Helena forced herself to work, breaking off only when it was a respectable time for lunch. She could not eat much, but it was a relief to be out of sight of Ivo’s desk for a while. After she had put the uneaten food back in the fridge, she went for a long walk and tried to forget the increasingly lurid suspicions that were fomenting her panic.
Back in the shed, she got down to work and eventually completed the restoration of the chair. By then not only her head but also her neck, back and arms were aching and she longed to lie down and sleep, but there were still things to be done. It had occurred to her that only by rigidly following her own routines would she be able to keep any sense of control over the stupid terror that she could not stop.
She fetched her camera and recorded the day’s work as she always did, filled in the last section of the survey form, filed it, switched on the word processor, composed a letter to the client and printed it out with a carefully itemized bill.
Having switched off the machine and put away her tools, she swept the shed, keeping her eyes averted from Ivo’s desk, locked up and went back to the house for a bath. Halfway across the garden, she stopped to pick some sprays from the rosemary tree that grew, covered in small blue flowers, against the fence.
She took the sprays up to the bathroom and put them in the bath, running cool water over them and smiling at the memory of an ancient herbalist’s instruction she had once read, that ‘if thou be feeble, boyle the leaves in cleane water and washe theyself and thou shalt wax shiny’.
Well, I’m definitely feeble, she thought, breathing in the half-medicinal, half-churchy smell with pleasure.
For a while she just lay in the scented water, letting herself relax, and felt all her muscles begin to soften. She realized that she must have been grinding her teeth all day and let her jaw go slack. The pain in her neck began to ease almost at once.
It was then that the questions started again: why had Miranda shown her the Land Registry certificate? What else did she know or suspect? Was Ivo the real owner of the house or a nominee? What was hidden behind its shutters? Was there, could there be, an innocent explanation of it all? If so, why had he been so angry when he thought Helena had been spying?
Sitting up and scrubbing at her dirty nails with a stiff brush, she told herself to stop it. She reminded herself, as she had done so often, that none of her previous panics had had any basis in fact at all. Her powers of judgement were suspended as soon as her heart began to race. There were hardly any facts holding up the teetering edifice of suspicion she had been building ever since she had seen the certificate. The fear was stupid and she had to get rid of it.
There was no reason whatsoever to believe that Ivo was in the pay of money-launderers or that he, or someone else, had bought the farmhouse as a store for stolen antiques that needed keeping for several years before they could be fed into the market, perhaps through her restoring business. She had invented both fears and neither was anything except a product of her own neurosis.
‘What makes you so sure?’ she asked herself aloud as she stood up and reached for her towel.
Hearing her voice echoing in the tiled bathroom, Helena savagely told herself to shut up. Having wrapped herself in the towel, she leaned forward to rest her aching forehead against the mirror for a moment. When she straightened up again, she could see her face reflected in the smeared, dripping patch she had wiped on the glass. Her eyes were surrounded by shadows. Her upper lip was tucked between her teeth.
‘You’re going dotty,’ she said to her reflection. ‘To be mistrusting Ivo, whom you’ve known and loved all your life, is mad. This is just a panic attack. It’s not real. For heaven’s sake get a grip on yourself.’
She rubbed her body violently with the towel and when she was dry bent down to pick up some spiky rosemary leaves that were stuck between her toes. They had not done much good, she thought, feeling just as feeble as she had before the bath.
Only a little later a possible explanation of the panic occurred to her. The advent of Miranda had upset all kinds of laboriously constructed certainties and probably put Helena under greater stress than she had understood. It was more than possible that her ludicrous suspicions of Ivo were no more than a displacement of the suppressed anxiety that had been generated by Miranda’s reappearance in her life.
Helena had known for a long time that her mother’s desertion had left her terrified of trusting anyone’s affection or relying on them in any way. It was all too likely that her return had created an emotional upheaval that could make even the safest people seem alarming.
Once more almost within reach of self-control, Helena dressed in clean shorts and a loose shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen to see what she had left that she could eat for supper. Mike had said he might ring her, but she knew from experience that there was no point waiting until then before eating. If he did arrive hungry later, she could always assemble a salad or cook him some eggs. She poured herself a glass of elderflower-flavoured mineral water.
There was not much fresh food left apart from the salad and so she cooked some fettuccine with a sauce made from scraps of smoked salmon and half an onion sautéed in butter whizzed into a couple of tablespoons of crème fraiche. She took her supper into the drawing room and, since she did not want to risk letting her mind free to re-create the terrors she had only just managed to stop, she turned on the BBC nine o’clock news.
With the glass of elderflower water beside her on the floor and the plate of pasta on her knee, Helena watched the real disasters that were happening around the world. The news ended before she had finished the fettuccine and so she watched the weather forecast and then the local news. After those came a sitcom and then Crimewatch.
