Told in Silence

One Wednesday I see the time display on my computer click on to six o’clock, and I don’t move. It’s late September, and the last of the light is fading outside. Autumn has come early this year and I can see the leaves falling darkly from the trees that flank his window. In two days I will pack up my things for the last time and walk out of his life to begin my own, at university, in Manchester. For these last few days, I don’t want to leave his office until he does. He is bent over the desk, writing notes on a pad of paper, lost to everything else. His lips move slightly, unfathomably, as he writes. I lean back in my chair and surrender myself to the pleasure of watching unobserved. I don’t know how much time passes; only that the room gradually shrinks and glows until it seems that we’re caught in the only pocket of light in the whole universe and the darkness outside has graded through to pitch black. This should feel strange, but it doesn’t. It feels as if I have come home.

Suddenly, he raises his head and I feel the force of his gaze on me. ‘Violet,’ he says. ‘Why are you still here?’

I straighten up in my seat. ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

‘Nine o’clock.’ He speaks with faint surprise. ‘I don’t know where the time’s gone tonight.’ He pauses, and I know I am supposed to fill the silence, but I am mute and frozen to my seat. ‘Why are you still here?’ he asks again.

‘I thought,’ I begin, and clear my throat to ease the tightness, ‘I thought you might want me to stay, in case you needed anything.’

He stands up abruptly, snatching his briefcase and stuffing the pad of paper into it. ‘God, I am sorry,’ he says briskly. ‘I had no idea – you should have said something. I meant to leave hours ago myself. Let’s get these lights off and lock up. I expect everyone else has already left.’

Hearing him say it makes it real. We’re alone here. I watch him click his desk lamp off, and want to scream for him to stop. I stand too, but I don’t move away from my desk. At the door he glances over at me, looks away, then back again. His brow creases in confusion, or indecision. After a few moments he comes across the room to stand in front of me. Close up, I can see the faint golden hairs pushing through around his mouth and chin, and a flash of how they would feel against my fingers comes to me so clearly that I can’t help making a small sound, deep in the back of my throat. He puts his hands palms down on the desk, leaning in slightly towards me.

‘Is there something wrong?’ he asks.

I can smell the dark spicy scent of his aftershave, and his fingers are just inches from mine, and suddenly a wildness overtakes me and I think, why the hell not, why shouldn’t I get what I want this time? I don’t reach out and touch him. I don’t tell him that I think I love him. I know, instinctively and deep in my gut, that the most brazen thing of all is not to say a word or move a muscle, and that’s exactly what I do. The realisation seems to come to him slowly, drip by drip, easing its way through his body and changing the expression on his face so subtly that I can’t pinpoint the moment it switches. All I know is that first he’s looking at me with detached concern, the way that any employer might see his secretary, and next he’s just a man staring at a woman.

‘I didn’t…’ he says slowly. He doesn’t finish the sentence, because he’s realising that of course he did know, he’s always known. I stare steadily back at him, and then I back away, inch by inch until my back is flat against the wall. I feel the silky fabric of my stockings catch against the cold plaster. He moves towards me in slow motion, never taking his eyes off mine. When he is as close as he can be without touching me, he puts one hand, flat and deliberate, against the wall above my shoulder – centimetres from my face, a knife just grazing my ear. I’m trembling, waiting, feeling the heat rising off him. He slides the other hand down the opposite side of the wall until it is level with my waist, then curves it swiftly inwards, slipping against the small of my back. I feel his touch on me like an electric shock. He pulls me towards him, roughly against his body, and suddenly I’m closing my eyes and giving myself up to it, kissing hard and fast. When he pulls back for a second, his face is dazed and surprised.

Later, much later, he whispers, ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ and I say, ‘You won’t.’ At eighteen, I am filled with confidence and certainty, and I have no suspicion that I am wrong. When I’m lying in bed beside him, finally still and listening to him breathing, I pinch the back of my hand so hard that tears spring to my eyes. I don’t wake up. This is a dream from which I won’t surface for another two years, but when I do it will be with such violence – eyes streaming, limbs aching, throat straining for breath – that it will almost kill me.

