The Lying Game Read online

  With Luc though, Ambrose seemed to be an unfailing well of patience. And now I understand why.

  Freya is asleep, her breathing even and feather-light, and I stand, stretching, lost in memories as I stare out across the estuary towards Salten, remembering the Luc I knew, before we went away, and trying to work out why his anger in the post office has shaken me so much.

  I knew that that fury was there, after all. I’d seen it, directed at others, sometimes even at himself. And then I realise. It’s not his anger that has scared me. It’s seeing him angry at us.

  For back then, no matter how furious he was, he treated the four of us like bone china, like something too precious to be touched, almost. And God knows, I wanted it – I wanted to be touched, so very much. I remember lying beside him on the jetty, the heat of the sun on our backs, and turning to look at his face, his eyes closed, and longing with a heat so fierce that I thought it might consume me, longing for him to open his eyes, and reach out towards me.

  But he did not. And so, with my heart beating in my chest so hard that I thought he could surely hear it, I reached out and put my lips to his.

  Whatever I expected to happen, it was not this.

  His eyes flew open instantly, and he shoved me away, crying out, ‘Ne me touche pas!’ scrambling up and back so hard he almost fell into the water, his chest rising and falling, his eyes wild, as if I’d ambushed him while sleeping.

  I felt my face turn scarlet, as if the sun were burning me alive, and I got up too, taking an involuntary step back, away from his furious incomprehension.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I managed. ‘Luc?’

  He said nothing, just looked around, as if trying to understand where he was, and what had happened. In that moment, it was almost as if he didn’t recognise me, and he looked at me as if I was a stranger. And then recognition came back into his eyes, and with it a kind of shame. He turned on his heel, and he ran, ignoring my cry of ‘Luc! Luc, I’m sorry!’

  I didn’t understand then. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong, or how he could react so violently to what was, after all, barely more than the sisterly kiss I’d given him a hundred times.

  Now, though … now I think I know what kind of experiences were at the back of that terrified reaction, and my heart is breaking for him. But I am wary, too, for that moment gave me a taste of what I felt again in the post office.

  I know what it’s like to be Luc’s enemy. I have seen him lash out.

  And I can’t help thinking of the dead sheep, of the fury and pain behind that act, of its guts spilling out like festering secrets into the clear blue water.

  And now, I am afraid.

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU going to do?’ Fatima says in a low voice, handing me a cracked porcelain cup.

  Lunch is over. Fatima and I are washing up – or rather she’s washing, I’m drying. Freya is playing on the hearthrug.

  Kate and Thea have gone out for a cigarette, and to walk Shadow, and I can see them through the window, walking slowly back along the bank of the Reach, heads bent in conversation, the smoke from their cigarettes dispersing in the summer air. It’s odd, they’re walking the other way to the route I would have gone – north towards the main road to Salten, rather than south to the shore. It’s not nearly as nice a walk.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I wipe the cup and set it on the table. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I – I honestly don’t know either. All my instincts are shouting at me to go home, it’s not like we can change anything by being here, and at least in London we’re less likely to get a knock on the door from the police.’

  Her words give me a shiver, and I glance involuntarily at the door, imagining Mark Wren walking across the narrow bridge, knocking on the blackened wood … I try to imagine what I would say. I remember Kate’s vehement injunction last night – We know nothing. We saw nothing. That has been the script for seventeen years. If we all stick to it, there is nothing they can do to prove otherwise, surely?

  ‘I mean, I want to support Kate,’ Fatima continues. She puts down the sponge and pushes back her scarf, leaving a smudge of white foam on her cheek. ‘But a school reunion when we’ve never been to one before? Is that really a good idea?’

  ‘I know.’ I put another cup on the table. ‘I don’t want to go either. But it’ll look worse if we bail out at the last minute.’

  ‘I know. I know all that. Rule two – stick to your story. I mean I get it, I do. For better or worse, she’s bought the bloody tickets and told everyone that’s why we’re coming down, so I can see it’s better to see it through. But that thing with the sheep …’

  She shakes her head and returns to washing the lunch things. I sneak a quick glance at her face as she scrubs.

