The Lying Game Read online

  ‘What the fuck? You’ve not even touched your drink!’

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it here.’

  ‘Sure,’ Kate said. She scooped up the last spoonful of marshmallow, and Fatima began looking for her bag. But before we had time to do anything more, the door of the pub banged open, and Mary Wren came in.

  I wasn’t expecting her to come to our table – she knew Kate of course, she was a good friend of Ambrose, but she had never taken any notice of Kate’s friends.

  But she did. She walked straight across, and looked from me to Thea and then to Fatima, her broad lip curling.

  ‘Which of you is Isa Wilde?’ she asked in her deep hoarse voice.

  I swallowed.

  ‘M-me.’

  ‘All right.’ She put her hands to her hips, towering over us where we sat. The hubbub in the pub seemed to die away, and I saw that people were listening, craning to see round Mary’s broad, muscular back. ‘Listen to me, my lass. I don’t know how people behave back where you were brought up, but round here, people care what’s said about them. If you go spreading lies about my boy again, I will break every bone in your body. Do you understand? I will snap them, one by one.’

  I opened my mouth but I couldn’t speak. A deep, spreading shame was rising up from my gut, paralysing me.

  Beside me, Kate looked shocked, and I realised she had no idea what this was all about.

  ‘Mary,’ she said, ‘you can’t –’

  ‘Keep out of it,’ Mary snapped at her. ‘Though you were in on it, I’ll be bound, all of you. I know what you’re like.’ She folded her arms and looked around our little circle, and I realised that in some perverse way she was enjoying this – enjoying our shock and upset. ‘You’re little liars all of you, and if I had charge of you, you’d be whipped.’

  Kate gasped at that, and half stood, as if to fight my corner, but Mary put a heavy hand on her shoulder, physically forcing her back down against the cushions.

  ‘No, you don’t. I imagine that fancy school is too modern for that sort of thing, and your dad, he’s too nice for his own good, but I’m not, and if you hurt my boy again –’ she looked back at me, her sloe-dark eyes meeting mine unflinchingly – ‘you’ll live to regret the day you were born.’

  And then she straightened, turned on her heel, and went out.

  The door slammed behind her, loud in the sudden quiet she left behind, and then there was a gust of laughter, and the noises of the bar began to return – the clink of glasses, the deep rumble of the men at the bar. But I felt the eyes of the villagers on us, speculating about what Mary had said, and I wanted to sink into the floor.

  ‘Jesus!’ Kate said. Her face was white, with a flush of anger high on her cheekbones. ‘What the hell is wrong with her? Dad will be so furious when –’

  ‘No.’ I grabbed at her coat. ‘No, Kate, don’t. It was my fault. Don’t tell Ambrose.’

  I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear for it to come out – the stupid, unworthy lie I had told. The thought of repeating that back to Ambrose’s face, seeing his disappointment …

  ‘Don’t tell him,’ I said. I felt tears prick at the back of my eyes, but it wasn’t sorrow – it was shame. ‘I deserved it. I deserved what she said.’

  It was a mistake, that’s what I wanted to tell Mary, as I sat there speechless in front of her wrath. It was a mistake, and I’m sorry.

  But I didn’t say it. And the next time I went into the post office, she served me as usual, and nothing more was said about it. But seventeen years later, as I feed my baby, and try to smile down at her laughing, chub-cheeked face, Mary Wren’s words ring in my ears, and I think, I was right. I did deserve them. We all did.

  Little liars.

  KATE, THEA AND Fatima are seated around the scrub-top table as I burst back into the Mill, hot and footsore, and my throat dry as dust.

  Shadow barks a short sharp warning as the door crashes back against the wall, making the cups on the dresser rattle, and the picture frames bang against the wall in sympathy.

  ‘Isa!’ Fatima says, her face surprised as she looks up from her plate. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

  ‘I have. Why didn’t you tell us, Kate?’

  The words were a question in my head. Spoken, they sound like an accusation.

  ‘Tell you what?’ Kate stands, full of bewildered concern. ‘Isa, did you just walk all the way to Salten and back in three hours? You must be exhausted. Did you take a bottle of water?’

