Told in Silence

Told in Silence
Rebecca Connell

A novel from exciting young author Rebecca ConnellViolet seems like an ordinary young woman - single, working in a shop, and living with her parents in rural Kent - but things are not always as they first appear. At 22, Violet is already a widow, and the couple she lives with, Harvey and Laura Blackwood, are not her parents at all, but those of her late husband Jonathan, who died a year and a half earlier when he and Violet had been married for just six months. The three exist in an uncomfortable state of co-dependence. Violet, in the absence of a family of her own and still rocked by grief, needs the stability that they provide her, but this stability is becoming stifling. She provides them in turn with the daughter they never had, the closest available substitute for their dead son.For the past 18 months, Violet has existed in a glass bubble, able to see the world around her, but never to reach out and engage with it, but now cracks are appearing in the glass. The mystery surrounding Jonathan's death nags at her; she becomes increasingly sure that Harvey and Laura are hiding something from her; and the re-appearance of Max Croft, an old friend of Jonathan's, into their lives threatens to shake the foundations of everything she thought she knew. Violet is powerfully attracted to Max, but it isn't long before she realises that he has a dark side, and he wants her to help him achieve a sinister aim - to avenge Jonathan's death, whatever the cost.Told in Silence is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel of desire, deception, and the lengths that we will go to for love.

Told in Silence

Rebecca Connell

For Joy

‘The cruellest lies are often told in silence’

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u030d26cf-3ab7-5488-81dd-780193fd2fa2)

Title Page (#u5ef95464-ceae-5aa8-ba01-48a9935d0512)

Dedication (#ue7f07786-9f2c-5393-bad7-b61f3cd4be90)

Epigraph (#u0097143f-ef65-58a6-9f2b-9a9b18506c92)

PART ONE Violet (#uf33099a9-4bf9-5085-abc3-2e4a675d6e52)

July 2008 (#u2b698548-3078-57dc-b96e-b8a6ce060030)

PART TWO Harvey (#litres_trial_promo)

June—July 2008 (#litres_trial_promo)

PART THREE Violet (#litres_trial_promo)

July 2008 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Rebecca Connell (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PART ONE Violet (#ulink_c00c6837-537e-5d18-b2ff-95433d36d890)

July 2008 (#ulink_a349852f-562c-5a64-8374-90f8a4c32619)

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?’