The Woman He Loved Before Read online

  ‘Here, let me help,’ he says, and gently tugs off my shirt, which I’ve been struggling to remove. I’ve left it too long between painkiller doses and my muscles are starting to protest at not being properly soothed, and so movement is hard. I’d known it was time for a dose of painkillers, but I couldn’t risk leaving my hiding place in the downstairs shower room for them – not when the goodbyes would then have lasted longer than the party. Gently, Jack takes off my T-shirt. ‘Lie back,’ he says, taking my hands so he can help me lie down.

  Leaning over me, his scent fills my senses as he undoes the button of my jeans and unzips me. ‘If I didn’t know you better, Jack Britcham,’ I say, drowsy with pain, ‘I’d say you were getting some kind of cheap thrill out of this.’

  He smiles sadly at me as he gently takes off my jeans and then stops to look over my body. I know what he’s seeing because I looked at my body this morning, too. My skin is black, blue, purple and yellow all along my left side. The bruises radiate outwards towards the centre of my body like paint spilled onto brown paper. Those are ‘multiple contusions’. My ribcage is still taped up to support the hairline fracture of my rib. I have the scar from my spleen operation, which is slowly healing, and other smaller grazes and scratches, most of which have scabbed over.

  I see him swallow the lump of emotion at the back of his throat, as he tries to stop his face from crumpling with tears. This is why I’ve mainly undressed for bed alone, to spare him this sight knowing it’ll rip him up inside.

  ‘Do you want your bra on or off?’ he asks, even though his chest is starting to heave as he tries deep, slow breathing to control himself.

  ‘Off,’ I say. I can’t wear it for too long during the day because it digs into me and aggravates the bruising.

  Tenderly he removes that too, and then has to press his lips together to stop himself letting out a sob at the bruising on my breast. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says quietly as he reaches for my pyjama bottoms.

  ‘Shhh,’ I whisper. The aching is spiralling slowly but surely into intense pain, and it’s hard to talk, hard to breathe. ‘It’s all right. I’m all right. It’s not your fault.’ I close my eyes and am no help at all as Jack dresses me in my stripy pyjamas.

  ‘Libby, Libby,’ his voice says gently while his hand strokes my face. ‘Come on, sit up, take your tablets, and then we’ll go to bed.’

  ‘It’s early,’ I say, allowing him to prop me up. ‘You can stay up.’

  My hand feels weak and not really connected to my body as I move the two tablets in my palm to my mouth. I spill a little water as I raise the glass to my mouth and Jack has to steady me. Tablets taken – although the jerk of my head to get them down was probably not a good idea – Jack moves me to my side of the bed, where he has pulled back the covers, then lays me in place.

  He covers me up, then stands in front of me as he quickly strips.

  ‘You’re gorgeous, you know that,’ I say as my eyes flutter open and closed like the up-and-down movements of a bird’s wings. ‘Course you know that, everyone knows that.’

  The last thing I remember is feeling Jack’s arms around me as he snuggles up behind me and carefully wraps his arms around my body.

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ he whispers in my ear before the pain and the tablets take over and move me away from Jack and from consciousness.

  chapter nine

  libby

  The door to the cellar is barely open before Butch has darted past me and scampered down the stairs.

  ‘Oi, you!’ I shout after him as he is swallowed up by the blackness down there. ‘If you fall down in the dark and hurt yourself you’ll get no sympathy from me.’ We both know that’s not true. He’s left extra special ‘presents’ in both my and Jack’s shoes and he’s managed to simper his way out of trouble. I’d be devastated if he was hurt.

  I switch on the light and suddenly I can see down into the cellar. The noise of Butch’s paws on the stone rises up the steps at me. It is pretty nice as cellars go: the floor has been relaid, and the walls damp-proofed and painted white, even the old fireplace is restored and fitted with a Victorian black iron surround and grate. The cellar actually extends underneath all of the house, but the other chambers have been bricked up and nothing done with them. It’s also the only place in the house that I’m usually too afraid to visit.

  By the time I have stiffly negotiated the stairs, Butch, who has been trying to get down here for over a week, is in front of the old wooden cupboard pushed in the corner right at the back of the cellar up against the wall. His black and brown white-topped paws are almost a blur as they scratch away at the cupboard doors. It’s because of this cupboard that I have braved the cellar, and Butch seems more desperate to get in than I am. The doors of the cupboard are a smooth, pale wood with a keyhole at its centre, holding the two doors together. It is locked, and apparently there is no key.

