ANNA

Saturday, 14 April 2018 Day Zero

THERE WERE TWO EMPTY WINE GLASSES, EITHER SIDE of her bed. Kai was at Hannah’s birthday sleepover, Anna had just had the shag of her life, and she was happy.

Douglas’s ribcage rose and fell under her head. She could feel his heartbeat. Every so often his stomach gurgled. He played with her hair, smoothing it through his hand. He stroked her back too, in an absent way, but his hands were so warm and firm that it felt akin to a massage. The smell of his skin was seductive, a cocktail of male musk and soap. When they made love she had pressed her nose into his neck, breathing him in. She ran her fingertips over his stomach muscles, then slid them up to his scar. He had told her he’d got it in a brawl when he was younger. She loved all his imperfections.

Anna was overwhelmed by emotion. She had known when she met him that there was something there, but this had taken her by surprise. She thought about what she had lost over the years: the betrayal by the first man she loved, the baby she’d had adopted, the family who turned cold, the husband who took himself from her. Tears started to run, trickling from the corners of her eyes, down her cheekbones to her ears. Douglas touched her face.

‘Was it something I said?’

She laughed and wiped the tears away. ‘No. Just feeling shaky.’

‘Come here.’ He pulled her up, and she curled against his chest. He held her like a child. ‘Tell me.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘It’s evidently something. Vain as I am, I’m not deluding myself that my superior sexual performance has left you an emotional wreck.’

She chuckled. ‘Well,’ she said, tipping her head up and letting him drop a kiss on her lips. ‘There is that, of course. Obviously, it was the best sex I’ve ever had.’ Another tear fell, and her laugh must have sounded forced, because he held her closer.

‘It’s a pathetic story.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

She went silent, thinking. Where should she start, and how much should she tell him? She didn’t want to sound like she was whinging, but then again, this was part of her and if Douglas loved her he would understand. Her mouth was dry, but they hadn’t brought any water upstairs with them. She reached for the wine bottle and drank straight from it.

‘Easy there.’

She put the bottle down with a grimace. She already knew that Douglas found excess unattractive. ‘When I was fifteen years old I was seduced by Nick Ritchie’s father.’

She had already told Douglas about Izzy’s death, but not about the part Tim and Nick played in her life. Now she was ready to talk, wrapped in her lover’s arms, his scent in her nose, his hand tracing the curves of her body. She told him about Tim, how he had encouraged her to turn to him in the aftermath of Izzy’s death. How the secret affair had allowed her to occasionally forget what had happened.

Her heart was racing. She had kept Tim’s secret for so long that it felt monstrous to betray it, but Tim had betrayed her first.

She leaned back with a sigh. ‘But then everything changed. Ritchie’s collapsed and my parents were left with a huge hole in their finances. There was nothing we could do but sell up and leave London. I was still in love with Tim, I thought he loved me. I was young, and it was a fairy tale. Then I found out I was pregnant.’ She swallowed hard, that old humiliation still raw. ‘I was so happy. I called him, and we arranged to meet. He sounded on edge. Christ, that should have given me a clue.’

‘Go on.’

‘I naively thought he would leave Cora and we’d set up home together, but it turned out it was a kiss goodbye, not hello. He told me that it was wonderful to see me, that I was adorable and would always have a place in his heart, but that I had my whole life ahead of me and it couldn’t include him. He said he loved me, but he didn’t want to ruin my life; or his. When I explained about the baby …’ She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. ‘I thought he would be pleased. I had this fantasy … but he told me none of it could happen, that it would destroy him, and he could end up in prison. I loved him, so I agreed to keep quiet.’ A tear makes its way down her face. ‘I managed to convince Mum and Dad that it was some random guy I’d met at a party, and since I was a total nightmare at the time, drinking and staying out all night, they believed me.’

‘Did you have an abortion?’ Douglas asked, wiping her tears for her.

‘No. Tim wanted me to, and offered to pay for it, but I couldn’t so I had her adopted.’ She sniffs. ‘It was hard, but it was the right thing to do. After that I moved back to London and sofa-surfed with friends for a while, but usually their parents got fed up with me pretty quickly. I was a mess.’

‘Poor Anna.’ His arms tightened round her. ‘Poor baby.’

She snuggled into him. ‘You won’t hurt me, will you? You wouldn’t treat me like Tim did?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Only I don’t think I could bear it if it happened again.’

She only worried because her attraction to him felt similar to the way she had felt with Tim – insecure; scared that this all-consuming love might not be reciprocated, that she was being toyed with again. She felt him withdrawing and decided to reveal more, to pique his interest.