  ‘What was that about? You saw the body better than I did. Was it really Shadow?’

  Fatima shakes her head again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ve only seen a couple of dog attacks, and maybe it’s different when they attack people, but it didn’t look …’

  My stomach clenches, and I’m not sure if I should come clean. If the police get involved then perhaps it’s better if Fatima doesn’t know, doesn’t have anything to conceal, but we swore never to lie to each other, didn’t we? And this is lying of a kind – a lie by omission.

  ‘There was a note,’ I say at last. ‘Kate saw it, but she hid it in her pocket. I found it when I went to rinse her coat.’

  ‘What?’ Fatima looks up at that, her face alarmed. She drops the dishcloth and turns to face me. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to worry you. And I didn’t want …’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It said …’ I swallow. The words are almost unbearable to speak, and I have to force myself to make them real. ‘It said, Why don’t you throw this one in the Reach too?’

  There is a crack, as Fatima drops the cup she is holding, and all the colour and expression drains from her face, leaving it a pale Noh mask of horror, framed by her dark headscarf.

  ‘What did you say?’ Her voice is a croak.

  But I can’t bring myself to repeat it again, and I know full well she heard me, she is just too scared to admit what I already realise – that someone knows, and is bent on punishing us for what happened.

  ‘No.’ She is shaking her head. ‘No. It’s not possible.’

  I put down the tea towel, and go to the sofa where Freya is playing, and I slump down, my face in my hands.

  ‘This changes everything,’ Fatima says urgently. ‘We have to leave, Isa. We have to leave now.’

  There is a sound outside, the scamper of paws, the noise of feet on the jetty, and my head comes up in time to see Kate and Thea open the shore door and come inside, stamping the sand and mud off their feet. Kate is laughing, some of the strain that has been in her face for the last twenty-four hours ebbing away, but her expression turns wary as she looks from Fatima to me and back.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asks. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’m going.’ Fatima picks up the shards of broken cup from the floor and dumps them on the drainer, then she wipes her hands on the tea towel and comes to stand beside me. ‘I need to be back in London. So does Isa.’

  ‘No.’ Kate’s voice is firm, urgent. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Come back with me!’ Fatima says desperately. She waves a hand around at the Mill. ‘You’re not safe here and you know it. Isa – tell them about the note!’

  ‘What note?’ Thea’s face is alarmed. ‘Will someone explain?’

  ‘Kate got a note,’ Fatima spits, ‘saying Why don’t you throw this one in the Reach too? Someone knows, Kate! Is it Luc? Did you tell him? Is that what this is all about?’ Kate doesn’t answer. She is shaking her head in a kind of mute misery, but I’m not sure what she’s saying no to – the idea that she would tell Luc, or the idea that it’s him, or whether she’s answering Fatima at all.

  ‘Someone knows,’ Fatima says again, her vo
ice rising in pitch. ‘You have to leave!’

  Kate shakes her head again, and she closes her eyes, pressing her fingers against them as if she doesn’t know what to say, but when Fatima says again ‘Kate, are you listening to me?’ she looks up.

  ‘I can’t leave, Fati. You know why.’

  ‘Why not? Why can’t you just pack up and walk away?’

  ‘Because nothing has changed – whoever wrote that note hasn’t gone to the police, which means either they’re just speculating, or they’ve got more to lose than we have. We’re still safe. But if I run, people will know I have something to hide.’

  ‘Well, you stay if you want.’ Fatima turns, begins picking up her bag, her sunglasses from the table. ‘But I’m not. There’s no reason for me to stay here.’

  ‘There is.’ Kate’s voice is hard now. ‘At least for one night. Be reasonable, Fatima. Stay for the alumnae dinner – if you don’t, it punches a hole a mile wide in the reason you’re down here. If you don’t go to the dinner, why would you all suddenly be here after so long?’

  She doesn’t say what that reason is. She doesn’t need to. Not with the headline still blaring from every copy of the local newspaper.

