book bag, Jamie. Yours. When are you going to grow up and take some sodding responsibility? I shout in my mind, struggling to keep it inside, but it’s still there in my loud sigh and I sense Jamie’s shoulders sag.

  ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ he says in a voice so quiet I almost don’t hear. The hurt inside threatens to pull me in two.

  ‘I love you to the moon and back,’ I used to tell Jamie every day.

  Jamie’s reply was always the same. ‘I love you to the sun and back a hundred times.’

  It was never ever angry words and silence that we shared.

  We turn around, back in the direction of the big white house with its black beams that sit a little wonky. Back to the L-shaped maze of rooms and cold and gloom. Back to the smell of the bonfire, and the memories it unleashes.

  By the time we make it to school the playground is empty. The children have already filed inside. Jamie turns and disappears into the building and just like that the anger from this morning is gone and all I feel now is the emptiness of the day dragging out before me.

  When I look back at that first month without you, I wonder if I should’ve seen her coming. Like a siren, bright and blue, flashing in the night. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in you and the grief, would I have seen the path my life was about to take? The old Tess, the person I was before, screams YES, but the new one is not so sure.

  Chapter 4

  Monday, 19 February – 48 days to Jamie’s birthday

  Happ
y Birthday to me! Thirty-eight years old. When did that happen? Of course my birthday this year would fall on a Monday. That’s five now, Mark. Five Mondays without you.

  Happy Birthday, Tessie.

  At least it’s cloudy today. A thick blanket of grey hangs low, trapping in the cold of the night and the frost shimmering like glitter on the brambles beside the road. I don’t think I could’ve survived another clear-blue-sky kind of day, where aeroplanes leave those streaks of white cloud and I feel the injustice of it all like a savage beast in my gut.

  So that’s one thing at least.

  Jamie caught me crying at the kitchen table this morning – big heaving sobs – which made him cry because he thought he’d upset me, which made me cry even more because I was being selfish and shitty.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mummy. Please don’t cry,’ he said over and over as I held him tight in my arms.

  By the time we both calmed down we were late for school, and I snapped at him for losing his school shoes, which were exactly where they should’ve been by the side door. And that set us both off again.

  I asked Jamie if he wanted to stay home with me, but he said no. Mondays is PE.

  We arrived at school thirty minutes late, quivering tear-streaked messes the pair of us. At least the school has been lenient about the lateness. I’ve been waiting for the head teacher to grab me for a quick word, but the staff have kept their distance. I’m not sure if it’s out of respect for my grief or out of fear over how I’ll react, but either way I don’t care.

  It wasn’t the best start to the day.

  But it made me think – maybe I should take a tablet today. Just as soon as I’m home, just as soon as I’ve warmed up in a hot bath, I will. Maybe.

  You don’t need the tablets, Tessie.

  Easy for you to say.

  Here’s what they don’t tell you about grieving – you feel cold. Really cold. An icy chill froze my body in those first moments of knowing, and it hasn’t left. Nowhere in the half a dozen Coping With Grief pamphlets that have been thrust unwanted into my hands in the last month has cold been mentioned. It’s all about the stages of grief: the numbness, the shock, the anger, the guilt. The emotions are listed in bold and bulleted as if we, the bereaved, can simply tick them off one by one and come out the other side normal again.

  By the time I’m almost home from dropping Jamie at school, my teeth are chattering and I’m shivering all over. All I can think about is sinking into a scalding-hot bath. So I don’t register the huge black Land Rover parked in the entrance of the driveway. Not at first anyway.

  It happens all at once. I’m turning the corner, sidestepping between the car and the brick wall, cursing under my breath when my elbow catches the wing mirror, and then I see you and a rush like the wintry wind sweeps through me.

  It’s you. It’s really you. You are standing in our driveway. Your half-smile. Your head tilt. I love you. I love you. I love you.

  For a split second everything is how it was. The darkness, the fog, the cold, it all lifts and I smile. It was all a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake. You’re alive and I love you.

  And just as quickly, in the very next heartbeat the feeling is gone. Reality hits with the same force as PC Greenwood’s words on that day: ‘Your husband was on board … there were no survivors.’

  It’s not you. It’s your brother. How have I never noticed it before – the similarities between you and Ian? It’s in your eyes – deep brown and a perfect oval shape. I miss your eyes so much. I miss the way you cupped your hands around my face and stared at me with those eyes.

  The hair is the same too. Ian’s is shorter, more corporate, more suitable for his partner role at Clarke & Barlow Solicitors – but it’s the same straight chocolate brown as yours.

  ‘Hi Tess,’ Ian says. He steps closer, crushing the final whisper of hope lingering in my imagination. Ian is not tall like you, but my height. Five foot ten, so that when he reaches me, his eyes – your eyes – stare straight into mine.

  ‘Hi.’ I don’t know where to look. I can’t look into his eyes so I pick a place to the right and stare at the white side door with black hinges that leads into the kitchen.

