Hidden Depths

Chapter Twenty-Two

Felicity wandered back from the garden. She was holding a colander of beans for supper, too many she realized. There would be only the two of them this evening; James had arranged to be out with a friend. In the kitchen she had a moment of unease as she imagined herself and Peter, sitting at opposite ends of the table, eating dinner. She wasn’t sure what they’d say to each other. She imagined Lily Marsh there too. A beautiful ghost, coming between them.

It was ridiculous the effect the death of a stranger was having on her. She told herself not to be hysterical. But this life she’d spent years creating – the house, the garden, the contented family – suddenly seemed very fragile. She had a picture of Vera Stanhope shattering it with her loud, intrusive voice, her big feet, the heavy hands slammed against the table. With her questions, Vera would wreck it all.

She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. There were pictures of birds instead of numbers and their calls marked the hours. It was a joke present from Clive to Peter for one of his birthdays. She hated it but Peter had insisted on putting it up. It would soon be two o’clock. There were at least four hours before Peter would be home. She ran upstairs, changed from trousers into a skirt, put on lipstick and a splash of perfume. As the wren finished calling she snatched up the car keys from the hall table and almost ran outside.

She had never visited Samuel at work. She wasn’t even sure where he would be. Certainly, she thought, he would disapprove of this unplanned meeting. He kept his life in separate boxes. But she couldn’t stay at home fretting. She had never made demands before. He would understand that the pressure was intolerable.

She drove along the straight, narrow roads, impatient when she had to slow down for a tractor. It was an old car, without air conditioning, and she had the windows open. The sun shone hot on her arm and shoulder. In the town she slid into a parking space in the street next to the library. Now she sat for a moment thinking again that this trip had been a terrible mistake. Samuel was a clever man. If he’d thought it sensible for them to meet, to discuss strategies, he would have suggested it. He would consider this a rash, foolish gesture. In the end her desire to see him made her give up on reason. She shut the windows and got out of the car. She was a member of the library after all. She had every right to be there.

Inside the building it was cooler. A couple of students and an elderly man were hunched over their public-access computers. Behind the desk was a thin, rather untidy young woman in crumpled linen trousers and a white cotton blouse. She caught Felicity’s eye and smiled at her. She looked familiar. Felicity thought vaguely that she might be the daughter of one of her book group friends.

The book group had brought her and Samuel together. She loved the company of the group, the excitement of trying a book new to her, and when she had been a member for a year, she had persuaded him along to give them a talk. A real published author. The group had read his most recent anthology beforehand and hadn’t known quite what to make of it. The stories were so depressing, they said. Well constructed but twisted and rather horrible. One woman said they gave her nightmares. Generally they preferred happy endings. When he visited, though, they were more positive. They sat him in the big armchair in front of the fire. They were meeting for this session in the home of a large, capable woman who worked as a physiotherapist. Her husband was a surgeon and the room was quite grand. Green walls covered with paintings, large, old furniture. It was February, cold, and the curtains were drawn against the chill weather outside. The audience was wholly female. They drank white wine from tall glasses. Samuel had charmed them, speaking as if their opinions were important to him. He talked about the structure of the stories. These days people were obsessed about character, he said. Character was important, that was a given, but anyone could write faithfully about people like themselves, or people they knew. He was more interested in ideas. His themes were reflected in the construction of his plots. He wasn’t so interested in portraying reality, but in creating a world where the most unlikely events were possible.

‘It’s the only way one has to play God,’ he said.

One woman asked if that made him more like a poet than a novelist. He smiled, delighted, and said perhaps it did. Felicity had thought it all went way above her head. She worried about what she might say to him when they were alone.

‘But wouldn’t you make more money writing real, long books?’ This came from a farmer, who read voraciously but understood nothing of literary snobbery. She never bothered with reviews or award lists. There was a moment of silence. The other women were afraid that he’d been offended. But it seemed that question had pleased him too.

‘If I wrote a novel I’d get caught out,’ he said. ‘I’m not that good an author. I can’t keep going for more than five thousand words.’ He turned towards Felicity, giving her a look of complicity. The light from the fire caught his face. The women in the room laughed. She could tell that they all admired him.

Felicity had given him a lift to the book group and it had been arranged that she would take him home. In the car he suggested they go for a drink and she agreed. It was the least she could do. Her standing in the book group had changed because she’d introduced him to them. The pub was crowded and noisy, not the sort of place either of them would usually have chosen. Perhaps they landed there because it was so anonymous. They had a small table to themselves, crushed into a corner.

The announcement came out of the blue. He took her hands in both of his and said he thought he loved her. At first she couldn’t believe he was serious. It was a joke. He was a great one for games. Nothing could come of it, he said. He was Peter’s friend. Then she saw he was deadly serious and she was very flattered, moved. How noble and honourable he was! In the pub car park, which looked out over bare, open hillside, she reached up and kissed him. Droplets of mist clung to his hair and his jacket.

Later, back at his house, she asked, ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in for coffee?’ She knew exactly what she was doing, had already considered which underwear she was wearing, remembered that she had shaved her legs that morning. He had hesitated for longer than she expected. Perhaps his friendship to Peter was so strong he would refuse. But at last he nodded, held open the door for her, took her hand once they were inside. That had been five years ago. They had been lovers ever since. Very discreet. There were no phone calls which couldn’t have been overheard, no emails which might not have been read. They met every few weeks, usually in his neat little house in Morpeth. This was quite different from the public friendship – the trips to the theatre or the ballet. Nothing intimate ever took place on those outings.

