Chapter 43
CHAPTER 43
Sophie was in Charlie’s car. She’d called him as soon as Beau and Tamar had left, trying to sound casual and normal, to ask if he wanted to ‘catch up’ some time.
It had been weighing on her heavily since he’d turned up at the Crown when she’d been there with Sebastian. She’d cancelled him for another man and lied about it. She hadn’t been thinking straight.
‘Now’s good,’ he’d said, when she rang. So he didn’t seem to be holding a grudge. ‘I’m already on my way into St Leonards to get something and I can pick you up right after. I’ll take you on a mystery tour.’
They were on a narrow lane travelling through pretty agriculture countryside that Sophie hadn’t seen before and when they came to a small group of buildings, he pulled over to the side of the road and they got out.
After grabbing a couple of blankets, Charlie led the way across the road and onto a beach. There were high cliffs to the right, and in the other direction, stretching east, miles and miles of shingle. The beach was divided at regular intervals by wooden groynes, yet it still seemed much wilder than the coast at St Leonards, and even out where Rey’s beach hut was.
‘This is lovely,’ she said, raising her face into the breeze. ‘Where are we?’
‘Pett Level,’ said Charlie. ‘My favourite place to swim – and to decompress. I do like an autumn and even a winter sea swim, but don’t worry, I’m not suggesting we go in today.’
They walked along for a while and then he turned towards the water’s edge and laid one of the blankets down to the left of one of the wooden partitions, indicating for Sophie to sit. Once she was down there, she realised they were completely sheltered from the wind. She gazed out to sea and sighed deeply.
‘There you are,’ said Charlie. ‘Let the tension out and the Pett Level calm in. Coming here always lowers my blood pressure.’
She closed her eyes and surrendered to the moment, then opened them again, looking out over the choppy waves, relishing the feeling of the sun on her face.
‘This is wonderful,’ she said. ‘I feel spoiled. Thank you, Charlie.’
They sat for a while, silently gazing out to sea. Just being.
He spoke first. ‘I wanted to spoil you, Sophie, because I think you deserve it. And to show you this lovely spot, which I knew you would appreciate, but also because I want to tell you something. I want you to know my whole story.’
‘Okay...’ said Sophie.
‘I told you how I lost my son.’
‘You did. So awful.’
‘It was an appalling trauma, as you would know. A sudden, pointless, avoidable death. I went quite crazy. Which is why, as well as losing my son, I lost everything else important. I drank too much, I was angry with everybody and...’
He paused and pulled his lips together tightly. Sophie could see this was something he found hard to say. She understood that.
‘I had an affair,’ he said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. ‘With a young teacher at my daughter’s school. I didn’t even like her that much, but she flirted with me and in my insanity and my self-hate for being alive when my beautiful boy was dead, I responded. We were found out and everyone at the school knew. I looked like a disgusting sleaze – I was a disgusting sleaze – and my wife was so humiliated she went for everything in the divorce and got it. I didn’t have the strength to fight and I didn’t think I deserved anything, anyway. The stress made me useless at work and they fired me. And the worst thing of all is that, as I told you, my daughter still doesn’t talk to me, so in effect, I’ve lost both my children.’
He turned to her, his eyes holding hers. ‘There is a particular reason I’m telling you this now, Sophie. Last week, in the Crown, with your brother-in-law...’
Sophie’s mouth went dry. She looked down at her hands resting in her lap, feeling sick.
‘I’m not passing judgement, Sophie,’ he continued. ‘It must be a great comfort to be so close to Matt’s extended family, but I couldn’t help picking up on a vibe between you two that day – and I’d seen a glimpse of it already at the beach party – something a bit beyond the normal in-law connection. So it’s been pressing on me to tell you my story, because after the shock you’ve had, you could make poor decisions, as I did. I don’t want that to happen to you.’
Sophie felt a tear slide down her cheek.
‘I’m sorry to upset you,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to tell you my whole story, because if someone had given me advice then, everything could have been different for me.’
The tears came faster and Sophie couldn’t help a sob escaping. She groped in her pocket to see if she had a tissue and Charlie reached into his and pulled out a large cotton handkerchief, pressing it into her hands. She wiped her cheeks.
‘I kissed him, Charlie. Nothing more, but even that was too much. You see, his wife’s left him and I think on top of Matt dying, it just made us both lose our hold on reality. Thank you for telling me your story. I totally understand how that happened. When everything in your life has been mangled, it can somehow seem weirdly right to do the worst possible thing.’
Charlie nodded. ‘Yep, and I certainly did. But the great thing is – you didn’t.’
