At half past three that morning Helena woke with a headache and a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Neither was the result of a hangover. She rarely drank enough to have any effect at all and never in her father’s company. One and a half glasses of wine could not have made even a teetotaller tight.
She lay for a moment, wondering what had woken her. It could, she supposed, have been either the heat or indigestion from all the rich food. There was certainly an uncomfortable tightness in her gut. Rolling over on to her front to ease it and turning her head to the left, she decided it was not so much what she had eaten as the tension that gripped her whenever she saw that her father and Irene were on the brink of one of their battles.
Ivo had worked wonders, but the way Fin had looked at Irene throughout the evening, and the coldness with which he had spoken to her after the guests had left, had made it all too clear that he was furiously angry about something. When Helena had tried to sympathize with Irene as they said good night, Irene had shrugged and said something about his complete unreasonableness, adding: ‘I sometimes think it’s impossible to believe that he managed to produce a daughter as kind as you. No two people could be less alike.’
Giving up hope of a quick return to sleep, Helena pushed back the light duvet, intending to fetch a glass of water. Just as she swung her legs to the ground, she heard the sound of angry sobbing through the thin party wall and then a loud male voice, shouting: ‘Oh, stop snivelling, you maggot-faced bitch.’
Franny and Jack Thompson, who had lived next door for the past two years, had once been the best of good neighbours. Helena liked both of them. She had always fed their two fat tabby cats whenever the Thompsons were away and watched their house for damage or burglars, and they did the same for her. Franny was a potter and Jack a teacher, and until recently they had seemed entirely happy with their life and with each other.
All that had changed in the last few months, and the sound of their rows was becoming an almost daily occurrence. Ordinary conversation came through the wall as a kind of low buzzing sound with indistinguishable words, but raised voices were easily audible. Helena tried never to listen to what they were shouting at each other, but it was not always possible to avoid it. That night, without even any traffic noise to compete, their argument might have been taking place in her bedroom.
Helena had always detested loud voices even when they were not angry, and real arguments, laced as the Thompsons’usually were with tears and the sound of a fist crashing into the wall, filled her with a mixture of irrational fear and a flooding anger of her own. If she had been able to do anything to help them it might not have been so bad, but she knew perfectly well that there was nothing she could do. She went downstairs to drink a glass of water in the kitchen.
It should have been possible for her to ring the Thompsons up and tell them that she could hear everything they were yelling at each other, to knock on the front door and ask whichever of them appeared to keep a little quieter, or even to bang on the wall to remind them how thin it was, but she could not bring herself to do any of it. Ashamed of her ludicrous over-sensitivity to something that was no threat to her, and of her cowardice in not telling her neighbours how much their noise disturbed her, she fetched her duvet and wax earplugs and lay down on the drawing room sofa. From there she could still just hear them, but once she put in the earplugs she had peace again.
Even so, she could not get back to sleep until well after five and then she was disturbed by wildly tangled dreams, in most of which she was trying to grab hold of Franny to save her from some agonizing fate but unable to make her hear or catch up with her. Eventually, some time after eight, Helena gave up trying to sleep and made herself some coffee. There was complete silence from next door.
Her tongue felt furry and her eyes were burning, but she thought that strong coffee might set her to rights. The first sip tasted so unpleasant that she poured the coffee down the sink and drank some apple juice instead.
Later, as she read the newspaper in her bath, she realized that she was not going to be able to do any of the delicate work on the girandole for some time. Her hands were steady enough, but her mind felt fogged and she doubted that she would achieve the concentration she needed to ensure that she did not damage the gold leaf.
Dropping the paper on the floor, she sank down under the water, sluicing it through her fine hair and letting it smooth over her hot, painful eyelids. At least working for herself meant that she could decide to take a morning off without exploiting colleagues or causing trouble to anyone. She sat up and washed her hair, rubbing vigorously at her scalp.
