To Tell You the Truth, page 3
“Not scared,” he repeats.
“That’s the spirit, Teddy,” you say.
5.
Dan and I made the journey back to our flat in Bristol the next morning. I had still heard nothing from Max by the time we left. I emailed to let him know my movements, but he didn’t reply. His silence gnawed at me and so did a spiteful little hangover.
The journey home felt like the start of a new chapter. Glittering sea views and trees bent double by gales disappeared in the rearview mirror as we gradually reentered civilization, and soon the motorway beckoned. Three lanes of traffic, roaring between cities. We went north. Dan put his foot down and turned the music up and I gazed out the window and looked forward to being home. I’d thought I might tell him about Eliza on the drive, but I wanted to know what his surprise was first.
My first clue was when Dan didn’t take our usual turn off the motorway. I glanced at him and he glanced back at me and raised his eyebrows. He was smiling but I found I couldn’t smile back because this road was familiar to me. We were driving toward my childhood, the street where I grew up. Charlotte Close.
I fixed my eyes on the road’s center markings and didn’t look up. I knew where every landmark on this road was and knew there was nothing I wanted to see here. As we approached the junction with Charlotte Close my chest tightened. Here was where reporters had camped out when I was a child, incessantly calling out my name, desperate to talk to me even after my dad pleaded with them to leave us alone.
When we were almost beside it, Dan said, “It’s okay. You’re fine. Don’t panic.”
“Yes,” I said. It was the only word I could manage.
“Breathe,” Eliza whispered. I listened to her and made myself match the soft rhythm of her inhalations and exhalations, and we breathed in synchrony until Dan had driven past the end of Charlotte Close and on past Stoke Woods, which began where the small gardens on one side of Charlotte Close ended.
Those woods were what I saw from my bedroom window as a child. The old oaks bled oxygen into the air I breathed and enchanted me.
I felt my tension release when we were past the boundary on the other side of the woods, but my relief was premature, because Dan switched on the indicator light and slowed the car before turning into a lane that ran alongside the far edge of the woods. A sign at the junction read “Private Lane.”
I had roamed the woods as a child but never explored this far on my own. I vaguely remembered my parents driving us down here once to rubberneck the big houses, but otherwise this place had been meaningless to us. Another country. Until the investigation into Teddy’s disappearance, when police had questioned the residents, but nothing had come of that, and we had forgotten it again.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Trust me,” Dan said. “Will you? Relax. Just be patient for a few more seconds.”
The houses were along one side of the lane only, the side adjacent to the woods. On the opposite side was a grass verge and an imposing row of copper beech trees that must have been planted not long after the houses were built. Behind them was more farmland.
I peered down the first driveway we passed and glimpsed an imposing Victorian mansion. The property appeared to have substantial gardens around it, but the overwhelming impression was that it was embedded in the woodland. It made me shudder.
The next driveway offered a view of two homes. One was as grand as the first place, if not more so. Sharing a driveway with it was a more modern, architect-designed property, probably no more than ten years old. The modern place looked to have been built on land sold off by the bigger house. Though the driveway was shared, the design and distance between the two houses must have ensured reasonable, but not total, privacy for both. These properties, too, were nestled into the woods.
“I don’t like it here,” I said. Claustrophobia had me in its grip. My hands were trembly and my palms clammy.
“It’s okay,” Dan said. “You’ll see.”
“Please turn around,” I said, but he kept driving as if I hadn’t spoken.
The lane curved and just beyond the curve, it ended abruptly. Posts with barbed wire strung between them signaled you could drive no farther. Beyond them there was more woodland. One more driveway opened to our left, flanked by ornate stone columns. One of them bore a name: Cossley House. Dan turned into the driveway. It was pitted and overgrown.
“Please,” I said. “I just want to go home.”
Dan stopped the car halfway down. “You have to trust me,” he said. His smile had gone, and he cradled my face between his hands. “Look at me,” he said. “Pull yourself together for me.”
I nodded and he let go. His insistence unsettled me. I felt no better.
We drove the last few yards in silence. At the end of the drive was the finest house of all, a true mansion, but it had been neglected. There was another car in the drive and as we pulled in, the door opened and a man stepped out. He was about our age, with prematurely thinning hair and cheeks that were fatly red with the afterglow of many good lunches. He was an estate agent, I realized, he had to be, though there had been no “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign at the end of the drive.
Eliza came to the same conclusion. “You’ve been ambushed,” she said. “Dan wants to buy this place.”
Dan got out of the car without saying anything and before I knew it, he was on the steps of the house shaking hands warmly with the agent. I followed, slowly.
“You must be Mrs. Harper,” the agent said, descending the steps toward me, hand outstretched. “Welcome! I’m Henry. It’s lovely to meet you.”
I suffered Henry’s bearlike handshake and knew I was going to have to endure this viewing because it would humiliate Dan if I refused to stay. I thought I would get through the tour as quickly as possible and get out of there because I would never, in a million years, agree to buy this house. Henry unlocked the large front door and held it open for us.
