Told in Silence

‘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.

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?’