In Another Life, page 27
Then there was Paul, but after a couple of awkward dates when he had accused her of behaving ridiculously over the little that he knew of the situation, a rift had opened up between them. Loretta hadn’t felt able to explain it all to him and he already seemed to think that Natalie was unhinged. She let his calls go unanswered and sensed that he was drifting away. She found she didn’t care. She had far more important things to focus on.
Her confidant needed to be someone who knew both her and Natalie well and understood enough of their past to know what they had been through to get to this point.
She rang Liz.
They arranged to meet at Loretta’s flat. Liz had never been and was enthusiastic to see where her friend was living, and Loretta was anxious that they shouldn’t be overheard, even though she knew this made her as paranoid as Natalie was.
Liz arrived clutching a bottle of Liebfraumilch.
‘Thought we might need this,’ she said. ‘God, this is nice. Look at you with your own front door. I’m so jealous. I reckon I’ll be living with Mum and Dad until I’m forty. Longer, probably.’
She pulled a face and Loretta felt compelled to laugh despite everything.
Loretta found two glasses and a corkscrew and they flopped down on her sofa.
‘Right,’ said Liz. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
Loretta took a deep breath.
‘You’re never going to believe me,’ she said. ‘It’s the maddest story you’ve ever heard.’
‘Try me,’ replied Liz.
She listened carefully as Loretta explained what had happened.
‘And so now Nat has convinced herself that I’m in danger and that she can’t come back whilst I’m in London. And that’s obviously rubbish, but I have no idea where she is and I can’t get her to see sense. I can’t speak to her until she rings me and every time she does she sounds even more delusional. I’m scared that if I don’t do as she wants then I’ll lose her completely.’
Liz stared off into the middle distance for a moment, apparently considering the situation, and Loretta waited.
‘Let’s look at the facts,’ said Liz. ‘What’s the most important thing here? Your life in London or Nat?’
Loretta didn’t hesitate.
‘Nat,’ she said.
‘And what do you have that’s holding you here? Your parents’ place and that’s rented out, and your job.’
Her job. The thing that Loretta loved the most in all the world except her sister, the thing she had worked so hard to get. She nodded.
‘What if you told them at work that you had a family crisis, that you needed, say, three months off. Unpaid. You could sell the house. That would keep you afloat for a bit. Then you can move somewhere out of London, get Natalie to come home, and then when you’ve calmed her down you can come back home and pick up where you left off.’
Liz took a gulp of wine, and then raised the glass to her own suggestion.
It wasn’t the worst idea, Loretta had to admit. She imagined it would be hard to convince the paper to hold her job open but if she didn’t ask for any pay they might do it. And her tenants had asked if they could have first refusal if she and Natalie ever wanted to sell so they might be prepared to buy quickly.
‘Where would I go?’ she asked.
‘Wherever you like,’ replied Liz. ‘Far enough away to convince Nat that you’re safe.’
Loretta felt as if her world was being torn apart. In fact, it was being torn apart, but what choice did she have?
‘What would you do if you were me?’ she asked Liz.
Liz stared up at the ceiling for a moment or two. She was Loretta’s oldest friend and suddenly whatever she was about to say carried more gravitas than anything else.
‘Natalie is the most important thing in your world,’ she said. ‘She’s broken and she needs your help. If I were you, I’d do what she wants. I don’t see that you have any choice.’
69
Where did you go when you could go anywhere except the one place you wanted to be? Loretta had no idea. She knelt on the carpet with her father’s battered AA road map in front of her and considered her options. They were pretty much endless. Great Britain was a big place when you looked at it in terms of places to move to.
She would have to narrow things down. It had to be somewhere that was far enough from their home in London to be convincingly safe for Natalie, but not off the beaten track entirely. Loretta was a city girl and had no experience of living otherwise. How far north could she go before basic amenities dried up? She was assuming there was running water and electricity all the way up to Scotland. She smirked at herself. She was joking, but only just. She really had no idea what lay beyond the GLC’s domain.
Her finger traced its way up through the brightly coloured counties. Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire. She was sure all these places had their merits, but her finger kept moving north. One county was significantly bigger than the others: Yorkshire. Well, she supposed, if she wanted to disappear maybe it was best to do it somewhere big. And if it was big, it would surely have at least some of the trappings of the capital.
The only thing she knew about Yorkshire was the names of its football teams. She had fond memories of her father listening to James Alexander Gordon reading the match results on a Saturday evening. Her finger stopped on Leeds. That was as good a place as any. She would head to Leeds and see what happened.
And that was how Loretta Halliday ended up in a temping agency on The Headrow. The woman behind the desk was small and pointy with huge glasses that completely swamped her tiny features. Coronation Street’s Deirdre Barlow had a lot to answer for, Loretta thought.
‘Name?’ asked the woman, the ‘a’ sounding longer than Loretta was used to.
‘Loretta . . .’ she began. Then she remembered that she was supposed to be incognito and switched Halliday for Hamilton. She felt a little thrill at the naughtiness of it.
‘Typing and shorthand?’
