A Trick of the Mind (22 page)

We drank while the world went on beneath us, doing busy stuff in the summer city, people hurrying hither and thither and texting and emailing and talking and tweeting, as if no one knew there
was this other way to be, this blissful other world so close to their own.

We took a taxi to Moro’s and ate fabulous Moroccan delicacies and Patrick ran his hand up my leg and told me he loved me. Then we got a taxi home again.

‘Tell me something new about the river,’ I said as we lay on his bed, gazing out over its rippling surface, lights reflecting up from its depths. ‘Something nice.’

‘I can’t think of anything that nice at the moment. The river is a monster at times, Ellie, however benign it may appear.’

I looked at him.

‘It looks pretty nice at the moment,’ I said.

‘Maybe. But it’s deceptive.’

‘Actually, I know,’ I said. ‘It’s what I try to show in my painting. The darkness that lies beneath an apparently benign surface.’

‘We’ve got so much in common, darling,’ he said, tugging off my jeans and turning me over.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That we know that things that look benign can be deceptive. Now sshhh, while I kiss you, all the way down your back.’

Later, I awoke in his bed. Patrick wasn’t there, but I could hear movement in the kitchen across the other side of the vast open space, could just see a soft light, hear
the clatter of cups. A silvery light was pouring in through the curtainless windows from the city buildings all around us that meant it never grew completely dark outside. Lights flashed on and off
at the top of tall buildings, and bright windows reached to the sky in towers of glass and steel while the spire of the Shard glowed tall and ghostly up to the sky.

On the cabinet on my side of the bed was the photo of Patrick’s wife.

I picked it up, feeling a stab of jealousy that I tried to quash at the realisation he had put her right there. She was dead, for Christ’s sake. You couldn’t be jealous of a dead
person – could you? I remembered he had told Chiara she had died of meningitis while he had told me quite clearly she had died at sea.

I looked more closely. She was wearing a white lace dress, flimsy, blowing back against her in the wind. Her wedding dress.

She was bending forward, holding the dress against her knees to stop it blowing up. Clutching a bouquet of flowers. Behind her was the sea and then, of course, I realised she was standing on a
beach. In fact, it looked a lot like the beach in front of Aunty May’s house. I squinted closer. It
was
the beach in front of Aunty May’s house. There was the groyne, the one I
knew so well, with the ‘Danger’ sign, and in the distance you could just see the great white spheres of Sizewell power station.

I shuddered to think she was dead. She looked so pretty, so alive in this picture. So full of love. She must have felt the same way towards Patrick as I did, and it gave me an odd feeling of
sisterliness for her.

Patrick came back in then and I almost jumped out of my skin.

This time he didn’t respond as I was afraid he might, the way he had been so angry when he’d found me looking at the photos of him as a child.

‘I should have put that away,’ he said. ‘It must be upsetting to you.’

‘Patrick,’ I said, ‘you told Chiara your wife died of meningitis. You told me she had an accident. What did happen?’

He came over to me, gently took the photo out of my hand and lay down beside me. I drew back from him, prised his hand off my breast where he had let it rest.

‘Ellie, Ellie, I thought you liked this?’

‘I do. I will when you’ve explained. Meningitis or an accident?’

He lay very close, his eyes shut. Was he going to speak? Or avoid telling me the truth?

‘You told me she had an accident at sea,’ I said. ‘But how exactly did she die?’

‘Speedboat,’ he said at last. ‘That’s all I want to say at the moment. It’s still quite raw. It’s still very painful to relive it. I don’t like telling
people, Ellie. Especially people like your friends who I barely know. Because it wasn’t pleasant.’

‘No, I’m sure but . . .’

‘OK. You’re not going to let it drop. So I will tell you. She took out a power boat. I warned her it wasn’t safe to drive, but she got it into her head and . . . oh no, I
can’t.’

‘It’s OK, if it’s too painful, you don’t have to talk about it now.’

‘Look.’ He got off the bed and stood up. He turned to face me. His expression had changed; he looked like a small boy who had been unfairly accused of something, indignant, his lips
puckered.