Even after all this time, she didn’t consider the relationship as an affair. There was nothing romantic about it – no flowers or presents or candlelit dinners. She knew Samuel felt a continual guilt. He never talked about love after that first meeting. And she had never once considered leaving Peter. He needed her. She saw the delight and excitement Samuel gave her as a wage, her dues for living such a boring and unadventurous married life, for keeping the Calvert show on the road. She knew it wasn’t the way women usually looked at things, but couldn’t see why they couldn’t all maintain a civilized friendship. At least, she had thought that until Vera came blundering in with her questions.

Now Felicity wandered around the library shelves, as if she was having difficulty choosing a good read. She couldn’t see Samuel, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t working here. He was a manager, would have an office somewhere behind the door which said STAFF ONLY. He would be there, or in a meeting with his staff, or out of the region altogether on a trip to one of the big library suppliers to select books. She encouraged him to talk about his work in the little house in Morpeth when they drank tea together before they separated. She was always fascinated by other people’s working lives, and when she lay in her afternoon baths she imagined him sitting at his big desk, or chairing a meeting in his precise and authoritative way. It excited her that none of his staff could possibly guess what he did on his days off.

She was preparing to ask at the desk if he was in the building when he appeared through the STAFF ONLY door. He was carrying a briefcase and seemed to be on his way out. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and a pale linen jacket, a concession, she supposed, to the weather. Usually when they met up, if he’d come straight from work, he wore a tie. He dressed very well and cared what he looked like. At first he didn’t see her. He was smiling at the young girl behind the counter. Felicity felt a stab of physical discomfort which she realized was jealousy. She wondered if he took other women to his house on his free afternoons.

Then he turned and saw her. He gave no indication that they knew each other. He said to the young woman, ‘I’ll be in Berwick for the rest of the afternoon. But if anyone phones, tell them to call back tomorrow. This is an important meeting. I don’t want interruptions.’

Felicity caught up with him outside. He was walking down the pavement towards his car. If she hadn’t hurried after him, perhaps he would have driven off without giving her the chance to talk to him.

‘I’m sorry, Samuel. I had to speak to you.’

He must have heard her footsteps following, but he affected surprise.

‘I really do have a meeting in Berwick.’ He frowned, seemed more nervous than displeased.

‘Just ten minutes.’ Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. Reassurance, she supposed, that everything would continue as normal.

He agreed to meet her in the Little Chef on the A1 and was already there when she arrived, apparently engrossed in the menu. Even walking towards him she sensed he was frightened, that he needed reassuring more than she did. The place was almost empty. The windows were all open and the traffic noise came in from outside. They ordered tea from a sweaty youth, stared at each other.

‘You know something,’ she said suddenly. ‘Something about the girl. Lily. Had you met her?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ But he was blustering, not at all his usual controlled self. This wasn’t like one of his stories. He couldn’t make the plot work out.

‘The boy, then. Luke Armstrong. You’d heard about him?’

‘I think Gary was going out with his mother. That woman he was talking about. She was called Armstrong. I’m sure she had a son. It’s a link.’

‘I told that detective Gary was seeing someone called Julie. He wouldn’t kill anyone!’

‘Of course not. But they don’t believe in coincidences.’

It seemed a tenuous connection to her. A woman called Armstrong who had a son. How many Armstrongs were there in the phone book? Samuel must know more than he was letting on.

The waiter came back with their tea. As he lowered it to the table, liquid slopped onto the tray. He paused, expecting a reaction from them, anger, complaint, but they sat in silence until he left them again.

‘I was worried that detective would find out about us,’ Felicity said.

‘How could she?’ But she saw that the idea had occurred to him too. Perhaps that was why he seemed so uneasy, so unlike his usual urbane and confident self.

‘I wondered if perhaps we should tell her, in confidence,’ she said. ‘That way she would know it could have no bearing on the girl’s murder.’

‘Of course it has no bearing!’ His voice was impatient. She imagined he might speak in the same tone to a foolish library assistant. She felt tears come to her eyes.

‘We know that.’ She tried to sound reasonable. ‘But Lily Marsh came to Fox Mill the day before she was murdered. You can imagine the police jumping to conclusions, building up a scenario. What if we were together that afternoon and she saw us? That might give us a motive for killing her.’

She waited, expecting another angry response, but he smiled. ‘You should write fiction,’ he said. ‘A creative imagination like that. We weren’t together, were we? Not in the afternoon. I was at work all day on Wednesday. Book selection, then Library Management Team. I’d be able to prove it. We only met up in the evening to go to the theatre. Besides, James was there with you when the girl was at your house.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was.’

Samuel looked around the room. There were no other customers now. The staff were at the counter, engrossed in conversation. He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘How can anyone know?’ he said. ‘We’ve been so careful. I’d hate it to come out. It would seem so squalid. How could people understand?’ He pulled away from her and leaned back in his chair. His voice was still very low and she had a struggle to make out the words. ‘I couldn’t bear it if Peter found out. I’d die.’