I'll Never Tell, page 20
She sits down on the edge of the bed and rests her head on her knees. She has a headache; Paul can see that. He knows she always gets them when she flies.
He still can hardly grasp that they are here when less than thirty-six hours ago they were cocooned inside the Barbican’s dusky hall. He cannot believe the things that have happened since then: wild, unimaginable things. My daughter is missing, she ran off with a man old enough to be her father, a man we invited into our own house.
For now he tries to focus simply on the practicalities in hand. ‘Do you want paracetamol?’ he asks Julia.
‘I’ll be fine in a minute. I might go out on the balcony for a bit.’
The balcony? It’s pitch black and blowing a gale out there.
She doesn’t move though, and for want of anything better to do, Paul opens their shared suitcase and starts to unpack, sliding shirts onto hangers and underwear into a drawer. He knows it probably isn’t even worth it, since they’ve already missed most of their first night due to the flight delay, and their plan is to stay here at most one more night. The hire car they’ve booked will be ready for them at half eight in the morning, and the website says the camp is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from here, so it’s doable, surely. They can get to Chrissie, drive her safely back here, get her on a plane home then work out what the hell to do next.
If she’s there at the camp, that is. Even now the idea of the two of them, Chrissie and Francis, together in this place, this camp, seems ridiculous. Squatting with a bunch of hippy-activists in the woods – is that meant to be charming? Is it some kind of skewed idea of romance?
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ he asks Julia. ‘Do you want a shower or something to eat, or what?’ He doesn’t really know what she might want.
‘No. It’s all right. I’ll just get some air.’ Julia pushes herself off the bed, wincing with the movement, then unlocks and tugs open the balcony door. Her action lets a vicious gust of wind into the room, chilling the air at once, but before he can stop her Julia is outside, banging the sliding door shut again behind her. Maybe she wants that. Maybe she needs it. In the wind, her short, dark hair whips about her head. He carries on unpacking their suitcase, putting Julia’s pants and bras in a drawer. He clicks the kettle on, though he doesn’t want tea either, and moves on to sorting through their hand luggage too.
He can see Julia’s silhouette, out on the balcony, a flickering shadow behind the thin curtains and the glass.
He lifts her handbag onto the luggage rack and unzips it to look for some painkillers. She doesn’t like taking them, but under these circumstances who wants a blinding headache as well? Her purse is in here, and some make-up and a tiny bottle of shower gel. Packets of tissues, hand sanitizer, the slim case for her glasses. And something else, crushed right down at the bottom, almost lost or forgotten, in a dark corner of the bag. A business card? What is it?
He recognizes the logo and the name. YSL.
He can still hear the wind roaring outside as he sits down on the hard, clean bed, and smooths the little card out on his knee. YSL. Saint Laurent. With a rush of nostalgia, he thinks of those earrings, sparkling in the mirror of the vanity as she dressed. How beautiful she looked that night. But it was also the night that Francis was a guest in their house. The man who induced Paul to invest tens of thousands of pounds in a get-rich-quick scheme that Paul wasn’t savvy enough to profit from, a man whom Julia foolishly lied about knowing but who is somehow terrifyingly tangled up with their family, and who – through fate or coincidence or God-knows-what – now seems to single-handedly be ruining Paul’s life.
Paul turns the card over. He stops. Almost chokes.
The balcony door clunks as Julia comes in again, half brutalized by the wind. She doesn’t seem to notice that her handbag lies open and part-disembowelled on the stand. Her eyes are watering, her cheeks reddish-blue. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I think I need that paracetamol after all …’
Paul gets to his feet. Julia trails off as she sees him standing there. Now she is looking at him properly, seeing him and what he’s holding.
So now they both know.
She goes pale. He holds the card in his hand like a bomb.
‘Julia …?’
No escape. They stare at each other. He holds the creased card out to her, like an offering.
To my Julia, love Francis, it says.
