Liz Jensen - The Rapture

But I don’t. I swim to the edge, fighting back the sobs, while Bethany explodes into ugly, high-pitched laughter and splashes her way to the opposite bank. Scrambling out and grabbing her towel, she runs, stark naked, towards the house.

I drag myself out of the water to the safety of my chair and strip off. Bethany’s cries grow fainter in the distance. You’re being manipulated , Ms Fox, her father said. And you can’t even see it . Now I do. I know she is mad but I still feel betrayed. Just a moment ago, I thought we might have edged into a new realm. My teeth are chattering and there is steam coming off my skin as my heat mingles with the cold air. Laboriously, I towel myself off and squeeze out my wet clothes. Transferring from the ground into my chair is something I mastered long ago, in rehab. But here, with the chair perched at an awkward angle on the concrete platform next to the mud bank, the manoeuvre seems impossible. I fail twice. By the third attempt I am in tears.

N’abandonne pas! says a voice in my head. Whenever I fantasise about Maman, I am eleven again. But I’m not listening to her. Or to my father, who’s here too, not as the man he is, but as the man he was, with his kindness and his gentle jokes and his cultivation. The word that best summed up both him and the things he appreciated in life was ‘civilised’. He is saying, this is not civilised.

No, Dad. And I’m sorry about that. But this is the way things panned out. Lying naked in the mud, I imagine my body dissolving to become a part of the Earth’s crust, my flesh rotting and my bones fossilising to rock.

I hear a shout. Frazer Melville is calling my name. Wearily, I look up. He’s running towards me from the direction of the house. He looks desperate. Trying to summon up some dignity, I haul myself to a sitting position and cover up with the towel.

‘What happened? What did she do? Did she hurt you?’ He squats next to me, panting, and takes hold of my arm.

His hand is on my back. ‘My God, you’re freezing!’

‘Let me go!’ I shuck him off violently.

‘You’ve had a shock. Calm down. It’s OK, I’m here.’ He looks wild with alarm. I draw a line in the mud with my finger, gouging deep. He’d better not cross it.

‘You have to tell me what’s going on!’ he pleads. ‘What are you doing out here? Why are you acting like you hate me?’

‘Because I do hate you!’ And now I need his help to get into my chair and I hate him for that too. He looks astonished, slapped. Confounded. Then horrified.

‘But why? What have I done?’

‘Well, you tell me!’ I lunge for my chair and miss. He repositions it, hauls me up by the arms — I succumb for practical reasons but despise myself for it — and seats me in it. Free to move, I roll back sharply but miscalculate the edge of the concrete platform. The chair tips: catching it just in time he pitches me back.

‘I haven’t done anything!’

‘Yes, right! And I’m supposed to believe that? When I saw you with her?’ I spin on my wheels and propel myself as fast as I can along the walkway. He grabs my chair by a handle and jerks it to a stop, planting himself in front of me at eye level.

‘When you saw me with who?’

‘With Kristin!’

‘Kristin?’

‘In your house. It was evening. You drew the blinds. And the next day you lied and said you’d been at the office.’

‘Yes, Kristin came to my house! I showed her Bethany’s drawings and we talked and that’s all we did. Oh, and I drew the blinds. Which is now obviously one of the classic signs of infidelity!’ he shouts. ‘If you think that, then you’re as crazy as Bethany! I didn’t tell you about her because we realised we’d have to abduct Bethany and I didn’t want you to be part of it. For your sake. I did it for you. How could you think—’

‘I came to see you and there she was and so of course I thought what I thought!’

‘There’s no of course!’

‘There is if you’re me! And Bethany said—’ But I can’t say it. The tears and the rage are in the way.

‘Bethany? You’re trusting her? ’ he shouts.

‘We’re both trusting her! It’s why we’re here, remember?’

‘But you believed her? About me and Kristin? Doing what? Having an affair? How could you?’ He is furious. And it’s genuine. ‘How could you insult me like that?’

‘So tell me it’s not true!’ I yell. ‘Go on, I dare you to tell me.’

‘Stop it. Stop this. Look at me. I love you. Can’t you see that, Gabrielle? I love you!’

But I can’t let it go. Not yet. ‘No! I can’t see it, how could I? How could anyone? Look at me! I can’t even feel it when you’re inside me, do you understand? I can’t feel anything down there!’

‘I don’t care! Do you hear me? When we make love I’m making love to all of you! Not just the bit that can’t feel, don’t you get it?’ He’s grabbed me by the shoulder and he’s shaking me. I struggle to free myself but he won’t let go. We grip each other. I am fighting him off even though I feel the truth and I should be ashamed, because my anger is on its own, unstoppable roll and it’s in control of me, roaring its way through until finally the tears burst out and I go limp, and he lifts me up in his arms and kisses my hair and my face and my neck and tells me he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care. He would never even look at another woman. He loves me. Every part of me, now and for ever.

Frazer Melville has lit the fire in the hearth, and we are watching the flames throwing shadows across the walls and ceiling. Every now and then a log pops, or some bark bursts open and releases a fizzing drool of sap. I could stare at it endlessly. Earlier, in the downstairs bathroom, I managed to bathe and wash my hair and I let him dry it for me which took a long time because every two minutes he stopped to kiss me and tell me I was a fool. Now, with coffee inside me, and an Indian shawl wrapped around my shoulders, I am finally warming up. After a furious altercation in which I overheard Frazer Melville threaten to return Bethany to the authorities if she ever, ever pulled a stunt like that again, she is keeping a low profile upstairs. But I do not kid myself it springs from remorse.

‘Low self-esteem can wreak the worst kind of havoc,’ I say in conclusion.

‘I never guessed you suffered from it,’ he says sadly. The green shard in his eye flickers and I realise how much I have missed it. And him. ‘I should have. But you’re so sure of yourself. So incredibly sexy.’ He leans in to me and buries his face in my cleavage. ‘I want you all the time. I can’t get enough of you. I want you now.’

I want him too. But I still can’t let go of the cruel truth I met in the lake, the truth I have not articulated before. The truth about the depth of my own insecurity, the intensity of the hurt. The realisation that whatever I may have told myself, I have not even begun to heal.

Frazer Melville is adding more wood to the fire when the phone rings. I pick up. It’s Kristin. If she is surprised at the warmth with which I greet her, she doesn’t let it show. But I feel the need to make amends.

‘I have an apology to make, Kristin. I was rude to you. There was a lot going on and I—’

‘Forget it. It was understandable. But listen.’ She’s speaking in an excited rush. ‘Harish pulled some strings and got hold of the seismic logs from Buried Hope. They have some geophysicists who do some research for them and get the data regularly. I had two other experts study them. They confirm what Bethany said. There’s a horizontal crack beneath the hydrate field which will lead to a huge methane blowout. We don’t know when it developed but it showed up on the data from September so it has been going on for a while. The company must know about it.’