Later, wrapped in a towel, she went downstairs to see whether a fresh pot of coffee would taste any better than the first. Half ashamed of the self-indulgence of her life, she took the coffee back to bed. There she lay, with her wet hair spread out on a towel over the pillow, drinking, reading, and only gradually understanding that the suppressed guilt at lazing in bed instead of working was making her feel even worse than she had before. Inertia kept her lying down, even though by then she knew she would feel better if she got up and did something useful.
Only the telephone made her move when it rang soon after half past ten.
‘Hello?’ she said, using her customary unhelpful response.
‘Helena, it’s Mike. How are you?’
‘Fine,’ she said as usual, instead of: lazy, badly slept, ashamed of myself and jangled. But the sound of his deep, unurgent voice made her smile. ‘What about you?’
‘Not bad at all. Look, I’ve had an unexpected escape today. I was supposed to be lunching with some clients who were due in on the Red Eye this morning, but they’ve been held up in New York. Fog apparently. I don’t want to interrupt you if you’re working, but I did just wonder whether we might have lunch together. Is there any chance?’
‘Oh, what a heavenly idea! I haven’t been feeling at all like work, but not-work hasn’t been doing what I wanted either. Would you like to come here?’
‘That was rather what I had in mind,’ he said with an appealing mixture of hesitancy and suggestiveness in his slow voice. As usual it was tinged with laughter, as though he found the whole of life a pleasant entertainment. Helena loved his lighthearted confidence.
‘Good. I’ll expect you about one, then,’ she said, remembering the previous Saturday when he had come to lunch and they had spent three glorious hours together in bed before picnicking on fruit and cheese.
Their affair was quite new and they were still learning each other’s codes and discovering the unexpected vulnerabilities that lay hidden behind the masks they showed to the rest of the world, but so far it was going really rather well. They had known each other casually for some time, having several friends in common, but neither had taken much notice of the other until they had been to stay in the same house one weekend at the end of February.
It had been a lugubrious couple of days, damned by cold grey skies and unremitting rain, and the only diversion had been provided by their hosts’horribly obvious dislike of one another. Helena and Mike had been the only guests. She had arrived first and by the time she had been in the house for an hour she had realized that she had been invited so that Harriet and George Bromyard need not speak to each other or be alone together. Helena had been tempted to invent a reason to flee back to London at once. Something about the desperate pleading in Harriet’s face had made it impossible to go, and Helena had done her best to chatter away merrily and appear to be enjoying herself.
Mike’s arrival two hours after hers had given all three of them some much-needed relief, and Helena had watched in silent admiration as he single-handedly started to change the laborious conversation into real talk. She still did not know how he had done it, but she had followed his lead, agreed to play every game he had suggested throughout the weekend, helped Harriet cook and gone out for walks with George, listening to them both and doing her best not to side with either. By the end of the weekend, she had been exhausted and had driven back to London noticing almost nothing in her longing to be in her own empty, quarrel-less house, where she could nearly always sleep.
The following day Mike had telephoned, told her how much he had admired the way she had dealt with the Bromyards and invited her to have dinner with him in a well-regarded restaurant in Chelsea.
Helena had liked him even more on his own and they had seen each other two or three times each week since then. It had not been long before she began to think they might end up as lovers and to realize how much she wanted that. Her last relationship had collapsed nearly eighteen months earlier, and she had not been tempted to surrender her safe solitude until she had got to know Mike. It was beginning to seem less satisfactory, but she had enjoyed the interval of celibacy so much that she wanted to surrender her solitude freely and not have it wheedled out of her after a series of well-used courtship rituals.
When Mike sent her a large but informal bunch of garden flowers with a carefully judged – and quite amusing – amorous note, she had rung him up to thank him and, to her own surprise as much as his, added: ‘But don’t let’s go through all that performance. I should very much like to go to bed with you and it seems silly at my age to start pretending that I wouldn’t in order to inflame your passions or persuade you that I’m not what my stepmother still calls an easy lay.’
