Chapter Seventeen
Claudia
‘Is this true?’ Mum asks me, looking up from her phone.
We’re in a curtained cubicle in A the secrets I’ve kept – but I feel suddenly compelled to tell him how sorry I am, for everything.
You deserve better.
But I can’t do that in front of Mum and the driver.
So, ‘I’m fine,’ I say instead.
And Nick gives me a strained smile, then closes my door, climbs in beside the driver, Mum gets in beside me, and we set off back to Doverley.
It isn’t a massive deal that I’ve been invalided out for the rest of the weekend, not like it was when Emma was sick, and I take some comfort from that.
Although we only have a fortnight left on the estate now, with a hard stop at the end – the National Trust need it back on 1 December for their festivities – the focus is still very much on finishing Emma’s scenes, and she has several outstanding that I’m not involved in.
Her final one needs rain, lots of rain, so is being saved until the weather cooperates.
In the meantime, while I’m resting, she’ll shoot a montage of pool matches with the boys (Clare was apparently incredible at pool), then another in which she pens Clare’s un-postable letters to Hans, and, assuming that all goes to schedule, another night in Bettys Bar, with everyone except Nick and me.
We will both feature in that sequence, just back in Doverley’s abandoned billiards room, with the idea that the noisy, boozy fun in Bettys will be intercut with much steamier, silent footage of the two of us.
My anxiety over filming that footage is something I think about at least once a day.
It’s one of a trio of scenes scheduled for the last week of this month that I’m really, really dreading.
The second is the shot where I give Robbie the coordinates that lead him and the crew to their deaths.
The third is the one when I kill myself – which, like the second, I’m still hoping gets dropped from the script.
For the present though, I can’t do anything about that, so I park it and, once we arrive at Doverley, leave Mum in Jeff’s capable hands, gratefully acquiescing with her insistence that I go straight upstairs and make use of my rolltop bath.
‘Remember to wear a shower cap,’ she calls after me as, with Nick, I head for the stairs. ‘You can’t get those stitches wet.’
I don’t see her again for the rest of the evening. She texts me while I’m still in the bath, saying her room’s extremely comfortable, I’m not to worry about her, she’s going to eat dinner with Felix then have an early night.
I suggest you do the same. Phil and the girls send their love xxx
‘You pull that off,’ says Nick, nodding at my plastic cap as he comes out of the shower, wrapping himself in a towel.
‘My hair’s going to get gross,’ I say. I’m not allowed to wash it until these forty-eight hours are over.
‘You could never be gross, Claude.’ Exhaustedly, he runs his hand down his face. ‘Want me to leave you in peace?’
‘No, stay.’
It takes him aback.
I see that from the look he gives me, and, thinking of how incredible he’s been all day, feel guiltier yet.
I’m sorry, I wanted to tell him in the car.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say to him now. ‘I know I haven’t been making anything easy.’
‘I’m not interested in easy,’ he says, moving to rest against the vanity. His shoulders are coated with beads of water that catch the lights’ glow. His face, despite his tiredness – despite the years I’ve spent looking at it – still gives me pause, pulling my eye.
It’s a good face.
My favourite face, in fact.
Yet, even as I think that, I discover I’m picturing Robbie’s too, and feel even worse.
‘You deserve … ’ I begin.
‘Don’t,’ he says, cutting me off. ‘I won’t hear it.’
‘But you do deserve better.’
‘I don’t deserve anything. I want you.’
‘I think I’ve lost me,’ I say, without knowing I’m going to, and my throat closes up, like it’s trying to stop the words leaving, only they’re already out.
And they don’t seem to surprise Nick at all.
His expression moves in pain, but not shock.
‘I lost me too,’ he says. ‘The difference between us, though, is I’ve wanted to find my way back to who I am.’
‘I want to find my way back … ’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
With a sigh, he tips his head up, looking, sightlessly, at the lights above.
‘What happened this morning, Claude? How did you fall like that?’
‘I slipped … ’
‘You were standing still.’
‘I still slipped.’
Slowly, he brings his gaze back down to mine. ‘Did you want to do that?’
The question astounds me.
‘No,’ I say, appalled. ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking?’
‘No.’ He frowns. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Nick, I did not want this.’
‘I was scared. You scared me. You keep doing it.’
‘I don’t mean to.’
‘Then stop,’ he says, and his low voice cracks on the stop. ‘Please. Let me in.’
‘I want to.’
‘Then do it.’
‘It’s hard … ’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m frightened too.’ This time, it’s my voice that fractures. ‘I’m so afraid I’m not enough for you. That I’m keeping you from how happy you could be.’
Setting his jaw, he draws a long, frustrated breath.
