Told in Silence

Told in Silence

Rebecca Connell

For Joy

‘The cruellest lies are often told in silence’

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE Violet

July 2008

PART TWO Harvey

June—July 2008

PART THREE Violet

July 2008

Acknowledgements

Also by Rebecca Connell

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE Violet

July 2008

At the airport I felt the first stirrings of a change. I watched my shadow gleaming ahead in the bright reflective floor as I walked towards the café’s reddish cocoon. Curved walls rising and curling inwards to meet me; warm globular lights scattering sparkles across the tables. It struck me that I had never seen these things before. I had grown so accustomed over the past few months to reseeing the same surroundings that the realisation that there could still be first times, for anything, gave me a brief sting of surprise.

The plane was late landing. I felt impatient as I scanned the arrival boards from my café seat, and this sensation too was unfamiliar. I imagined Harvey, shifting slightly in his window seat, every so often glancing at the heavy gold watch that he always wore, but otherwise betraying no flicker of discontent. Lately I had mastered his level of restraint without even trying. Now, though, I could feel my fingers wilfully flexing with annoyance, my heart beating a sharp erratic tattoo against my ribs. Anxious not to be late, I had driven too fast up the motorway, numb with fright after so long away from the wheel. It had taken half an hour of patrolling the cool white airport shopping arcade for the panic to subside. I had left the café until last, deliberately stringing out the minutes as I watched the plane’s arrival tick back and back, balancing what little entertainment I could find against the delay.

I ordered a coffee and drank it in tiny sips, the acrid taste prickling on my tongue. It was another twenty minutes before the news that the plane had touched down blinked out at me from the screen. Although I knew it would be a while longer before Harvey emerged with his luggage, I gulped the last of the coffee down hastily. I would walk over to the arrivals gate and wait there. The decision, small though it was, flooded me with pride; I was too used these days to having my decisions made for me. I found myself smiling. I had dreaded this mission for weeks, but now that it was drawing to its conclusion, I wondered what I had been worrying about. I took a swift look around the café: an elderly couple huddled over a teapot, a bored beautiful young woman flicking through a magazine, a teenage boy plugged into headphones and oblivious to his parents. I’m one of you, I thought. And it was true – from the outside, no one would be able to tell the difference between us. I stood up.

As if by magic, a waitress materialised at my side. All false nails and false smile. ‘Are you off?’ she cooed.

I nodded uncertainly – what business was it of hers? I started to move away, but she followed, her tanned forehead creasing a little now with what looked like annoyance. I turned back, my eyebrows raised politely.

‘That’ll be one ninety-five, then, please,’ she said. Simple though they were, it took a strangely long time for my brain to filter and decipher the words. Reflexively, my hand went to my pocket, but I knew it was pointless. I had come out without a handbag, without any money, without a credit card, without anything at all except the car keys. Two hours earlier, it had been as much as I could manage to force myself through the door. I felt my cheeks flush and panic grind into gear; a sharp needling noise in the back of my head, a sudden ache in my stomach. Uselessly, I patted the pocket again. The waitress had taken a step back now, arms folded. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the elderly couple, watching, waiting. Their faces were suddenly full of suspicion.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. My voice sounded far off. The curved red walls of the café began to swoop and slide around me. ‘I…I don’t—’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ the waitress said. I had expected her to be angry, but her voice was soaked in pity. I glanced up sharply, and saw it reflected in her eyes, as clear as glass.

I spun on my heel and walked away, as quickly as my legs would carry me. I could feel those eyes boring into my back, making their judgement. For a second I wanted to turn back, to explain to her that although I might well pass for a wayward teenager in her eyes, I was a respectable married woman, that I had simply been going through a difficult time, and that sometimes the everyday practicalities of how to move through the world had a tendency to slip away from me. But she wouldn’t have understood – few people did – and of course I wasn’t married; not really, not any more. I pressed my fist, cold and hard as a diamond, against my chest, and breathed in. That much I could manage, but it didn’t shut out the little voice hissing at me in the back of my head. What sort of person goes into a café and orders a coffee, without remembering that they have to pay for it? An idiot. A madwoman. I gritted my teeth against the voice, but I knew by now that attempting to quell it was pointless.