Chapter 36
Julia
He wasn’t a work associate. Never had been. I first met him at Duchelle’s, a private members’ club in Oxford. Rather than going home to my family after work, one evening I went to the bar there, alone, instead.
Most people in Oxford wouldn’t even know Duchelle’s existed. It was perfectly selective like that. But I knew this place – I had first come here at the age of seventeen. My father had taken me and bought me a vodka martini, a drink I’ve always chosen ever since. He taught me to drink it like a perfect lady: in tiny sips, with restraint. No one cared that I was underage; my father was paying. We spent a whole afternoon there. It was his way of teaching me where I belonged and how I should comport myself. Where I fitted in this world. He was showing me the kinds of people I should mix with and the sort of places I should frequent. Not just anyone and not just anywhere. Only people and places like this.
I hadn’t been there for years, though. It so happened that I had never come here with Paul. Maybe that was why I picked it that night: as somewhere my husband had never been, it felt like it represented all the things he couldn’t know. At the time, I was just aware of the deep association with my father. It was only later that I came to realize the profound symbolism in that too.
How ironic then – or how perfect – that this was the place where I first met him, in a scene that was almost a perfect cliché. I sat at the bar. I didn’t have a book, I didn’t fiddle with my phone; I made it clear I wasn’t waiting for my ‘date’. The vodka martinis I ordered tasted exactly the way I remembered from twenty years before with my father. I sat and waited to see who would approach.
It took half an hour, perhaps only twenty minutes.
From the moment Francis Maitland walked in and set eyes on me, something sparked within me. It rose up from deep inside – not quite an emotion or a sensation or a memory. More like recognition, or an echo. Something that felt like history on repeat.
When I introduced myself, he repeated my name back to me. Julia Montrose.
Hearing those words, in his rich voice, and it was as though part of my self came back to me. Montrose, I’d told him. Not Goodlight.
He bought me a drink: another martini. Brazenly, he offered me cocaine, which I took.
He seemed to know exactly what I wanted.
He would turn out to be perfect for me. The perfect way to break myself.
He didn’t know it – and at the beginning, neither did I – but Francis Maitland would turn out to encapsulate everything I craved.
Chapter 37
Paul
NOW
He should have known. The clues had been there, almost textbook. Was this ever really about Chrissie at all?
It’s five past nine in the morning and they are standing out in a freezing, rain-puddled car park and Paul has the keys to the hire car in his hand. He is still completely reeling from the shock. They’ve filled out all the forms, paid the cost, paid for insurance. There’s nothing left to do now but get in and drive. The two of them. For nearly three hours straight.
The car smells of pine air freshener and cheap leather and carpet cleaner. It only makes the nausea in Paul’s stomach worse.
‘I’ll drive,’ he says. More than ever now, he feels the need to be in the driver’s seat.
Beside him, Julia is awash with anxiety and remorse. He can feel it coming off her in waves. He’s so angry he could drive this car into a ditch. Back at the hotel, he was unable to speak to her. He literally couldn’t look at her or find a single word. The only thing he could manage to do at that point was climb into the hard, crisp bed and try to block everything out until daylight came. He wasn’t going to sleep; they both knew that. But there was nowhere else to go. He was trapped here, with Julia. Now, finally, he has found his voice, in the action of moving, driving, holding the wheel.
‘You lied deliberately to the police,’ he says. The road that they’re on is wide and smooth but the landscape is wholly unfamiliar: bracken and moorland and distant, craggy hills. It makes his whole sense of disorientation worse. ‘You told them you didn’t know him when you were having an affair with him. And, what – now Chrissie too? Both of you? What kind of twisted situation is that?’
‘No, Paul. Stop. I don’t think it’s like that.’
‘Then what is it? Chrissie and Francis are clearly involved with one another. Or do you think she’s run away with him like this just to, what – mess with your head? Spite you?’
‘I didn’t even know that Chrissie knew him.’