‘You’re enough for me,’ he says. ‘You’ve always been enough. But you haven’t given me you in a long time.’
‘I don’t know where I am.’
‘You’re not looking.’
That stings. ‘Yes, I am … ’
‘You’re not … ’
‘I am.’
‘You’re not.’ He shouts it, with a sudden ferocity that silences me.
‘The only person you seem interested in finding is a dead woman.’ His eyes, fixed on mine, fill with tears that I watch him fight to hold back.
I can’t bear it. Can’t bear that I’m doing this to him.
‘It’s like you’ve given up on you, and that doesn’t make me happy. It’s breaking my heart.’
I don’t know what to say.
It’s breaking my heart too.
That’s what I think.
But I still can’t find my voice.
I really can’t speak.
And I’m not holding back my tears.
They’re out, gushing from my eyes as Nick moves towards me, kneeling beside the bath.
And I’m not sure what I should do – if I should turn from him, as I’m used to doing, or towards him, as I want to – but while I’m still deciding, he rests his head against my plastic-covered one, holding my face in his hands, and his touch feels so welcome, so right, so good, that I stun myself by kissing him, which stuns him too – I feel that from his stillness – but then, he kisses me back.
And if, as I reach up, lacing my fingers with his, there’s a moment when I sense the touch of that other hand I felt in Tim’s lounge, in Bettys Bar, and kiss Nick harder – as him, and as him, the lines between my now and then, this love and that love, once again blurring – it’s fleeting, gone in a gasp, and I don’t allow myself to dwell on it.
Nick kisses me more, and for the first time since before we lost our son, neither of us attempts to push the other away.
We cling to each other, not for any camera, or any script, but for us, as us, in private, and it feels so precarious, so delicate and unexpected, that I can’t bring myself to ruin it by questioning whether it was entirely him I was with just now.
‘I love you,’ I say, looking into his luminous eyes, windows to his soul, and think only of how easy it suddenly is to pour my heart into those words. ‘I want to give you me.’
‘I want you to, too.’
‘I want to believe it’s enough.’
‘You’re enough … ’
‘I hope so.’
‘You are,’ he says, running his hand around my neck, down my bubble-covered back.
I’m still wearing my shower cap.
Remembering, I go to take it off.
‘No,’ he says, his eyes creasing in a smile. ‘Leave it on.’
And, through my tears, I laugh.
He laughs too.
We laugh together.
Then we kiss again.
This time, we don’t stop.
It really has been a long time.
A long, long time.
Almost a year.
We don’t talk about that, afterwards.
We just lie together on our bed, silent and entangled, looking at each other, his hand on my waist, mine on his chest, both of us absorbing what we’ve just done.
I’m glad that we’ve let it happen.
Relieved.
Now that we have, it comes to me how much I’ve missed it.
Missed him.
And I don’t know what it will mean for us from here. I only know that it feels good, so very good, to be lying in his arms again like this, for now.
His eyes grow heavy.
I feel mine do the same.
‘Please don’t go upstairs tonight,’ he says, bringing me back from the brink of unconsciousness. ‘I won’t sleep if I think you might. I need to sleep … ’
‘I know you do.’ He’s been awake for the best part of forty-eight hours. ‘I won’t go up.’
‘You’ve told me that before.’
‘I won’t go. I promise.’
This time, I keep my word.
Rousing myself just long enough to swallow the painkillers I’ve been prescribed, I fall asleep easily, and, for once, feel no pull to the attic.
Perhaps, because I want to be where I am.
Or maybe because the painkillers are really strong.
Regardless, I wake only once before dawn, stirred by Nick’s movement as he sits up, checking his phone. I blink, registering his blue-lit frown, then, groggily, drift back to sleep.
‘What were you looking at last night?’ I ask him, when, at six, his alarm goes off.
‘When?’ he asks, dragging himself up to sitting, looking back at me from the edge of the bed.
‘I don’t know. You were on your phone.’
‘Was I?’
‘Yes.’
He shrugs. ‘I guess I was checking the time.’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘No.’ His brow furrows. ‘Kind of.’ Flexing his shoulders, he stretches, then stands. ‘I was pretty out of it.’
He seems sincere.
But then, he is an excellent actor.
I consider pushing him further.
Asking him again about that unnamed text he dismissed as nothing the other day.
Have you changed your mind?
But before I can, he leans down, kissing me, and it’s nice.
I don’t want to ruin it.
‘Go back to sleep,’ he says. ‘Make the most of having the weekend off.’
‘All right,’ I say, and let it go.
Still, as he heads into the bathroom, taking his phone with him, I’m left with a feeling of unease.
He never normally takes his phone into the bathroom.
He’s hiding something, I’m certain.
Keeping secrets too.