  ‘Fuck the water,’ I say angrily, but when she brings me a glass from the tap and sets it gently down on the table, I have to swallow against the pain in my throat before I can drink.

  I take a sip and then a gulp, and then slump on the sofa. Fatima has loaded up a plate with salad for me, and now she brings it over.

  ‘What happened?’ She sits down beside me on the sofa, holding the plate, and her face is worried. ‘Did you say you saw a ghost?’

  ‘Yes, I saw a ghost.’ I look over Fatima’s head, straight at Kate. ‘I saw Luc Rochefort in the village.’

  Kate’s face crumples, before I’ve even finished the sentence, and she sits abruptly on the edge of the sofa as if she doesn’t completely trust her legs.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Luc?’ Fatima looks from me to Kate. ‘But I thought he went back to France after …’

  Kate makes an unhappy movement with her head, but it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a nod or a shake, or a combination of both.

  ‘What’s happened to him, Kate?’ I hug Freya closer, thinking of his closed, impassive face, the fury I felt radiating out of him in the small post office. ‘He was …’

  ‘Angry,’ she finishes. Her face is pale, but her hands, as she reaches in her pocket for her tobacco, are steady. ‘Right?’

  ‘That’s an understatement. What happened?’

  She begins to roll up, very slowly and deliberately, and I remember this from school, how Kate would always take her time, she would never be hurried into an answer. The more difficult the question, the longer she would pause, before replying.

  Thea puts down her fork, picks up her wine and cigarette case, and comes over too.

  ‘Come on, Kate.’ She sits on the bare boards at our feet, and I have a sudden, painful memory of all the nights we spent like this, curled together on the sofa, watching the river, the flames, smoking, laughing, talking …

  There is no laughter now, only the rustle of Rizlas as Kate rolls back and forth on her knee, biting her lip. When the cigarette is done, she licks the paper, and then she speaks.

  ‘He did go back to France. But not … willingly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Thea demands. She taps her cigarette case against the floorboard, and looks at Freya, and I know she wants to smoke, but is waiting until Freya is out of the room.

  Kate sighs, and puts her bare feet up onto the sofa, beside Fatima’s hip, and she pushes the loose strands of hair off her face.

  ‘I don’t know how much you knew about Luc’s background … you know Dad and Luc’s mother, Mireille, were together, years back, right? And they lived with us here.’

  I nod, we knew all this. Luc and Kate were toddlers – almost too small to remember, Kate said, although she had faint recollections of parties by the river, Luc falling in once when he was too little to swim.

  ‘When Dad and Mireille broke up, Mireille took Luc back to France, and we didn’t see him for several years, and then Dad got a call from Mireille – she couldn’t cope with Luc, he was running wild, social services were involved – could he come and spend the summer holidays here, give her a break? You know Dad, he said yes of course. Well, when Luc got here, it turned out that there was maybe a bit more to the story than Mireille had said. Luc was acting out, but there were … reasons. Mireille had her own problems … she’d started shooting up again, and, well, she maybe hadn’t been the best parent to Luc.’

  ‘What abo
ut Luc’s dad?’ Fatima asks. ‘Didn’t he have anything to say about his son disappearing off to England to stay with a strange man?’

  Kate shrugs.

  ‘I don’t know if there was a dad. From what Luc said, Mireille was pretty fucked up when she had him. I’m not sure if she ever knew …’

  She trails off and then takes a breath, and starts again.

  ‘Anyway, he came back to live with us when we were maybe thirteen, fourteen? And the holidays turned into a term … and the term turned into a year … and then another … and then somehow Luc was enrolled at the secondary school in Hampton’s Lee and living with us full-time, and you know … he was doing well. He was happy, I guess.’

  We know this too, but no one interrupts.

  ‘But after Dad …’ Kate swallows, and I know the bad part is coming, the time none of us can bear to think about. ‘After Dad … disappeared, Luc – he couldn’t stay here any more. He was only fifteen, I turned sixteen that summer, but Luc was still several months off and a minor, and in any case once social services got involved …’ She swallows again, and I can see the emotions passing across her face, cloud shadows flitting across a valley.