‘I have a few mementos.’ She sat up and pulled the covers over her, hunching over her knees. ‘I wanted proof of where she came from, so I pulled out some of her baby hairs.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘She screamed like crazy, but I have her DNA.’

The revelation has the desired effect. ‘Clever girl.’

‘I didn’t feel particularly clever,’ she grumbled. ‘I felt like an idiot. I’ll never forgive either of them.’

‘Either of them?’

‘Nick too. But that’s another story.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Are you interrogating me?’

She hopped out of bed and went into the bathroom, turned on the tap and angled her mouth beneath it. Her face was still flushed and her eyes bright. She splashed her cheeks with cold water and dried them with a towel.

‘I want to know everything about you,’ Douglas said.

How far could she trust him? She barely knew him. But Douglas wasn’t Tim and she had to talk to someone about what happened. It had been poisoning her for so long. She crawled back under the blankets and snuggled up to him, closing her eyes tight.

‘Talk to me, Anna. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us.’

She hugged her arms around her knees above the duvet. ‘The reason Izzy ran down to the river was because something had upset her, had scared and shaken her so much that she wasn’t in her right mind. Before she went, she told me she had been hiding with Nick. She was trembling from head to toe, and she looked like a ghost.’

She felt Douglas’s body tense.

‘What are you saying?’ His voice had bite in it. The loving quality had gone.

‘We’d been playing this silly game, pretending Nick didn’t exist. Izzy didn’t like it and would sneak off and spend time with him when she thought no one was watching. But I knew. I suppose they got close and Nick misinterpreted the signals and took things too far. He was a very troubled teenager.’

Why did she add that last lie? He wasn’t troubled, at least not before that summer. Had she really been that powerful? It seemed extraordinary now.

‘He changed after she died; became withdrawn and depressed, everyone knows that. It wasn’t as if he had lost a sibling, so it must have been a guilty conscience. He did something to her, then made sure she couldn’t tell. He knew she was a weak swimmer. I think he may have followed her down to the river that day.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘And something happened. Obviously, I can’t prove that.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Anna. Get to the point. What did he actually do?’

‘She said he had his hand on her breast.’

‘Fuck.’ He raked his hand through his hair. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell the police?’

Because in her heart she knew it wasn’t the whole truth. In her heart, she knew it was her fault.

‘Because I had no proof. Also, he might have only meant to scare her, but lost control of the situation, or misjudged the river, and she was swept away. I’d known Nick all my life and I didn’t think he could do anything like that, and it was all so fragmented: the storm, the game we were playing, Tim kissing me. It was this weird kaleidoscope. It was only years later that my memories started to resolve themselves into something coherent. It seems so obvious now, but it wasn’t then.’

Douglas is grinding his teeth. It was the first time she’d seen him do that.

‘I shouldn’t have told you.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Anna.’

The words stripped the warmth from the room. ‘I’m not …’

‘He’s parenting my daughter, for fuck’s sake. Jesus.’ He thumped his fist down on the mattress. ‘I don’t believe it. If you knew that about him, why didn’t you say something to Grace?’

Had she gone too far? Nick had come close to the bone when he asked her why she was so keen to lay the blame at his door, but she refused to feel guilty. He was his father’s son. She waited, then said quietly, ‘Because I wanted to use the information and I was waiting for the right time.’

‘What do you mean? Use it for what?’

‘For money.’

There was a long, long silence. A door closed with a bang somewhere down the street. Anna imagined she could hear the fridge humming. Douglas got out of bed and pulled on his boxers, then went to the window, opened the curtains and looked out, his hands pressed against the frame, his shoulder blades jutting like fins. When he turned he was backlit by the street lights. The headlights of a passing car lit the room. She drew her knees up to her chest and covered her face with her hands.

‘How much money?’ he asked softly, coming to sit beside her.

‘Twenty thousand pounds down, plus a thousand a month,’ she mumbled into her palms.

‘And that’s what you think my daughter’s safety is worth?’

She dropped her hands. ‘No! Of course I don’t think that.’ That was not what she meant at all, but why hadn’t it occurred to her that this would be his reaction? She back-pedalled quickly. ‘She isn’t in any danger. I could be wrong about Nick. That’s only my theory. Douglas, don’t you see—’

But he’s already out of the bed and pulling on his trousers. He does up his shirt before looking at her again. ‘You’ve done a lot of damage, haven’t you, Anna? You’re going to have to put this right.’