The morning after Harvey’s return from Spain, I walked into town for my shift at the shop. Every Friday and Sunday for the past four months, I had done the same thing. Laura had been the one who had seen the job advertised in the shop window, had noted down its details on a scrap of notepaper and pushed it under my bedroom door without a word. I hadn’t thought it worth my while to argue. Even I could see that I couldn’t sit in the house for the rest of my life. It was a kind of rehabilitation, I supposed – an undemanding job designed to reintegrate me into society – and like all rehabilitations, it felt at once painfully repetitive and ridiculously daunting.

Finding my way to the shop was usually like sleepwalking, my feet blindly steering me on a course they knew by heart. That morning I made myself stop and look as I walked, forcing the blurred, remote shapes around me into reality. Trees, lampposts, buildings, people. It was a hot day, and I could feel the sweat trickling down the back of my neck and catching in my collar. Everything I saw seemed to have a kind of unexpected clarity to it, like bright flesh suddenly and shockingly revealed under a layer of skin ripped away. For months I had felt distant and separated from the world I walked through; a patient behind a smooth, impenetrable glass wall. That morning I felt that I could reach out and touch whatever I saw. I was acutely aware of the pavement underneath my feet, pressing up against the soles of my shoes. When I reached the shop and raised my head to look up at its purple painted sign, the letters flashed at me, winking crazily. I closed my eyes briefly, and I could still see them – Belle’s Boutique, written in luminous script across the darkness.

I pushed the door open, listening to the sharp tangle of sound that pealed from the bell above. Catherine was already there, her platinum head bent over a glossy magazine. As always, she was sipping from a huge mug of tea, cradled in her tiny hands with their vixen-painted fingernails. When she saw me she set it down and gave me a brief friendly nod of acknowledgement. Catherine was twenty-two and blessed with the prettiness of a pixie. She had been away from the village for the past three years at a London fashion college, and I suspected that she would soon be gone again. Today she was wearing a linen smock covered with green and crimson flowers and a pair of high-heeled, strappy emerald sandals. In my first few weeks she had tried her best to make friends, but I had been unable to rouse myself to reciprocate and as a result we had fallen into an uneasy truce, two strangers brought together by a common setting. That morning I tried to smile in a way that would tell her that something had changed, even if I wasn’t quite sure what, but her face gave no sign that she had understood.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said, glancing at the clock. The extra lingering on my way in had cost me ten minutes.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Catherine said, shrugging. We rarely got any customers before eleven. ‘Good day yesterday?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ I said, finding that it was at least partly true. Looking back on it now, the drive to the airport had lost its nightmarish quality. I felt expanded, like an animal let out of a cage into the open air.

‘You were picking up your dad, weren’t you?’ she asked.

I stared at her. She wasn’t looking at me, still thumbing through the magazine and drinking her tea. A sudden bolt of vertigo hit me. For just a second, the whole shop lifted itself and shook before settling back into place. I opened my mouth to speak and the words came out. ‘Actually, he’s not my father.’

Catherine looked up now, her face quizzical and alert. ‘Oh, right – sorry,’ she said. ‘I just assumed he was – I mean, well, because you live with him, and…’ And because you always call him Dad, her frown finished silently.

I sat down opposite her at the till. My heart was beating very fast, with excitement or fear. I wanted to giggle. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘He and Laura are actually my parents-in-law. I married their son, Jonathan, a couple of years ago.’ The truth slipped easily from my lips then, and I wondered why it had stayed locked up for so long. Catherine was staring across at me, red-painted lips parted in blank surprise. I could see her tussling with questions, selecting one almost at random.

‘How old are you?’ she asked bluntly.

‘I’m twenty-one next month,’ I said. ‘I married young.’

Catherine was alive with shock now; I could feel it buzzing, crackling off her. ‘That’s amazing!’ she shrieked, reaching out and grabbing my hand hotly in hers. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been working with you all this time, and I never even knew you were married! God, I don’t know anyone who’s even in a serious relationship, let alone…it’s so romantic.’ All of a sudden she looked down, as if her hand were telling her something. She examined mine, turned it over. ‘You don’t wear a ring?’ she asked. For a second her face dropped with disappointed suspicion.