She had heard him laugh and added more confidently: ‘If you feel the same, would you like to come round to supper tonight?’
That had been the beginning and she had quickly discovered that Mike was as responsive and amusing in bed as out of it. She still felt that she knew about him only what he was prepared to let her know, but she was almost always content in his company and often felt very nearly safe with him. She had never yet been to his house, although he had invited her there more than once.
Each time they had arranged to meet it had seemed easier for them both if he came to Clerkenwell, and she thought she had detected a hint of relief whenever she said as much. Mike had certainly never pressed any of his invitations and had recently fallen into the habit of ringing up to ask whether he could come and visit her, without even mentioning his own house.
The prospect of seeing him unexpectedly in the middle of the day was so cheering that she ignored her still-uneasy stomach and aching head and quickly got dressed in clean shorts and T-shirt. She changed the sheets and tidied her already impeccable bedroom before nipping over to the workshed to inspect the gilding on the girandole.
Having checked the patch and seen that it really was as unobtrusive as she had thought the previous evening, she moved to the far end of the shed to have another look at Ivo’s desk. As her close examination of the dowels, the patination, the rust marks left by the screws and all the other signs of authenticity began to make her think that against all the odds the desk might be genuine, she became so engrossed that she forgot Mike’s imminent arrival. Her hair kept falling into her eyes and so she bundled it up in a new rubber band and began to jot down notes, describing the piece in full and outlining every flaw, whether or not she thought it should be corrected.
To Helena’s taste, there was little worse than furniture so heavily restored that it looked like a reproduction, but she always made a careful list of even the slightest marks and chips in the veneer before deciding how much she wanted to do to a piece. Even then she would discuss the whole project with her client to make absolutely certain that they were in complete agreement about the repairs she planned to make and the flaws she intended to leave as they were.
She was soon so absorbed that she completely forgot her headache, the fight between Franny and Jack that had woken her, and her dislike of the barely suppressed aggression between her father and Irene. At one moment, when she dropped her pencil and had to grovel on the floor for it, she remembered how reluctant she had been to get down to work and laughed at herself. It had happened so often before that she could not understand why she never remembered that work was the only thing that invariably made her feel better.
When Mike rang her buzzer, she was still there, squatting down between the desk and the wall, checking the backboards. It took her a moment to lever herself out and, when she saw on the monitor that he was dressed in full City fig and realized how grubby she must look, she laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ he said over the intercom. ‘Have I gone green?’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ she said, pressing the buzzer. ‘At least not as far as I can see, but the screen’s only black and white. Come on in. I’ll meet you in the hall.’
He was standing, peering at his face in the long, triptych-like mirror she had hanging over the hall radiator. As so often when she saw him after an interval apart, she was struck by the unlikeliness of his looks.
Taller than Ivo, he was more substantial too, with big shoulders and strong thighs. He dressed with all the expensive conventionality expected of successful City men, but his amusing face and the coarse, mousy hair that would never lie tidily flat saved him from sleekness. He had a big, almost spreading nose and a flat, wide smile, which always made her think of a duck; the nicest kind of duck, as she would remind herself whenever she felt it might be an unfair comparison. His brown eyes were usually narrowed in amusement and his dark lashes were considerably longer and thicker than hers. He looked kind, aware, intelligent and fun. So far, to her surprise, he had lived up to his appearance.
‘I can’t see anything odd at all,’ he said, still examining his reflection, ‘except for my dreadful nose.’
‘It isn’t and, anyway, I told you there was nothing wrong,’ she said, waiting for him to kiss her. ‘You just didn’t believe me.’
Mike straightened up to smile at her. Almost at once his face changed. The amusement left his eyes. Realizing with dismay that he was frowning at her clothes, Helena glanced down at her sweaty, dusty legs. For an uncomfortable moment she wondered whether he could have expected her to dress up for him in black lace suspenders or something even worse. The knowledge that he had never even hinted at such a thing did not help.
