Seeing it, now, even with its repaired window and the fallen tree removed, gave me such nausea it was suffocating. As if dreaming, I walked, almost asleep, to the back door, and let myself in. The door creaked open, revealing the dank kitchen and barren living space, its floorboards bare, the walls freshly painted and still somehow drab. Then I saw father’s portrait, his eyes boring into me, looming above my head. The nausea, and the darkness, threatened to consume me. A woeful depression fell over me, as if the weight of all those years was pressing down on me all at once.
I drifted toward the staircase, the pressure increasing, a whistling sound building in my ears.
And then I saw her.
She was at the top of the stairs, watching me, suspended in mid-air with her white hair flailing all around her head. Her white nightdress seemed little more than a chalky vapour.
“Hello, mother,” I said solemnly.
Just like in my dreams, she opened her mouth, a gaping, dark wound of flesh and seeds. Wasps crawled from the orifice, and began humming around her head.
I was afraid, at first. But she gave me an excellent idea.
I went to the outhouse and found a shovel.
“The fig tree,” I told Nick in a whisper as he paced back and forth, stretching his legs. “The base of the fig tree.”
I wondered if for once it would bear decent fruit before the wasps destroyed them. Or perhaps Tom would be consumed, too, by the sour rot. It seemed a fitting end for him. My dear childhood friend, who was not so dear after all. But of course, Tom’s resting place was temporary. We would have moved him long before he would feed the tree and ripen any figs.
A dreadful truth came over me, then, as I looked at the infected tree. A kind of sour rot was already within us all; it was in me, and Louisa, and Nick and Tom. It found us in the soil and we were doomed from the beginning. It had been eating away at us since our childhoods, warping our growth. What hope did any of us have in our circumstances, to be functioning, wholly ordinary people?
“The storm’s finally passed. It’ll be a lovely ride home. Look at the stars, darling. They’re so clear and beautiful outside of London,” said Nick, looking up at the night’s sky.
I made to dig the first spadeful, but the ground was solid, icy cold. The shovel bounced back with adelightful ring. Above our heads, mother watched from the window, the wasps in a fury all around her.
She isn’t real, I told myself. And yet she was painfully real. I had to wonder where my father was, and why he wouldn’t appear to me now. He was, no doubt, too cowardly to face me. My mother, too angry and defiant to stay away.
Nick took the shovel from my hands.
“Allow me,” he said, digging the spade into the earth with one shove.
Chapter Eighteen
Nicholas
There was no time at all to rest.
Tom Stoddard, a man I barely knew and yet detested, was dead and buried.
But not for long. The question remained: what to do with him?
I pondered his case as I drove, with Grace asleep in the passenger seat beside me. Dawn was breaking as we crossed the boundary for London, the pink and orange hues rising faithfully above the city skyline.
I’d known Grace had a stalker; I’d seen him myself, though only from a distance, peering through the wrought iron gates even before the night he first confronted her. I began to monitor him, waiting for him to appear again, and he did, several times. Once, I even saw him among the gravestones, I was certain of that now – but at the time, I couldn’t be sure it was the same man. We had many members of staff who roamed around the grounds.
I knew he had been asking about me in the local pubs, lapping up their rumours of this or that, especially those regarding Louisa. On the very same day that Graceand Eugenie had traced my steps to the church, Tom had followed. He had witnessed what they had seen: my poor, tortured wife, attending the church service. It was the only social normalcy she had left, and a promise I intended to keep, to accompany her there weekly. He would have seen not only Louisa, but Grace’s investment in me. Her curiosity in my whereabouts, the distress in her expression when she saw the commotion, when Louisa became unwell. All of it would have tormented him.
I knew, because if I were in his shoes, it would have tormented me.
When he continued to follow her, day after day, observing her every movement – he will have seen, at some point, a sapphire glimmering on her ring finger. It was then, I believed, that he sought and discovered Louisa’s home in the hospital. He heard of the annual ball in conversation with his new friends, my critics, in the pub, and there he formed his plan to manipulate her.
What he hadn’t expected, apparently, was that part of the rumours about me were true. I did have a capacity for violence. Not for pleasure, however – not like my brother Alexander, or Tom Stoddard himself – but for necessity. For prudence. I tried not to think of it, but it was there, festering in the back of my mind, this knowledge that I was capable of murder.
There’d been a few times, in the early days with Louisa, when I was savagely in love with her, that I thought I might unleash that aspect of me. When men stared, or made whispered promises to my vulnerable, fragile young bride-to-be, it awoke the murderer in me. On a few occasions, with their throat in my hands, I had been tempted by somedarkness to squeeze just a little tighter. To twist, quite abruptly, and wait for the tell-tale clicking sound.
But for her sake, and mine, I’d always let them go. In the time it took to show them how brutal I could be, I would come to my senses, and stop myself just shy of seeing the deed through.
When it came to Grace, everything was different. The hell-beast inside me was snarling and, at the sight of Tom above her, its cage was unlocked. Its movements calculated, its bite inevitable, I needed only to stand back and let it happen. When it came to finishing him, I knew, even as I wound the mortuary wire around his neck, that I had pocketed it for this very purpose. That when I’d hastily fetched my coat, I had seen the reel in an open package in the office and taken it, in case fortune should smile upon me, even briefly, and I found opportunity to use it.
