The First Cut (14 page)

‘I guess you’re right,’ she said. But it didn’t feel right.

N
icky went off for a walk. She needed to calm down; she needed to keep things pleasant. One more evening, that’s all it would be. Maybe this was for the best. She’d leave feeling desperate to go. The fields were turning brown in the heat, crisping slowly, transforming into France. The pleasant weather was giving way to a heatwave and the plants had had too much of a good thing. She wondered if this was an allegory for her . . . flirtation. She could hardly call it an affair.

She suddenly wished she had never gone to Spain, never sat next to Adam on that flight . . . She was annoyed at herself because there was no one else she could blame. This was all her own doing; she had brought this situation entirely upon herself. She came upon a series of outbuildings to the side of the house and saw broken equipment and an old bicycle leaning against the wall of the barn. The air was heavy with abandonment and decay. She walked under the large willow that his mother had painted in the picture that hung in the billiard room, and paced around under its leaf curtain. She could simply walk away – leave the stupid car, walk across the grounds and out to the road. But Nicky felt she was someone who saw things through, who stayed the course. She reluctantly went back to the house.

He was standing in the drawing room staring out at the lawn.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ she suggested.

His eyes screwed into slits and he shrugged. ‘You asked for it, Nicky.’ They headed to the wine cellar.

She picked up a bottle and dusted off the label. She was not a connoisseur and had no idea what she had chosen. She was examining the label as she walked up the three steps to the entrance, when she heard a cracking, and with a lurch she plummeted forwards and down. She saw Adam jump with the noise and turn, but then her attention was taken up by the broken bottle under her hand, smashed against the stone floor as she’d tipped forwards under the broken stair tread. She gasped as blood ran down her palm, mixing with the red wine. Then she screamed as the pain in her leg reached her brain.

Adam pulled her out by her armpits. She groaned and swore as he pulled her leg from the broken board. She leaned against a cupboard, frantic for breath, looking back at the rotten stair. Her palm was gashed, but she tried to remain calm as it didn’t look deep. Adam swore and ran off. She heard him clattering around in the kitchen. He came back with a tea towel which he wrapped round her hand. She tried to put her foot on the floor, and pain shot up her leg.

‘Fuck fuck fuck!’

‘Calm down.’ He bent down and looked closely at her leg, at the bright red scrapes running up her shin.

‘They’re smarting like hell.’

‘They look awful. Can you put weight on it?’

She tried and gave a yelp. ‘No.’

‘I’ll carry you.’ He lifted her up and put her on the sofa in the drawing room. ‘Keep it high.’

He picked up cushions and put them under her foot. He left her and she untied the tea towel, squeezing blood from the wound in her hand. The flow was slower now so it didn’t need stitches. She shivered violently in the heat and realized she’d had a proper shock to her heart. As she looked at her ankle she fancied she saw it expanding and she experienced a feeling of utter hopelessness. Tears sprang to her eyes. She couldn’t blame anyone for what had happened. She’d walked down the stairs fine; he’d walked up them fine. It was not Adam’s fault.
You asked for it, Nicky
 . . . She shook her head. No, he hadn’t meant it like that, had he? She heard the kitchen door banging and wiped her tears away. She didn’t want him to see her like this. She wanted him to see her strong.

He set down a bowl of warm water and some cotton wool in a plastic packet and sat down at the end of the sofa. He handed her a packet of paracetamol. ‘Take three.’

She took four.

He began to bathe the scrapes on her leg in a strictly professional manner. ‘First aid was part of the circus-skills training.’ She winced. ‘Sorry, sorry.’

He handed her a bottle of wine. ‘It’s for your leg – hold it against it. I don’t have any ice.’ The bottle was cool at best but it was better than nothing. ‘Can you wiggle your toes?’

She nodded, watching him as he untied her sandal. ‘Well, it’s not broken. It’s a sprain. You need to rest it.’

‘I need a drink.’

He laughed nervously. ‘Yes, of course.’ He came back with a bottle of red wine and two glasses. She reached the bottom double quick, sour self-hatred swirling round her brain.

He bandaged her hand and fixed it with a safety pin.