‘What is it?’ she said almost as coldly as her father might have spoken.
‘I thought you weren’t working this morning,’ Mike said, sounding accusatory. Helena took a step backwards. ‘I’d never have come if I’d known I was disturbing you.’
‘You’re not,’ she said, sighing in relief. She brushed some of the cobwebs off her shorts and moved closer to him again. ‘And this wasn’t really work anyway. Yesterday my brother brought me a desk he’s just acquired, and I was having a look at it to see how much restoration it needs. It’s such a lovely piece that I got carried away. Don’t worry about it.’
‘But I do. I know that nothing would make you clam up so quickly as my assuming rights over your time – or you.’
‘I won’t hug you,’ she said, ‘because I’m so grubby, but will you consider yourself hugged and stop talking nonsense?’
His face lightened then and he kissed her at last, keeping his suit well away from the dust.
‘Good,’ she said when he let her go. ‘Now would you like some food while I clean up or … ?’
‘Why don’t we just go up and have a bath together?’ he suggested and was enchanted when he saw her blush.
When he had first met her some years earlier, he had thought she was one of the most guarded women he had ever seen, and he had always assumed that she would turn out to be dreary if he bothered to get to know her. Her heroic attempts to deal with the unspeakable weekend that had been imposed on them both by the miserable Bromyards had interested him because they seemed so unexpected in the woman he had thought she was. Later, as he had seen more of her, she had revealed glimpses of a character he found unexpectedly appealing.
Since then, he had discovered that when she was at ease and happy she could be the best companion he had ever known. Aware of aspects of him that no-one else had ever understood, terrifically affectionate – and often very funny – she had got past all his defences. He longed to make her feel safe enough to show her real self all the time. So far he thought he was doing pretty well, but there was still a long way to go.
He had come to think of her as one of those sea creatures that inhabit discarded empty shells and only occasionally ease out of them in the sea itself. There were times when he wished he could think of a more attractive image, for the creatures were, as far as he could remember from some old natural history films, disgustingly sluglike or unpleasantly scuttly; but there was nothing else that quite expressed Helena’s forays out of her shell and the inevitable quick retreats as she remembered her fear of dangers that he suspected would turn out to be wholly imaginary if he could ever discover what they were.
If the extent of her need for protection surprised him, then so did her unexpected flashes of bravado. It had appalled him to discover that she had no anxiety about walking alone, after dark, through the streets of London. Whenever he challenged her, she just laughed and reminded him that she had been doing it for years, that Clerkenwell was her home, and that she was not going to give way to the fear whipped up by media stories of the relatively few serious assaults that were actually suffered by Londoners.
‘Listen,’ she had said to him once. ‘I don’t carry a handbag, I never wear jewellery, I’m always in jeans or trousers of some sort when I’m walking home. Why should anyone attack me? They never have.’
Surprised by her easy dismissal of physical danger when she had confessed that in the past she had been made almost ill by fantastic fears of all sorts, he had stopped trying to persuade her to change her ways.
He had also come to see that the idiosyncratic working life she had created for herself was peculiarly suited to her. The thought of her tackling any of the worlds, like the financial one in which he worked, where aggression was a prerequisite and at least an appearance of unassailable self-confidence vital made him shudder. There were times when even he found it tough, and he had spent fifteen years at it and knew well enough what was expected of him and how to provide it.
Leaving the noisy world of his work for the quiet of Helena’s house was often hard. Sometimes he did not manage to adjust quickly enough and would see her shrivel in front of him as he spoke in the voice he would have used to a colleague: impatient, pulling no punches, insisting on his own way. With Helena it was crucial to pull all punches if he wanted her to feel safe.
She was looking up at him with the best of her smiles, almost confident, slightly naughty, wholly affectionate.
‘Come on, Mike,’ she said. ‘Let’s bath. There should be plenty of hot water.’