  ‘Fuck,’ Fatima says suddenly, loudly and viciously. She drops her bag on the floor and paces to the window, banging her forehead gently against the rippled-glass pane. ‘Fuck.’

  When she turns back, her face is accusing.

  ‘Why the hell did you bring us down here, Kate? To make sure we’re as implicated as you?’

  ‘What?’ Kate’s face looks like Fatima has slapped her, and she takes a step back. ‘No! Jesus, Fatima, of course not. How can you even say that?’

  ‘Then why?’ Fatima cries.

  ‘Because I couldn’t think how else to tell you!’ Kate shouts back. Her olive cheeks are flushed, though whether with shame or anger, I can’t tell. When she speaks again, it’s to Shadow, as if she can’t bear to look at us. ‘What was the alternative? Email you? Because I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I want on my computer records. Phone you up and spill it out while your husbands listened in the background? I asked you to come down because I thought you deserved to be told face-to-face, and because it seemed like the safest option, and yes, if I’m honest, because I’m a selfish bitch, and I needed you.’

  Her chest is rising and falling, and for a minute I think she is going to burst into tears, but she doesn’t, instead it’s Fatima who stumbles across the room to pull Kate into a hug.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she manages. ‘I should never – I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ Kate says, her voice muffled by Fatima’s scarf. ‘This is all my fault.’

  ‘Stop,’ Thea cuts her off. She goes across to the two of them, and puts her arms around them both. ‘Kate, this is on all of us, not just you. If it hadn’t have been for what we did –’

  She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. We all know what we did, the way that slow, sunlit summer unravelled beneath our fingers, taking Ambrose with it.

  ‘I’ll stay the night,’ Fatima says at last, ‘but I still don’t want to go to the dinner. After everything that happened – how can you think of going back, Kate? After what they did?’

  ‘We have the invitations …’ Thea says slowly. ‘Isn’t that enough? Can’t we say we decided not to go at the last minute, that Fati’s car wouldn’t start, or something? Isa? What do you think?’

  They turn to me, all three of them – three faces, so physically different, and yet their expressions identical: worry, fear, expectation.

  ‘We should go,’ I say at last. I don’t want to, I want to stay here in the warmth and quiet of the Mill. Salten House is the last place I want to go back to. But Kate has already bought the tickets in our names, and we can’t undo that. If we don’t attend there will be four empty places on the seating plan and four unclaimed name tags at the entrance. People know we came down – in a small town like this there are no secrets. If we don’t attend they will ask why. Why we changed our minds. And worst of all, why we came down in the first place, if not for the dinner. And we can’t afford questions.

  ‘But what about Freya?’ Fatima asks, and I realise she’s right. I hadn’t even thought about Freya. Our eyes turn to her, playing contentedly on her back on the rug, chewing some garish piece of bright-coloured plastic. She feels our eyes on her and looks up, and laughs, a gurgling joyous laugh that makes me want to snatch her up and hold her close.

  ‘Could I take her?’ I ask doubtfully. Kate’s face is blank.

  ‘Shit, I never thought of Freya. Hang on.’ She gets her phone out, and I peer over her shoulder as she brings up the school website, and clicks on the ‘alumnae’ tab.

  ‘Dinner … dinner … here we are. FAQs … tickets for guests … oh crap.’

  I read aloud over her shoulder: ‘Partners and older children are welcome, but we regret this formal event is not suitable for babies or children under ten. We can supply a list of local sitters, or B&Bs with babysitting facilities upon request.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Isa. But there’s half a dozen girls in the village who’d come out.’

  I bite back the remark that it’s not that simple. Freya has never taken bottles well, and besides, even if she did, I don’t have any feeding equipment with me.

  I could blame it on the bottles, but it would be a kind of lie, because the bigger truth is that I simply don’t want to leave her.

  ‘I’ll have to try to get her down before they come,’ I say reluctantly. ‘There’s no way she’ll go down for a stranger, she won’t sleep for Owen let alone someone she’s never met. What time does it start?’

  ‘Eight,’ Kate says.

