A Deep Deceit

Epilogue

Still when I think back to that awful day I feel the horror and the sense of guilt, and above all the terrible shock, as if it were yesterday. I have, in fact, learned to cope by thinking about it as little as possible. There is in any case nothing I can do now to change any of it.

And I have learned to accept that I was not to blame. I have had to do that in order to carry on with my life, which I have managed to do to a degree which continues to surprise me.

The letter Carl left behind was both comforting and painful. He had written as best he could with the bits of old crayon ends and used sketch pads that had been stored in the cellar, scribbling over the sketches he habitually made when he planned out his paintings. It was not easy to read – he had, after all, been badly injured and was forced to write in the dark with only very inadequate materials. The letter was in several colours. Carl had obviously used each crayon end in turn until they became totally blunted and his writing, usually so neat, was scrawled and barely legible.

He then attempted to write down many of the things I had learned about him in America, telling me, when it was already too late, the kind of truth about himself that might have made possible a relationship that I now saw had never had a proper chance of any real normality. At least half of the letter was impossible to read. Not only was Carl having to write over his own old sketches, but also he must sometimes have been trying to use completely blunt crayons without realising that they had no lead centre left. In places all that appeared on top of the drawings already on a page was a scratchy imprint.

There was a mention of Robert Foster and the way in which he died, but sadly I couldn’t decipher it. I just had to accept that I would never know for certain whether Carl had really believed I had killed Robert.

I made a decision about that even as I read the letter for the first time. I decided I would believe in Carl again. Absolutely. I had to in order to make any sense of our life together and of our love. From that moment on I accepted in my mind that, confronted not for the first time in his life with the awful spectacle of a dead body covered with blood, Carl had made the same tragic mistake as I had. He had honestly believed I had killed my husband. To believe that was, I was sure, the only way forward for me.

The image of Carl trapped down there, struggling to explain himself, still intent on declaring his love for me, made me shudder. There were odd phrases that stood out, cut into me almost as if I were being stabbed by the knife that for so long I believed I had used on Robert.

The letter made it clear enough that Carl must indeed have knocked himself unconscious when he fell into the cellar, and did not recover consciousness until after I had replaced the flagstone and sealed him in what was to become his tomb.

That, of course, was the bit that would always haunt me.

It also seemed that he wrote the letter over a period of several days, the last days of his life, in fact. Maybe he did not have the strength to write very much at a time. He must have been in a great deal of pain from those broken ankles and growing weaker hour by hour. I imagined him crawling across the stone floor to find the sketch pads and the crayons – he would have known exactly where they were, of course, although it would have been pitch-black down there, because even in the cellar Carl had stored things in a scrupulously ordered way – and then struggling to write down his last thoughts.

The final paragraph still makes me cry every time I read it.

There was no proper goodbye. That was where the letter ended. Maybe Carl had fallen into his final unconsciousness then. Or perhaps he had never found the strength to write any more. I was sure that was not the ending he would have planned for his last message to me. But it was the only ending there was.

I keep the letter tied in ribbon in the drawer of my bedside table. I try not to look at it very often. There is no point. I have cried all the tears I can muster for Carl and for our life together. I have grieved as much as I am able.

We buried Carl in St Ives on a wet Monday morning. The rain fell softly but relentlessly all day and somehow that seemed appropriate. It tasted of salt, as it always does in St Ives, and reminded me of rain-soaked walks along empty winter beaches arm-in-arm with the man I was finally saying farewell to. His body now lies in an English churchyard in the little seaside town where I think he experienced, with me, as much happiness as he was ever capable of.

Frank Harvey came over from America and we sat together in a pew at the front of the parish church along with Mariette and her mum.

I was surprised by how many local people turned up. I had not realised they would care, particularly after knowing what Carl had done. But they had like him, of course. You couldn’t help liking Carl. Or loving him...

