Past Praying For (12 page)

She
wrapped her arms about her body, rocking to and fro in that expression of misery which is as old as misery itself.

***

The curtains in the games room were still closed, and the air was thick with the cigars Piers had smoked last night. The light suspended above the three-quarter size billiard table had been left on, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

Piers
was oblivious to its squalor. Sitting in the big club chair by the dead ashes in the fireplace, nursing a brandy, a queasy stomach and a sore head, he heard his wife talking on the phone and scowled. No doubt she was bleating to one of her friends about how badly she was treated by her husband. He’d noticed they were distinctly cool to him nowadays.

With
one exception. He grinned evilly at the thought. It was a long time since anyone had come on to him like that – in fact, if he was honest, this was a first, and he wasn’t about to let scruples stand in his way.

He
had felt liberated to be himself at last, in these few months since his mother died. She was a tough old bird, he reflected with a certain wary admiration, and while she might still descend from mercifully-distant Yorkshire and make him feel like the very unsatisfactory small boy she had always considered him, he had behaved, at least when she was around, with a certain circumspection.

But
now, there were no controls. Lizzie couldn’t say Boo! to a goose, let alone No! to her husband, and he need no longer check the bullying impulse which her perpetual cowering stirred in him.

Bullying
came as naturally as breathing to Piers. His father had been a hard bastard, whom he had admired and feared in roughly equal proportions, but never loved. He had looked forward to kicking ass in his own firm when choler and rich living had carried the old boy off to an early grave, but his mother would have none of it.

‘
Th’art not half the man thi father was,’ she said gruffly, affecting the broad old-fashioned Yorkshire she knew enraged him. ‘Happen tha’ll not play ducks and drakes with my grandchildren’s money, and tha hast thi poor pretty wife to provide for, think on.’

And
he had, as always, been unable to defy her. He had sold the business to Trucking Worldwide, and agreed to the financial safeguards her lawyers had imposed – astute enough, to be fair – and subjected himself to the constant humiliation of having been guaranteed a seat on the board without the guarantee that anyone would listen to a word he had to say.

No
wonder he saw her death as liberation. And yet, and yet...He missed the old certainties and the luxury of safe rebellion; sometimes, in his more sober moments, he even felt frightened himself by his growing taste for violence.

He
would certainly never have taken up with Hayley Cutler if there was the smallest chance that his behaviour might come under his mother’s searing scrutiny. She would have laughed in earthy amusement at the notion that a woman like that could find his charm irresistible, would have suggested...But it had been bad enough being forced to listen to her opinions when she was alive. He wasn’t about to let her start offering them from beyond the grave.

He
was having to be careful, of course. Hayley was one of the group Lizzie moved around with, and he was smart enough to know that this spelled danger. A woman might be as ready for a roll in the hay as you were, then before you knew it she’d be yakking around the kitchen table to her best friend who would turn out to be your wife’s best friend as well and who would see it as one of the duties of friendship to enlighten her as to who was doing what and with what and to whom.

But
somehow Hayley was an outsider, never properly within the charmed circle. None of them really liked her, that was the thing, and come to that he wasn’t sure how much he liked her himself, though that had nothing to do with the price of cheese. It wasn’t precisely for her personality that he fancied her.

He
was flattered, of course. He was far from being the only man around who had the hots for her, but she had definitely singled him out, and he was revelling in the experience. Despite the purchasing power of serious money, he had been finding life dull and disappointing, and secret assignations certainly added spice.

The
brandy was beginning to kick in now, and he started to feel a sort of woozy benevolence as his stomach stopped heaving. He would have another glass, just to make sure, and then he could snooze till lunch time. Lizzie should have got the Alka-Seltzers by then.

***

Elizabeth’s visit to Bentham’s had been brief and awkward. Suzanne had done her best to seem bright and normal, but she knew she had failed. She was paralysed by the awkwardness of her position; after all, in asking for the return of her key, she was actually saying that she believed her best friend might have trashed her kitchen, and she had always been hopeless about covering things up. Elizabeth was clearly offended; she couldn’t possibly blame her for asking for her own key back in exchange, and she just couldn’t think of anything to say.

It
had been a dreadful morning. Patrick had taken Ben off clay-pigeon shooting, and she had suffered a jealous pang at this male-bonding exercise.

She
had been left to make the phone calls, and the fact that this had been her own choice did not lessen her resentment. As a person who, on the whole, was as honest with herself as anyone ever is, she recognized that unforgivably what he had forced her to face was an unwelcome truth.

Hayley
’s response to her request had been puzzling. She was always difficult to read, but Suzanne thought she was intrigued, rather than surprised or offended. The key had been posted through the letter box half an hour later.

Laura
’s reaction had been quite different. After an initial gasp of obvious dismay, she had recovered herself quickly, babbling on about the ludicrous demands insurance companies saw fit to make nowadays. She promised that one of the girls would bring it round, then rang off abruptly.

Suzanne
might have known she would make a mess of it. Perhaps it would have been better if Patrick had done it after all. Then he could have taken the flak; certainly all she had achieved, despite the agonizing beforehand, was to alienate both her closest friends at once.

She
put her head in her hands. Why had everything so suddenly started spinning out of control in her tightly-ordered universe? Only weeks ago, it seemed, she had been coping effortlessly with demands on every side which would have brought many another woman to her knees.