  Shit. It will be touch and go. Freya is sometimes asleep by seven, sometimes she’s awake and chirruping at nine. But there’s no way around this.

  ‘Give me a number,’ I say to Kate. ‘I’ll call. It’s better if I talk to them direct, make sure they’re reasonably savvy about babies.’

  Kate nods.

  ‘Sorry, Isa.’

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ Fatima says sympathetically. She puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes gently. ‘The first time is always the hardest.’

  I feel a wave of irritation. She doesn’t mean to pull the ‘experienced mother’ card, but she can’t help it, and the worst of it is, I know she’s right, she has two children and a vast amount more experience than I have, she has been here before and knows what it’s like. But she doesn’t know Freya, and even if she thinks she remembers the edgy nervousness of the first time she left her baby with a stranger, she doesn’t really, not with the visceral immediacy that I am feeling in this moment.

  I’ve left Freya with Owen a few times. But never like this – never with someone I don’t know from Adam.

  What if something happens?

  ‘Give me the numbers,’ I say to Kate again, ignoring Fatima, shrugging her hand off my shoulder, and I pick Freya up and we go upstairs, the list of numbers clutched in my hot fist, trying not to give way to tears.

  IT IS LATE. The sun is dipping in the sky, the shadows over the Reach are lengthening, and Freya is nodding at my breast, her hand still clutched around the fragile necklace of twisted silver wire that I rarely wear any more, for fear she’ll tug it and snap the links.

  I can hear the others conversing downstairs. They’ve been ready for ages, while I try and fail to get Freya to sleep. But she’s picked up on my nerves, wrinkled her face disgustedly at the unaccustomed smell of the perfume I’ve dabbed behind my ears, batted angry hands at the slippery black silk of a too-tight sheath dress borrowed from Kate. Everything is wrong – the strange room, the strange cot, the light slanting through the too-thin curtains.

  Every time I lower her to the mattress of the cot she jumps and flails and snatches at me, her angry wail rising like a siren above the noise of the river and the low voices downstairs.

  But now … now she seems really and truly
asleep, her mouth gaping, a little trickle of milk oozing from the side of her lips.

  I catch it with the muslin before it can stain the borrowed dress, and then rise, very stealthily, and edge my way to the cot in the corner.

  Lower … lower … I bend over, feeling my back twinge and complain, and then at last she’s on the mattress, my hand firm on her belly, trying to merge the moment of my being there into the moment of my not being there so smoothly that it passes unnoticed.

  Eventually I stand, holding my breath.

  ‘Isa!’ comes a whispered hiss up the stairs, and I grit my teeth, screaming shut up! inside my head, but not daring to say it.

  But Freya slumbers on, and I tiptoe as silently as possible towards the corridor, and down the rickety stairs, my finger to my lips as the others raise a muted cheer, and then hastily hush at the sight of my face.

  They are standing, huddled together at the bottom of the stairs, their eyes upturned to mine. Fatima is dressed in a stunningly beautiful jewelled shalwar kameez in ruby silk that she somehow found in a formal-wear shop in Hampton’s Lee this afternoon. Thea has refused to bow to the dictates of the black-tie invitation and is wearing her usual skinny jeans and a spaghetti-strap top that starts out gold at the bottom hem, and deepens into midnight black at the neck, and it reminds me so much of the hair she used to have as a girl that my breath catches in my throat. Kate is wearing a rose-pink handkerchief dress that looks like it could have cost either pence, or hundreds of pounds, and her hair is loose around her shoulders and damp from the shower.

  There is a lump in my throat as I come to the foot of the stairs – and I don’t even know why. Perhaps it’s the sudden, heart-shattering realisation of how much I love them, or the way they have grown from girls to women in the space of a heartbeat. Perhaps it’s the way their faces in the evening sunlight are overlaid by the memory of the girls they once were – they are polished, a little wary, eyes a little tired, but more beautiful than I ever remember them being as girls, and yet at the same time they are clear-skinned, hopeful, poised like birds to take flight into an unknown future.