Believing the Lie

past with drugs. She hadn’t thought it had, however, but she played along, saying, “You might want to talk to someone, Nicky. You know how it is,” and he nodded. But he looked at her with so much love in his face that she realised whatever was on his mind most likely had to do with her.

They hadn’t made love. This, too, was unlike her husband because she had approached him and not the opposite, and he’d long loved to be approached by her because he was not a fool and he knew very well how disparate was everything about them, at least everything visible to a world that judged people’s equality by external matters. So the fact that she would want him at least as often as he wanted her had always thrilled Nicholas, who had always responded. This too was a sign.

So when Alatea left the house and made her way to the garden, it was in part because she needed to do something to take her mind off the terrifying possibilities that had been assailing her throughout the night. But it was also in part to avoid seeing Nicholas because eventually what was bothering him was going to come out into the open and she didn’t think she’d be able to face it.

There were several thousand bulbs to be planted. She planned the lawn to be filled with early glories of the snow so that a bank of blue upon green would fall from the house down to the seawall, and this was going to take considerable work, for which she was glad. She would not, of course, be able to complete it in this one morning. But she could make a very good start. She set upon it with shovel and spade and the hours passed quickly. When she was sure her husband would have left Arnside House to make the drive to Barrow-in-Furness for his half day at Fairclough Industries prior to his work at the pele project, she finished up what she was doing and stretched and rubbed the sore spots on her back.

It was only when she headed to the house that she saw his car and understood that Nicholas hadn’t gone to work at all. Her gaze then went from the car to the house, and the dread she felt crept up her spine.

He was in the kitchen. He was sitting at the broad oak table, and he appeared to be brooding. There was a cup of coffee in front of him, with a cafetiere and a bowl of sugar nearby. But the cup of coffee appeared undrunk and a ring of sediment round the inside of the cafetiere suggested its contents had long gone cold.

He hadn’t dressed for the day. He wore the trousers of his pyjamas and the dressing gown she’d given him for his birthday. His feet were bare although he didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the tiles on the floor would be cold against them. There was much about his appearance that wasn’t right. But least right was the fact that Nicholas never missed work.

Alatea wasn’t sure what to say. She went with the lead he had given her during dinner the night before. She said, “Nicky, I didn’t think you were still at home. Are you ill?”

“Just needed to think.” He looked at her then and she saw his eyes were bloodshot. A tingling went up her arms and felt as if it would encircle her heart. He said, “This seemed like the best place to do it.”

She didn’t want to ask the obvious, but not to do so would have been more obvious still, so she said, “Think about what? What’s wrong?”

He said nothing at first. She watched him. He moved his gaze from her, and it seemed he was thinking about her question and all the different answers he might give. At first he said, “Manette came to see me. In the shipping department.”

“Are there problems there?”

“It’s Tim and Gracie. She wanted us to take them.”

“Take them? What do you mean?”

He explained. She heard but didn’t hear because all the time she was busy trying to evaluate his tone. He spoke of his cousin Ian; of Ian’s wife, Niamh; and of Ian’s two children. Alatea, of course, knew all of them, but she had not known of Niamh’s intentions towards her own flesh and blood. It was inconceivable to her that Niamh would use her children in this way, as chess pieces in a game that by all rights should have been over. She wanted to weep for Tim and Gracie and she felt the imperative of doing something for them as much as Nicholas obviously felt it. But for this to have disturbed his sleep, to have made him ill…? He wasn’t telling her everything.

“Manette and Freddie are the best ones to take them,” he concluded. “I’m no match for Tim’s problems, but Manette and Freddie are. She’d get through to Tim. She’d be good at that. She doesn’t give up on anyone.”

“So it seems there’s a solution, yes?” Alatea said hopefully.

“Except that Manette and Freddie have split up so that throws a spanner,” Nicholas said. “Their situation’s odd. It’s also unstable.” He was silent again for a moment, and he used the moment to top up his cold coffee with more cold coffee, into which he stirred a heaped teaspoonful of sugar. “And that’s too bad,” he went on, “because they belong together, those two. I can’t think why they split up in the first place. Except they never had kids and I think perhaps that wrecked them after a time.”

Oh God, this was the crux, Alatea thought. This was where it all headed in the end. She had known it would, if not with Nicholas then with someone else.

She said, “Perhaps they didn’t want children. Some people don’t.”

“Some people, but not Manette.” He glanced at her. His face was drawn. From this, Alatea knew he wasn’t telling her the truth. Tim and Gracie might indeed be in need of a stable place to live, but that was not what was bothering her husband.

She said, “There’s more, though.” She drew out a chair from the table and sat. “I think, Nicky, that you had better tell me.”

It had long been a strong part of their relationship that from the first Nicholas had told her everything. He’d insisted upon it because of how he’d lived in his past, which had been in a world of lies, experiencing a life defined by hiding his drug use in any way he could. If he didn’t tell her everything now — despite what that “everything” might comprise — his withholding of information would be more damaging to their marriage than whatever the information itself was. Both of them knew it.

He finally said, “I believe my father thinks I killed Ian.”

This was so far from what Alatea had been expecting that she was rendered speechless. There were words somewhere inside her, but she couldn’t find them, at least not in English.

Nicholas said, “Scotland Yard’s up here looking into Ian’s death. Considering it was ruled an accident, there’s only one reason that Scotland Yard’s turned up. Dad can pull strings when he wants to. I reckon that’s what he did.”

“That’s impossible.” Alatea’s mouth felt dry. She wanted to reach for Nicholas’s coffee and drink it down, but she stopped herself from even moving, so unsure was she of her ability to keep the sudden trembling of her body under her control. “How do you know this, Nicky?”

“That journalist.”

“What…? Are you talking about that man? That same man? The one who came here…? The story that never was a story at all?”

Nicholas nodded. “He’s back. He told me. Scotland Yard’s here. The rest is clear enough: I’m the person they’re interested in.”

“He said that? The journalist said that?”

“Not in so many words. But from everything that’s gone on, it’s obvious.”

There was something more here that he wasn’t telling her. Alatea could read it in his face. She said, “I don’t believe it. You? Why on earth would you have hurt Ian? And why would your father think you could?”

He shrugged. She saw that he was struggling with a conflict that he couldn’t bear to reveal and she herself struggled to understand what it was and what it could mean to both of them. He was deeply depressed or deeply grieved or deeply — very deeply — something else.

She said, “I think you should speak to your father. You must do this straightaway. This reporter, Nicky, he doesn’t mean you well. And now this woman who says she’s from the film company that doesn’t exist… You must talk to your father at once. You must hear the truth of the matter. It’s the only answer, Nicky.”

He raised his head. His eyes were liquid. Her heart constricted with her love for this man, troubled soul to her own troubled soul. He said, “Well, I’ve definitely decided against being part of that documentary film that she was here about. I’ve told her that, by the way, so there’s one less thing for either of us to deal with.” His lips curved but it was a poor effort at a smile. It was meant to encourage her, to tell her all would be well soon enough.

Both of them knew this was a lie, however. But like everything else, neither one of them would be willing to admit that.