‘So this is what we’ll do,’ he said, as if he were making a shopping list. ‘We’re going to tell the twins. You and Marcus will get a divorce, you and I will marry and we’ll live happily ever after.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘I’ve got something to show you.’ He picked up an iPad and slipped on to the bench to sit right beside her, his hand on her thigh. He held the screen thoughtfully close up in front of her and stroked his way to some photographs.
‘This is my house in LA,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d keep it. Do you like it? If you don’t, I can always buy another.’ He took her through a series of photographs of large, beautifully furnished rooms, a dark-bottomed infinity pool, and a night-time picture of a terrace hanging on the edge of a hill above the lurex sprawl of Los Angeles.
‘We’ll sit here in the evenings and I’ll watch you drink champagne.’ He pulled across another picture of a red bedroom, with a beautifully dressed oversized bed, brocaded hangings and what appeared to be an original Klimt hanging above the pillows. ‘I had it decorated with you in mind. You like red, don’t you? And this –’ he opened another photo of a vast, more minimally furnished room, with the same view as the terrace – ‘is for Olly. See the guitar.’ He pointed to the wall. ‘An original Les Paul. Owned by Kurt Cobain. When I found it I knew he’d love it.’
‘But, when—’
‘This is for Bella.’ He showed her another bedroom, softer, with more pattern to it. ‘She could have my Alice Neel in there. But,’ he smiled at Lara, ‘she’ll have to keep it tidier than her Brighton room.’
‘How do you know—’
‘Hello beautiful breast,’ he said, and bent to kiss her left nipple.
Lara’s mind whirled. The food had lifted the hangover and ache that had clouded her brain.
This wasn’t romance. It wasn’t nostalgia. It wasn’t
what-if
.
She had been so, so stupid.
‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ she said.
‘I’ve had long enough to think it over,’ he said, drawing a line with his finger down her front, from her breast to her navel.
She tensed her stomach muscles and tried to draw away, but his other hand remained firmly on her leg. ‘You’ve been very clever, haven’t you? It wasn’t coincidence we bumped into each other, was it?’
‘Got me in one!’ He winked at her.
‘Tell me how you did it,’ she said, trying to sound more fascinated than horrified, trying to buy some time.
Stephen sat back, extending his right arm along the back of the bench, so one hand held her firmly by the shoulder. The other gesticulated freely as he spoke.
‘I think we’ve already established that I am chivalry itself.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’ve been lying low, waiting for those twins to reach their sixteenth birthday so they no longer need their cosy little nuclear family and I can come back and claim what is rightfully mine. You did say that, didn’t you? When I had to go. You did say that we belong to one another?’
‘Yes.’ Her breath came in short, shallow gasps, but she tried to look admiring. ‘I did.’
‘And I was extremely lucky because, if you have a bit of money to pay the right people, it’s very easy to follow what a person is doing these days. I’ve been keeping tabs on you, Lara Wayland.
‘Poor old Marcus. His career didn’t ever really happen, did it? They gave him a good review in the
Guardian
for that National Theatre young people’s tour he did, but generally he doesn’t even get a mention, does he? I did worry whether he made enough to support you. I even thought about slipping a few quid into your Co-op account.’
‘How did you know about that?’ Lara gasped. Even Marcus had no idea about her Co-op account.
‘Ways and means,’ Stephen said. ‘Look at this.’
He picked up the iPad and searched through the photograph library.
‘Look.’ He held it in front of her. There she was, getting out of the car in her local Sainsbury’s car park, the Brighton sea wind whipping through her hair as she reached into the boot for something. ‘That was last year. This is a bit earlier. They used to send me prints. I scanned them in for my records.’ He flicked to a picture of her struggling up the hill back to her house, the twins in a double buggy laden with bags. ‘You’d been Christmas shopping. You really maxed out your plastic,’ he said. ‘Naughty Lara.’
‘But I had no idea …’
‘’Course you didn’t,’ he laughed. ‘That’s the point. And then, as time went on, and these two got bigger …’ He scrolled on to a photograph of Bella, aged about thirteen, at a bus stop in her school uniform, bending over her mobile phone. ‘She began to look like you.’ His finger lingered over the photo. ‘Just like you. And he, the naughty lad …’ The next image was of Olly in swimming trunks, sitting on the beach, staring out to sea, an incriminatingly fat roll-up in his hand. From the look of him, it must have been taken the previous summer. ‘Well then, how could you not have suspected that I am the boy’s father?’ Stephen held his hands up to frame his face, assuming the exact expression Olly wore in the photo. Breaking the pose, he shrugged and smiled at Lara.
