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‘You could take up photography,’ Anneliese had told him. Edward was very artistic, although there wasn’t much call for artistry in the insurance business.
‘I’m only an amateur, love,’ Edward said back, although she knew he was pleased. He hadn’t been raised to compliments. Edward’s mother thought praise was a word you only used in church, praising the Lord. Anneliese had always tried to make up for the lack of praise in Edward’s youth.
‘It’s pretty good for an amateur.’
‘You’re blind, do you know that?’ Edward said, smiling. ‘You only see my good points.’
‘Selective blindness,’ Anneliese smiled back at him. ‘I see the bits I like and I like most of it.’
Walking along the beach now, Anneliese knew she’d have to take the picture off the wall when she got home. It would hurt too much to see it.
The wind bit into her face, stinging her eyes. Anneliese stared down at the sand, determined to find something to shift her mind off the sharp pain in her heart. A few yards ahead of her lay a piece of driftwood, tangled up in a skein of chemical blue net from the fishing boats.
Bending slowly, she picked it up. It was a foot long, twisted like a coil of rope. Some of the driftwood was beautiful, sculpted by the sea, still a thing of beauty despite the battering.
And then there were pieces of driftwood that were just that: wood flung on the beach after thrashing around in the surf, desolate and hollowed out, ugly and unwanted. Like this one. Like me, Anneliese knew.
She wasn’t a plant at all – she was driftwood. Ugly to most people, beautiful only to the very few.
Summoning all the pent-up energy in her body, she hurled the driftwood back into the ocean and screamed at it.
‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’
There was nobody to hear her scream. Her voice was caught on the wind and whipped away into the air where the seagulls paid no attention.
Edward hadn’t seemed to pay attention that morning when she’d got up at eight and said she was going to Sunday Mass at nine, then might call in on Lily. He’d murmured something that sounded like assent, and rolled over in the bed, bunching the snow white of the duvet around his lanky frame. Anneliese didn’t mind. She was a lark and he was an owl. Opposites and all that.
Ten minutes later, she was showered, dressed and sipping a cup of green tea before she hurried out the door. She’d grown to like green tea, for all that she’d loathed it for ages after the acupuncturist had said it was good for you. Why was it that things that were good for you took a long time to get used to and things that were bad were instantly addictive?
The early service in St Canice’s in the square in Tamarin was pure and perfect. The cold spring sun sent rays of light shining through the stained-glass windows, leaving dust motes hanging in the air, an effect that was for all the world like celestial rays blessing the faithful in biblical paintings. There was no music at the early service.
The choir sang at eleven Mass, with Mr Fitzpatrick strangling hymns on a rheumatic organ, with the congregation wincing and Father Sean smiling bravely, willing people not to laugh openly.
Dear Father Sean. He had a great sense of humour which he had to subdue because not everyone wanted a priest who cracked jokes. Anneliese felt sorry for him, having to toe some invisible line.
Eleven was the family Mass too, where toddlers knelt on pews and twinkled bored eyes at the people behind them. Adorable but distracting.
At nine on a Sunday morning, the church was only a quarter full and it suited Anneliese perfectly. She loved the peace of it all. Time to think but not so much time that her mind skittered off into dark areas. No, she didn’t like that. Luckily, it never happened at Mass. Something to do with the ritual of standing and kneeling, murmuring responses to prayers that were engrained in her soul because she’d been murmuring them for so many years.
Anneliese’s religion was a meditative, safe place for her to rest rather than an intense, doctrinaire version.
Then the migraine came helter skelter into her head without warning; not the full blast that required lying down, but certainly a blistering ache that made her eyes narrow with pain.
There was no point waiting: she had to go home and lie down. She could phone Lily and apologise later. Her aunt, well aunt-in-law strictly speaking, because she was actually Edward’s aunt, wouldn’t mind. Lily had many glorious qualities – she was funny, warm, had a marvellous sense of humour – but one of her absolute virtues was the fact that she never sulked or took offence at anything.
‘Take care of yourself, Anneliese, and drop round when you’re better,’ was all she’d say.
Anneliese knew so many people who cherished perceived injuries and looked for them in everything. It was comforting that Lily wasn’t such a person.
Anneliese drove home slowly, feeling the car judder with the wind, and hurried into the house, thinking only of the blessed relief of getting into her bed, only half registering that the car parked outside belonged to her friend, Nell. Edward would have to talk to her. Nell wouldn’t mind: she and Edward were great pals and Nell knew that when a migraine hit, Anneliese could only think of lying down.
And then she stepped into the kitchen to see Edward and Nell sitting together at the table, his dark head bent towards her fair one and their hands clasped.
There was no soft music or gentle lights, no state of undress. But the intimacy of their togetherness cut into Anneliese like a knife sliding into the underbelly of a chicken fillet.
‘Anneliese!’ gasped Nell, seeing her.