Unconsciously, I had kept to my original plan; my feet had taken me to the arrivals gate. Dozens of passengers snapped into focus in front of me, flooding through the double doors. It was too early for the plane to be Harvey’s, but nevertheless I found myself scanning the faces intently. As the crowd cleared I saw a man hovering on the opposite side of the barriers: middle aged, balding, dressed in dilapidated tweed as if he had come from a shooting party in the country. He was holding a sign with the words ‘AU PAIR’ printed in large black letters across it. Underneath, in shakier lettering, ‘Natalia Verekova’ – much smaller, as if the woman would be more liable to recognise her job title than her own name. He was acting out a pantomime of exaggerated distress: craning his neck forward and waggling his head from side to side as he scanned the crowd, looking at his watch, brandishing the sign desperately aloft. This woman had obviously let him down. Natalia Verekova. It was a Russian name, I thought. Suddenly a memory flashed into my mind; a finger rubbing back and forth along my cheekbone, slowly and rhythmically, familiarising itself with the angular line. Your bones are Russian, he had said. I had no Russian blood, as far as I knew, but I had liked the idea that my face hinted at a more exotic lineage than the one I possessed – it had made me feel tightly packed with mystery.

All at once I imagined myself walking across the cool polished floor towards the man in tweed, holding my hand out to greet him and introducing myself as the woman he was looking for, apologising for the delay. I could see him nodding and smiling, looking at me and accepting me without suspicion. I would travel back with him to some country pile and meet his children, and there I would be…catapulted into another life. For a second, the random force of the thought and the strength of the longing that came with it made me dizzy.

With a jolt I realised that I was staring at the man in tweed, and that he had noticed his eyes on me, was coming forward fast through the crowd. Another morass of people was spilling out of the double doors and he had to raise his voice to be heard above the chattering throng as he reached me. ‘Natalia?’ he said, yellowing teeth showing in an eager, uneven smile. ‘Natalia?’

I shook my head and backed away, and in the same instant I saw Harvey, his smooth silver head swaying back and forth like a snake’s as he searched for me in the crowd. The man in tweed was reaching out an uncertain hand, frowning now. I broke away from him and half ran across the hall, ducking into the one place where neither he nor Harvey could follow me. In the ladies’ cloakroom I stood in front of the long row of mirrors, stretching vertiginously down the corridor into bright white space. I ran some cold water on to my hands, and they felt burning hot, shaking violently as if I had a fever. I had a crazy urge to laugh, and I forced the sound back unsteadily into my throat.

My reflection stared back at me; black hair in a soft cloud around the face, dark indigo eyes, a mouth that fell naturally into lines that looked sulky, even when they did not feel so. It seemed that this woman was someone other than myself – someone who could pass for a glamorous au pair in a plush country home. It was only a fantasy, of course, one that had passed as quickly as it had come, but the bright flare of excitement that it had given me remained. There in front of the gleaming mirrors, I felt something shift in the back of my mind and come into focus. For months I had felt so dull and tarnished that I had stopped trying to recall how I had been before. The memory came to me now unbidden, and it made me lift my chin and shake my hair back from my face.

Out on the concourse Harvey was standing stock still, his head raised to the clock. He was looking at it, motionless, watching the second hand glide round and round. Some thirty feet behind him, the man in tweed hovered, mercifully with his back to me, worriedly shifting from foot to foot. I hurried over to Harvey and touched his coat sleeve lightly. He swung round to face me, and I thought I caught a spark of irritation in his cool blue eyes.

‘Hello, Dad,’ I said quickly, and his face softened.

‘It’s good to see you, Violet,’ he said, holding out his hand for me to shake; always the same formality. ‘You managed the journey all right, then?’

