Chapter 12
TWELVE
It was another hour before Ellen and Robert made their way to bed. Joe had been unrelenting in persuading them not to leave and – at one point – had even suggested they stay up to see the sunrise, before Lucy had dragged him off to their room.
Now Robert sat on the edge of the bed, pulling off his shoes, seemingly oblivious to the cauldron of anger that was about to come his way. He chuckled softly to himself. ‘Joe’s a character, isn’t he?’
She had no time for more small talk. ‘How do you know Charlotte?’
He didn’t turn to face her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I said. It’s clear that you’ve met Charlotte before. And possibly Joe, too. What’s going on, Robert?’
Now he did turn towards her, his face in profile. ‘How much wine have you had?’
‘I heard you, talking to Lucy. She was apologising to you for Charlotte turning up. Why would she do that?’
He twisted his body so that she could see his whole face. He was looking at her as if she was crazy. ‘She was apologising because she’d invited us to stay and hadn’t realised that her daughter was going to turn up. I told her that it didn’t matter at all, because it doesn’t, does it?’
Of course it didn’t matter if Lucy’s daughter joined them, but he was avoiding her question. ‘Why was she apologising to you? And why is she paying you so much attention?’
Robert rubbed his eyebrows with his finger and thumb. ‘You are imagining things. Yesterday you said I was paying her too much attention and now you’re saying the reverse. I need to go to sleep, Ellen, I’m exhausted.’
Ellen could’ve screamed. She was not imagining things.
From the moment they’d arrived, there was another layer of communication between Robert and Lucy that she wasn’t privy to.
‘Don’t try and pull the wool over my eyes.
Every time I turn my back, you and Lucy are whispering about something and then, when I come close, you change the conversation. ’
Robert rolled over and looked at her, his face dark and unreadable. ‘You always do this. I said it wasn’t a good idea to come and then you push push push until you get your own way and then, what a surprise, I was right.’
His tone took her breath away. He never spoke to her like that. Robert was the most easy-going man in the world. They rarely argued about anything. ‘I always do this?’
He closed his eyes as if he was trying to make her go away. Took a few deep breaths before he spoke. ‘I didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t a good idea.’
Her nagging suspicions told her that this was more than just him not wanting to take a holiday. ‘Was there something between you and Lucy. Years ago. When we were at college? Before you and me, I mean.’
Lucy had known Robert before Ellen. They’d taken some of the same classes, so she’d met him there. If Ellen remembered rightly, he’d also been her lab partner that first term.
Like a politician, he continued to evade her questions. ‘How is this relevant now?’
It wasn’t a no. ‘Answer the question. Was there ever anything between you and Lucy?’
‘It was university, Ellen. Those first few weeks were a free-for-all. I think we kissed at a party early on. It was nothing. Really.’
The image that flashed into her mind made her nauseous. ‘How come you’ve never told me that?’
‘Because it’s not important. We’re talking about twenty-eight years ago, Ellen.’
‘But, at the time, why didn’t you tell me? Neither of you ever said anything.’
She remembered Lucy reacting strangely when she’d first got together with Robert. How she’d told her that he was boring and not the kind of guy she should be with. With this new information, Ellen wondered whether that had been jealousy talking.
Even with a few glasses of wine inside her, she knew that she had to choose her words carefully. There was so much bubbling beneath the surface that she didn’t intend to voice. Instead, she retreated into a temporary silence while Robert got ready for bed.
Though it was only destined to make her feel worse, she checked her phone to see where Abigail was. For a moment or two, she thought it mustn’t be working. Abigail’s icon had completely disappeared. She shut it down and re-opened it. Still the same thing, no icon.
Heart in her mouth she called her daughter. Even if her phone had run out of battery, her icon would still be displayed at the last place she’d been. There was no possible explanation except that…
‘Hello? Mum? Is that you?’
Her daughter’s words sounded slurred. Behind her Robert turned in amazement. ‘What are you doing, Ellen?’
She ignored him and spoke to Abigail. ‘Yes. It’s me. You disappeared from my phone. I wanted to check that you were okay?’
There was an exaggerated groan at the other end. ‘I’m at a party, Mum.’
She sounded drunk. Ellen wanted to ask her who was there with her, whether she was accepting drinks from people she didn’t know, how she was getting home. ‘That doesn’t explain why you disappeared from the app. Is your phone working?’
That was a stupid question when she was speaking to her on it. Abbie got uncharacteristically angry. ‘I deleted it, Mum! Because I’m eighteen and you don’t need to know where I am.’
And she hung up.
For a moment, she was about to call back, until Robert spoke. ‘Ellen, what were you thinking calling Abbie like that when she’s out with her friends?’
She was so hurt it felt raw. With his pragmatic approach to life, she didn’t expect him to understand. ‘I was worried. Do you know she’s deleted herself from the tracker app?’
His laugh was hollow, unkind even. ‘I don’t blame her. For goodness’ sake, Ellen. You need to stop worrying about what the girls are doing and where they’re going. It’s becoming an obsession. You’ve got to let them live their lives. We should be living our own lives.’
His anger stung. They never argued like this. But she’d never felt as unsure of him as she had in the last few days. ‘But we aren’t living our lives, are we? You’re working all the time. When you’re home, you’re constantly preoccupied. And then…the way you’ve been around Lucy…’
Robert groaned. ‘You’re drunk, Ellen. Let’s just go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
Behind her, she felt the mattress move as he got into bed, but she couldn’t face even turning to look at him. What had happened to them? What was going on here?
If the roles were reversed right now, she’d be asking him why he was still sitting there, frozen in place, rather than coming to bed.
She wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep as he had.
But Robert was soon softly snoring and she was left adrift, not knowing what to do with the conflict of emotions firing in her chest.
What was going on?
Though her mind was still fuzzy with the wine that Joe had poured into her glass all evening, Ellen tried to remember how Lucy and Robert had been around one another at university. Had there ever been a sign that something might’ve been going on back then?
She suddenly remembered the photographs she’d brought with her.
To keep them flat, she’d tucked them inside the cover of a paperback which had sat, unread, on the dressing table.
Thanks to their smartphones, her girls probably had more pictures of one night out than she had for her entire three years at university.
This handful of snapshots was all the more precious for that.
The top one was from their first year, before she and Robert were together.
He was to the right of the picture next to Lucy.
Ellen was on the far left. She’d forgotten how handsome he was back then, but also how young they all looked.
In her memories of those days, they’d been adults.
Now, looking back from two decades on, she could see that they weren’t much more than children.
From the background, and the smoke around their heads, they were clearly in a bar and Robert was very close to Lucy; their shoulders touching.
Had something been going on between them then?
Though Ellen and Lucy had been friends since their first meeting, in the early days there’d been evenings when Lucy had been out without her.
Had some of those nights been spent with Robert? In a bar? In his room?
Dropping this photo onto the bed, she looked at the second.
Ellen and Lucy with the other two girls they’d hung around with.
What had happened to them? For the first year, they’d been super tight with Lucy – hanging on every word she said and copying everything that she did – then, with no real explanation, they’d disappeared from their lives.
At the time, she hadn’t really minded. But now she wondered if they knew something she hadn’t.
Robert had kissed Lucy. It was before he was with her.
It wasn’t a big deal. But if it really was ‘nothing’ like he’d just said, why had it never come up before?
Back then, when they’d first got together, there was no good reason for him not to tell her that something had happened between them. Or for Lucy to do the same.
Why had they kept it a secret?