They moved apart sharply, quickly. In another universe, Anneliese might have joked about what the speedy movement might do to Edward’s sciatica or Nell’s dodgy neck. But she knew, with absolute certainty, that there was nothing innocent about their closeness. The migraine pummelled louder in her head, fighting with the sense of nausea that rose instantaneously.
‘We were just…’ began Nell awkwardly, and then stopped as if she had no idea what to say next.
Nell was never short of words. In contrast to Anneliese, who preferred silence often, Nell had a word for everyone and a comment for anything.
Like the rain: ‘It’d be a great little country if only we could get someone to put an umbrella over it.’
People loved that.
Or thoughts on money: ‘Spend it now: there are no pockets in a shroud.’
Now, Nell had nothing to say.
‘Anneliese, you don’t want to get the wrong idea,’ began Edward, his face a mask of anxiety as he moved towards Anneliese and tried to take her hands in his. His hair was wet from the shower. It was only twenty-five minutes since she’d left the house. He must have leapt out of bed as soon as she’d gone.
‘Explain the wrong idea to me, so I can understand the difference between it and the right one,’ Anneliese said, gently detaching her hands. Her head still felt cloudy but the powerful instinctive message in her brain told her not to let her husband touch her.
‘Lord, Anneliese, please don’t think we’d ever do anything to hurt you,’ began Nell.
She looked anxiously at Edward, pleading with him to sort it out.
You could tell what people thought by their eyes more easily than by anything else, Anneliese knew.
Over the years, she and Edward had exchanged many telling looks. And she and Nell had exchanged them too – they’d been friends for nearly twenty years, a lifetime.
Only she’d never been aware of these two important people in her life looking at each other in this way. Until now.
Anneliese felt as if she was watching the last reel of a movie where all the plot loopholes are tied up.
Nell and Edward were the ones sharing the telling looks now because they were the couple in this scene: not Anneliese and Edward, but Nell and Edward.
‘Please, Anneliese, sit down.’
Edward was still beside her, his expression anxious and his hands out in supplication.
‘I wish we didn’t have to do this but I suppose we have to. Now or never, right?’ he said, looking defeated but determined, determined to have this awful conversation.
And that was when Anneliese knew absolutely that Edward was leaving her for Nell.
Edward hated confrontation of any kind. He’d been useless on those occasions when Beth was in floods of tears, distraught over something or other.
His facing a conversation that could easily end in shouting told her all she needed to know.
‘You’re going, aren’t you? You’re going with Nell.’
Edward nodded mutely and held his hands out imploringly, as if to say, What else can I do?
Anneliese sat down then and placed her hands on the table. ‘I came home early because I’ve got a migraine,’ she said to no one in particular.
‘Shall I fetch your pills?’ Edward said.
She nodded.
He rushed from the room, eager to be gone.
‘Tea might help,’ Nell added and turned to open cupboards, finding cups and teabags easily. She’d spent so many hours here, sharing tea and life with Anneliese, that she knew where everything was as well as Edward and Anneliese did.
‘Tea wouldn’t help, actually,’ Anneliese said harshly. ‘Nothing is going to help.’
Defeated, Nell sat down at the far end of the table opposite Anneliese.
Her hair was different, Anneliese realised. Normally, Nell’s dark blonde curly hair was windswept even when there wasn’t wind. She rarely wore much in the way of make-up and for a woman of her age – Anneliese’s exact age, actually, fifty-six – she had remarkably clear, unlined skin with just a few freckles and the inevitable little creases that spun out from her laughing blue eyes. Today, her hair was brushed carefully into shape and she wore lipstick and mascara. She looked done, ready for some event.
And that event was running off with Anneliese’s husband.
‘Why, Nell, why?’
‘Oh Anneliese, don’t sit there and look so surprised,’ snapped Nell, who’d never snapped at Anneliese before in her life. ‘You must have known. Edward said you didn’t, but I knew you did. Women know. You’re turned a blind eye, that’s all. Which says a lot about your relationship, that you didn’t care enough –’
‘I didn’t know,’ interrupted Anneliese, shocked at this new version of Nell whom, mere moments ago, was saying she’d never meant to hurt Anneliese. ‘If I’d known, do you think I’d have gone on wanting to be your friend, going for lunch with you, asking you here for dinner?’ She stopped because she felt too numb to think up other examples of how she hadn’t known.
‘How long has it been going on?’ she whispered.
Anneliese knew she should summon up rage and fury, but all she felt at this moment was a terrible weakness in her legs, and the sense that she’d been totally wrong about the people in her life.
If either Edward or Nell had betrayed her individually, the other would have been there to remind her that they still loved her. But they’d both betrayed her. Together.
‘Don’t let on you didn’t know. You must have known,’ Nell hissed.
Again, Anneliese felt herself recoil at the bitterness in her friend’s voice.