‘Well, she did. Clearly.’ He is disgusted, sickened by both of them. ‘You know what, Julia? He came to our house.’
‘I know he did. Because I invited him.’
‘No, not then. Not at the party. Another time. I came home to the reek of his cologne in our kitchen, just days after that evening when Chrissie ran off.’
He cannot believe what they’ve got themselves into. What Julia has got them into. He wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist, then places his hands back on the steering wheel: ten to two, as though following the rules and doing things properly could somehow fix things.
‘And you didn’t tell the police any of this, Julia.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. They pulled out his photo and I was just so shocked I couldn’t speak. And then they told me you knew him.’
‘So you were going to leave for Scotland without me? What a perfect way to cover your tracks.’ He can’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. ‘You were never going to tell me, were you? You did all this so you could keep up your lie.’
Paul wants to pull over and cover his ears. Part of him wishes he’d never said anything and had simply shoved that damning piece of evidence back into her bag, fed her paracetamol and water, and pretended none of this was real. But Julia realized as soon as she saw him. The look on his face. You can’t be married for eight years and not be able to read each other like that.
So now it’s out in the open. There’s no escape. For two hours, he has her: he can ask her anything.
‘Which way,’ he says to her. They are coming up to an unmarked junction and Julia is navigating. ‘Which way?’
Julia taps the screen of the car’s complicated sat nav. ‘Straight on – no, wait, left. Follow signs for Laggan and then for Kilgarry – that’s the town just outside Camp Dìon.’
It’s raining as well now: thick, heavy drops spattering the windscreen. He turns on the wipers, but almost at once the rain evolves into a deluge. Even on the highest setting, the wipers struggle to keep up.
‘Slow down,’ says Julia. ‘We can hardly see anything!’
He has to drive at thirty-three miles an hour on this straight flat A-road, the windows steaming up, the car feeling more claustrophobic than ever. They’re both dead silent as he navigates another junction, peering at the signs that have letters half scraped off. When they find themselves on the right route again, it’s Julia who is the first to speak.
‘You have to believe me,’ says Julia. ‘Paul, it was over.’
‘Over? Really? How on earth am I supposed to believe that? Over – or he just moved on to Chrissie?’
This man! He seems to have infiltrated every aspect of Paul’s life, torn it apart, like ripping whole beams from the wall. Julia shakes her head. ‘Stop it. Stop saying that! Jesus, Paul, you’ve got no idea. Listen, I broke it off with him weeks ago. Honestly, I did. I mean, I tried.’
‘Tried? You tried? What’s that supposed to mean?’
He is hit suddenly with a sheer wave of grief. He cannot believe this has happened to him. Yes, of course, he knew he and Julia had problems, that she was unhappy. He’d sensed that she had been losing her way. But they had been going to therapy, goddammit.
‘So with Lynn, then,’ he said. ‘You were lying to her too?’
‘Here,’ says Julia. ‘This is the turn-off.’
Oh, the irony of it. Being stuck in a car together, having to work as a team. He hates this; he is overwhelmed by these roads, the wind, the rain, the navigation. How can they also be having a conversation like this?
As though in answer, Julia’s phone rings.
‘Shit,’ she says. ‘Shit. It’s DS Brayford again.’
‘You have to answer it. Let me pull over.’ Even through his anger, the practicalities push through.
‘No, don’t stop. I can’t bear another delay, just keep driving.’
‘Then put it on speaker. I need to hear as well.’
She swipes to answer and does what he says.
‘Mrs Goodlight? I mean, Ms?’ DS Brayford’s voice is crackly. It’s hard to hear her over the battering of the rain.
‘Yes, this is Julia.’
‘I’m outside your house, Julia. Are you not home?’
