Me?came Orla’s accusatory voice again.Don’t you mean the burden you placed on yourself by not saving me?
‘I was tired of saving you!’ he fired back, startling a nearby blackbird in the bushes at the loudness of his words. More quietly, he muttered, ‘I kept on saving you, Orla; again and again.’
As if suddenly realising what he was doing, and ignoring the wetness of the ground, he plonked himself down on it and clasped his head between his hands. Was he going mad, talking to his wife’s rotting corpse, imagining her responses and justifying himself? Was this what she had driven him to?
Purgatory. This was his fate until the day he died, to be forever punished for failing to save Orla … to save her from herself.
He still couldn’t make sense of why he had stayed as long as he had in the marriage, when so much of it had been a lie, when repeatedly he hoped things would change. But seldom do relationships make sense, and he had loved her so much in the beginning, had never believed that he would ever feel differently. Her outrageous sense of fun and her energy had been intoxicating, and he had thrived on her unpredictable nature, the storm force of her magnetism. Their sexual dynamism was at the core of their relationship; the extreme fierceness of it drove them deeper into each other’s hearts. There was tenderness too, that was all the more poignant for its rarity.
But then the axis of their love changed when Orla’s unfulfilled desire for a child impacted on their relationship. It was the first time in her life when she had been unable to have her own way over something, and it drove her to the edge of reason. His role then, as she became increasingly unable to cope with the internal forces that drove her to extremes, was that of protector and keeper of the worst of her emotions. For the most part he didn’t mind – for better and for worse; that was what he had signed up for.
Orla made him promise that he wouldn’t share the full extent of her misery with his friends. And just as he had always respected her wish that he never spoke of the abortion she’d undergone as a young girl, he kept his promise. If you loved somebody, you respected their wishes, that was what he believed.
But what she didn’t appreciate was that he too had suffered heartache over their inability to have a family, and desperately in need of emotional support himself, he had turned to the one person he should not: Sorrel. He couldn’t deny that it was a shamefully pathetic cliché that when he sank to his own emotional low, he turned to another woman to assuage his sorrow.
Not just any woman, but the wife of one of his closest friends. Sex with Sorrel had been so easy and uncomplicated – no temperatures taken, no strict timetable of optimum moments to adhere to, when sperm and egg might collide, and no pressure to perform to order, just the basic animal instinct to lose himself in a yielding woman.
The worst of it was Orla must have suspected. She never said anything directly, but she had to have noticed the perceptible change in Sorrel’s manner, the glances that lingered on him for too long, the hand that rested on his arm unnecessarily, but most of all, the air of possession Sorrel began to display, as if she were confident of usurping Orla’s position.
If he could turn back time and not make the mistake he’d made of turning to Sorrel for comfort, he would do so in a heartbeat. It was a mistake he paid for dearly, when, and out of the blue fifteen years ago, Orla forced him to admit that he had slept with Sorrel. He had no idea what triggered her suspicion, but she had been triumphant in extracting the admission from him. He’d made it in the hope that once it was out in the open between the two of them, he would feel less guilty about it. He was tired of living in the shadow of his deceit; he wanted to be free of it.
He’d misjudged Orla’s reaction. Her moment of triumph that she had been proved right was quickly surpassed by the need to punish him, to make him atone for his betrayal. Such was his remorse that whatever she demanded of him, he complied, hoping each time she would exonerate him. She never did. This then became the new reality of what marriage to Orla meant. And the crazy thing was, there were times when they were genuinely happy, when he still loved her. She could look at him in a certain way and he felt just as he had the day they met.
Yet more and more it crossed his mind to leave her, and whenever she recognised she had pushed him too far, she would cede him some small measure of respite and behave as though they were the happiest couple alive. It never lasted. Always there was the threat that she would tell Simon what he and Sorrel had done. It was a threat he had no wish for her to carry out and he did all he could to ensure she didn’t.
But when last year he finally realised that he couldn’t keep up the pretence that their marriage resembled anything remotely normal or happy, he told her straight that enough was enough. ‘I can no longer be your punchbag,’ he said. ‘The price you want me to pay for my one small mistake is too much.’
‘It might seem a small mistake to you,’ she’d countered, ‘but to me it was the greatest act of betrayal. For which,’ she’d added, ‘you will have to pay the greatest price if you leave me.’
‘You’ll tell Simon?’
‘Of course.’
‘But why? Why after all this time would you want to do that to him? And to Sorrel, and Callum and Rachel as well. You’ll deliberately hurt them all. Why?’
‘I don’t care about them; it’s you I care about.’
‘If that’s true, you have an odd way of showing it.’
‘I love you, Alastair. I love you in a way you’ve never understood. I need you for me to be able to function. I always have. Your love has always given me breath. Without it, I can’t live.’
Summoning his courage, he’d said, ‘But your love is choking me, Orla. You’re slowly suffocating me with your desire to make me pay for hurting you. Wouldn’t it be better for us to part and breathe air that hasn’t turned toxic?’
She’d looked as if he’d slapped her. ‘You can’t leave me!’ she’d cried. ‘You can’t! I won’t let you!’
‘Your threats won’t make me stay,’ he’d said, ‘not now; it’s gone beyond that.’
‘But I need you! And you need me; you know you do. We’ve always needed each other.’
He’d shaken his head. ‘The only thing I need from you now is my freedom.’
She had turned manic at that. ‘I’ll kill myself if you leave me. I swear it, I’ll kill myself and you’ll have my death on your conscience for the rest of your life. You’ll never be free of me!’
His patience pushed to the limit, he’d laughed. God help him, he’d laughed at her. ‘Go ahead,’ he’d shouted. ‘Kill yourself and put us both out of our misery! I’m sick of your threats!’
Eighteen hours later, her body was found amongst the reeds in Linston Broad.
So yes, when he’d watched from an upstairs window and seen her take out the boat at two in the morning, when he knew she had been drinking and was in a highly emotional state, and had done nothing to stop her, he’d as good as put his hands around her neck and killed her.