She looked down at her own hands, so tightly twisted that her knuckles had turned blue. Shame spread over her like a shroud. She had not had an inkling that her family were being trailed. Not a clue.
‘But look,’ Stephen said, expansive again. ‘What a guy I am. I had all this evidence and
still
I waited until they turned sixteen. I’m a man of my word.’ He lifted her hair to kiss her neck. ‘I didn’t get in the way of their exams,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘I wanted them to have the best start.’
‘That was very kind of you,’ Lara said, trying to choke her fear back down again.
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ He laid his head on her shoulder.
‘But what about Jack, though?’ Lara said. The thought of her little boy brought tears to her eyes. She wished she was back home in Brighton, curled up, reading him a bedtime story in their safe little house. But then she remembered it had only
seemed
safe. Unseen eyes had been watching their every move.
‘I know,’ Stephen said, heaving a weary sigh and taking her by the shoulders to face him. ‘But how long am I supposed to wait, Lara? When do
I
get my turn at happiness?’ He smiled. ‘Good job about the abortion though, eh? Or you’d be pregnant now and that would’ve complicated matters somewhat.’
Lara closed her eyes. She felt sick. Sick and cold.
‘And I know you’re not happy. Drinking wine on the sofa in the afternoon, all those arguments with him.’ He stroked to another image, which, on his touch, began to play.
‘I won’t be angry with you if you tell me the truth,’ she heard herself say from the screen in his hand.
‘OK. Well, you look a little, well, bulgy in it,’ Marcus’s voice replied.
‘
I
thought you looked lovely,’ Stephen said, pausing the video and showing her herself standing in the bedroom in her tight pink dress, hurt stinging her eyes.
‘How?’
‘Laptop. That router I delivered was rather clever. It was as if I was sitting inside your computer. A lovely place to be.’
The router he delivered?
What remained of Lara’s spirit swirled away, like the last grains of sand in an hourglass.
‘Poor thing, you’ve got goosebumps,’ Stephen said. ‘Here, have this.’ He pulled over a deerskin from the back of the sofa. ‘Fur on skin,’ he murmured as he tucked it round her bare shoulders. ‘So beautiful.’ His hand fell back to her thigh.
Lara caught the faint, sweet tang of animal putrefaction on the pelt.
‘So you knew we were coming here,’ Lara said, trying to keep him talking and away from her. Despite its smell, she was grateful for the cover the deerskin offered. She drew it tight around her.
‘No. Leave it open so I can see you, please,’ Stephen said, arranging it so she was exposed again. ‘Oh Lara. You don’t get it, do you? Do you really think James wanted Marcus for his
Macbeth
? He took a lot of persuading, I can tell you. It got quite expensive!’
‘Expensive?’
‘Fully retractable seating, re-arrangeable into eight configurations. Custom-designed and covered in the costly red option. Your favourite colour crops up again.’
‘You mean you bribed James to bring us here?’
‘“But Stephen,”’ Stephen took on James’s accent and mannerisms exactly, ‘“we so need more accommodation for our
actors
. And the Larssen place is such a
bargain
.” I’m glad you found my work so convincing. Lara,’ he went on, slipping back into his own voice. ‘I didn’t want you and Marcus stepping into a love nest.’
‘You made up the Larssen story?’
‘Nope. Horrible, isn’t it? But it inspired me and I worked a bit of theatre magic on the place. A nice old carpet soaked in the entrails from the doe you are currently wearing, as it happens. A couple of photographs. A bed. Some manacles.’ He rolled the word round his mouth like it was a strawberry. ‘I even hid a hunk of dead mama deer here down in the basement for an authentic miasma.
‘James and Betty were reliably busy and only too happy to let me sort it all out for them. Not that they’d ever question a thing I do. They try to appear cool but they’re really just proper little starfuckers like all the others. It wasn’t exactly hard for me to retain their “friendship”, if that’s what you call it, to help me brew up my plan.’