‘It was fine, but we’d better get going,’ I said. ‘Laura will have lunch ready by one, and you know what the traffic can be like.’

He nodded slowly, but I could see I had displeased him; it was the ‘Laura’, of course. I pretended not to see, picking up one of his bags and hauling it over my shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the man in tweed approaching, and started to walk fast, down towards the car park, my footsteps pounding in my head, trusting that Harvey was following. My heart was hammering stupidly.

He caught up with me by the car, watching as my fingers fumbled shakily with the keys. ‘Who was that man?’ he asked. ‘The one who was talking to you when I arrived.’

So he had seen me after all. ‘No one,’ I said. ‘At first he thought he knew me, but he didn’t.’

Harvey looked suspicious, wearily so, as if it were almost too much effort to see through such an obvious lie. ‘You must be careful, Violet,’ he said. ‘You could get yourself into trouble.’

Grindingly, I reversed the car. He was way off the mark with the kind of trouble he was referring to, but I had learnt by now that Harvey could see a sordid sexual motive in almost any contact I had with any man, no matter how old, unattractive or obnoxious. In some ways, he had taken over the role of jealous husband – not that it needed taking over, as Jonathan had never been that way inclined. I had been the jealous one. All the same, I nodded as I swung the car out on to the motorway. All the way back, I felt his eyes on me. After two weeks without him, I had forgotten the relentlessness with which he could watch me, even in such a confined space – without embarrassment, without deviation. At first, it felt strange. Soon enough, as I drove, I felt the inevitable familiarity of it seeping coldly through me, numbing me from head to toe.

Pulling into the driveway, I caught a glimpse of Laura through the cream curtains, her outline flickering there for an instant before they snapped shut. I knew she would have been waiting there for some time, as if by keeping vigil she could somehow ward off disaster: a violent ball of flames blowing the plane to smithereens, a snarled, ugly pile-up on the motorway. It was understandable, I supposed, but that morning it felt like another new irritant. Laura had no business to take such a responsibility on herself, or to presume that she had any divine power to influence anyone else’s fate.

As she cautiously pushed the front door ajar and came forward to meet us, barefoot, the thought seemed even more ridiculous. There was something insubstantial about Laura – a kind of transparency that made it too easy to look past her, through her. Hair the shade of straw, the negative of my own. Pale colourless eyes and papery skin that looked as if you could effortlessly scratch it off with your fingernails. She was a slight woman, barely five foot two, and when she craned her neck up to look at Harvey, I saw the pale blue tendons strain and push against their thin covering.

‘Welcome back, darling,’ she said. Her tone was calm, but her eyes were wet with anxiety. Harvey touched his hand briefly to the small of her back and kissed her hairline. It was a smooth ritual that I had seen a thousand times. ‘How was your flight?’

‘Dull,’ he said. ‘There was a woman next to me who insisted on telling me her life history, even though I patently had no interest in anything she had to say.’

Laura shook her head, as if barely able to believe the temerity of the woman, before she turned to me. ‘And you, Violet?’ she asked tentatively. ‘You managed the drive all right? Everything was fine?’

‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. I saw Harvey shoot me a glance of satisfied relief. ‘Everything was fine.’ I could have told her about my panic on the way to the airport: the spasms that had racked my cold hands as they gripped the wheel, seemingly independent of me; the way my head had reeled at the sudden sharp smell of diesel on the motorway as I wound down the window to get some air; the sense of desolation I had felt as I got out of the car and realised I had no idea how to walk to the correct terminal. She would have been sympathetic – too much so. It was easier to keep quiet.

‘You left your handbag,’ she said, her hands fluttering nervously in the direction of the coat-stand. ‘I was worried that you wouldn’t have any money to pay for the parking.’

‘Dad dealt with that,’ I said quickly. When I had driven to the barriers, the overdue realisation that I would have to pay for the privilege of parking my car had felt like a complete surprise – and yet it was something I had done many times before, a ritual that most people would perform as smoothly as breathing. Well, it didn’t matter, I told myself as I busied myself with untying my boots. Anyone could make a mistake. Despite my thoughts, my fingers were stiff and clumsy with the laces and, for just a second, before everything snapped back into focus, I felt as if I were being confronted with some incomprehensible, soaringly complex mathematical puzzle that I would never be able to solve, that made no sense at all.