‘She was supposed to be there for me.’ His voice had gone up a pitch. ‘She
insisted
on leaving me. On going back to Dunwich without me, on taking that boat. She was so
headstrong, always thinking she knew better than me . . .’

‘Were you there?’

‘Of course I was there, I was telling her not to go. I saw it all.’

‘Now you’re frightening me.’

‘You asked me to tell you, so I’m telling you. Do you want to hear it, or not?’

I didn’t, and I did.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Exactly what I warned her would happen if she insisted on breaking up with me. The boat went out of control and there was no safety cord installed, which normally would have made the
engine cut out. So. She shot out, and the boat cut her up into pieces.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Stef died in a speed boat accident,’ he said. ‘And her family have given me strife about it ever since. They couldn’t accept she had died in an accident due to her own
headstrong nature. But that’s how it is. How it was. That’s it, Ellie. What else do you want to know?’

‘Nothing. That was all.’

‘Are you satisfied?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You asked and I said I’d only tell you if you really wanted to hear. You insisted, Ellie, and now you’re upset. So I’m asking, are you satisfied?’

‘No of course not, Patrick. I’m shocked, not satisfied.’

‘Then stop asking about it . . . she wouldn’t want you to pry, and probe and insist.’

‘But I—’

‘Do you think she would want you, or your crusty friends, to know how her perfect body shot into the air, how the very boat she was driving walloped into her so her blood spilt onto the
white froth of the waves, turning it all red? It was ghastly. And you’re insisting on making me relive it.’

‘I’m so sorry, Patrick. I really don’t want to make you relive it. Let’s stop talking about it now.’

‘Ellie.’ He moved towards me. He looked very tall, very big against the silver window, his face in silhouette, his broad shoulders tensed. His voice had gone back to normal and he
spoke softly, gently.

‘I think you ought to know that she let me down badly, the way EVERYONE seems to think it’s OK to hurt me and then leave me. You’re not going to do that, are you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So I would like you to agree something for me,’ Patrick said.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t want you ever to make me go out to meet your friends again.’

‘Oh.’

I felt my heart sink. I had so wanted them to know him, to see how happy I was, how far my life had moved on. Though now . . .

‘And I think I’d prefer it too if you stopped seeing them as well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I say. You don’t need to hang out with that bunch of hobos any more now you’ve got me. Do you?’

‘But . . .’

‘Ellie, Ellie.’ He had come over to where I was sitting on the bed and he was holding me close to him, pressing me up against him, squeezing me so the breath was crushed from my
lungs.

‘You’re mine and I’m yours, and that’s all that matters. You can paint at the studio, that I have given you specifically for the purpose, and for now you can go and teach
if you must, you can take your poor old dad his shopping, but then you’re to come straight back to me, OK?’

His tone changed again, to the seductive one I had first been so attracted to.

‘We’re building the perfect life between us. You with your painting. Me with my contacts. We’re both on the cusp of such exciting things, we don’t need people who will
hold us back. Sometimes I simply can’t believe we met! Can you, Ellie? I want to share everything I’ve got with you, and for you to share your whole self with me. It’s
what’s meant. But I don’t want to share you with anyone else.’

And he began to kiss my face so gently, so slowly I didn’t think I had any strength left to object.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Although my teaching job was hard work I always found it grounding after the art I did in the week, which was solitary and about ideas. But today it also came as a welcome
escape from thinking too much about everything that Patrick had said the night before.

I had awoken in the small hours in a cold sweat. There had been no covers over me. I’d sat up. Looked around. For quite some time I had no idea where I was. It seemed to be dark, but I
could see a pink streak in the sky visible through the window and the usual lights blinking on and off across the city.

Then, it came back to me – I was in Patrick’s apartment,
my
apartment now I’d moved in. I could see now the shapes were his strange, spartan industrial furniture, the
white faces just the blown-up photos he kept on his walls. Then the sensations of earlier began to slide back into my mind, the drink he’d kept on pouring, saying it would make us both feel
better, that it was too painful reliving that day, the day Stef died, that he hadn’t meant to get angry with me. At first, I’d been so taken aback by the switch in his character I had
considered leaving then and there. But as he apologised, his face a picture of remorse, I softened. It’s OK, I had told myself . . . I can always run. He can’t. After this I’d
forgiven him and told him I understood. He’d repeatedly filled my glass, apologising, telling me I needed the drink to soothe me after his outburst. I accepted drink after drink from him.
Then the vague awareness that I would no longer be able to run, and anyway, where would I run to? That I could barely stand up, but that it was all fading, everything was fading and I must have
fallen asleep.