‘I do,’ I said quickly, hating her doubting me. ‘I just wear it around my neck, see?’ I fumbled for the long, thin white gold chain beneath my shirt and drew it out. The platinum-and-diamond ring sparkled wickedly in the light, swaying back and forth like a dowser’s pendulum beneath my hand.

‘I see,’ said Catherine slowly, reaching out a finger to touch it. ‘Why do you do that?’

I drew in breath to speak, and found that this was harder. I fought past the sudden sickness in my throat: I had come this far. ‘Jonathan died last October,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to get rid of the ring, but it feels wrong to wear it on my wedding finger now. I don’t know why.’

She leant in towards me, her hands clasped tightly together now as if she were praying. Her face was flooded with sympathy. ‘Oh my God.’ She was looking at me as if I were someone entirely different from the girl she had thought she had known – a curiosity, a rare discovery to be treasured and explored.

‘You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about it.’ I corrected myself. ‘The first person who didn’t already know.’

Catherine bowed her head, as if sensible of the honour, simultaneously gratified and unworthy. When she shook her head in disbelief, her long beaded glass earrings leapt and jangled prettily against her neck, casting pale shadows against her skin. For a few moments, stupidly, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them. I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end and prickle against my sleeves; despite the heat of the day, I was cold, and shivering with what felt like delayed shock. Now that I had told her, the glee had drained out of me. I wanted the words back, wanted them swallowed back up into the black depths of my head.

I heard her voice, tentative but insistent, come to me from somewhere. ‘How did it happen?’

‘It was an accident,’ I said, and in the same instant heard the bell go. A group of young girls poured into the shop, chatting and screaming with laughter. Catherine looked swiftly across at them, then back at me, frozen into silence. Excuse me, excuse me, one of the girls was bleating, holding up a skirt, do you have this in a size ten? She means a twelve, another cut in. Whoops of laughter. You cheeky cow. Oh, come on – you’re never a ten. Their words rolled around the walls like marbles. I watched Catherine rise reluctantly from her seat and move towards them. I could still feel my pulse beating hard and fast, thumping in my eardrums. I slipped the chain back inside my shirt. For the rest of the shift, I could feel the cool, perfect circle of the ring against my skin, always there, reminding me, branding me.

We stay away from the office for the next two days, holed up together in Jonathan’s penthouse flat, leaving only to buy food, which we eat mostly in bed. On Friday morning he sleeps in until twelve, and I spend over an hour just lying there looking at him. His lips are slightly parted, showing a flash of white pointed teeth that gives me a sick, shifting pang of lust deep inside my stomach. His eyes move mysteriously under closed lids, rolling and flickering. I want to peel them back and step into his dreams.

When he wakes he reaches for me reflexively. ‘Good morning,’ he murmurs.

‘Good morning,’ I repeat. He must catch something different in my voice, because he sits up sharply.

‘What’s up?’ he says. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want me to get you something to eat?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s just…I’ll have to go soon.’

Jonathan shakes his head, more in confusion than disagreement, as if he simply cannot believe what he is hearing. ‘Go where?’ he asks. ‘What for?’

I spread my hands helplessly. ‘I’m going to Manchester tomorrow,’ I say. ‘To start university. You know that.’

He frowns a little, lines creasing the smooth beauty of his forehead. ‘You can’t do that,’ he says. When I don’t reply, he repeats it, louder this time. ‘You can’t do that. You’ll have to cancel.’

Even though I can hardly bear the thought of leaving him, a laugh rises unwillingly in my throat. ‘You can’t just cancel university. I have to go.’

‘No,’ he says, grabbing my hand, pulling me against him. We are so close that I can’t even focus on him any more, but I can still feel his eyes boring through me. ‘You have to stay. Here with me. If you go to Manchester, it’s over.’

His words land like a punch and I gasp. This conversation is moving too fast, making me dizzy. If I’ve thought about it at all in the haze of the past two days, I have vaguely assumed that we will manage, no matter how far apart we are; visits at weekends, long stretches of time together in the holidays. I love him, and although he hasn’t yet said so, I know he loves me too. This is what love is about: enduring separation, believing that we can surmount all obstacles. I tell him as much, but he thumps his hand impatiently down on the bed, making me flinch.