‘Don’t lie to me, Anneliese. You might lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. If you two were crazily in love with each other, would Edward have come to me? Answer me that, then? No, he wouldn’t. He came to me because you didn’t need him, you cut him off. You had so much and you didn’t care, didn’t realise it. Well, I did and I’m not going to apologise to you for it.’
Anneliese felt the weight of Nell’s rage at her: at Anneliese for having the wonderful Edward all to herself and not realising what a treasure she had, a treasure that she’d stupidly lost.
She thought of all the Saturday nights she’d invited Nell over to the cottage for dinner, making it sound as if they were three friends sharing a meal instead of a happily married couple reaching out the hand of friendship to a widow who might be sitting on her own at home otherwise. Eric, Nell’s husband, had died ten years previously, and since then Anneliese had tried so hard to include Nell in their lives. Anneliese had meant it as pure friendship, but perhaps Nell had seen it as something else: as pity? Or as Anneliese showing off, as if to say, I have a husband and you don’t. Come and eat with us and feel jealous, why don’t you? What else had Nell misconstrued?
‘I thought you knew me well enough, Nell, to know that if I’d realised you and Edward were –’
Saying it was hard.
‘– having an affair, I’d have said something. I might have a lot of flaws, but I know that I’m honest. Remember how many talks we had about the value of friendship where honesty mattered? How we hated fake friends, people who said the right things at the right time and meant none of it?’
The anger that hadn’t been there suddenly blazed to life in Anneliese’s heart. They’d lied to her. They’d both said they valued truth, and now it transpired that truth had been missing for such a long time. Worse, Nell was trying to put the blame on to Anneliese.
‘I didn’t have a clue what was happening,’ she went on in a harsh voice. ‘It might make you feel better to think I did and that I was giving you tacit approval to steal my husband, but I didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry, Anneliese.’ Edward stood in the doorway, the small plastic container of Anneliese’s migraine medicine in his hand and a look of desolation on his face. ‘I knew you didn’t know. I wanted to think you did because it would be easier, but I knew you didn’t.’
‘How long has it been going on, this thing between you two?’ Anneliese asked, purposely not looking at Nell any more.
‘Not that long,’ said Edward.
‘Since the fundraiser for the lifeboat,’ Nell interrupted, obviously not keen on the damage limitation of breaking it all to Anneliese gently.
Well over a year, Anneliese thought to herself.
‘I presume you were waiting for a nice time to break it to me, then. My birthday? Christmas?’
‘It had to come out sometime,’ Nell said coolly. ‘Might as well be now.’
Both women looked at Edward, who shrugged helplessly.
Anneliese felt another surge of anger, white hot this time.
The words were in Anneliese’s mouth before she had time to think about them: ‘You should pack, Edward. Nell, I’d like you to wait outside, please. I don’t want you in my house any more. You could always go home and wait for Edward to come. He’ll need space for his things.’
Somehow, Anneliese got up and went into the living room, where she broke with the habit of a lifetime and poured herself a strong brandy from the stupid globe drinks trolley that Edward loved and she’d always hated. He could have that, for a start.
She heard muffled talking from the kitchen, then the sound of the kitchen door closing and the revving of Nell’s car. That was some relief.
She couldn’t bear Nell being in the cottage now. Her very presence was poisonous: the worst sort of poison, the sort you hadn’t known was dangerous.
After the first drink, Anneliese had a second. Ludicrous to be drinking now, but she needed something to numb her. She sat on the window ledge looking out at the bay and tried not to listen to the sounds of Edward’s packing.
When Beth had been a teenager, Anneliese became very good at listening. It was different from listening to a small child messing round in the kitchen: hearing the fridge opening, the milk bottle top being laboriously pulled off, the glug of milk and the intake of breath when some spilled. That was a sort of innocuous listening.
But mothers of teenagers had to listen in a different way; what CD was being played was an excellent gauge.
Oasis and Counting Crows were good signs. Anything slow and dreamy might mean Beth was in a relaxed mood. But Suzanne Vega was fatal. A signal that Beth was in turmoil.
She’d have to tell Beth about this, of course. Anneliese closed her eyes at the thought of that conversation.
The back door banged and she jumped at the noise. Edward had gone. She rushed to the side window to see him put one suitcase and a gym bag into his car. He could have taken very little, just his clothes, she decided. Did that mean he wanted to stay after all, or was he so desperate to be with Nell that he didn’t care about his belongings? Who knew?
Evening was casting its greying spell over the beach and despite the old padded jacket, Anneliese shivered. The beach was bleak when the promise of sun had gone: like a wild kingdom that showed a softer side during the day but, when evening arrived, it was time for humans to clear off so the place could revert to its feral, untamed state.
The tide was coming in, slowly, inexorably. Anneliese stood at the edge of the water and watched as the waves lapped in and swept out, surging further and further up the darkening sand every time. It was relentless. In and out, on and on. Like life, coming at her endlessly, when she wished it would stop.
She watched as if hypnotised, until the water seeped into her shoes and then she moved back, startled.