Nicky looked at the wounds on her shin and the scabbed-over remains of her fall into the Thames. She now had a gash in her palm and a ruined ankle to accompany them.

‘You’re lucky you didn’t break your leg. You wouldn’t be able to drive, then.’

But I should have already been away, Nicky thought silently. She tried to keep things light, though inside she was fuming at . . . she knew not what. ‘Well, I can see the view from here at least.’

Adam sat staring out of the windows. ‘Do you mind if I go and do something, Nicky?’

She shrugged. ‘What?’

‘I’m looking for something.’

‘What?’

He patted her leg and headed off. She crossed her arms and sat in a funk. Typical. Now she didn’t even have any company. She pressed the bandage harder on her palm and then began counting the pictures on the walls. Twenty-two on the back wall alone. She tried to think how many she and Greg had in their entire house. She thought about Adam at boarding school; he’d only just left, really. His phone never rang. He didn’t want to look up Facebook or email anybody. He seemed strangely alone for someone of his class, looks and health. Unconnected. She looked round the living room, seeing it with a fresh pair of eyes. She thought hard, back to the times they’d spent together. He’d never mentioned friends, of any kind. There was mad Bea, Davide in Spain, and his family, and that was it. He didn’t have a job. And now she was semi-trapped in a house far from human contact. Yet he knew where she worked, had quizzed her carefully about Greg, her family, had poked around inside her tragic history with Grace. There was no balance. She’d haemorrhaged information to him. Something wasn’t right. The problem was that Nicky didn’t know what, because she realized she didn’t know anything about
him
. She was pretty much trapped in the house of someone who was as much of a stranger to her as the person she sat next to on the tube. She’d made the most basic error: she had been taken in by a pretty face, a tidy body and a big house. You’re a journalist, Nicky; find out. For your own safety, said a deeper voice.

She picked up Adam’s phone to call Maria.

A revving noise distracted her. She was about to get off the sofa and hobble to the door when she looked through the French windows and saw a tractor chugging across the lawn, Adam driving. He drove to the furthest corner of the garden, by the lake, and as he passed the windows she saw something attached to the back, something metal that glinted viciously in the late evening sun. When he got to the corner where the rough grass began to rise up the slope, he took a while to reverse and turn and manoeuvre into position He jumped from the cab with the motor thrumming and unhitched a part of the metal contraption he was pulling behind him. It was a plough. She watched in amazement as Adam climbed back into the cab and drove along the lowest part of the slope skirting the lake, the plough turning the ancient lawn into a vicious brown streak in his wake. At one point he stopped and climbed back down, adjusting bits of metal and blades, before continuing to the end near the old jetty and turning in an awkward circle. He didn’t look at her; he didn’t look at the house once. He was a man possessed, destroying the thing he professed to love.

Nicky heard him reversing and revving up the slope as she hopped and hobbled out into the hallway. By the bolted front door she found what she was looking for: an umbrella stand crammed with walking sticks. She took two and could make quite good progress across carpets and floors. She came out through the French windows.

‘What are you doing?’ she hollered above the noise of the engine.

Adam didn’t respond so she shouted louder, waving her sticks. He ploughed another furrow, the dry earth throwing up clouds of grey dust that sat like mist in front of the lake. She started screaming at Adam, testing how loud she needed to get before she was heard, but he seemed in a world of his own as he cut up the garden.

He drove to the far end and stopped. The silence returned with a vengeance once the engine noise died.

‘What are you doing?’ He looked up at her, got out of the cab and walked back up the garden towards her. His face was set, stony.

‘I’m looking for something.’

‘What are you looking for?’

‘I don’t know.’ He paused and stared at her. ‘Yet.’

She felt Adam’s phone in the pocket of her dress, resting against her thigh. Its weight gave her the means to beat back her fear. There was something deeply wrong about this wanton act of destruction.

‘It’s not very rational, Adam, what you’re doing.’

He continued to stare at her, and as an unfamiliar door swung open in her mind she glimpsed something horrible lurking behind it. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It depends on what I find.’

‘Or whether you find anything.’

He looked out at the ruin of the garden and bit his lip. ‘I wanted us to do it together but time’s running out.’