‘No, Violet,’ he barks. His face is aflame with anger and outrage. ‘Love is about being together. I want you, and it’s now or it’s not at all – I won’t wait for you.’ It should sound hard and unfeeling, but somehow it doesn’t. It sounds like exactly what I’ve dreamt of hearing all my life. Someone who needs me, who’s desperate for me, so desperate that he can’t even bear me to be out of his sight.

‘I can’t,’ I say again, but the conviction has gone from my voice.

He leaps up and pulls on a robe; grabbing the phone from the bedside table, he strides back and brandishes it in front of me. ‘Of course you can,’ he says. ‘You can call them right now and tell them you’re not coming.’ Suddenly, he smiles wickedly, and the warmth of it soaks right through my skin to my bones. As I take the phone I’m laughing and shaking my head, because it’s all so ridiculous, because the truth of it is that I barely know him, because it would be crazy to throw the future I’ve planned for months away with one phone call, and because I know that this is it, suddenly there’s no other option – he’s the one and I’m going to do it.

The woman at the admissions office on the other end of the line is silent for a long while, and then asks to speak to my parents. My mouth opens and words fall out: I tell her she can’t, because they are both dead. I have not crafted my thoughts or moulded them into speech – they have just happened to me, used me as a vessel. As the woman flounders and gropes for a response, I press the button and cut her off. I’m laughing like a madwoman as I jump into Jonathan’s arms. He hugs me back, but I can feel the tension in his shoulders. Sure enough, after a few seconds he grips me by my arms and pushes me back slightly, frowning at me.

‘Was that true?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say, even though an inner voice is telling me to stick to my story. To do otherwise looks crazy, unreliable, but I can’t help myself. Anyone else I can lie to, I think, but not you, not you.

He tips his head back sharply for an instant, as if to throw his thoughts together into a heap. ‘Why did you say it, then?’ he asks. I can’t know, at this point, that denying his parents’ existence would seem to him the worst kind of sacrilege.

I shrug, looking at him steadily, straight on. This is who I am, and if he can’t accept it then he is not who I think he is. ‘I had to say something,’ I say. ‘I’m doing this for you.’

For a split second, uncertainty pulses across his face and I feel something curl coldly between us; a sudden distance, a moment of clarity. We’re facing each other, both our bodies tensed. His face spells out his thoughts as plainly as if he has shouted them into the silent room. He’s wondering what the hell he is doing, if he is right to have pushed me to make that call, if it’s too late to backtrack. He’s wondering whether I am worth his time. Just as he begins to speak, his mobile rings, shrilling and flashing insistently from the bedroom cabinet. His head snaps instantly towards it, and he strides across the room to pick it up. Facing away from me, he murmurs a hello. I watch his back straighten; he moves towards the balcony, pushing the glass doors open and pulling them to again behind him. I’m left alone in the bedroom. I stare down at my hands; they are clenched and shaking, blurring in front of me. I feel as if I have narrowly avoided a disaster. In the past two days I have discovered something so strong and so powerful that it comes as a shock to find that it could also be so fragile. I can’t let him take this away from me, from us. I will have to fight for him.

Dimly, I become aware of his voice outside on the balcony, seeping in through the tiny gap where the door has not quite closed. He’s saying that there is nothing to worry about, that he has everything under control and that he will be back in the office on Monday. He sounds deferential, stumbling over his words in a way I have never heard before. After a minute’s taut silence, he says, ‘Yes – yes, she is.’ Another silence, and then a short, relieved laugh.

‘OK,’ he says, and as he does so he pushes the door open again and steps back inside the room. ‘I will. Lunchtime tomorrow at the club? Got it. I’ll see you then.’ He disconnects the call and tosses the phone on to the bed, breathing deeply. He glances at me and I am surprised and relieved to see a flirtatious spark in his eyes. ‘That was my father,’ he says. ‘Wondering why I’ve been playing hooky from the office. He’s a clever old devil, I’ll give him that – he worked out that you must be with me, and he’s intrigued. He wants to meet you—us—for lunch tomorrow with him and my mother. Fancy it?’

