Хилари Боннер - The Cruellest Game

I thought about what he was saying. ‘But Brenda didn’t know?’

He shook his head. ‘Not until she had the tests, no. I do believe that. You would have to be quite mad to bring a child into the world knowing for sure it was going to get that disease. And she wasn’t that. Not then, anyway.’

‘What do you mean? Not then?’

‘I’d recently been beginning to notice things about Brenda, things other people probably wouldn’t, that made me think she was now developing Huntington’s. And that her mind was beginning to be affected. Her behaviour was erratic. She could be shaky too, physically, although perhaps again not noticeable to anybody else. Not yet.’

I remembered her shaking and, more specifically, the smashed wine glass and the difficulty she’d had that day on the beach attaching the lead to her dog’s collar.

‘I suppose I saw things,’ I said. ‘But only occasionally.’

He nodded. ‘That’s how it is to begin with.’

I stared at him. I really hadn’t expected this.

‘Did she know?’ I asked. ‘Did she know she was getting it?’

‘She knew she was going to get it, of course,’ he said. ‘After the tests showed the double mutation she knew it was inevitable. And she’d reached the optimum age. But sometimes the disease doesn’t develop until people are in old age. Sometimes people die before they get it. I did feel guilty about that side of making her have the tests, that she then knew there was no chance at all of her avoiding the damned thing. But she seemed to cope with it extraordinarily well, really. Brenda was very good at going into denial, I think. Very good indeed.’

Wasn’t she just? I thought, reflecting on all the times we had spent together. Brenda knowing full well who I was and my relationship with her husband. Me totally unaware of who she really was.

What had she been hoping to achieve? And had she achieved it with Robbie’s death? It was my belief that she had.

I’d thought I had guessed most of Robert’s story. But I hadn’t dreamed of anything like this. For a fleeting second I felt a wave of sympathy towards the man I’d once so loved. I quickly cast it aside.

He had deceived me to a devastating degree. He deserved no sympathy at all. Not from me or from anyone.

‘You could have told me,’ I said. ‘You should have told me. We could have worked something out together. That’s what people do.’

He shook his head quite violently.

‘No. Don’t you see? I wanted another life. I needed another life. I loved my daughters but couldn’t cope with them being all there was for me. I couldn’t cope with just watching Laura deteriorate and then waiting for little Janey to develop this terrible illness. Just watching and waiting. I was afraid I would end up as mad as them. And I suppose in a way I did.’

‘But you brought it on yourself,’ I said. ‘I mean, what did you think, for God’s sake, when you came back the night Robbie died and there was Brenda, your wife, in our kitchen? What did you think, Robert?’

‘I didn’t know what to think. But it was obvious that you didn’t know who she was, and all I wanted was to keep things that way for as long as I could. That’s why I had to leave you the next day. I had to go and see Brenda. To find out what was going on. To try, somehow, to square things with her. Don’t you see?’

‘Oh, I see all manner of things now, Robert. All manner of things. But what did you say to each other? What did she tell you, and what load of rubbish did you tell her?’

‘I told her more or less the truth,’ he said. I almost smiled at the use of the phrase ‘more or less’. I feared that was probably the best he would ever be able to do with the truth.

‘She told me about meeting you on Exmouth beach by chance, seeing Robbie, and being struck at once by how like me he was. Then how she talked to you and found out about your husband Robert and so on. She said she pretended to be someone else simply so that she could get close to you, see how you lived, find out more about our life together.’

‘And did she tell you how she felt when she found out about me?’

‘She said she was devastated, of course. But she decided not to confront me at least until she’d found out more. And she still didn’t want to risk losing me altogether, it seemed.’

‘But can’t you imagine the effect it must have had on her seeing the near-perfect life we had together?’ I asked. ‘Imagine comparing the life you had with me, here at Highrise, with her life, her hellish life surely, looking after a dying daughter, knowing both she and her second child would go the same awful way, and living in that dreadful house I assume you shared...’

I stopped abruptly.

He shook his head very slightly as if trying to clear it. ‘You went to the house? To Riverview Avenue?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said, and I told him about my aborted visit to the home of the woman I knew as Bella Clooney.

Robert did a kind of double take. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘You only told me she was called Bella. I’m sure of it. If you’d ever mentioned that the surname of the woman you met on the beach was Clooney, I don’t know, but I may just have wondered—’

‘What are you talking about?’ I interrupted, irritated that he seemed to be going off at some sort of a tangent.

‘Brenda was crazy about George Clooney. Obsessed almost. She had DVDs of all his movies, the complete boxed set of ER , and she played them all the time—’

‘Can we get back to what we were talking about, please?’ I interrupted again.

He nodded. Then did another double take. ‘My God, what would have happened if you had knocked on the door, I wonder, gone into the house...’

His voice tailed off.

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘It was the day after I was released by the police. And you were there then, with Brenda, weren’t you? I presume you went to her after I kicked you out. You might have answered the door to me. Wouldn’t that have been interesting?’

He looked startled. ‘Yes. I didn’t think of that. Yes, I suppose I was staying there then.’

‘And, even if you hadn’t been in the house, I could easily have noticed signs of your presence, seen photos of you about the place,’ I continued. ‘Or did you do your best to prevent there being any of you with her too?’

He looked down at his hands.

‘You’d certainly have seen more pictures of George Clooney,’ he muttered.

I ignored that.

‘I didn’t have to wait long to see Brenda’s picture in the paper, though, did I?’ I went on. ‘To see her name in print.’

He made no comment.

‘So, getting back to your story, how did you attempt to “square things with her” as you put it?’ I asked.

‘Well, I just promised her I wouldn’t change anything, I wouldn’t leave her, I would always look after her and the girls, as long as...’

He broke off.

‘As long as what?’

‘As long as she let my life with you continue. As long as she never attempted to tell you the truth. We could all carry on just as we had done. All she had to do was accept it and not tell anyone. Particularly not you.’

‘And you thought she was prepared to go along with that?’

‘She told me she would. She told me she’d been more afraid of my leaving her, abandoning her, as she put it, than anything else. She was angry, of course. But she said she realized she had been partly responsible for everything because she hadn’t been honest with me from the start about the Huntington’s. So she said yes, she would go along with it.’

I studied him carefully.

‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ I asked.

‘Get what?’ he replied.

‘Don’t you see? Bella or Brenda has been responsible for everything. Breaking in here so mysteriously in the middle of the night, with keys I assume she somehow stole or copied from you; wrecking the place; snatching little Luke Macintyre specifically for the purpose, I don’t doubt, of trying to incriminate me. I’m sure she was responsible for Robbie’s death too. Quite sure of it. It was her revenge, on you, on all three of us in this family. And she’d been planning it, or something like it, for months... all that time I thought she was my new best friend, she was...’ I paused, searching for the right word. ‘She was grooming us, me and Robbie. And she was guilty of incitement to suicide at the very least. She had to be.’