I felt parched and ill, and watched through the vast window in Patrick’s bedroom the soft peachy light creep up over the Thames, the shapes of ships and pilings and the buildings on the
other side gradually solidifying.

I thought of Chiara telling me I barely knew him, was I sure I should move in with him? Finn saying, ‘
But he’s not your type, Ellie
.’

Were they right? But they didn’t know him, didn’t know what he’d been through.

I rolled over, threw my legs over the edge of the bed, but then I felt Patrick’s strong arms hauling me back towards him.

‘Patrick, I need to get to work.’

‘I’m sorry, Ellie, if I upset you last night. I’m going to make up for it.’

Later I got up and pulled on my clothes. It was Friday – a teaching day and I couldn’t be late.

I went into his bathroom to tidy myself up as best I could. I washed my face, took a toothbrush out of a holder and cleaned my teeth. My knees felt weak and painful, my eyelids heavy as if I
couldn’t open them properly. It was an effort to think, to put one thought coherently in front of another. I would put my teaching clothes on. I would brush my hair and then quietly I would
leave and go to work. I needed time to assimilate what Patrick had told me last night. To think about what I was doing. Where my sense of responsibility for Patrick’s injuries had seeped over
into passion, where my passion had seeped over into obsession. Whether my obsession had led me to a place of entrapment?

Should
I have left last night when all he told me about Stef and the demands he had made had made me feel uneasy? But where would I have gone? The flat was let. Finn was angry with me.
Chiara had run out of patience with me.

Stupidly I must have accepted more and more drink from him until I lost the will to think for myself.

Now in the sober light of day, I rationalised. Patrick had violent mood swings, that was clear. But they were part of his frustration with his injury, the outbursts a form of fury with all that
had happened to his wife as well as to him. Of course he was afraid I might leave him. Of course he was afraid that my friends might try to pull me back into their world. All I had to do was hang
on in there with him, tend to him, and he would recover both physically and emotionally. I was perfectly capable of looking after myself if he got stroppy with me again. But I owed it to him to
stand by him. I owed him more than he would ever be aware of.

As I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to make myself look presentable for work, I considered his saying he didn’t want me to meet up with my friends any more. In the sober light of
morning this seemed ridiculous, there was no way he could enforce such a demand. I wouldn’t make
him
meet up with them, while it felt humiliating to him with his fresh injury. I
would just keep my two worlds separate. He didn’t need to know.

I got into school early and said hello to Jim, the caretaker, who as usual lurked in his storeroom looking for staff members to swoop on so he could regale them with his latest
football stories. I stopped and he asked me if I had heard the latest news of the Hammers and I reminded him I didn’t follow football and he reminded me that my new studio was on the site
where the team was founded and I should therefore take a certain pride in them. In the middle of a sentence, he paused and frowned.

‘You bin in a fight?’

I’d absent-mindedly swept my hair up as I talked and now I let it fall.

‘Sorry, luv, probably shouldn’t mention it.’

‘It’s OK.’ I could feel myself blushing. He must think I had a hickey – how undignified! We moved on, discussed the likelihood of the Hammers ever reaching the top of the
Premier League. There was something comforting about this chitter-chatter: I wished all I ever had to occupy my mind was whether West Ham were going to win their next match. I left him counting
replacement packs of toilet paper and passed the kitchens where I waved to Pauline, a warm woman whom the children adored – this school had more children on school dinners than any other;
even kids whose parents were willing to make them packed lunches went for the hot dinner option because Pauline laughed and chatted as she served them up her lovingly cooked old-fashioned nursery
dishes: shepherd’s pie, toad-in-the-hole or macaroni cheese, culinary miracles when you thought of her restricted budget.