I blink, unsure of what has just happened. The thought of lunch with Jonathan’s parents both exhilarates and terrifies me. I stare at him, running the tip of my tongue nervously along my bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ I say, because there seems to be nothing else to say, nothing else that will keep us on this course.

He comes to sit beside me on the bed and puts his arm around me, and with that one gesture my doubts dissolve and I want to weep with relief. ‘I’m sorry this is all so fast,’ he whispers into my neck. ‘But I don’t want to lose you. I know that already.’ He kisses my collarbone, a soft, long kiss that makes me close my eyes. ‘You’d better go home later,’ he says. ‘Explain things to those parents of yours. Maybe leave out the part about them being dead.’ A low snort of amusement against my neck lets me know that he’s teasing me, repainting what initially seemed bizarre and disturbing in a kinder, more indulgent light.

‘We’re not close,’ I say. I’m trying to justify myself to him, but he doesn’t seem interested in hearing me. He’s running his hands slowly over me from top to toe, as if he has just noticed that I am naked. He mutters something that I can’t catch, and soon enough I don’t want to talk any more. He attacks my body with a passion that half frightens me, so roughly at times that I can feel the pain stabbing at me through the haze of pleasure, and more than once I almost scream at him to stop, but he seems to read my thoughts and softens his touch at the crucial moment every time. Soon enough I will reflect that things are much the same out of bed as they are in it. Some people have a knack for bringing you to the brink again and again, pushing you right to the limit of your endurance until you think you cannot take any more, but never quite tipping you over the edge and out of love.

Laura was in the garden when I returned from the shop, tying lengths of pale green and lilac crêpe paper in bows around the back of each chair in turn. I stood and watched her from the kitchen window. When she had tied each bow, she stepped back, shaded her eyes against the sun and tipped her head a little to one side, as if expecting the chair to speak to her. Several times she came forward again and readjusted the crêpe paper, fluffing it primly and precisely into place until she was satisfied. There must have been fifty or sixty chairs in total, huddled in groups around spindly metal tables dotted across the sweep of lawn. A pile of bunting was stacked up by one of the tables – multicoloured flags strung together on a pale yellow cord, stirring slightly with the summer wind. As I leaned out of the window, peering closer, I could see tiny sparkling dots nestling in the grass, winking and glimmering like jewels. Rose petals perhaps, or some kind of confetti. As I stared at them, Laura looked up and saw me, gave me a little wave. I came out into the garden to join her.

‘How was the shop?’ she asked when I was close enough to pick up the soft, low register of her voice.

Briefly, I considered telling her the truth. I told Catherine about Jonathan today. She treated me differently all afternoon, and before I left she asked me whether I wanted to talk any more about it. I said no, but now I’m not so sure. I think I might, and soon. ‘This all looks great,’ I said instead, gesticulating to take in the whole lawn. ‘Better hope it doesn’t rain overnight.’

‘Oh, it won’t rain.’ A hint of Laura’s old imperiousness surfaced. ‘I wanted to get everything ready today, so that I could concentrate on the food tomorrow. We’ve got almost sixty coming, you know.’

There was pride in her words. I stared out across the lawn, shading my eyes against the evening sun, trying to imagine it filled with people intent on celebrating Harvey’s sixty-fourth birthday. It was an arbitrary number to be making such a fuss over, but I suspected that the birthday itself was little but a device to kick-start Harvey’s return to society. Last year, visitors had come and gone with a monotonous regularity that had rapidly thinned into nothingness when it became clear that none of us was inclined to put on a brave face and entertain company. I could tell that through his grief Harvey was still capable of being disappointed by the shoddy pretence of respect with which his erstwhile friends and colleagues had retreated – and contemptuous of it, too. All the same, the garden party had been his idea, perhaps to test the permanence of the situation. As the RSVPs had trickled back I had sensed a kind of cold satisfaction emanating from him, a growing confirmation that he had not been erased as swiftly as it had appeared. He had always known, as well as they did, that he was not the sort of person who was easily forgotten.