‘But I might have. Seb’s as lost as I am and although it didn’t go any further that weekend, he keeps messaging me, wanting me to go up to London to stay with him.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Well, I’m not going to stay with him, that’s for sure. I’ll have to find a way to distance myself a little bit, without damaging our friendship. I don’t know quite how yet, but I’ll figure it out.’ Sophie took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Anything.’
‘Do you think having all the stuff with the affair and the divorce and your daughter to deal with made it harder for you to process your son’s death and deal with the grief?’
‘Totally,’ said Charlie. ‘Just when I needed all my capacity to deal with his loss, it was bound up with all the other stuff, so I couldn’t process any of it properly. Whenever I tried to address one aspect, another one would pop up. It was like emotional Whack-a-Mole.’
Sophie had to smile. That was so exactly what it was like for her. Every time she tried to deal with losing Matt, up would pop the Gillette aspect. And when she tried to work through that, she would get consumed by grief and then the anger would come again. And now she’d added confusion about Sebastian to the mix. It was exhausting and impossible.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘There is something else I think I’m going to have to tell Sebastian, but I’m going to tell you first. In fact, you are the very first person I’m going to tell this to.’
Charlie turned to face her and took both her hands in his. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘You know my husband—’
‘Matt.’
‘Matt,’ she said, nodding. ‘My husband of thirty years who got run over by a heavy goods vehicle. Dead. Awful. But there was something else. An hour before it happened, he’d told me he was leaving me for another woman. And that was the day after we’d exchanged contracts to sell our family home and buy the one down here, so there was no going back on it. He was going to take his half of the money and go off with her and leave me to move to Hastings on my own.’
‘Sheesh,’ said Charlie, looking properly shocked.
It was good to see. It meant she hadn’t been overdramatising this whole time. What Matt had done really was appalling.
‘That’s terrible,’ Charlie added. ‘One then the other straight after?’
Sophie nodded her head slowly. ‘He destroyed me emotionally and then he got killed. So I don’t know what I am, Charlie. Am I an abandoned wife or am I a poor grieving widow?’
‘And you’ve told nobody?’
‘Who could I tell? Even in the depths of the shock, I knew the most important thing was to protect the boys from it.’
‘So all this time you’ve been the secret double-headed grief-confusion monster?’
She nodded.
‘And,’ he continued, ‘because publicly, you’re confined to the saintly widow role you don’t get to enjoy the righteous revenge aspect and have to hold all that anger in. No wonder you feel confused! I’m surprised your brain hasn’t exploded.’
Feeling too moved to speak, Sophie squeezed his hands. After all this time of having it buzzing round her head like a maddening bluebottle, to hear her situation summed up and understood by somebody else felt almost like a miracle.
‘Ten months I’ve been keeping this inside. There were times when I was scared to open my mouth in case it all came out in a big scream.’
Tears filled her eyes once more and Charlie pulled her towards him. She surrendered to it, enjoying the feel of his jacket against her cheek and his lovely scent.
‘You always smell so nice,’ she said.
‘That’s because I always put on my best aftershave when I know I’m going to be seeing you,’ he said, softly. ‘Lucky I had it in the car today.’
Sophie glanced down for a moment, taking it in.
‘You know I have feelings for you, Sophie,’ he said, when she looked up again. ‘I did think they might be returned, but I know you’re in a very vulnerable place, so we can just leave that where it is for now, and when – if – the time is right, we can go wherever that takes us.’
‘Has the thing with Seb put you off?’ she asked, knowing it was pathetic, but wanting to punish herself. She was tainted. Damaged goods.
Charlie raised his forefinger and wagged it at her. ‘You can stop that right away. Don’t start making yourself the bad one, so there’s a reason all this crap has happened to you. It hasn’t affected the way I feel about you at all. Although it might take me a while to forgive him—’ He chortled softly. ‘I was ready to put one on him in the Crown. Could you tell?’
‘Yes!’ said Sophie. ‘But I thought it was me you were angry with.’
‘There you go again,’ said Charlie. ‘Stop blaming yourself, Sophie. You are in a horrible nightmare created entirely by somebody else. Don’t do what I did and somehow make it your own fault.’
Sophie looked out at the sea, thinking about what he’d said. She needed to process it.
‘But there is something I think you should do,’ said Charlie.
She turned back to him.
‘Tell everyone everything. It will be difficult to tell the boys – and Matt’s brothers – but it will be better in the long run. You’re carrying this burden on your own. You didn’t create it. Matt did, and even in death, he has to take the moral responsibility for it, not you.’