  A huge wave of disappointment swells inside me as I remember that the conversation about this cupboard was the first time I realised that Jack not only could but would lie to me. A month after we were married, when I’d had no problems going down into the cellar, I had been down here looking around and obviously couldn’t fail to notice the large, locked cupboard so naturally asked Jack about it. He’d looked at me a little vacantly and said, ‘Oh, that old thing? Is it still there? Had forgotten about it, to be honest.’

  ‘What’s in it?’ I’d asked.

  He’d shrugged and glanced back at the TV, seeming even more vacant than he had been a few minutes ago. ‘Just stuff, bits and bobs.’

  ‘Aren’t you even curious?’ I’d pressed.

  ‘No, not really. Don’t even know where the key is.’

  Like a door slowly being opened to shine light on the other side, it dawned on me why he was being so vague. ‘Does it have Eve’s stuff in it?’ I asked gently, and he flinched like he always did when I said her name.

  He took a while to answer, instead staring at the window as if he wished he could open it and fly away. Slowly his head moved up and down as he whispered, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s fine. I don’t want you to get rid of her belongings if you’re not ready. It’d just be nice to know, seeing as I’m living here now.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. I’ll sort it out soon.’

  ‘When you find the key, of course.’

  He turned his head to look at me, and I stared back at him because I did not want him to think he’d got away with that lie. He didn’t need to lie. All he had to do was tell me, I would understand. ‘Yeah, when I find the key.’ He went back to watching the window, and I curled my feet up under me on the sofa and went back to watching the television while reading the newspaper. We hardly exchanged more than a handful of words for the rest of the night.

  Nearly two years later, the cupboard is still full and locked, and my aversion to the cellar, which began right about then, is still in place. Because of the way he’d been so secretive about it, it felt like Eve was down here. Buried here. While I always seem to ‘feel’ her around the rest of the house, and often feel like an intruder when I walk into some rooms – especially the ones that haven’t been repainted and re-carpeted – down here it is as if I am walking on her grave, and any second now her hand will reach up out of the earth and grab hold of my ankle.

  That thought has me climbing back up a few of the stairs, further away from the cupboard, closer to the escape route. But I need to see if I can get into the cupboard to find out what’s inside, if it will give me any insight into their marriage.

  Automatically, I glance back at the door at the top of the stairs (what if it swings shut and the key somehow turns itself?) before I gingerly place a foot on the solid, stone floor of the basement. I pause, waiting for Eve’s hand to appear and to reach for my ankle. Nothing happens so I go over towards the cupboard, causing Butch to flee, knocking aside a few boxes, bumping and rattling both
the large wooden wine rack and the fireplace, then darting past me to another part of the cellar. He’s made a bit of a mess, caused a lot of dust to fly up which makes me cough, which in turn makes my ribs ache, but I’m not going to give up.

  Grace’s revelation about Jack being a virgin before Eve set me on the road to thinking about why he was still obsessed with her. And with the dreams, with the way he won’t talk about her, I have to find out what is going on. Why he can’t let her go. Because, as I am having to admit, all roads lead to Eve. They always have, they always will. So maybe I can find out what I need from this cupboard. I have tried the Internet and there is nothing except a few small mentions about her death, and nothing at all about her before she became Eve Britcham. I could ring the policewoman and ask her, but I’d rather die than give her that power over Jack or me, so I have nothing to lose by seeing if this cupboard is unlocked.

  It might be. Jack might have been down here recently, going through her things. He might be taking them out and finding comfort in them, trying to capture notes of her perfume, or holding items and replaying the memories, or even re-reading love letters. If it were me, and I had lost him, I would do the same. I don’t think I’d be able to completely let go. If he has gone through her belongings recently, he might have forgotten to lock the cupboard behind him. Failing that, I could maybe convince him that I’d got hold of an axe that went out of control in my hands, cleaving the doors apart in the process. Or even that I tripped and accidentally pushed it over, thereby breaking it apart in the fall.

  The keyhole can’t be that strong a lock, but it’s enough to show any attempt to break into it. The doors have no handles, probably not put on when it was constructed, so you need the key to unlock it and then to lever the doors open. They are still locked. Of course they are.

  Butch is still sniffing around the rest of the cellar, searching for something. ‘Go on, Butch, find me the key,’ I tell him. ‘It’s here somewhere, I’m sure of it. Go on, Butch, you can do it.’

  Butch stops what he’s doing to shoot me a dirty look, then goes on about his business. ‘Yeah, I know, I was being ridiculous,’ I say.