By the time he had wrapped her in soft towels and, in spite of her ludicrous protests that she was too heavy for him, carried her to her bed, they were both laughing. He laid her down on the dark blue duvet and unfolded the white towels from her thin body.
Later, when Mike was lying slumped against her, Helena stroked his hair and kissed him and forgot about having to worry about anything at all. Whatever happened in the future, they had what they had and were able to give to each other, and that was all that mattered.
After a while she realized that he was asleep and, feeling restless as she nearly always did when he went away from her into unconsciousness, she slid out of bed and went downstairs to see what food there might be for lunch.
She rarely ate elaborate meals and did not like cooking anything much except vegetables, eggs or pasta. There were some red onions left and so she cut two of them almost into quarters and put them into the oven to roast in olive oil with some halved red peppers, before opening a tin of anchovies, and washing a bag of watercress. She often worried about Mike’s heart since he worked so ferociously hard and appeared to live on the worst possible kind of food when he was alone – butter, cheese, bacon, and take-away meals that were full of salt and fat – and she liked to feed him on all the foods that were currently supposed to prevent heart disease. He did not much like walnuts, but she sneaked them into her simple cooking whenever possible, along with broccoli, olive oil, other approved vegetables, lots of garlic and as much red wine as possible.
Mike usually slept for nearly an hour after they made love and even the onions should be cooked by then. She poured herself a glass of mineral water mixed with elderflower cordial, smiling at the memories of Ivo that the scent evoked, and went to lie on the sofa in the drawing room to read until Mike should happen to wake. Serenely happy, she had no need of the previous night’s comforting novel and took up a new book about fakes and art-market scandals she had been reading with a mixture of interest and alarm.
When the telephone rang she was furious, both with the unknown caller, who should have known that someone might be sleeping in the middle of a sunny May afternoon and with herself for forgetting to switch on the answering machine.
‘Yes?’ she said crossly when she had grabbed the receiver.
‘Ms Webton? Helena Webton?’ said a fruity male voice that she did not recognize.
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, excellent. I have just acquired some eighteenth-century chairs – Chippendale – that need restoration and you’ve been recommended to me by several people recently. They’re a trifle wormy, one or two of the legs wobble, the arm of one of the carvers is split, and all the C scrolls need tidying up. Would you be prepared to have a look at them for me and give me a price?’
‘Who are you?’ she said much less politely than she would normally have spoken, and she held her dressing gown more tightly across her chest.
‘My name is Dean Swift.’
‘And who exactly was it who told you that I might do some work for you?’ she asked, suppressing a laugh as she thought about the names he might produce next. John Dryden would probably fit best with Swift, or even Elkanah Settle. She wondered what his real name might be.
‘You sound remarkably suspicious, my dear,’ he said in the most patronizing voice she had heard for some time. ‘I hear your name all over the place, sale rooms, other dealers, that sort of thing.’
‘I see,’ she said, trying to sound reasonably civil.
‘So, when will you come to look at my chairs?’
‘I’m afraid that I am very busy just now, and I really don’t think that I could take on any more work for at least six months.’ Helena gritted her teeth and added: ‘But it was kind of you to think of me.’
The politeness seemed wasted since he did not bother to say anything else at all. When he had put down his receiver she thought of dialling 1471 to find out where he was ringing from in an attempt to identify him, but then decided that she would prefer not to know.
‘What was all that about?’
Helena turned and, seeing Mike tying the cord of the dressing gown she had bought him a couple of weeks earlier, went to hug him.
‘Lunch?’ she said after a moment and was relieved when he did not repeat his question about the telephone call. She wanted to forget it.
‘Lovely,’ he said, pushing both hands through his untidy hair and shrugging his big shoulders until the silk of the dressing gown sat more comfortably on them. He turned to look at the clock over the fireplace.
Helena waited to hear that he was going to have to get back to the office and told herself that she would not mind if he did since she had plenty of things to do and they had had a pleasant time together and nothing else mattered. He was always busy, but, even if he had not been, she would have done her best to avoid seeming clingy. From the beginning she had schooled herself to smile and encourage him to go whenever he showed the first signs of thinking about leaving.