I followed Laura into the kitchen, which was thick with the smell of roasting meat. As she lifted the lid off the largest saucepan, clouds of potato-scented steam billowed forth, clinging to our hair and clothes. Laura was a good plain cook, but she was an obsessive checker, barely able to go a minute or two without testing the status of everything she was cooking, with the result that she slowed down the progress of every meal she made. It was already almost half past one and nothing seemed to be ready, despite her pleas before I left to be back on the hour. I watched her turn to the pan of broccoli. Anxiously she fumbled with the oven gloves, tipping the lid to the side, releasing the heat, and my hand itched to reach out and slam the burning lid back on, no matter how much it hurt. But of course I didn’t. I did nothing at all. My limbs felt heavy and hopeless.

‘Did Dad say anything about the trip?’ she asked presently, addressing the vegetables rather than me. The concentration with which she avoided looking at me betrayed the casualness of her tone.

‘No,’ I said truthfully. Since he had retired from the law firm to which he had given over forty years of ruthlessly efficient service, Harvey occasionally took a fortnight alone away from home, usually to somewhere hot and mildly exotic: Spain, Greece, Bulgaria. The trips were usually taken without much in the way of prior warning, or indeed of explanation. On a practical level, it was almost impossible to imagine what Harvey actually did on these jaunts away. The idea of him sunbathing on the beach was ludicrous; even in my mind’s eye, I could not strip him of his suit and tie, and the image of him sitting primly on a sunlounger, fully dressed, briefcase in hand, was one that alternately amused and confused me. Of course, it was none of my business. It was difficult to begrudge him a bit of solitude, particularly as it was bought with the money he had earned, even if in his absence the house did feel even emptier and bleaker than usual. All the same, I knew that Laura wondered and worried. She didn’t like him out of her sight, or more precisely, I suspected, she didn’t like herself to be out of his.

‘He seems rested, anyway,’ she said, nodding with an air of finality. I knew that she would never ask Harvey directly about his trip; incredibly, my one-word answer seemed to have got the curiosity out of her system. All the same, I thought I saw a fleeting sadness cross her face as she turned back to the stove.

‘He does,’ I agreed, although in reality I wasn’t sure. If an alcoholic stopped drinking, he was just an alcoholic without a drink, and if you allowed some of the tension to relax from a coiled spring held between your hands, then what you were left holding was still, after all, just a coiled spring.

‘I think this is ready,’ Laura announced cautiously now. Her hands fluttered around the pots and pans as if she were trying to calm an angry mob. ‘Will you help me dish up, or would you rather go and sit with Dad?’

It didn’t matter. Surely even she could see that. I knew what she was trying to do: give me decisions, give me back some responsibility. It was a pity that she thought I was capable of so little. But look what happened when she trusted you to drive to the airport, the voice at the back of my head hissed. You panicked, you forgot your money, you could barely even lift your hands off the wheel. This is about your level. I bit my lip. I helped Laura dish up, and she was disproportionately grateful.

Harvey was sitting at the head of the dining table, his back ramrod straight, the newspaper he had brought from the plane held up before him. He was frowning and intently scanning its pages, seemingly totally absorbed. It was only in the second in which he folded it and smoothly returned it to the floor that I saw that it was in Spanish, a language he didn’t even speak.

‘This looks excellent,’ he said to Laura, bestowing one of his tight smiles on her. His eyes travelled over the dishes of pulpy vegetables, hard little bullets of potato, anaemic meat carved and carefully arranged on a platter. It was impossible to tell whether or not the compliment was sincere. With a flash of clarity, I suddenly saw the meal as it would appear to someone outside our enclave; joyless and functional, a means to an end. Harvey had once been something of a gourmet, if not a gourmand. That was lost now, like so much else, and bizarrely, the thought made my chest constrict for a second. I sat down, keeping my eyes on my plate.