It
was at work that things had started to go wrong, when the Powers That Be were misguided enough to appoint a woman surgeon. It wasn’t that Suzanne was prejudiced of course not, she judged everyone on merit – but this woman breezed in and started making ridiculous demands, oversetting procedures which had worked satisfactorily in the hospital all the time Suzanne had been theatre sister: no one had ever suggested otherwise, and three of the top men always made a point of asking for her if the operation was going to be tricky.

But
the cow had given her a public dressing-down in front of her juniors, humiliating her and undermining her authority. Suzanne was upset, inevitably, and it was hardly surprising that she should make one or two trivial mistakes over the next few days.

She
had no qualms at first when one of the younger male theatre nurses took over working with her
bete
noire
– it was appropriate, really, since men never made such good nurses as women, though she pitied the victims of their operations but now, to her hurt disbelief, her own surgeons were asking for him as well. Somehow, word had spread that Suzanne was difficult, not as much on the ball as she used to be.

She
hadn’t meant to say anything to Patrick about it, but she had been so upset that she couldn’t help blurting it out.

To
her surprise, he had listened sympathetically to her tale of woe. At the end of her disjointed recital, he paused, then said carefully, ‘Do you want me to be absolutely, brutally honest with you, Suzanne?’

And
for a moment, she had almost said yes. Almost – but she had too much to lose. She had built the edifice of Suzanne Bolton laboriously on shaky foundations, with pain and persistence over the years. His honesty was like a huge builder’s ball on a chain, swinging back ready to crash its way through and bring everything tumbling down.

‘
No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I do want your analysis of what’s wrong with me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d get a real kick out of cutting me down to size.’

Patrick
looked at her and sighed, then shrugged.

‘
OK, have it your own way,’ he had said, and switched on the television.

So
she had tried to cope on her own with her loss of self-worth. And now it looked as if she had lost herself the support system of friendship on which she was so heavily reliant.

And
worst of all, here, alone, in the silence of her empty house she must confront the question she had crowded out with practical concerns until this moment.

Which
one of her so-called friends could it be who had crept into her kitchen in the hours of darkness and destroyed all her precise preparations? Which of the women who had been granted this familiar access for so long had been harbouring such malice? And, still more alarmingly, if thwarted by a locked door, what might she do next?

***

There was a brief snatch of winter sunshine after lunch, and Laura allowed James to persuade her to come out for a walk. They drove up to the reservoir at the farthest end of the common, strode round it then began the climb to the top of the low hill beyond. They had the place to themselves, apart from a family down below at the water’s edge throwing sticks for a retriever, whose joyous barks were the only sound to break the stillness.

Shading
her eyes to look down at the pleasant scene, Laura drew in great gulps of the cool damp air. She had not realized how badly she needed to get out of the house, which seemed stuffy and over-heated; she had felt unable to get a proper, satisfying deep breath for the last two days.

She
had put up a good show, though. James had been pleased with her and the girls relieved, as she talked and laughed and produced appropriate Christmas fare, for all the world like someone who wasn’t falling apart inside. She had made constant, surreptitious rounds of the house, in fear of what else she might find – or worse still, what one of the others might find that she would be forced to explain.

But
she hadn’t suspected this latest horror. When Suzanne phoned her this morning to ask for her key back she knew, knew at once, that insurance had nothing to do with it. Suzanne was famously bad at the mildest social deception, and she had not been convincing. She had been kind not to confront Laura – too embarrassed, probably – but now Laura was haunted by the knowledge that her sphere of operations was wider than she had supposed. It had taken all her control to conceal from James and the girls the panic and confusion that threatened to engulf her.

They
had set a brisk pace to the top of the hill and saved their breath for climbing, but now James came across to put his arm round her shoulders.

‘
Well done,’ he said with a friendly squeeze, and she knew he was not talking only about her effort in reaching the top. ‘It’s good to see that you’re feeling better.’

Unreasonable
rage that he had been so easily deceived rose in her, and she took a step forward out of his grasp.

‘
I’m not, actually,’ she said, her voice cool and controlled and seeming to herself to come from a long way away. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m feeling pretty dreadful.’

The
comical change in his expression from complacency to wary dismay might at another time have made her laugh.

‘
Er – aren’t you? Well, that’s, that’s a shame. I’m sorry. You seemed to be much brighter, I thought. Though I know, of course, that it’s because you were making a big effort,’ he added hastily.

She
wanted to scream at him, ‘Can’t you see I’m disintegrating before your eyes? Can’t you see
anything
?
’
But unless she told him her dreadful secret, what good would that do? He would look hunted, talk about stress and working too hard and seeing a doctor, all the while thinking loudly enough for her to hear that she was merely being foolish, hysterical and self-indulgent.

‘
Look – could we go away for a few days?’ she said instead, the inspiration suddenly presenting itself to her like a gift. ‘The Lake District, perhaps; fresh air and water and mountains…’

Her
beloved Wordsworth, after all, had believed in Nature’s healing powers; perhaps, far from the situation that had reduced her to this, she might find his ‘tranquil restoration.’ She clasped the idea to her like a talisman.

But
James only looked at her with alarm. ‘I’m back in the office tomorrow. You know that, Laura.’