‘Although tea would be more accurate,’ he said.
The powerful rush of delight that flooded through Helena surprised her. She told herself that she could not possibly mind that much about whether Mike stayed or left.
‘Except that tea would have to be cucumber sandwiches and little pink cakes,’ she said, trying to sound relaxed. ‘Let’s eat in the kitchen – if you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all. Best place. Was your telephone call very private? You sounded quite unlike yourself, hard and rather angry.’
‘Did I?’ she said, realizing that she would have to say something to explain why she was reluctant to talk about it. ‘No, it wasn’t private at all; just a man wanting me to do some work, but he seemed more than a bit shifty.’
‘In what way?’
Helena shrugged and added reluctantly: ‘Well … the name he used must have been false. But, worse than that, he refused to tell me who had recommended me. I may be neurotic, but I won’t work for people I know nothing about.’
Mike, who had been smiling at her unabashed admission of neurosis, quickly said: ‘Quite right. None of us can these days. KYC is crucial. We din it into all our new recruits before almost anything else.’
‘KYC?’
‘Know your customer. In these days of money-laundering it’s absolutely vital. When you can get fourteen years for assisting a money-launderer and five for just not reporting your suspicions, you can’t take any chances. We screen all our new clients these days as carefully as though we were MI6.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Helena, marvelling once again that anyone could survive in the world in which Mike apparently felt so at home. ‘Thank heavens I don’t have to worry about that.’
‘Don’t you?’ Mike wondered whether Helena could really be as ignorant as she sounded of the use money-launderers made of the art market. As he knew better than most, transactions in antiques and paintings were among the simplest ways of disguising the origins of dirty money. Remembering how easily spooked she could be, he thought it might be better not to enlighten her for the moment at least.
‘No, I don’t. I never deal in furniture. I just restore the stuff. All I have to worry about is whether I’m working on stolen property or having any contact with the sort of iffy dealers who ask restorers to produce fakes or made-up pieces.’
‘And that’s what this man was?’
‘I thought he might have been, not least because he talked of the C scrolls needing to be tidied up.’
‘What’s the problem with that?’
‘“Tidying up” is the kind of code some bent dealers use to ask restorers to add something like the C scrolls that prove a piece was made by Chippendale. It’s much the same as a picture restorer being asked to ink in a signature that’s said to have been washed away in the cleaning of a watercolour.’
‘But you haven’t any actual proof that’s what this man was after, have you?’
‘No. But even if he were legit, there’d be no point my risking it. I have quite enough honest work these days from people I know are trustworthy without having to take on dubious strangers who come without an introduction.’
‘Bully for you,’ Mike said, trying to sound casual. He yawned and sat down in the chair furthest from the cooker. ‘Something smells wonderful. I hope you weren’t slaving while I was asleep?’
‘Certainly not.’ Helena was surprised by the abrupt change of subject but accepted it without comment. ‘You’ll see how simple it is in a moment. Wine? There’s some nice red in the rack.’
Mike shook his head. ‘I’ll have to go back and work this evening. My clients are due in at dawn tomorrow.’ He paused, and then, apparently unaware that he might be revealing an anxiety of his own, added: ‘Do you mind that I came round now rather than tonight?’
‘I don’t know how you knew, but it was the most perfect thing you could possibly have done,’ she said, touching his hand, more worried about his anxiety than any feeling of her own.
She told him a little about her noisy neighbours, adding: ‘And in any case, I was feeling pretty ghastly after a dinner at my father’s last night and knew I wouldn’t be able to work. When you rang, it all changed. Bliss, as my stepmother would say.’
‘Would she?’ Mike’s face had lost some of its humour again. ‘Helena, when are you going to let me meet the family?’