Laura sat down last, clearing her throat. Her hands drifted together, clasping loosely as she bowed her head. ‘Lord,’ she said quietly, ‘for the food we are about to receive, may You make us truly thankful. Bless the land from whence it came and all those who receive it.’ She paused, took a breath. Staring at my plate, I felt all the muscles in my neck tighten. Don’t say it, I thought. The vague, blurred discomfort I always felt at these moments had inexplicably sharpened today into a fury that I found I could barely contain. The pale blue swirls around the rim of my plate started to go bright and fuzzy before my eyes. For a moment I thought that Laura would break the habit of the past nine months, raise her head and go on with her meal. But of course she didn’t. ‘And, Lord, please bless Jonathan,’ she quavered, her voice bending with that predictable crack. ‘Commend him to Thy spirit and let him watch over us.’

She wiped each eye in turn with the tip of her finger, laid her hands flat down on the tabletop for a moment, and then rose to serve the vegetables. As I had waited for the inevitable words, I had genuinely thought that when I heard them, I would jump from my seat, slash my arm viciously across the table and send the dishes smashing to the floor. Instead I nodded when Laura asked whether I wanted broccoli, sat quietly and chewed my way numbly through the meal. Inside, I turned this new rage over and over in my mind, examining it, exploring it. At its core was something very simple. I didn’t want Jonathan’s name trotted out over the dinner table as if it were public property. He had been mine as much as theirs. Maybe more. I wanted some choice in when he was spoken of. I wanted some ownership, some right to him.

Our past is so real to me that I can’t see it as something dead and gone; it’s always there waiting. I can picture myself there in the office with him as clear as day. Whenever he comes near me I feel my skin prickling all over. Air rushes into my lungs and makes me gasp, my heart thudding against my ribs like a crazed demon trying to rip its way out through my skin. Surreal bright spots pop, tiny fireworks at the corners of my vision. I know that this is lust, but it feels more like danger, and it frightens me. I’m barely eighteen, and this is too big for me. I can’t rein it in.

My desk is barely fifteen feet from his. I file papers, forward emails, take messages, all the things a secretary is supposed to do, but my real job is watching him, nine hours a day. Most of the time it seems he barely notices that I’m there at all. Even when he speaks to me his eyes are elsewhere. I watch him flicking through files, frowning down in concentration at the bright white sheaths of paper. When the sun shines through the window behind his desk, the light that bounces off these papers sparkles across his face and I ache at the way it illuminates his bones. His dark golden hair is always perfectly smooth; he wears dark expensive suits that look as if they were lovingly fitted to every line of his body; his lips are full and almost feminine. He’s so nearly a dull, passionless prettyboy, and yet there is something in the set of his shoulders and the hard slash of his jaw that tells me otherwise. He looks…I think, the unfamiliar words coming readily to my mind as I stare at him across the room, he looks as if he can handle himself.

I know now that this is what people mean when they talk about fate. When I decided to take a summer job before starting university, I barely considered my choice of workplace. It was nothing but a means to an end, a way of earning money. I circled a temp agency’s ad at random. I didn’t even care whether or not I got the job, but now that I’m here, I know that it is where I was always meant to be. Every morning I make him a cup of coffee, black with two sugars, and I press my lips against the side of the burning cup for just an instant before I take it in to him. When I’m back at my desk watching him curl his fingers around the place where my lips have been, it’s all I can do not to cry out. This frustration keeps me awake at nights – hot and restless and impatient, wanting him, needing him. When I do sleep I sometimes dream of him, but in these dreams he’s just as elusive as he is in life, always a crucial few inches away from me. His name is Jonathan Blackwood. He is thirty years old and an associate lawyer at the firm; his father, Harvey, is a partner. He wears no wedding ring. This is the sum total of what I know about him. No—I know one more thing. I know that he was made to love me.