Helena was soon watching films of armed robbers caught on security video cameras and police officers describing various unsolved crimes for which they needed public help and information. Her own anxieties seemed even sillier than before. She finished her supper with much greater enjoyment, put the empty plate on the floor beside the glass and slid further down her chair, relaxing into comfort.
She watched the whole programme through, wondering what it must feel like to be faced with someone you knew on a security film replayed on television, and whether it would be possible to ring up a police incident room and say: ‘I’ve just seen a friend of mine on your programme. His name is such and such and he lives at so and so.’
What kind of person would you have to be to betray someone you cared about?
And what kind of person could you possibly be, she asked herself, still silently but more tartly, to let someone capable of a serious crime go free? You would have to report them, however important they might be to you.
The woman on the screen was reciting the last of the incident room numbers and then she invited anyone watching to ring Crimestoppers with information about any crime that had not been mentioned in the programme. When her picture faded, Helena stood up to switch off the television and pottered across to the bookshelves to choose something to read in bed. The telephone rang before she had found a book that looked alluring enough.
She smiled when she heard Mike’s voice and they had a long, silly, and tremendously reassuring conversation about nothing very much. Half an hour later they said good night to each other and Helena went up to bed, hoping to sleep.
That night was not too bad, but her hard-won peace did not last. During the next few days whole new waves of panic washed over her without warning, each one more powerful than its predecessor. However often and however forcibly she tried to tell herself that it was nonsensical to imagine that Ivo might be involved in anything criminal, she could not believe it. Her theories about displacement anxieties seemed less and less convincing every day and she hung on to them only with the greatest difficulty.
Trying to mock herself back into rationality, she often sang ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’to herself, repeating the line about ‘sudden strange fancies came into her head’over and over again. Mike caught her at it one evening when she was washing sawdust out of her hair in the bath and he was supposed to be making a late supper for them both.
He had rung up after nine and, when he had discovered that she was still working and had not eaten anything all day, he had told her that he would come round and bring food with him.
‘What’s that you keep singing?’ he asked, looking round the bathroom door to smile at her.
‘Sorry,’ she said at once. ‘Is it driving you mad?’
‘No. It’s a pretty enough tune. But I can’t identify it.’
She told him the name of the song.
‘And why that line?’
She tried to smile and, finding she could not, proceeded to lather soap all over her face, muttering something about the rasp of the sawdust against her skin. Getting soap in her eyes and on her tongue, she thought it a suitable punishment for someone who told as many lies as she was beginning to tell both herself and Mike.
Blinded and with the disgusting taste in her mouth, she felt his hands on her slippery shoulders, pressing her backwards. Obediently, she lay against the end of the bath and felt a cool flannel wiping the soap from her face.
‘Open your eyes,’ he said firmly. When she did so, the remaining soap stung so much that involuntary tears spurted out of her eyes. Even so, she could see that Mike was holding out a towel.
‘Mop,’ he said brusquely.
She did as he told her and then accepted a glass of cold water from him to wash the soap out of her mouth. He took the glass back from her, but he did not go away.
‘Now, tell me what’s going on,’ he said at last, sitting down on the closed lavatory.
‘Nothing’s going on.’
‘Helena, I’m neither stupid nor insensitive. You’ve been behaving in the most bizarre way for the past week. If you’re trying to get rid of me, just say so. I’ll go without any sort of fuss. You ought to know that. But if that’s not what you want, for God’s sake tell me what is going on.’
‘Bizarre? What d’you mean?’
He laughed, but it was not the usual, enticing gurgling sound that had always made her smile. Instead it was a short angry bark.
‘Where shall I start? You talk to yourself when you think I’m not attending. You toss and turn in bed, where you used to be able to lie peacefully for nearly quarter of an hour at a time. Sometimes you look at me as though you hate me and then a few minutes later you fling yourself at me and cling more tightly than you ever have before. You don’t initiate any conversations and you answer questions in the most perfunctory way I can imagine. You used to be relatively interested in me and apparently liked me. I am not aware of having done anything particularly dreadful, but if I have, I’d prefer it if you told me directly instead of playing games and sending me messages in this impenetrable code of yours.’
Disliking his increasingly angry voice, shocked that her private terrors should have been making her behave with visible oddity when she thought they had been well enough controlled to be hidden from everyone but herself, she could not say anything.
‘Is it something your stepmother said after I met her that evening when you were out? Did she take against me and warn you off?’
Helena shook her head. ‘It’s not like that at all. You don’t understand, Mike.’
‘You’re telling me. Then has someone else been talking about me? Who? And what have they been saying?’
Helena covered her mouth with her hand, once more shaking her head.
‘No,’ she said before she could stop herself. The sound did not reach beyond her hand.
‘I can’t hear you. What did you say? Take your hand away from your mouth. Who’s been talking to you? What have you been told?’
