Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

We drove the van up the hill from the car park by the harbour where we had parked it, and caused traffic chaos when we had to block the road in order to unload. Rose Cottage seemed pretty well perfect to us and we had rented it ever since from an absentee landlord apparently quite content to receive a regular small income from tenants who gave him no bother.

That was the beginning. And at first almost all its promise, all of our dreams, were realised.

The first six years of our life together passed uneventfully and, by and large, were remarkably content. The early memories in particular were such happy ones, because they had brought with them a sense of peace and a degree of loving companionship that I had never thought possible.

You can’t deny your own past, of course, not to yourself, anyway. But Carl and I succeeded in settling into Rose Cottage so easily and completely that it was almost as if the place had been built specially for us – which Carl insisted it had been, albeit 200 years or so earlier.

The cottage had everything we wanted. We bought a futon sofa and turned the glorious upstairs room into a kind of bedsit. We found some wonderful old pale-gold curtains in a charity shop, which we hung in the dull downstairs room that we used as a dining room in the evenings, when we could pull the curtains and mask the room’s ugliness with candlelight.

The studio in the backyard suited Carl perfectly. We even discovered, when trying to brighten up the shabby little kitchen by replacing the decaying brown linoleum that covered the floor with a dazzlingly colourful material, that there was a small, apparently forgotten, cellar below. Its entrance was protected by a piece of old stone right by the sink, which had at first seemed no different from the rest of the floor but which had given a slightly hollow ring when Carl had tapped the new floor covering in place. He had been delighted when he succeeded in prising up the stone with a crowbar to reveal a seven-foot-square cellar, which gave him an excellent hiding place for his cash earnings and also somewhere to store completed paintings. I had been pleased too, because, having both a vivid imagination and a love of history, I immediately conjured up an image of our cellar housing stashes of illicit contraband brought there by Cornish smugglers.

Mostly we led a very quiet life, our love for each other all that really mattered to either of us, and even the arrival of the letter did not alter that. Not to begin with. We were determined, at the end of that fateful year, that Christmas would not be spoiled. We enjoyed special occasions. We celebrated alone, as was our habit in most things, with roast pheasant and a bottle of good claret, after spending a jolly – and mercifully Fenella-Austen-free – lunchtime hour in the Sloop.

By the end of January both Carl and I had almost begun to dare to believe that perhaps both the van incident and the letter had not really meant anything. Certainly I had still somehow managed to keep any further nightmares at bay. But the peace I so hoped we had found was shattered when, one dark and cold morning, the postman brought another letter.

I suppose I had been kidding myself that there wouldn’t be any more. That it had ended as abruptly as it had begun. After all, two months had elapsed since the first letter arrived so to receive one again, just like that, was a greater shock than ever. This time the message was not only devastating but also devastatingly appropriate. ‘YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM THE TRUTH ANY MORE’, it said.

Carl and I both tried to pretend to the other that we were able to take it in our stride, but I knew deep down that neither of us was as calm as we pretended to be.

‘This can’t go on,’ I told Carl the next day. ‘I think we should go to the police. We’re both living my nightmare now. Anything would be better than that...’

He looked at me as if I had slapped his face. ‘No!’ he said emphatically. ‘No. I cannot risk losing you.’

I sighed. I was no longer a frightened twenty-year-old girl. Nowadays I was a frightened twenty-seven-year-old woman. Nothing had changed, really, except that I was beginning to believe that nobody could run for ever.

Carl cuddled me and told me stories, as he always did when he knew I was upset. He told me again about growing up in Key West in the Sixties and early Seventies when the artists and writers were there with a vengeance, and the whole place existed in a cloud of scented smoke from marijuana and joss sticks, and he as a small boy used to go hunting for clams on the beach accompanied by a chorus of songs from guitar-playing hippies.

Sometimes he made his growing up sound forsaken and lonely. It depended on his mood, I knew that. Sometimes he resented the haze of drugs and booze, which had engulfed his parents to the extent where they could hardly be bothered with their only son. Sometimes he romanticised it all. This was one of those days. He was trying to lift me, of course. ‘Did I ever tell you about Crabman Killenny?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘They called him Crabman because he could sing the crabs off the beach.’

I laughed.

‘No, really, every night he’d go to the beach and sing to the sunset. His voice was so bad even the crabs couldn’t stand it. A great procession of them would make their way across the sand and up into the streets. All we kids used to go and watch. We reckoned they’d rather be squashed underneath the Conch Train than listen to old Crabman Killenny singing.’

‘Yuk,’ I said. And I laughed again dutifully.

‘No truly, I saw it with my own eyes.’

And Carl stared at me, arms outstretched, hands palms up, a picture of offended innocence.

Nobody could make me forget pain like Carl. He was just so easy to be with somehow. I loved his gentle sense of humour. He had a way of jollying me out of myself. It didn’t quite work on this occasion though, and the tranquillity of our day-to-day existence never quite returned. Any chance of that was wrecked by a series of three or four nightmares, brought on, I knew all too well, by the letters.

Carl and I still didn’t have a clue who might be responsible. For a start, there was no one whom we could possibly imagine knew anything about us that might lead him or her to behave in such a way.

‘Who could hate us that much?’ I asked Carl one Sunday morning.

He shrugged. ‘I wish I knew, Suzanne. The most hateful person I know around here is that damned Fenella Austen.’

It wasn’t the first time he had mentioned her name and I wished he wouldn’t. There was no logic in focusing on Fenella and I told him so.

‘But what if we’ve got it wrong; what if we’re being threatened because of something that has happened here in St Ives? Maybe Fenella resents us, resents me. You know what artists can be like. I sell better than she does nowadays.’

‘Carl, you’re not exactly Damien Hirst, thank God. We barely get by. And there is absolutely nothing about either of us since we’ve been in St Ives that anybody could use against us, you know that.’

Carl grunted his agreement. But he seemed to be totally preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with finding the letter writer. And it was that, probably, which led him to behave later that day in a rather hot-headed manner, which was quite out of character.

I understood that Carl could not bear anything that threatened our lives together. But I had had no idea of his intentions when he suggested we visited the Sloop, and indeed, still do not know for certain that he had actually intended to do what he did.

I was trying not to think about our problems when we walked down to the pub at lunch time. It was a wet and blustery February day, and there were virtually no holidaymakers around. The bar was jam-packed full of locals, most of whom we knew at least a little and who knew us.