  We hug – an awkward, weird kind of embrace where our feet stay rooted and we lean our bodies in towards each other. Ian never used to hug me on the few occasions each year when we saw him. It was always a little wave and an ‘Oh, hi Tess,’ as if I was an odd cousin at a wedding that nobody wanted to invite.

  We hugged at your funeral too. I can’t remember if I started it or if Ian did, but we seem to be stuck with it now.

  ‘I’ve been calling you,’ Ian says when we pull apart.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve … I’ve had the flu,’ I lie.

  ‘For a fortnight?’ His tone is incredulous and I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Can we go inside and talk?’ Ian strides to the open porch and side door without waiting for a response, leaving me trailing behind like I’m the visitor and this is his house.

  My hands are shaking when I push the key in the lock. I’m not sure if it’s the shock of thinking it was you standing on the driveway or the cold making them tremble, but either way I can’t get the old deadbolt to shift.

  ‘Here,’ Ian says, moving closer and waving my hand away from the key. ‘You have to lift the door a little as you turn it when it’s cold like this. It’s always been that way.’ The hinges of the door creak and whine as it swings open. Ian strides into the kitchen and I’m left on the doorstep wishing I didn’t have to follow him in.

  It doesn’t seem to matter to Ian that he hasn’t lived here for a good twenty years, he still treats the house like it belongs to him, like your mother is still alive and rattling around the place.

  He’s my big brother, Tessie. He means well.

  Maybe, but he never stopped treating you like a stupid teenager, and me and Jamie like we were a temporary phase of your life.

  You’re just as bad. You never gave him a chance either.

  I kick my boots off in the nook and pad into the kitchen in my woolly socks. The tiles freeze my feet. The heating has clicked off and the temperature inside is the same as it is outside. Not that it matters. There could be a tropical heatwave in our kitchen and I’d still feel cold.

  Ian leans against the worktop by the sink and the window that overlooks our driveway. He stares at the table and my and Jamie’s half-eaten breakfast bowls. My Weetabix have bloated, congealing into one soggy mass. I catch Ian’s frown, the disdain for the mess. He adjusts his tie and stands a little straighter.

  ‘Here,’ Ian says. He lifts his hand and for the first time I notice the carrier bag he’s holding. ‘I bought you some grapes, and some chocolate. I wasn’t sure what you liked.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  He looks disappointed and I wonder if I should be more grateful. Maybe you’re right, maybe I never gave him a chance.

  ‘That’s really kind,’ I add.

  ‘I’m sorry to ask this, Tess,’ Ian says, ‘but it can’t wait any longer. The thing is, I need that money.’

  Money. The word pinballs in my mind. I should’ve known Ian didn’t come to see me, or to ask after Jamie.

  ‘What money?’

  He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes for a beat. You used to do that.

  ‘I explained all this at the funeral,’ Ian says. ‘I lent Mark money when you moved. He told me you knew about it. He needed my inheritance from Mum, just for a few months whilst you sold the house in Chelmsford.’

  I swallow and for a moment my teeth chatter together again. I don’t remember much about the funeral. I remember the rain spattering on the stained-glass windows. The cold of the stone walls seeping through my coat and my dress, all the way to the block of ice already inside me. The rest is blank – a black hole, a deleted scene in my head.

  ‘Tess?’ Ian’s impatience jolts me. His eyes seem darker in the gloom of the kitchen and I can’t help wishing we’d stayed outside to talk, not th
at I had a choice in the matter.

  ‘The Chelmsford house sold straight away,’ I say. I turn my back on him and focus on clearing the bowls. Ian sidesteps away from the sink but doesn’t offer to help. ‘We sold the house in Chelmsford and used it along with Mark’s inheritance from your mum to buy out your half of this house, and then we got a mortgage for the rest. It was all handled through your solicitors. I was with you and Mark in your partner’s office when we signed all the paperwork. The money was transferred straight to you. You were there. So was Jacob Barlow.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ian nods and I have that sense of being treated like a child, of not understanding the simplest of things. ‘And then you borrowed some of it back.’

  ‘No, we didn’t.’ The start of a headache throbs behind my eyes.

  ‘I need that money, Tess.’ Ian takes a step towards me. He’s so close that I can smell the citrus spice of his cologne, and I stop moving, bowls in hand. Something flashes in his eyes. Desperation, I think, or maybe frustration.

  ‘Jacob wants to retire and sell his half of the solicitors,’ Ian continues. ‘I have some of the money I need from a bank loan and savings, but not all of it. If I don’t buy him out we’ll be forced to sell into one of the umbrella companies. We’ll keep the name and the office but we’ll have to do everything by a tick box. All my hard work and my reputation down the drain. I know there’s a death benefit from Mark’s job, and a life insurance policy. He declared it all when you made your wills. You can use some of that to pay me back.’

  I grit my teeth, clamping my mouth shut before I can say something I’ll regret. I hate how your brother knows so much about us. Things I don’t even know. ‘He’s my brother, Tess. We need a solicitor and he’ll give us a good rate,’ you said. ‘Ian won’t represent us. His partner can do that.’