‘They know everything?’ Lara said.
‘No,’ Stephen laughed. ‘Only enough to make them useful to me. I knew James had taught Marcus back in the wilds of time, so I searched him out. And then the whole stalker business – which really
did
upset me, Lara – well, that proved most useful for bringing out Betty’s big old maternal tits. It really got them on my side, looking after me.’
‘But the stalker is still a problem for you,’ Lara said. Stephen stopped, froze for a few minutes, a distant smile on his lips and one eyebrow raised, as he surveyed her. Then he jumped up.
‘Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about Elizabeth Sanders any more,’ he said. ‘Be back in a tick. Don’t go anywhere.’ He went into the bathroom.
What did that mean? Alone at last, Lara cast around the room for an exit. She knew all the doors were locked, and the windows were covered with secured screens. With a rush of joy she made out the unmistakeable shape of her handbag on the kitchen counter, where she had left it when she first arrived, when the world had been a different place.
Drawing the deerskin around her, she shuffled over and tipped out the contents. She scrabbled wildly through the purse, keys, pills, Ventolin and make-up, all so strange to her now, as if they belonged to someone else entirely. Finding her phone, she unlocked it with trembling fingers. But, with a groan, she realised it had no signal whatsoever. She flung it down and looked about wildly, more like a feral beast under the animal pelt than the woman she once had been. She spotted the house phone, which Stephen had put by the cooker when he was scrambling the eggs, dived towards it and quickly punched the number of the Trout Island digs into the keypad. But, to her horror, when she pressed the green ‘go’ button, the sound of the connection being made was relayed at great volume throughout the house.
The bathroom door flew open. Stephen rushed out, grabbed the phone from Lara and threw it into the kitchen sink, which was full of cold, soapy water. He wheeled round towards her, his jaw twitching.
‘I said I’d take care of it,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to call anyone right now. They all think we’re trapped up here by that fallen tree.’
‘But don’t you think they’ll start to wonder soon?’ she said. ‘They could send someone up and I could climb over the tree, or someone will come up here and check it out.’
‘Now why on earth would they worry? James and Betty will be only too delighted that I’ve got you up here. Marcus will be enjoying being looked after by the lovely Selina and, in fact,’ Stephen said, tidying up the things Lara had strewn over the kitchen counter and putting them back in her bag, ‘in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if James isn’t telling Marcus this instant about how he drove up here and found the tree and how impassable it was, how difficult it would be to get around it even on foot.’
Lara stood there, clutching the deerskin to her, her mouth wide open.
‘Now then, I think we’d be more comfortable if we moved to the sofa. Don’t you? Would you like to watch a movie?’
He steered her through to the living area. ‘I don’t think you need this any more,’ he said, removing the deerskin from her shoulders. ‘Not now you’re away from that big old wooden fan.’
He sat next to her, scrolled through a list of films on his iPad and made a selection. Using the remote control, he switched on the large, flat screen TV that he had pulled up close in front of them.
The opening credits to his first-ever movie rolled on to the screen.
‘I thought we’d take a tour through my back catalogue,’ he said, putting his arm around her and drawing her close to him. ‘Start at the beginning. Can you see alright?’
Lara nodded.
‘Brilliant,’ Stephen said, ninety minutes of his young self later. Lara thought perhaps she could detect the hurt he had been carrying with him when he made that first film. He was beautiful then and he certainly hadn’t lost his looks over the years. But beautiful was not a word she would now use to describe him. He was not beautiful at all.
‘You’re tired,’ he said, as he switched off the TV and stood her up, taking her by the hands. ‘How about a lie-down?’
‘I’m fine. I’m really good. Thank you.’ She tried to work her hand free from his. She felt so exposed.
‘Nonsense. Come with me. This is our life now, Lara.’ And he led her back upstairs to the bedroom, where the bed stood testament to the night before, all red splattered with rose petals and her own blood.
‘Lie down,’ he said. ‘On your front.’
What now
, she thought, as she heard him move to the other side of the room. The bed shifted as he came back towards her and placed his knee close to her arm. Then he poured something wet on her back, and the smell of orange trees in full blossom assaulted her nostrils. Instantly she was pulled back to the cheap spring holiday she and Marcus had taken near Seville, when the twins were tiny. All sunlight and laughter.