Shit, shit, shit. It’s another jolt of complete disorientation. They are supposed to be hundreds of miles away in Oxford, surrounded by the dreaming spires and no doubt just a light drizzle of English rain. Not way out here in the back of beyond, in a sleeting downpour. What are they doing here, what has happened to his life? Paul almost feels like bursting into tears, picturing their house, their driveway, their street. The familiar landmarks of his precious world. Thinking of Jackson, their faithful dog. They are so far from home right now. But more than that, he can’t remember ever feeling further away from himself.
‘DS Brayford, I’m sorry,’ says Julia. ‘We meant to come back first thing but we’ve … been delayed at my parents’.’
‘Where exactly are you? It sounds like you’re driving. Are you on your way home now?’
Paul tries to keep his eyes on the slick road, but from the corner of his vision he can see Julia as well. She has covered her eyes with her free hand now. As though that makes it easier to lie.
‘No. No, we’ve just driven to the shops. We’re in Guildford. Surrey. We … I … just needed to be home for a while. I think we’re going to be here for another few hours at least.’
It is making Paul sick to hear the lies coming so easily from her mouth. When did she become so adept at deception? Duncan and Celina are in Keen-yah right now, not Surrey. And does DS Brayford really believe her?
‘Well,’ says DS Brayford, her tone revealing nothing. ‘I can understand that. But we’re here to do the further search of your house.’
‘Yes, of course,’ says Julia. ‘Yes, that’s fine. Please do go ahead.’
‘I’ll get the key from your neighbour, shall I?’ Paul can picture DS Brayford consulting her notes. ‘… Sally Fairshaw?’
‘No! No, don’t do that. There’s no need to disturb her. There’s a spare key under the lip of the dining room window. Use that.’
‘You leave keys to your house outside? You never told us that, Ms Goodlight. That could be how someone got in.’
A scraping noise. Faintly, in the background, Paul thinks he can hear the noise of the front door opening. Would the detective notice their suitcase was gone? But then they would have taken it to Guilford, wouldn’t they?
‘All right,’ DS Brayford says. ‘We’re in now.’
‘Okay,’ says Julia. Her voice is tight, breathless. ‘Okay. Good.’
‘You might want to think about coming back to Oxford ASAP. We need to speak with you further about Francis Maitland. And we may release a press statement shortly. I really do think it would be best if you were here.’
‘Yes,’ says Julia. ‘Of course. Absolutely. Thank you, honestly, for everything you’re doing. We’ll let you know as soon as we’re back.’
When she hangs up Julia is pale and shivering, even though they have the car’s heating on full blast. Paul grips the wheel and stares at the narrowing road in front of them. He is furious with Julia, but right now, he still needs her. Everything in the rear-view mirror is broken, and he has no idea what awaits him ahead.
Chapter 38
Julia
THREE WEEKS BEFORE
Once it began, I seemed to just give myself over to him. Or – not to him exactly, but to what we were doing. This thing. I kept on letting so many things happen, dumbly oblivious to what was even driving me. What did I need? What was I looking for, why was I letting myself be pulled apart like this? Looking back, I’m no longer surprised by any of the things I found there. All I knew at the time was that it felt like digging my way to the floor of a black hole.
Our meet-up that afternoon wasn’t so different: we went to Duchelle’s again, though these days we didn’t do cocaine in the stylish toilets. We did it in a decadent hotel room upstairs instead.
He seemed to be almost glowing when he met me in the lobby, and I felt myself tumble again. Heart – or something deeper, darker – completely overtaking my head.
‘Julia,’ he said. He held his arms open as he approached and kissed me. ‘How long have we got?’
Not the most romantic of questions, but I shrugged and told him. ‘An hour or two at least.’
He kissed me again and pulled me tight. ‘Wonderful.’ He nodded at my vodka martini, olives close to the bottom of the glass. ‘Another?’
I thought about this. I really tried to be honest with myself: what did I want? What had this thing become, what was I asking it to be? We could sit down here, and drink and talk. I could let him compliment me, charm me, respect me as he drank his ruby red wine. I could step back from this. I could tell him, maybe it would be better for us to just be friends.