I didn’t even want to step through it, but Dan pushed me not-so-gently in the small of my back and I entered the hallway, onto a pale limestone floor, inset with smaller black diamonds. The space was dominated by the staircase, which was dusty, but as elegant as any I’d ever seen. Delicate spindles and dark wooden treads outlined a sinuous climb toward a light well set three stories above us. I stepped into the pool of murky sunlight it cast on the floor and looked up and around. It was obvious that while one or two rooms had been renovated, the rest of the place had not.
This place is way too big for us, I thought. And way too grand. It’s all wrong. We’ll rattle around in it. It’s almost a total wreck. A money pit. I hate it. And I can never live beside Stoke Woods or Charlotte Close. Never.
The sound of the door shutting startled me and I swung around. The agent had left us to it.
Dan put his arms around me. “It’s one of Bristol’s finest mansions,” he said, “and one of its most historic. Houses like this only come on the market once in a lifetime.”
“I can’t live here,” I said. “And you know why.”
“Give it a chance, for me. Please? Imagine how beautiful we could make it if we finish the renovations. I could project-manage, maybe even do some of the work if we get you a proper assistant. We could put our touch on it.”
“He really loves it,” Eliza said. She sounded horrified but also intrigued, and I knew it would damage us if I insisted on leaving now.
I was also having to face up to something: the hole in Dan’s life that had been left by his failed writing career had clearly not been filled by his becoming my assistant, or by his new, moneyed, pursuits. I’d suspected it, but hadn’t really thought about what it might mean for us because when I was writing I had no mental space for anything else. However, it felt very real now.
But if Dan wanted another project, it wasn’t going to be this house. He was going to have to think of something else.
“Look around at least,” Eliza said. “Let him think you’re giving it a chance.”
It was good advice. “Show me everything,” I said, and tried to look interested. Dan beamed. He took my hand and led me into a renovated kitchen where most of the external wall had been punched out and replaced by glass. It overlooked a side garden that was grassed and surrounded by dense hedges. Shiny gadgets had been built or tucked into every crevice of the cabinetry, and the island was the size of the kitchenette in our flat. It had no charm. There was nothing homey about it.
“We could make the whole house as amazing as this,” Dan said. He was practically purring.
“Well, it’s something,” I said.
“Come,” Dan said. He led me back across the hallway and turned a door handle. “Ready for the big reveal?”
I nodded and he pushed the door open with the flourish of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.
The room was vast, an absolute dream if you are the type to have pretensions to grandeur. It had an ornate ceiling and the walls were maybe twelve feet high, two of them punctuated by sash windows offering views of a long lawn at the back of the house that was bordered, simply, by the low wire fence that demarcated the edge of Stoke Woods.
I was transfixed by the sight. The oaks were gathered along the perimeter of the property like sentries who have stood still for so long that their flesh has warped and turned to bark. I felt as if my past had walked right up to the boundary and was waiting for me there. Waiting to remind me of Teddy. Waiting to punish me.
I couldn’t pretend any longer. I turned to tell Dan that I absolutely could not contemplate living here, that it would be impossible for me to return to this location, but the sight of him stopped me.
He stood in the center of the room, in the midst of the remains of a fallen ceiling rose, which had created a starburst of debris on the parquet. Sunshine cut through the windows and pale light played across his face and his body, burnishing his narrow shoulders, glinting from his glasses. His grin widened as he pulled an object from his pocket and held it up in the dusty shaft of light. It was a set of keys.
“The house is ours,” he said. “I bought it for you.”
Eliza swore and I felt a powerful wave of nausea before my knees gave out from under me.
6.
Crushed plasterwork was digging into my backside and I could taste fine dust in the air, too. Dan was cradling me. I sat up cautiously.
“Are you all right?” he said. “I got you, I caught you before you hit your head.”
I looked at the lofty ceiling, the broken molding, the decayed grandeur, and imagined it all collapsing on us, the stale air choking us.
“How dare you buy this house without telling me?” I asked. “Did you buy it with my money?”
“Lucy, I—” he began, but he sounded bossy, as if he was a teacher and I was a slow pupil, and I didn’t want to hear it.
“You’ve betrayed all the trust I put in you.”
“I—” he began again.
“I want to go home. Take me home, please.”
We drove into the city across the Suspension Bridge without speaking. When we got home to our flat, we unpacked the car in silence and put as much distance between us as we could in the cramped space.
I lay on our bed, still barely able to process what Dan had done. It was shocking, totally unexpected, frightening. We would have to undo it as soon as possible, sell the house, even if we took a hit. There was no other way and I would have to summon the courage to tell him so.
I checked my email, hoping for some good news to distract me. My heart leaped when I saw a message from Max, but it was brutally short: Nearly finished reading. I’ll call as soon as I’m done.
I reread the message, more than once, but it was infuriatingly hard to read between the lines. Max was good at that. I typed out a needy reply, then deleted it. I typed out another and sent it to myself. I read it and was happy I hadn’t sent it to Max. I deleted that one, too.
I gazed around our bedroom. It was too small, like the rest of this place, but I loved every inch of it. I understood the arguments about investing my money sensibly, and knew we’d buy a place eventually, but it should have been a joint decision, a gradual moving on, when both of us were ready.