‘Excuse me? Help you do what, Adam? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s under the lawn. My mum said it was under here.’

‘Your mum? How can your mum have told you anything?’

‘When you were asleep I read her diaries.’

‘And your mum said that there was something buried under the lawn.’ Adam nodded. ‘So what is it?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ He laughed a little. ‘The answer – to life, the universe and everything . . . to your life.’

‘What? My life? Adam, what are you talking about?’ But he walked away across the lawn and started examining the furrows he’d ploughed.

Nicky struggled across the lawn after him. ‘Adam, you are digging up a beautiful lawn that has taken hundreds of years to cultivate, that you toddled across as a baby, that generations of your family have nurtured and enjoyed, because of something you read in those diaries upstairs?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it’s something valuable?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

The little beat of alarm, the insistent tap, tap in her mind grew louder. ‘What else did you say just then . . . why is time running out? Adam!’ He looked back at her, almost surprised to see her there. ‘What’s your dad going to say when he comes back and finds this?’ She pointed a stick at the dirt.

‘He doesn’t come here. No one comes.’ And with that he walked along the furrow he’d just ploughed, methodically searching, occasionally kicking at small stones and picking up clumps of dried earth to crumble in his hands. Nicky stood with her foot throbbing, watching him, waiting to see how far he would go. There was no hesitation in him, no moral battle over what he was doing. She hadn’t anticipated this; she could not have predicted he would act like this.

No one comes, he had said. But Mrs Perkins comes, doesn’t she? The garage will come. They will, they will. She wasn’t sure she believed herself. The sun dropped behind a large tree on the other side of the lake. Night was closing in.

T
hey ate an omelette and the remains of the bread for dinner and drank a bottle of wine. They didn’t talk much and the mood had changed; gone was the flirty banter, the suggestion of sexual possibilities. Even though he was physically closer to her than ever, swabbing her skin, changing the bandage on her hand, even carrying her through to the kitchen, he seemed more distant, more serious and preoccupied. Nicky felt she was drawing into herself, concentrating on her physical shortcomings and how to overcome them.

She told him she wanted to go to bed early and he helped her as she struggled to the bathroom on the first floor. He was waiting in the corridor for her as she came out, and she felt like he was her carer in an old people’s home. He led her to a spare room next to Connie’s bedroom and placed her sticks carefully against the wall. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He disappeared and came back a moment later with a white nightie. ‘This was my mum’s, but you can wear it.’

Nicky felt the last dregs of physical attraction drain away as she took Adam’s dead mother’s nightclothes from his hand. The differences between them – their age, their class, their experiences, their passions – yawned like a chasm. Nicky felt the red shame of embarrassment spread across her cheeks, quickly followed by the thought of how she would regale Maria with this story of a passionate two days loaded with flirtatious possibilities gone horribly, farcically wrong.

‘I’ll sleep next door,’ he said, his hand on the doorknob ready to close it. ‘If you need anything, just call out.’

‘I need a light.’

He paused. ‘Yes, of course.’ He came back with three candles and some matches and then rather formally said goodnight.

She heard him closing up the house for the night.

She woke hours later in the unfamiliar bed, with a start. It was very dark and her ankle was sore, her hand throbbing. She sat up and heard the bed creak beneath her. She was thirsty from too much wine and drank greedily from the cup of water on the table by the bed. She reached out and groped about for Adam’s phone. It glowed green in the darkness with the battery bar still showing signs of life, the reception bars rising like a stair. One thirty a.m. She’d forgotten how dark the countryside was – she couldn’t see anything beyond the low green circle of light. She wanted to phone Greg. She held the phone to her ear and imagined dialling his number. She wanted to hear his voice, to be taken out of herself by his upbeat outlook, to groan at one of his bad jokes. She shut her eyes. She knew she wasn’t going to call him, for she was in a strange bed in another man’s house and his Beamer, his pride and joy, was lying punctured in the drive. No, this was certainly not the time. Her foot hurt so she took another paracetamol. She’d have to take a taxi to work for the rest of the week. It would cost her a fortune. Her mind turned to practical issues looming in her immediate life. Once she’d got out of here.