‘Of course.’
‘References?’
Loretta paused. Malcolm would give her a reference for temporary work. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t be going back to her real job. She nodded.
‘We have something at Ashton & Brown. They’re accountants a few doors down. One of the partners’ secretaries has glandular fever, going to be off for a couple of weeks, maybe longer. Can be nasty, glandular fever.’
She looked up at Loretta, her eyes huge through the huge lenses of her glasses, and Loretta nodded sympathetically. The woman wrote an address down on a compliment slip.
‘Take this,’ she said. ‘Out of the door, turn left. I’ll ring them, let them know you’re coming.’
And that was how it began. The partner in need of assistance turned out to be Garth, who asked her out for a drink on her last day, stumbling over his words and assuming she would turn him down even before he had finished his question. She went because she had little else to do, and enjoyed herself more than she thought she might. He was seven years her senior, with a serious and earnest soul, so different to anyone she had met before, but he was attentive and concerned for her well-being in a way that no one had been since her childhood. She found herself falling for him and his straightforward ways.
She continued to temp around the city. Malcolm had promised to hold her job open until she managed to persuade Natalie that it was safe to come out of hiding, but that was proving hard. She had sent her contact details to the most recent post office box address that she had for her, but had to wait for her to get in touch. Natalie’s phone calls were sporadic and she categorically refused to say precisely where she was. All Loretta could do was to check that she had enough money, reassure her that everything would be fine and try to encourage her home. As she had no way of contacting Natalie, she was powerless to do more.
As the months rolled on, Loretta began to feel settled in Leeds. The people were friendly, and the fluidity of temping kept her on her toes. It wasn’t the same as the buzz of the newsroom but the constant switching and changing meant that she didn’t get bored. She’d had to change her name officially to match the stories she’d told, and doing that had felt so disloyal to her parents. Yet she had done it to protect Nat. She was sure they would have understood.
On top of that, and Loretta had never thought she would ever say it, but the countryside was growing on her. It was simply spectacular. Garth was an outdoorsy sort and he took her on long, bracing walks in the Yorkshire Dales at the weekends. In time, she even bought herself a waterproof coat and a pair of walking boots, although she was glad that her colleagues from the newspaper weren’t there to see her and mock.
It was only when Garth proposed that she stopped to think seriously about her future. Accepting him would mean leaving London for good. There was no way Garth would move south. Loretta thought hard about what that would mean. There wasn’t much left for her in London beyond the city itself. She had drifted away from the people she’d grown up with, had no family except Natalie, and the north wasn’t quite as cut off and parochial as she had assumed.
The only thing she would miss about her old life was the paper. Her initial three months of unpaid leave was extended to six and then nine, but in the end she had had to write to Malcolm informing him that she wouldn’t be going back. It was the hardest letter she had ever written but as there was no sign of Natalie returning, she had had no choice.
And then there were the lies she told, in the first place because what harm could it do when she would be leaving anyway, and then continued because she had passed the point when she could rectify them. She had told Garth nothing about her life before he met her. When he asked questions, she was vague on detail and that seemed to satisfy him. He was a simple soul, interested more in the moment than anything that might have happened before. Keeping her own counsel also meant that she could truthfully tell Natalie that she was still undercover. No one knew who she was or why she was in Yorkshire and she continued to hope that that would assuage Natalie’s paranoia in time.
When Garth suggested they buy a house in Ripon, a pretty but tiny cathedral city within commuting distance of Leeds but also in the heart of the North Yorkshire countryside, Loretta found herself agreeing without objection. When Marc was born two years later, she gave up temping, threw herself into country life and waited for Natalie to come back.
70
2005 – Ripon
Christmas was almost upon them. It was among Loretta’s favourite times of year, although she couldn’t place it in the top spot because there were too many other occasions vying for that honour. Each of the children’s birthdays, for a start, and the midsummer’s eve treasure hunt she always arranged even though Marc was seventeen and far too old for hunting for treasure, and the day that the first apple fell from their ancient apple tree, and their wedding anniversary. In fact, the calendar was peppered with Loretta’s favourite times. She should probably simply accept that she loved every part of the year and be done with it.
The children had already set off for school, Marc self-important in his suit and tie, the uniform for the sixth form at his school, and the girls, at thirteen and eleven, still sweet and biddable without any hint of the stormy teenage years that no doubt lay ahead, chattering away to one another. The house was quiet without them and Loretta tried not to think about what it would be like when they had all moved away. That was a while off, she knew, but the time would fly by.
She heard the letterbox rattle and the dull thud of their post landing on the mat, and went to investigate. Garth had beaten her to it. He stood at the door with a pile of Christmas cards in his hands.
‘How come we get so many Christmas cards?’ he asked, looking genuinely baffled.
‘Probably because I write so many,’ Loretta replied calmly.
Garth stood, shaking his head at her in amazement. ‘When do you do it? I never see you at it. You really are a wonder, Lori.’
Loretta smiled at him. ‘It’s amazing what I can get done when you lot are all at work and school,’ she replied.