‘No-one,’ she said and was glad both that it was the truth and that she sounded reasonably sane. ‘No-one’s been talking about you. I’m just worried at the moment. Family matters. I’m sorry if it’s been making me weird. I hadn’t realized that it showed. Since it does, I think perhaps I … erm … perhaps I ought to have a little time to myself to sort it out. Look, why don’t I ring you in a day or two when I’ve … ?’
‘Helena, for fuck’s sake!’ roared Mike.
She cowered against the back of the bath, appalled by his temper. She had always known that it must be there, but he had never shown it to her before. Her nakedness and smallness put her at such a disadvantage that she would have said anything to get him out of the room.
‘I can’t talk like this. Let me get out and get dressed.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said disagreeably.
‘I can’t get out while you’re here.’
‘You always have before. We’ve had innumerable baths together. What on earth is going on, Helena?’
‘You’re frightening me. I can’t get out while you’re angry like this.’
‘I? I? My God, but you take some beating. It’s not I who’s behaving abnormally. But I’ve never been one to outstay my welcome. I’ll go with pleasure. I only hope it makes you happier.’
She lay in the bath, shivering in spite of the heat of the evening, and heard the front door bang. Then she sank down under the surface. When she had rinsed the soapy water out of her hair and off her body under the shower, she found the biggest of her clean towels, wrapped it around herself, put an enormous dressing gown over that and got into bed to lie with the duvet pulled up around her until she was dry and warm again.
She remembered later that Mike had been cooking and went down to make sure that he had not left on any burners in the kitchen. He had not.
For the first time since he had slammed out of the house she felt guilty rather than scared. But she knew that she could never have told him about her fears. If they were as irrational as she hoped, then Mike would think her completely mad, madder even than he already thought; if they were real, she would have betrayed Ivo, and she could not do that.
Having eaten some of the food Mike had made, she washed her hands and telephoned him to apologize. He did not answer and she was faced with the dilemma of whether to ring off or leave a message that he might be hearing over the speaker as she was giving it.
‘Mike, it’s me, Helena,’ she said eventually. ‘All I can say is that I’m very sorry to have been so weird. I think it was partly hunger. I’ve been working so hard that I forgot to stop for lunch and didn’t have any breakfast either; that sort of thing. I’ve just eaten and I feel a lot less light-headed: just silly and apologetic. I wasn’t pretending when I told you that I’m bothered about various family matters or that I needed a bit of time to sort them out. Look, can you give me a couple of days? Perhaps even one would be enough. I’ll get to grips with the situation and then be normal again. Could I come round and see you the day after tomorrow? Leave a message on my machine, will you, to say yes or no and if yes what time? Thank you. I … well, you know how I feel. ’Bye.’
She tidied up the kitchen, thought about eating some more and then decided to leave it while she did something to sort herself out. Having tried to write a letter to Irene and then one to Ivo himself and eventually one to her father, she re-read the drafts and threw them all away. She did not know how to get herself free of the turmoil Miranda had wished on her, but she knew she had to do something quickly, and not only for herself.
She had already harmed Mike, without even realizing it, and there was no saying what she might do to other people if she let herself carry on. Eventually the idea that had been nagging at the edges of her mind for days returned. It had been more insistent each time she had thought of it and it was gradually coming to seem less silly and perhaps even less cowardly.
If she were to ring the Crimestoppers telephone number, anonymously, and say that she was afraid there was something going on at Ivo’s farmhouse, then it could be investigated. No-one would need to know that she had had anything to do with it. If her fears were as stupid as she hoped they were, and Ivo was entirely innocent, no one would be hurt. The police would have wasted some time, it was true, but they must waste time on false leads often enough. And if she told the Crimestoppers only that she was afraid something might be happening at the farmhouse, it would not be her fault that they had wasted time. Something must be happening; whether or not it was against the law was a different matter.
The thought of what her action might do if it were ever discovered to have been hers was frightening, but it was less frightening than the possible consequences for her and for Ivo, and for Mike and the rest of the family, too, if she did nothing.
It was such a dramatic step that she decided she would have to sleep on it before doing anything, but she did not sleep very much, and by the morning it no longer seemed melodramatic or even absurd.
Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, she locked the house carefully and drove the van miles away to the other side of London, where she knew of a large shopping centre. She parked, bought some food for cash in Marks & Spencer as cover in case anyone who might have recognized her had seen her in the area, and then found a telephone box. There, feeling a fool but determined never to be identified as the caller, she put on her gloves and tapped in the Crimestoppers number.
When her call was answered, she gave the man her prepared speech, told him the address of the farmhouse and when he asked what she suspected gently put down the telephone receiver.
She drove carefully back to Clerkenwell, anxious not to arouse any police interest by going through any red lights or breaking the Highway Code.
‘Please let them not find anything,’ she said over and over again as she drove, not minding that she was saying it aloud. ‘Please let it just be my neurotic silliness. Please let Ivo be all right. Please let there not be anything to find.’