Our neighbour Mrs Jackson, old Don Nash, Pete Trevellian from the Inn Plaice, Mrs Scroggins from the library, Steve the handsome fishmonger, my two colleagues at the Archive Centre, and several of the bar staff and regulars from our favourite pubs were all there. DS Perry turned up, which I had somehow expected, but so did DC Carter and PC Rob Partridge, which I had not. The biggest surprise was Fenella Austen, who not only attended the funeral but sought me out later at the graveside.

‘He was right, you know. I was jealous of him, of you both,’ she said.

I turned to her in surprise.

‘No, not his work. I’m long past that.’ She gave a small, rueful smile. ‘The way he was with you, more than anything. I’ve never had that with a man. He was flawed, but then who isn’t? It’s a wonderful thing to be loved the way you were, Suzanne, and don’t you forget it. Not many of us get that lucky.’

She had tossed her head in familiar fashion, sending a waft of smoke-laden whiskey fumes across the churchyard, and set off over the wet grass. But after a few steps she stopped abruptly and swung round to face me again. She was wearing a big shiny black cape instead of a raincoat. It billowed out behind her as she moved, making her appearance quite dramatic. ‘Another thing,’ she instructed in that familiarly centurion way of hers, one arm stretched out before her, finger pointed towards me. ‘Don’t let this ruin your life. That’s the last thing Carl would have wanted. Rise above it, Suzanne. Have a good life. Be happy. You owe him that. After all, it’s all he ever wanted for you, isn’t it?’ I studied her retreating back in amazement.

I continued to receive support from my friends in St Ives throughout the weeks and months that followed the funeral. I had never known that kind of support before and I had frankly not realised that I had friends, apart, of course, from Mariette and her mother. Small towns are like that. The gossip can drive you out of your mind, but the people do rally round in times of need.

I never saw Will Jones again. Apparently he left St Ives soon after Carl’s funeral – which fortunately he made no attempt to attend – and a little later ‘For Sale’ signs appeared in the window of the Logan Gallery and outside his bungalow. Mariette heard on the jungle drums that Fenella Austen had popped round to the gallery, along with two particularly brawny fishermen drinking pals, and had a quiet word with him.

You never know quite what to believe when it comes to local gossip, but I found I could easily imagine the scene and I doubted there had been anything very quiet about it. Fenella Austen in full flow was enough to frighten anyone off, with or without muscle-men to back her up. I was beginning to have to revise my opinion of St Ives’s raddled doyenne artist.

Apart from taking a few days off after the shock of Carl’s body being found in Rose Cottage and the week’s holiday I arranged for the funeral – following the autopsy, which had predictably confirmed that Carl had died of dehydration – I carried on working at the Archive Centre. It kept my mind busy and gave me a small income to supplement the interest on Robert’s legacy, the bulk of which, with advice from yet another friend of Mariette’s, I had invested.

One way and another all that had happened in my life seemed finally to have given me a strength I did not know that I was capable of. When I look back on my time with Carl now, and the way it ended, I do not do so with the degree of distress I would expect. Instead, I remember the great love and happiness that we shared.

‘Not many of us get that lucky,’ Fenella Austen had said. And I knew she was right.

It has been almost a year, now, since Carl’s body was discovered. DS Perry has become a friend. Nowadays I call her Julie. She is bright and down to earth, and has experienced so much. She has proven to be a terrific shoulder to lean on. Mariette remains as supportive as ever. And fun. God, how I need to have fun. Out of the blue she has become engaged to marry her fitness instructor, although there’s something about the way she talks of him that makes me wonder just how serious she is.

Perhaps curiously, I never really considered leaving St Ives. I reckoned I had done enough running. And in any case, where else would I have gone?

I have bought myself a tiny terraced house not far from the flat I rented off the Hale Road. It is even smaller than Rose Cottage, but has been recently modernised to quite a high standard. The one bedroom is fully fitted in smart pale oak, and the kitchen even has a microwave and a small dishwasher. I find it quite luxurious. Again there is no sea view, I could not afford anywhere with one if I wanted to keep enough of Robert’s legacy invested to give me some kind of financial security. But I am content knowing that this is my space in which I can make my own decisions.