Eliza said, “You have to talk to him sooner rather than later. Find out exactly what he’s done.”
I felt nervous. This felt bigger than me, somehow. I sensed it sharply, though even I could never have imagined where it would take us.
Dan was sitting at the kitchen table, doing something on his laptop. He shut the lid when he saw me. He had his wary expression on again.
“Why that house?” I said. “What were you thinking?”
“I thought you’d fall in love with it like I did.” There was something in the way he said it, a simplicity and a sweetness, that helped me let go of a little of my anger. He stood up and came to me, cupping my face in his hands, just the way he had earlier, but this time he kissed me, and my body relaxed.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“Starving.”
“Let’s go out and get something to eat and we can talk. I want this to work.”
We walked to the restaurant but didn’t hold hands, as we usually did. Things felt strange. Not unpleasant, but off. Dan was overly solicitous, stepping behind me when the sidewalk was too narrow for us to pass other people. Triple-checking the road was clear before crossing. He seemed hypervigilant.
Eliza said, “Thinking about it, if he’s really bought this place, and I think he has, you need to play a long game. You can get out of this, but probably not right away, so be smart and don’t be angry. Pick your battles with him. If he went behind your back and used your money to buy it, and I think he did, you need to make sure your name is on the deed. Until then, it’s his decision whether you sell or not.”
She was right. I listened carefully. But she couldn’t resist adding, “I told you not to give him access to your accounts.”
I had trusted him, though, and hadn’t wanted to handle the money myself. It had seemed like a no-brainer. Now I felt stupid.
Dan held open the door of the restaurant for me. It was a new pizza place he wanted to try. Over mozzarella in carrozza, a dirty martini for me, and a lager for Dan, I said, as calmly as I could, “You should have talked to me before you bought the house. We should be making joint decisions about money.”
“But if I had, you’d never have agreed to buying it,” he said. A string of cheese dangled from his mouth and he sucked it up.
“I’d never have agreed to buying it anyway, because of where it is.”
“It was the chance of a lifetime. I didn’t want your past to stuff up our future. And no one is going to know who you are. The last time they saw you, you were—what?—ten.”
“I was thirteen.”
My parents moved away from Charlotte Close then. It took that long for them to believe, finally, that Teddy was not coming home, but it haunted my mother afterward, that we hadn’t stayed. She regretted the move because she began to have recurring dreams that Teddy had turned up at number 7 after we left and thought we’d abandoned him.
She couldn’t bear to remain on Charlotte Close, but she couldn’t bear to be anywhere else, either. That was the pain she lived with, until she died, only a few months after my dad.
“And you changed your name,” Dan said.
I had changed it twice. Once as soon as I became an adult. Lucy Bewley had been a recognizable name and I didn’t want my past to be evident to anyone who might care to search for it on the internet. It was a worry even back then, before I became a somebody. I’d chosen to become Lucy Brown because it was a perfectly, beautifully, bland and extremely common name. When I’d married, I’d transformed from being Lucy Brown to Lucy Harper. Nobody who unearthed my marriage certificate would be able to connect me with the disappearance of Teddy Bewley.
I’d reveled in the wonderful anonymity of my married name right up until the point when I’d gotten a public profile. After that, I knew I would never feel adequately shielded from the past and wondered how Dan could sit here in the restaurant now and behave as if he didn’t know all too well that this was one of my greatest fears.
I wanted badly to argue the point, but was afraid that I’d become upset, that he’d accuse me of being overwrought, or irrational, of making a scene, so I swallowed my frustration.
“How much did the house cost?” I asked.
He stalled. “I made a good deal,” he said.
“How much, Dan?”
“Just shy of two million.”
I let out a low whistle. “You should have asked me.”
“But then we wouldn’t have the house, would we?” Dan took a swig of his beer and I felt confounded, as if he’d flipped my argument against me, and any coherent train of thought I might have had evaporated.
“Exactly!” I said, but I was a bit confused over whether I’d just agreed or disagreed with him. I downed my drink.
“I just don’t think anyone’s a loser here.” He folded a slice of pizza over itself and inserted most of it into his mouth. I watched him chew.
“We should have ice cream after,” he added, and I could see the masticated dough and pepperoni in his mouth, and it made me feel a terrific distaste for him. I felt like saying I wanted to leave and denying him ice cream, but I badly wanted some myself so I agreed with him that we should and the conversation about money seemed to be over for now.
He got salted caramel and blackcurrant ice cream. I got chocolate and lemon sorbet.
When it arrived, Eliza prompted me and I asked, “Is my name on the deed of the house?”
“No. Because if it was, I’d have had to trick you into signing to keep it a surprise and I wasn’t comfortable with that.”
I wasn’t sure how this was any worse than buying the house without telling me. Dan seemed to have entirely rewritten the moral code to justify doing what he wanted. He reached across the table and took my hand, turned it over and ran his finger over my palm. I flinched a little, in case my nerve pain flared up, but it didn’t. “The paperwork for putting your name on the house deed is ready for you to sign,” he said. “We’ll see the solicitor and make it official next week.”