  ‘He got sent back,’ she says abruptly. ‘He wanted to stay here with me, but I had no choice.’ She spreads her hands out pleadingly. ‘You realise that, right? I was sixteen, there was no way they were going to let me act as legal guardian to a stray French boy with no parents in the country. I did what I had to do!’ she repeats, her voice desperate.

  ‘Kate.’ Fatima puts a hand on her arm, her voice gentle. ‘This is us, you don’t have to justify yourself. Of course you had no choice. Ambrose wasn’t Luc’s dad – what could you have done?’

  ‘They sent him back,’ Kate says, almost as if she hasn’t heard. Her face is blank, remembering. ‘And he wrote and wrote, pleading with me, saying that Dad had promised he’d take care of him, and accusing me of betraying him, accusing me –’

  Her eyes well up with tears, and she blinks them away, her expression suddenly bleak and raw. Shadow, sensing her unhappiness without understanding it, comes to lie at her feet, with a little whine, and Kate puts her hand down, ruffling his white fur.

  ‘A few years ago he came back, got a job at Salten House as a gardener. I thought all the years would have given him perspective, that he’d have realised that I had no choice. I could barely keep myself out of a children’s home, let alone him. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t forgiven me at all. He cornered me one night coming back along the river, and oh God –’ she buries her face in her hands – ‘Fatima, the stories! You must hear them all the time as a GP, but I’d never – the beatings, the abuse, God, what he –’ her voice cracks – ‘what he suffered – I couldn’t bear to listen, but he kept on and on, telling me, like he wanted to punish me – what his mother’s boyfriends had done to him when he was little, and later when he went back to France and got taken into care, the man at the children’s home who used to – who used to –’

  But she can’t finish. Her voice dissolves into tears, and she covers her face.

  I look at Fatima’s and Thea’s shocked faces, and then back to Kate. I want to say something. I want to comfort her, but all I can think is how they used to be, the two of them, their laughing faces as they splashed in the Reach, their companionable silence as they bent their heads over a board game … They were so close – closer than my brother and I ever were. And now this.

  In the end it’s Fatima who sets down the plate of food very carefully, and stands. She puts her arms around Kate, rocking her, wordlessly, back and forth, back and forth.

  She’s saying something, very low, but I think I can make out the words.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she’s saying, over and over. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  I SHOULD HAVE known. That’s what I think, as I sit by Freya’s crib, trying to lull her into sleep, with a pain in my throat from unshed tears.

  I should have known.

  Because it was all there in front of me, for me to see. The scars on Luc’s back as he swam in the Reach, the marks on his shoulder that I assumed were botched inoculation scars, but when I asked him about them, his face only twisted and he shook his head.

  I am older now, less innocent. I understand those small circular burns for what they really were, and I feel sick at my own blindness.

  It explains so much that I never understood – Luc’s silence, and his dog-like adoration of Ambrose. His unwillingness to talk about France, however much we pestered him, and the way Kate would squeeze his hand, and change the subject for him.

  It even explained something that I had never understood – the way he would let the village boys tease and mock and swagger at him, and he would just take it and take it and take it … and then crack. I remember one evening in the pub, when the village kids had been ribbing him, gently but relentlessly about hanging out with ‘snooty’ Salten House girls. Luc’s position, not quite town, not quite gown, had always been a tough one. Kate was firmly Salten House, and Ambrose somehow effortlessly straddled the two worlds. But Luc had to negotiate an uneasy class divide between the state school in Hampton’s Lee that he attended with the majority of the village kids, and his family connection to the private school on the hill.

  And yet, he managed. He put up with the teasing, the ‘our girls not good enough for you, mate?’ remarks, and the veiled comments about posh girls liking a ‘bit of rough’. That night, in the pub, he had just smiled and shaken his head. But then, right at the end of the night, as last orders were being rung, one of the village boys bent down and whispered something in Luc’s ear in passing.