She stiffened and turned away to arrange the food on a long, white plate. Knowing that her movements were jerky, she deliberately made them smoother, hating the thought that he might misinterpret her reluctance as criticism. Since she detested being criticized herself, she did everything she could to agree with people she liked, and expressing any real complaint or anger could make her feel like a murderer. It took a great deal to push her into saying anything negative and when she did she worried about the consequences for days.
‘Don’t try to change it,’ she said, biting her lip. She felt Mike’s hand on her back through the thin cotton of her dressing gown. ‘Please.’
‘I’m not trying to change anything,’ he said with careful gentleness. ‘But I want to know more of you, to feel more included in your life. Is that so odd? You say that your parents’dinner was ghastly, but …’
‘You wouldn’t have liked it,’ she said hastily. ‘And anyway, my father doesn’t know anything about you, and even if he did he’d have made a fuss if I’d tried to get you invited. He’s …’
‘That sounds as though your stepmother at least does know about me.’
‘Well, yes, in fact she does.’
Mike turned her around so that she was leaning back against the worktop. Trying not to let the impatience make him sound angry or critical, he said lightly: ‘And does she approve of what she knows?’
He was rewarded for his patience when Helena smiled. ‘Yes, and she’s told me she envies us the freedom that we have.’
‘Freedom?’ He frowned and then his face relaxed as he provided his own answer. ‘You mean to meet and frolic in the middle of a working day like this? It is pretty amazing, although I don’t often get the chance to skive off like this.’
‘It’s partly that, but probably more that we’re free to see each other when we want and not see each other if we don’t. It’s heaven to me to be sure that you see me only because you want to. I couldn’t bear it if you – if either of us – felt some kind of obligation or had to pretend about anything.’
Mike took his hands away from her narrow hips and went to sit down again.
‘Don’t you see?’ Helena said urgently, wanting him to understand and, if possible, agree with her. ‘That’s what makes this so safe. We have our own houses; we don’t owe each other anything …’
‘Don’t we?’ He sounded almost harsh, quite unlike himself. She blinked.
‘I was going to say: anything except honesty and love while we feel it,’ she said with as much calm dignity as she could manage.
‘That suggests you envisage the love stopping.’ Mike was sounding more and more distant.
She shook her head, hoping that he was not about to get angry. The soft fair hair had slipped across her eyes so that she could hardly see him. He had never shown any anger, but she was sure that there was some in him somewhere and she dreaded finding it.
‘It would be silly to pretend it could never happen,’ she said, hoping to placate him. ‘And like this we don’t have to keep wondering if it already has. This way we can just enjoy it. If it ends tomorrow then it ends, but today isn’t spoiled, whatever happens, unless we get to the point where we have to watch each other to see if tomorrow might have come today. Don’t you understand?’
‘Yes,’ he said. Knowing how much reassurance she needed to make her feel even fairly secure, he suppressed his irritation and smiled. Helena brushed the hair away from her face but she did not smile back.
‘I understand,’ he said, ‘and I almost sympathize, even though I don’t agree with it at all.’
‘Lunch,’ she said decisively, filling his plate and putting it down in front of him.
What she had never felt able to explain to him was that while they were visitors in each other’s lives, they were not at risk of what had happened to Franny and Jack, the Bromyards, Fin and Irene, and in fact to most of the couples she knew well. The thought of finding herself trapped in an angry relationship like any of those filled her with horror. She would rather have lived entirely alone than at war with someone she loved.
She had grown up subject to disabling panic attacks, which she had more or less conquered by learning to avoid the stresses that triggered them. Feeling herself at fault had always been one of the worst, and there was nothing like being the target of someone else’s anger to make her feel in the wrong.
The attacks had always seemed to her to be like savage animals, leaping on her from nowhere, sinking their teeth into the back of her neck and then worrying her from side to side until she had lost all ability to think sensibly or do anything to help herself. She had been free of them for some time but she was not cocky enough to believe that she had overcome them for good and, dreading them so much, she would have done anything she could to prevent them.