‘Can I open these?’ Garth asked. ‘Just so I can do my bit.’
‘If you think you’re going to get away with opening ten Christmas cards as your contribution to the festivities then you’re sorely mistaken,’ she laughed. ‘But, yes. Go on.’
Garth took the pile through to the kitchen whilst Loretta started to attach the cards that had arrived the day before to the Christmas card tree she had fashioned. He was right. There were a lot of cards but then they knew a lot of people, or she did. From a standing start, Loretta had created not just one but a whole host of social circles in the city over the years and never was this more apparent than when all the cards arrived, each one representing a friend or acquaintance hard won.
‘Who’s N?’ shouted Garth from the kitchen.
Loretta’s heart stopped beating for a second.
‘Sorry?’ she called back, playing for time whilst she gathered herself.
What were the chances that Natalie’s card would be in the pile that Garth chose to open? He never opened cards generally. In fact, Loretta couldn’t ever remember him doing it before.
‘N,’ he said again. ‘There’s a card here from someone who has just signed themselves N. No message or anything.’
He came through to where she was, brandishing the card in one hand and the envelope in the other.
‘It’s got a foreign stamp.’ He peered at the envelope. ‘France, by the looks of it. Funny to go to all the effort of sending a card from there and then not writing a message in it.’
She could tell him, Loretta thought. Right now. She could simply explain everything and have the whole silly situation out in the open. Finally. It was ridiculous that it was still a secret anyway. Natalie no longer believed that she was under any threat, or at least so Loretta thought. It was hard to know exactly what Natalie thought when they spoke so rarely, but surely she had moved beyond that now. It had been twenty years. Twenty years of Natalie living on the move, never settling anywhere for long, using post office boxes rather than addresses.
A couple of times over the years, Loretta had gently suggested that Natalie would be safe by now and that no one would still be searching for her, but Natalie seemed lost to reason. Loretta wondered if her sister actually preferred to live as she did, with no ties and almost no commitments, and she herself had grown used to it as well. It was just how things were between them.
However, Natalie’s wishes, unreasonable as they might be, were not the only factor at play here. She and Garth had also been married for nearly twenty years and in all that time she had never once so much as hinted that she might have a sister. How could she tell him now and expose her huge betrayal of his trust?
She couldn’t predict how he might react, but she knew that integrity was written through him like ‘Blackpool’ in a stick of seaside rock. That was why he was such a trusted accountant. His clients could see his decency and scrupulousness and they respected that. Indeed, his practice had built its reputation on the back of it. Not all firms could say the same but at Ashton & Brown integrity was guaranteed. So what would he do if he discovered that his own wife didn’t match up to his standards? It was a question that Loretta simply couldn’t answer, but she did know one thing for certain. She had too much at stake to risk it.
And then there were the children. She and Garth had brought them up to be honest as well, modelling their father’s values to a fault. How could she tell them that she had been lying to them all by omission for their entire lives?
In the split second between him asking about N and standing in front of her, the card in his hand, she reached the same conclusion that she always did. It would be better for all concerned if she just kept her mouth shut. No damage could be done by a secret kept. She would tell him one day, she felt sure, but it would be in her own time and not because her hand had been forced.
Garth held the card up and read its contents aloud.
‘“To L. With all my love N xx”. So who’s N?’
Loretta could feel a pink heat starting to burn in her cheeks.
‘Erm,’ she began, but Garth was staring at her, his eyes on hers, his forehead creased in confusion.
‘You must know,’ he said. ‘It’s come from France, for goodness’ sake. How many people do we know in France? Or do you know?’
Garth wasn’t a jealous man. That wasn’t in his nature, but from time to time he had questioned why someone as young and vivacious as Loretta had been would have wanted to accept his offer of marriage. That she had done so had always seemed to trigger some insecurity in him that challenged his self-worth.
‘Could be Nigel from school,’ Loretta blurted. Why had she picked a man’s name? Her mind had gone blank and Nigel was the first idea she’d had as she struggled to avoid saying Natalie.
Garth examined the card again, the line between his eyebrows deeper still.
‘Then why not write Nigel?’ he asked. ‘And what are the kisses about? Was he an old flame of yours?’ He was smiling now, although some of the insecurity that Loretta knew he was feeling was still visible in his eyes.
‘No. Can’t be Nigel,’ she said. ‘Not from France. Must be Nicky back from when I was temping. She sends a card every year. I wonder what she’s doing over there.’
‘Bit of a waste sending her a card then, if she’s not at home to receive it,’ said Garth, handing her the card. ‘Right, I better be gone or I’ll be late. See you tonight?’
Loretta nodded. ‘I have a governors’ meeting at seven thirty, but you’ll be back before I leave?’
‘Should be. Have a good day.’
Then he placed a chaste kiss on the tip of her nose and departed.
As the front door closed, Loretta leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Garth was so sweet, so entirely trusting that she was telling him the truth although her hastily cobbled-together story had barely been coherent, let alone plausible. What was she doing, keeping secrets from the man she loved? It was unthinkable. But then, it had been going on for so long that what choice did she have?