I am learning to drive. To have both a car and a home of my own seems to me the ultimate in independence. In spite of the horrors and the great sadnesses of my past I am almost happy. I no longer have nightmares. I have learned to play tennis and I am taking swimming lessons. After work I often go to the cinema with my new friends or for a drink in the pub or to a restaurant for a meal. I am now leading the ordinary, perhaps rather dull, unexciting life I had always yearned for – but it is a normal life. And so many of the simple pleasures and pursuits that I enjoy were denied me by my various ‘protectors’.

It’s hard to explain what that means when you have spent a lifetime believing that all those kinds of things were always going to be impossible for you.

The only thing absent is a lover and I do miss that. But I can put up with it. I have to put up with it, because I am not yet ready to cope with that sort of intimacy. And I think it will be a long time before I am.

A single dad, unusually perhaps these days a widower rather than a divorce, lives next door. I have been to the cinema with him once or twice and out to dinner and for a drink several times when he has been able to get a babysitter for his four-year-old daughter. He is good company and he knows what pain is, having nursed his wife through a long terminal illness. I enjoy being with him and am growing quite fond of him. Mariette teases me relentlessly and refers to him as ‘your chap’.

He isn’t quite that and there has certainly been nothing physical between us so far other than a few brief goodnight kisses. But I like him and I like the fact that he seems to sense that I’m not ready for anything more just yet. Perhaps he isn’t either. I don’t really know.

I do know that Carl is a hard act to follow and I am beginning to understand just how special our relationship was. I no longer think of it as having been founded on a lie. Our feelings were not a lie. Our love was an overwhelming truth and nothing that has happened could ever change that.

Indeed, Carl had loved me so much that it had, in a way, been his final undoing. That was a painful legacy, but there are worse ones.

Nor do I feel guilty any more. In fact, far from it. I sometimes wonder if Carl’s death was not a kind of release. I regret terribly that he died alone and such a dreadful death. But I am no longer sure how much I regret his death in itself. Sometimes I wonder if Carl could ever have coped with the real world instead of the pretend one we had built around us.

Could he ever have sufficiently conquered his obsessiveness in order to share his life with a woman who wanted more than just him, one no longer prepared to live only in his shadow? I would never have been able to go back to being the Suzanne I had been before, the Suzanne he had created. I am now quite sure of that.

Never again would I rely on one human being. Never again would I let a man or anyone else make my decisions for me, let alone run my entire life.

I could never love anyone more than I loved Carl. But now that I have tasted normality and freedom, or as close to it as any of us can get, I realise that nothing less will do.

Imagine being let out of prison. You would never want to go back, would you, however kind the jailer, however warm and pleasant the jail?

That may be a cruel analogy, but it is what my life with Carl became – not just because of his behaviour, but also because of my own belief that I needed to hide, living in fear of discovery for so long, convinced that I could never have the kind of life others enjoyed. I had been imprisoned all right, not only in that awful old shed, but throughout all my time with Carl. It had been at times an almost glorious imprisonment, but an imprisonment nonetheless. And it is only since I accepted this, that I have been able to go forward.

I can face the future now, because I have finally conquered my past. All of it. My weird, restrictive childhood, my terrible marriage and the awful violence I suffered, my years with Carl culminating in the abduction, all that is behind me now. I am no longer frightened and unsure of myself.

Carl’s wonderful Pumpkin Soup dominates the living room of my little house, hanging in solitary splendour on a white-painted wall. It is all I have left of him, apart from my memories.

I still call myself Suzanne. Suzanne Adams. Mrs Peters no longer sounds right. But Suzanne, the name Carl gave me the night we arrived in St Ives, the night our extraordinary hidden life together began, that name I will bear for ever.

Carl’s voice is already not quite so clear inside my head as it once was. But I think I will always be able to hear him, albeit more faintly as the years pass: ‘You’re Suzanne from now on. Suzanne, my Lady of the Harbour.’