The morning was shrouded in mist, a cold wall of white whispering against the windows. The world beyond was hidden except for the one tree that stood closest to the house. Its branches rubbed up against the glass, the individual twigs twisted back upon themselves like arthritic hands curled in pain. My fingers itched to paint.
Silence brooded upon the valley, no birds or cars nor any sign of life beyond our walls, just us, bewitched within the mist. I looked at Craig, still asleep in my bed, his breathing slow and even.
My life had been incomplete, until now. Paul had been a massive mistake. The jibes, the arguments, the slow erosion of what little confidence I had; he’d played me with such expertise until I’d almost believed him. That I was a failure, that his world was everything.
The sex had become an act of submission, not love.
‘Give it up, Caro,’ he’d growled that last evening. ‘You’ll never make it as an artist. Haven’t you realised that by now?’
Paul’s hand moved around my neck, his thumb pressing against my throat, his hips crushing into mine. With each thrust of his body I felt his will defeating mine.
‘Say it, Caro!’
I couldn’t breathe.
‘No more painting, no more commissions.’ His voice was thick with hate.
My head began to spin. His body ground into mine and his eyes rolled back as if he was no longer aware of what he did. Then he snapped back to himself and his hand eased its grip, enough for me to speak.
‘Say it, Caro,’ he hissed. His eyes bored into mine.
‘Please …’ I gasped.
His grip tightened.
‘Yes!’ I cried.
‘Yes, what?’
‘Yes, I’ll give it up. No more painting. I promise!’
Oh God, what had I said?
I’d rung Harriet the next day, after Paul had gone to work. She heard it in my voice. She came round straight away and saw the state of me, the tears upon my face, the bruises on my neck.
‘You have to leave, Caro. Do you really want this?’
I shook my head.
‘Then let me help.’
For the first time I did. I let someone help. We packed up all my stuff there and then and she bundled me into a cab. Paul didn’t know where she lived. He screamed down the phone at me but I just cut him off. There was nothing he could do. But I lived in fear of him discovering me, tracking me down to one of the galleries, following me back to Harriet’s home, forcing me …
Larkstone Farm, the inheritance, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
I turned to look at Craig, his face relaxed in sleep. I wanted this so much – Craig. The way he was with me, it was so different from Paul; I felt it with a conviction I’d never had before. At some point, I had to forgive and forget. Paul, my family, myself.
Watching Craig over my shoulder, I slid from under the sheets, catching up a blanket that had fallen to the floor and dragging it around my body. I crept from the room, barefoot down the stairs, to stand upon the stairwell half way down and look out from the tall window that faced the garden. The mist pressed against the glass and I felt a chill breeze pushing through the gaps in the old wooden frame. It tugged at the tendrils of my hair about my face. I felt my eyes dry from sleep, my lips full from kissing. I yearned for acceptance, for belief, like the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw scratching at the window.
The tears seeped out from beneath my eyelids, unbidden and fast. It was different from before, a release I hadn’t allowed myself. For so many years this house had been Elizabeth’s home, her space, her refuge. Had she stood in this very spot, looking out of the window, beyond which the roof of the summerhouse lay brooding in the mist? Always reminded of her loss? She could have had it razed to the ground, to destroy the memory of Danny’s death. But it was his monument too, a wound she could never let heal because it meant so much to her – the place he last breathed. She was the mother who could not love me, who did not see or value the love I had to give, who’d never given me a chance. Who could blame her?
I thought of Steph, the sister – no, half-sister – who’d stayed away from me all those years. I had longed for her affection, her friendship, to make some sense of our sisterhood. Her distance was explained now. She and Elizabeth both had made their choices. These had been opportunities for love that had been lost, gifts that had been rejected, for I knew then that I could have loved them both, if they’d let me, and my love would have been worth having.
The pointlessness of it all sank into my mind. I’d always craved an understanding, reasons I could accept. Steph’s words, firmly placing the blame for my mother’s death on me, repeated in my head. I was a grown woman now, I knew there was no fault. Nature had taken my mother from me, not I. Steph had said that deliberately to hurt me. Her story about Elizabeth too had been to hurt me. Or was it to hurt Elizabeth, both of us, to plant a seed that would foul our relationship even further? Why would she do that? Elizabeth was Steph’s mother, as I now knew. What had gone on between them?
As I stood there at the window, my father’s love meant more to me than anything else. Not in the amount of the inheritance, but the fact that he’d given me his name, had provided for me and recognised me with an equal share. Perhaps he’d loved my mother too and this had been his way of making it up to her, to us, for her lost life. I’d never known my parents, but I knew they’d loved me. That gave me faith.
And what of Danny?
I saw the little boy that had teased and tormented me, gloating in my submission. But he’d been a child, too young to understand the damage he did, too young to have died like that, to lose the life that stretched out in front of him. I had carried the guilt for his death locked inside since I was six years old. It had been an accident. A terrible, heart-rending tragic accident. Whatever had happened in that split second as the glass shattered around us, as he fell towards me and the spike in my hand, whatever I did, whatever I had felt in that moment, I’d been a child, a very young child who couldn’t understand.
I cried for Danny then. For Elizabeth and Steph too. And for me. Pity, self-pity, warm and comforting, held me standing naked in my blanket.