Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

‘Will they ever stop?’ I asked him for the umpteenth time. They were my first coherent words. They were invariably my first coherent words.

‘One day,’ he whispered, his lips very close to my ear. ‘One day, I promise you.’

He was so kind. I knew he would not let himself sleep now. He never did. He realised that I needed him awake and loving me. And he knew that for at least the next week, maybe two weeks, the fear would be all around me again. And that some nights I would not dare to sleep. He would stay up with me until exhaustion overcame me. He always did.

He was my rock.

Often, when I was trying to get over a nightmare I would make myself think happy thoughts. Try to remember the good times.

The very best memory of all was the day I first met Carl, the day everything changed. The day I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, I would find happiness.

I was crying when he first appeared by my side, almost by magic. I was desperate and so badly needed someone I could trust and lean upon. Then, out of nowhere, along came Carl.

I had gone to the Isabella Garden in Richmond Park because I needed to be alone. I was twenty years old. I had been married at eighteen, and I was desperately unhappy.

I was orphaned when I was just a toddler and my grandmother brought me up. It was a very sheltered childhood, unhealthily so, I suppose, although I had not known that at the time. Gran even contrived to teach me at home through most of what should have been my school years – and that suited me just fine. My one brief spell at primary school had been torture. Indeed, I never learned to cope with much of the world outside the home I shared with Gran.

I was certainly totally ill prepared for marriage so young – particularly to a strong, domineering man who turned out to have none of the kindness about him that Gran had always shown me, and which I had somehow expected to receive automatically from someone I was to share my life with. Instead, he turned out to be both cruel and violent.

Gran was long dead by the time I met Carl, and I felt completely alone in the world. Even though I was only twenty, I honestly believed that my life was over, that I would be forever trapped in a vicious, loveless marriage.

The Isabella was one of my hiding places, one of my sanctuaries. It’s famous for its wonderful shows of spring shrubs, when the blooming rhododendrons and azaleas and camellias display themselves in all their blazing multicoloured glory. The autumn can also be glorious there, but not the winter. And this was a particularly unpleasant December Wednesday, cold, damp and relentlessly grey. But even so, I was grateful for the peace of the place.

I sat by a murky-looking pond weeping silently, and I thought I had the garden more or less to myself. Even the ducks seemed to have found somewhere more pleasantly hospitable. I was certainly not aware that there was another person nearby as I perched on an old, dead, moss-covered tree trunk, oblivious to its soggy wetness, lost in my own misery.

He must have approached very quietly because he was standing quite close to me before I noticed him. My head was bowed. My eyes were filled with tears. I saw his feet first, clad in Wellington boots. Then a hand reached out to me, offering a red-spotted handkerchief, the kind I had only seen before in films tied round a cowboy’s neck.

He didn’t startle me. There was nothing threatening about his presence and somehow I knew that immediately.

I looked up at him, seeing his face for the first time. It was a broad, unevenly featured face, but nevertheless quite pleasing. He had a big craggy chin, a reddish complexion emphasised by his cropped pale-blond hair, a wide, full-lipped mouth and the brightest, kindest blue eyes I had ever seen. But then, it was a long time since I had known any kindness at all.

I was aware at once of the gentleness in him. And there was concern in those blue eyes too, concern for a stranger. He had the look of someone who knew what pain was when he saw it.

He did not say anything at first, just continued to hold that spotted handkerchief in front of me. Eventually I took it, blew my nose and did my best to dry my eyes.

Only then did he speak, with that slight stammer which, I would learn later, occurred just when he was nervous. ‘A-are are you all r-right?’

I didn’t answer. It was, after all, pretty obvious that I wasn’t all right.

He shook his head and made a kind of tutting sound. ‘S-sorry, silly question,’ he said.

‘It’s OK,’ I replied. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute.’

He stood silently for a while as I sniffed inelegantly into his handkerchief, struggling desperately to stem the tears and regain control. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ he said again. ‘Would you like me to leave you? I d-don’t want to intrude?’

He took a couple of steps backwards towards the pond, without looking where he was going. His left foot sank deeply into the thick, gooey mud around the edge of the water. He stumbled and for a moment I thought he was going to fall, then he recovered himself and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Typical,’ he said.

He was unsure of himself, and hesitant and clumsy in his movements, but there was humour in his eyes. And even at that moment he managed to coax a smile out of me.

Immediately he grinned back. I reckoned he was in his early thirties, maybe twelve or thirteen years my senior, but in spite of the lines etched quite deeply round his mouth and across his forehead the grin was a boyish one. He positively beamed at me and his mouth stretched so wide that it seemed as if his face might crack. His teeth were perfect: bright, white and wonderfully even. His accent had already told me that he was American. I didn’t know much of the world, but I had read somewhere that being American and having good teeth went together. Involuntarily I felt my own smile widen.

‘That’s b-better,’ he remarked. He ran the fingers of one hand through his stubbly blond hair, stepped towards me again and reached out with the other for his handkerchief. ‘Finished with that?’ he asked.

I glanced at the now damp and soiled piece of cotton with horror. ‘I can’t give you it back in that state...’ I began.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he murmured, interrupting me. He took the handkerchief, put it back in his pocket and sat down next to me on the moss-covered tree trunk.

Although I had barely noticed its cold wetness until then, suddenly I was concerned for him. He wasn’t wearing a long coat like me, just a short leather jacket over blue jeans.

‘The moss is sodden,’ I warned.

‘Oh right.’ He glanced down at the tree trunk beneath him as if seeing it for the first time, then jumped to his feet, pulling at his jeans, which were already very wet and had stuck to him. ‘Y-yuk,’ he stammered.

Somewhat to my surprise, I burst out laughing. I could barely remember when I had last laughed.

As though reading my mind, he said: ‘You have a lovely laugh, you should try it m-more often.’

It was gone three o’clock and the day was starting to grow even colder and more unpleasant. All too soon it would be dark. That’s England in December for you. He shivered and thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He had big, capable hands, scrubbed scrupulously clean but rough-skinned and battered-looking, the kind of hands that were accustomed to working for their living.

‘Horrible weather,’ I remarked, falling back in true English fashion on the safest conversation topic of them all.

He nodded.

I was suddenly curious about him. ‘It’s really ghastly, so what brought you here today?’ I asked.

He removed his right hand from his jacket pocket and I saw that he was clutching a small sketch pad and a pencil. ‘Just l-looking for a few ideas,’ he said.