  I don’t know what he said. I only saw Kate’s face change. But Luc stood, so fast his chair hit the floor behind him, and he punched the kid, hard and straight on the nose, as if something inside him had snapped. The boy fell to the ground, gasping and groaning. And Luc stood over him as he bled, and watched him cry, his face as expressionless as if nothing had happened at all.

  Someone from the pub must have called Ambrose. He was sitting in the rocking chair, waiting for us when we got in, his normally good-humoured face without a trace of a smile. He stood up when we entered.

  ‘Dad,’ Kate said, breaking in before Luc could speak, ‘it wasn’t Luc’s –’

  But Ambrose was shaking his head before she’d even finished.

  ‘Kate, this is between me and Luc. Luc, can I speak to you in your room, please?’

  They closed the door to Luc’s room, so we couldn’t hear the ensuing argument, only the rise and fall of the voices, Ambrose’s full of disappointment and reproach, Luc’s pleading, and then at last angry. The rest of us huddled below in the living room, in front of a fire that we barely needed, for the night was warm, but Kate was shivering as the voices above us grew louder.

  ‘You don’t understand!’ I heard from above. It was Luc’s voice, cracked with furious disbelief. I could not hear the words of Ambrose’s reply, only his tone, even and patient, and then the crash as Luc threw something at the wall.

  When Ambrose came down, he was alone, his wiry hair standing up on end as if he’d raked it through and through. His face was weary, and he reached for the unlabelled wine bottle under the sink and poured himself a tumblerful, downing it with a sigh.

  Kate stood as Ambrose sank into the armchair opposite, but Ambrose shook his head, knowing where she was heading.

  ‘I wouldn’t. He’s very upset.’

  ‘I’m going up,’ Kate said defiantly. She stood, but as she passed Ambrose’s chair he put out his free hand, catching her wrist, and she stopped, looking down at him, her expression mutinous. ‘Well? What?’

  I waited, my heart in my throat, for Ambrose to explode as my father would have done. I could hear him now, raging at Will for answering him back, I’d have been thrashed for cheeking my father like that, you little shit, and When I give you an order, you listen, got it?

  But Ambrose … Ambrose didn’t shout. He didn’t even speak.
He held Kate’s wrist, but so gently, his fingers barely circling it, that I could see that was not what was keeping her there.

  Kate looked down at her father, searching his face. Neither of them moved, but her expression changed, as if reading something in his eyes that none of the rest of us could understand, and then she sighed, and let her hand drop.

  ‘OK,’ she said. And I knew that whatever Ambrose had wanted to say, Kate had understood, without needing to be told.

  There was another crash from above, breaking the silence, and we all jumped.

  ‘He’s trashing his room,’ Kate said under her breath, but she made no further move towards the stairs, she only sank back down to the sofa. ‘Oh, Dad, I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Aren’t you – can’t you stop him?’ Fatima asked Ambrose, her eyes wide with disbelief. Ambrose winced as the sound of broken glass came from above, and then shook his head.

  ‘I would if I could, but there’s some kinds of pain that only stop hurting when you lash out. Maybe this is what he needs to do. I just wish …’ He rubbed his face, and suddenly he looked every day his age. ‘I just wish he wasn’t breaking up his own stuff. God knows, he’s not got much. He’s hurting himself more than me. What happened in that pub?’

  ‘He took it, Dad,’ Kate said. Her face was white with upset. ‘He really did. You know what they’re like, it’s that kid, Ryan or Roland or whatever his name is. The big one with the dark hair. He’s always had it in for him. But Luc was putting up with it really well, he was just laughing it off. But then Ryan, he said something else, and Luc – he just lost it.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Ambrose asked, leaning forward in his armchair, but for the first time I saw the shutter come down between Kate and her father. She went completely still, a kind of wary reserve behind the blank mask of her face.

  ‘I don’t know,’ was all she said, her voice suddenly flat and strange. ‘I didn’t hear.’

  Ambrose didn’t punish Luc, and Fatima shook her head over it on the way home because we all knew, relaxed though he was, that he would never have tolerated that kind of behaviour from Kate. There would have been recriminations, reproaches, repairs taken out of her allowance.