‘We’re both trusting her! It’s why we’re here, remember?’
‘But you believed her? About me and Kristin? Doing what? Having an affair? How could you?’ He is furious. And it’s genuine. ‘How could you insult me like that?’
‘So tell me it’s not true!’ I yell. ‘Go on, I dare you to tell me.’
‘Stop it. Stop this. Look at me. I love you. Can’t you see that, Gabrielle? I love you!’
But I can’t let it go. Not yet. ‘No! I can’t see it, how could I? How could anyone? Look at me! I can’t even feel it when you’re inside me, do you understand?
‘I don’t care! Do you hear me? When we make love I’m making love to all of you! Not just the bit that can’t feel, don’t you get it?’ He’s grabbed me by the shoulder and he’s shaking me. I struggle to free myself but he won’t let go. We grip each other. I am fighting him off even though I feel the truth and I should be ashamed, because my anger is on its own, unstoppable roll and it’s in control of me, roaring its way through until finally the tears burst out and I go limp, and he lifts me up in his arms and kisses my hair and my face and my neck and tells me he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care. He would never even look at another woman. He loves me. Every part of me, now and for ever.
Frazer Melville has lit the fire in the hearth, and we are watching the flames throwing shadows across the walls and ceiling. Every now and then a log pops, or some bark bursts open and releases a fizzing drool of sap. I could stare at it endlessly. Earlier, in the downstairs bathroom, I managed to bathe and wash my hair and I let him dry it for me which took a long time because every two minutes he stopped to kiss me and tell me I was a fool. Now, with coffee inside me, and an Indian shawl wrapped around my shoulders, I am finally warming up. After a furious altercation in which I overheard Frazer Melville threaten to return Bethany to the authorities if she ever, ever pulled a stunt like that again, she is keeping a low profile upstairs. But I do not kid myself it springs from remorse.
‘Low self-esteem can wreak the worst kind of havoc,’ I say in conclusion.
‘I never guessed you suffered from it,’ he says sadly. The green shard in his eye flickers and I realise how much I have missed it. And him. ‘I should have. But you’re so sure of yourself. So incredibly sexy.’ He leans in to me and buries his face in my cleavage. ‘I want you all the time. I can’t get enough of you. I want you now.’
I want him too. But I still can’t let go of the cruel truth I met in the lake, the truth I have not articulated before. The truth about the depth of my own insecurity, the intensity of the hurt. The realisation that whatever I may have told myself, I have not even begun to heal.
Frazer Melville is adding more wood to the fire when the phone rings. I pick up. It’s Kristin. If she is surprised at the warmth with which I greet her, she doesn’t let it show. But I feel the need to make amends.
‘I have an apology to make, Kristin. I was rude to you. There was a lot going on and I—’
‘Forget it. It was understandable. But listen.’ She’s speaking in an excited rush. ‘Harish pulled some strings and got hold of the seismic logs from Buried Hope. They have some geophysicists who do some research for them and get the data regularly. I had two other experts study them. They confirm what Bethany said. There’s a horizontal crack beneath the hydrate field which will lead to a huge methane blowout. We don’t know when it developed but it showed up on the data from September so it has been going on for a while. The company must know about it.’
‘So now you can announce the press conference?’
‘Yes. We’re doing a big stunt to publicise it. Keep an eye on the news. By the way, the forecast says we’re in for thunderstorms. They’ll sweep across northern Britain this afternoon, and move south. Can you pass me to Frazer? I need to run something past him.’
Interesting, how easily I can do that now that I know she is not, and has never been, my sex rival. Now that I am free to like and admire her, I find that I do. Intensely. I hand over the phone and she and Frazer Melville begin a technical conversation about the series of graphs that have just appeared on his laptop. While they speak, I pull my wheelchair across and transfer into it. I have not seen Bethany since she ran out of the lake, but if I am to be in any way professional, I must talk to her.
I only wish I felt readier.
When Frazer Melville finishes on the phone, I say, ‘I’d better talk to Bethany. Alone.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I have to.’
‘I’ll make some tea, and get her to come down.’
Ten minutes later Bethany, engulfed in the tartan bathrobe, has flung herself on the sofa opposite me. She’s scowling.
‘I accept your apology,’ I say.
‘I didn’t apologise.’
‘I know. So I offered it on your behalf, and then I accepted it on mine.’
‘How the fuck does that work?’
‘Magic. Don’t knock it.’
‘Harish Modak calls me Miss Krall.’
‘And you like the sound of that?’ She nods. ‘In that case you can stop calling me Wheels and call me Gabrielle. Deal, Miss Krall?’
She blinks, considering, but doesn’t speak. Frazer Melville enters with two cups of tea and places them on the table between us. ‘Lapsang souchong,’ he announces. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He closes the door quietly behind him.
There is a silence. Then Bethany says, ‘She used to do that.’
‘Who used to do what?’
‘My mum. She’d bring me a cup of tea.’
I am immediately alert. I misjudged her mood. This is the first time she has mentioned her mother unprompted. She’s on the brink of something.
‘She brought you cups of tea, but what kind of person was she?’ She shrugs and looks away. ‘Something went very wrong between you. What was it like, that evening?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How can’t you know?’
‘You can forget stuff.’
‘Sometimes you need to forget. Because it can make things easier. Like feeling that you’re dead. But the ECT can bring memories to the surface. Perhaps that’s what’s happening. You had a big dose.’
She reaches to bury her fingers in the rug and flexes them. I think of the photo of the Krall family: the handsome father; the girl with a broad smile and braces on her teeth; the mother, a bloodless, ineffectual mouse. When she speaks, her voice is barely audible, carried on her breath like an exhalation.
‘I was never good enough for them.’
‘In what way?’
‘Even when I believed in God, the Bible, Genesis, the whole bag of shit, I wasn’t good enough. So I tried being bad.’
‘Sex?’ I ask, remembering the case-notes. A boy at school. But I feel there’s more, something bigger and more fundamental.
‘Have you ever tried burning a book?’
‘No. How do you go about it?’
‘You have to pour white spirit on it first.’
‘And why would you want to burn a book?’
‘Because it’s full of shit. Right from the beginning.’
She looks at the fresh bandages that Frazer Melville has wrapped around her hands, having swabbed them with antiseptic. ‘The beginning is Genesis.
