Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

I told myself I didn’t care what happened to Carl, as long as I never had to see him again.

I suppose I had a kind of breakdown. Not surprising when you considered all I had been through. I blocked everything out. Most important of all was to block Carl out.

And that might have been the way it would remain, had it not been for the intervention of Will Jones.

My time with Mariette and her mother was actually surprisingly peaceful, in spite of my distressed state of mind, but after three weeks I knew I must be overstaying my welcome. The sofa bed in the front room couldn’t be that comfortable, and Mariette continued to insist that I remained in her bedroom until I was both mentally and physically stronger. However, when I eventually expressed a desire to return to Rose Cottage both Mariette and her mother were worried that the house itself might upset me and suggested I looked for somewhere else to rent.

Perhaps stubbornly, I insisted on going back to the cottage. More than anything else I wanted at least to try to bury the demons that lurked there. I felt it was something I had to do alone, so I made my own way up the hill, carrying the small bag containing the few clothes and books Mariette had collected for me.

I had not been back since the night she and the policeman had knocked so forcefully on the front door. I remembered clearly enough that we had left the place in a fearful mess, complete with all those dirty dishes piled in the kitchen sink. I just hoped no mice or even rats had been attracted.

But when I unlocked the front door a pleasant surprise awaited me. The place looked and smelled fresh and clean, there were newly cut flowers in a vase on the table and not a dirty dish anywhere to be seen.

‘Bless you, Mariette,’ I said to myself with feeling.

She had been back to collect one or two things for me and to pick up the mail occasionally, and must have worked her magic on the cottage then. There had been no further letters from Carl. Maybe he had accepted that I wanted nothing more to do with him.

Rose Cottage was a wonderful surprise. I spent the day pottering around and realised that I must be beginning to cope. At any rate I was functioning after a fashion. I walked down to the town to do some shopping. I was still conscious of curious stares and had yet to venture back into any of the hostelries Carl and I had frequented. Nonetheless I didn’t find the exercise too difficult.

Steve, the matinée idol fishmonger, fussed over me charmingly and insisted on giving me a small, beautifully dressed fresh crab as a present. ‘Good to see you back, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some first-class fresh halibut coming in in a couple of days. I’ll save you a piece.’

I had smiled wanly. Halibut, Carl’s favourite. The king of fish, he called it. How the memories flooded back.

At home that evening I blessed Steve for his crab, not least because it meant I barely had to cook. I boiled some rice to eat with the crab and made a little green salad. The crabmeat was rich and sweet and, as ever, the plain boiled rice brought out its flavour beautifully – that was something, one of so many things, Carl had taught me. As I ate I realised I had not enjoyed a meal in a long time, probably not since before it all happened.

Afterwards I settled mindlessly in front of the TV for a couple of hours. I went to bed before midnight and slept surprisingly well – no more nightmares, not of any kind.

In the morning I made a concentrated effort to think about my future: what I was going to do next. I needed to work, I understood that. I had no money and no apparent way of acquiring any. It was hard to imagine what kind of work I could do, Carl had certainly been right about that. The library job had long been filled and, in any case, I still doubted that I would ever have been regarded as suitably qualified.

Mariette and her mother had kindly allowed me to stay with them free of charge but there had been rent to pay on the cottage and other bills to settle, and there was not a lot left of the £500 Will had given me – certainly not enough to pay for the next month’s rent, which would soon be due.

I counted the remaining notes and coins, still in the original envelope over and over again. Each time it came to the same amount: £110 25p. An electricity bill for almost £100 had come in the post that morning. That effectively took care of that. Suddenly I began to feel quite desperate. How was I going to live?

Strange for me to be worrying about money after a lifetime of having someone else to take care of such matters. It was actually quite frightening and was one bit of independence I could still do without, I thought wryly.

Then I had an idea. I wondered if Carl might have left any cash in our usual hiding place. I thought it unlikely, I assumed he would have taken whatever money he had with him when he rushed me off to that awful damp shed in the middle of nowhere, but you never knew.

On the off chance I decided to have a look in the cellar. I rolled back the linoleum floor covering and found the crowbar under the sink. I had never prised up the flagstone that served as a trapdoor on my own before and it did not prove to be an easy task. I had to lean on the iron bar with all my weight in order to budge the stone at one side. Then I wedged a piece of wood under the open end, did the same trick with the crowbar on the other side and somehow managed to slide the stone to one side. I fetched the small ladder that lived under the stairs and lowered it down through the hole.

First putting a torch in my pocket, I climbed carefully down. Although I had been as tickled as Carl when he discovered the cellar, I did not much like being in it and certainly not alone.

Resolutely I switched on the torch and felt behind the pile of Carl’s paintings, which were neatly stacked in one corner. There was no sign of the leather document case.

‘Damn!’ I said out loud. I wondered if the police had found it in the shed or in Carl’s van, and if it was at the police station now. I had not thought to ask. But even if it were there, I doubted they would hand it over to me. After all, it was Carl’s property, I supposed.

I shone my torch over the paintings. There were five of them, all abstracts. Will would take any number of the chocolate box landscapes, but never more than two or three of the abstracts at a time. There was a very limited market and he just didn’t have the wall space. In spite of various attempts, Carl had not found any other gallery in St Ives prepared to take his abstracts at all. Still, they were worth as much as £200 or £300 each on a good day. I decided to get them out of the cellar and see if I could at least get them displayed somewhere. Maybe I could play the sympathy ticket.

I carried the five paintings to the foot of the ladder, then climbed up a couple of rungs reaching down to pick them up one by one, lift them as high as I could and push them out on to the kitchen floor. As I did so I reflected that any revenue from their sale would surely technically belong to Carl, but I thought I might be able to persuade Will at any rate to bend the rules. He had already done so once, after all.

When I had successfully manhandled the paintings out of the cellar I carried them into the dining room and propped them up around the walls. They were good, no question about that. Whatever else he had done in his life, Carl could certainly paint. For just a fleeting moment I experienced a flash of nostalgia for what might have been. But I knew all I could do now was concentrate on the present. Carl was in jail. Our life together was over.

I decided to have a final look in the cellar to check that there was nothing else down there of value. There wasn’t. I shone the torch carefully into every nook and cranny revealing only some cans of paint, sidelined from Carl’s studio, a box of scrubby brushes, several packets of short stubby crayon ends and a number of used sketch pads, all arranged in tidy piles. Carl didn’t like throwing things away, just in case he might ever need them again one day. There were also a couple of cardboard boxes, one containing Christmas decorations and the other some candles and some old magazines. I thought I might at least make use of the candles and dragged the box over to the ladder.