Fifteen
On Tuesday evening I went back to the cottage. It seemed sad and dingy when I walked in but I was fresh out of clean clothes and, besides, the first floor walls wouldn’t knock themselves down. I really needed to get on with it or I was still going to be camping on a building site come Christmas.
I left my mobile switched on all night but Sean didn’t ring. By Wednesday morning I realised he wasn’t going to. He would be up to his neck in the Heathrow job and it wasn’t fair to expect him to be at my beck and call when he was working. He’d spared me more than enough of his time already. More than I probably deserved, given the circumstances.
I spent the day clearing up the mess I’d made at the weekend, shovelling the rubble into bags and boxes so I could cart it downstairs. I knew I couldn’t put off hiring another skip for much longer.
The activity was physically hard work but required no particular cerebral participation, leaving my mind free to wander. Almost inevitably, I found myself thinking about Sean, and my father’s warning.
They’d never liked each other from the first time they met. Perhaps, as far as my parents were concerned, there was always going to be an element of whoever I chose to bring home with me would never be good enough for their little girl.
It didn’t help that Sean’s personal transport back then had been a motorbike. A Yamaha EXUP – the FireBlade of its day. I was on an old Yamaha 350 Power Valve, the first bike I’d bought when I passed my test.
I remember being nervous on that ride up to Cheshire nearly six years ago, as though I’d had some premonition of how it was going to go. We’d arrived in the dark on a Friday evening, so the full extent of the house was shrouded. Even so, as we’d turned onto the driveway and our headlights had swept across the imposing front facade, it didn’t occur to me how it must look to him.
“Your folks live here?” he’d asked when we’d pulled up by the front steps and cut the engines. “Which bit?”
“All of it,” I’d said. At the time I hadn’t registered the significance of the question but later I realised he’d thought – hoped, really – that a house this big might be split down into apartments. It wasn’t until I’d visited his mother, years afterwards, that it dawned on me her little council house on a run-down Lancaster estate would have fitted inside the garage at my parents’ place and barely touched the walls.
Sean had still been a sergeant then, one of the instructors on the Special Forces course I had fought my way onto. Any obvious relationship between us would have set alarm bells ringing – as it was destined to do so catastrophically. So, we’d snuck away, leaving separately, meeting up on a motorway services.
I knew having an affair with Sean was madness but, like any doomed enterprise, once I was in the grip of it the dangers seemed worth the risk. Going anywhere together where people knew us, even my parents, was reckless at best. I suppose I was hoping that they would be as taken with him as I was.
Some hope.
My mother had prepared an elaborate meal for us and gone to town on the silver candlesticks and the starched linen in the dining room. I don’t know if she was expecting to impress Sean or overawe him. At least, as an NCO, he’d attended enough formal army dinners to know his way around a knife and fork with some finesse, even if he didn’t look entirely comfortable while doing it. Now, he spent so much time with royalty and riches he was blase in any company, but back then I was aware of watching him anxiously while we ate.
I wasn’t the only one. My mother might have been regarding him as if he’d come before her on the bench but at least she had made an effort to be sociable. Not easy when just about every aspect of our work could not be discussed with outsiders. My father had spent the first two courses in almost silent scrutiny before he’d condescended to join in the conversation.
“You’ll have been posted to Northern Ireland at some point, I assume, Sean?” he’d asked with cool detachment.
Sean had nodded cautiously. “I’ve spent a little time there, sir, yes.” I knew he’d done two tours as a squaddie and three more he wouldn’t talk about, even with me.
“I was there myself many years ago,” my father said casually, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “It was not long after I qualified as a surgical registrar.”
“The City hospital?” Sean had asked.
“No, the Royal Victoria.”
Sean had a good face for playing poker but even he couldn’t prevent his eyebrows climbing at that. “That’s near the Falls Road,” he’d said, respect mingling with the surprise in his voice as he reached for his wine glass. “What kind of surgery did you specialise in?”
“Orthopaedics. By the time I was finished I’d become quite an expert on kneecaps.” He’d allowed himself a flicker of disgust. “Whenever we thought we’d developed a new technique for repairing the joint, they came up with a new way of destroying it.”
“Well, they’re nothing if not inventive when it comes to killing or maiming people over there,” Sean had said, his voice low.
“They’re not the only ones.”
Sean had heard the censure in his voice and put down his glass with a careful precision that made my shoulders tense. He’d tilted his head towards my father very slowly.
“Excuse me?”
“Come now, Sean,” my father had said with some asperity. “You can’t try to tell me that the soldiers weren’t just as guilty of delivering beatings – and worse – to people they thought were working against them. I’ve seen the results for myself.”
“And I’ve seen the results of a nail bomb being detonated by remote control when there was an eighteen- year-old soldier less than six feet away from it,” he said, his voice calm almost to the point of indifference.
My mother had given a soft gasp. “Oh, but that doesn’t happen any more, surely?” she’d said, shaky.
Sean had turned his head and pinned her with that dark and merciless gaze.