  I look around at the brick walls, painted white, the flagstones laid on the floor, the ceiling also painted white with a single light bulb at its centre. There are shelves on two of the walls, and the tall, mahogany wine cupboard is near the steps. Butch is focusing his attention there, sniffing, scratching at the flagstones. Cobwebs line the place, most of them dusty and ancient-looking as if the spiders that made them are long gone. There is dust covering most things.

  Well, that was pointless, I think to myself, as Butch knocks over another box. Might as well tidy up. Most of the boxes are white document boxes where Jack stores old paperwork. Over the last couple of years, my stuff should have been moved down here, but it never felt right, what with it being Eve’s place, so I keep my bank statements and things up in the office. These boxes are too heavy for me to lift, not unless I want to open up an internal wound, so I push at them.

  As I am pushing, I notice that Butch has knocked the semicircle back plate of the big iron fireplace, so that it is leaning backwards. It is only pushed into that position when a real fire is burning, to let out the smoke.

  ‘You’re such a messy pup,’ I say to him as I go to it, hook a finger in the hole at the top of the semi-circle to pull it back into place. As I do so, my finger touches something crinkly and plastic-feeling. Confused, I remove my finger and push the plate a little further back so it is closer to horizontal than vertical, then look into the cavity beyond.

  On the ledge inside the fireplace wall I see a flash of white in the pitch black. A thrill of excitement and surprise bolts through me. What is this? My mouth is dry and my heart is racing as I slowly lower myself to my knees and peer into the blackness.

  It is white, but I can’t really see what it is too clearly. Without thinking through the consequences, I reach in and my hand touches plastic. It doesn’t crackle under touch, so it must be old and disintegrating. Carefully, I take it out.

  It is a carrier bag, an old flimsy one from a shop in London the name of which I don’t recognise, but it has the old 01 dialling code on it, and is covered in debris that has fallen down the fireplace. It is coming apart in my hands, leaving pieces of white and dirt on my fingertips. I unwrap it, the plastic falling to pieces until I come to another plastic bag, thicker this time. It is racing green in colour with no writing on it, and it has weathered the time in its hiding place much better so it’s easier to open it up to its full size and pull the contents out. Inside is a thick bundle, about A5 in size, wrapped in black velvet and tied up with a pink ribbon.

  This stops me in my tracks. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to hide this bundle; should I be opening it? Should I really look? Shouldn’t I give it to Jack since it was probably his house when it was placed here?

  But if I give it to Jack, there’s a chance he’ll never tell me what it is – he’ll fob me off with tales of lost keys and not remembering.

  I turn to Butch, to ask his advice, and find he has gone. Abandoned me to return upstairs, probably for a lie down. Or maybe he could see the way this was turning out and wanted to escape while he could.

  Sitting on the dusty floor, among the white boxes and beside the cupboard, I stare at the item in my hands. I probably shouldn’t do this. But then, what have I got to lose? My husband? He’s slipping further away from me with each passing day. My certainty in the world? That went the moment that driver made his choice.

  Just do it, I order myself and, before I can change my mind again, I pull apart the ribbon and unwrap the thick black velvet.

  I gasp when I see what’s inside, and it’s quickly clear I have just made the biggest mistake of my life.

  jack

  I wonder what would happen if I told her? If I told her what had happened directly after the crash, what I did, I wonder what would happen. Would Libby forgive me? Would she turn me away? Or would she think about it and then reject me?

  ‘Libby,’ I say to her over dinner.

  She is distracted, has been all evening since I came home and I’m a little scared that she has remembered. Or that she is on the way to remembering. It’d be better if it came from me, surely? It’d have less sting, would cause less upset if I told her first. Like all the little secrets that Eve didn’t tell me straight away – if I’d found out for myself, rather than hearing them from her lips, things would have been a whole lot worse than they were.

  ‘Hmmm?’ Libby raises her head from staring at her dinner plate and stares at me as you would a stranger who knows your name but you’re not sure how or why.

  ‘I, um …’ Tell her, you idiot, tell her now. Do it quickly and she’ll thank you for it. She blinks those big, liquid brown eyes at me, her bisected face an unreadable blank. ‘Are you OK?’

  She nods, then returns her gaze to the plate in front of her, moving food around with her fork.

  I can’t do it. This is not the time to do it. Butch comes to me and snuggles against my legs. He knows it’s not the right time, too. She has something on her mind and it could be because she knows, or it could be something completely different. Whatever it is, it’s not the right time for me to do this. To come clean and smash up what we’ve got.

  libby

  I have Eve’s diaries.

  The Eve. Her diaries. The best insight into her I am ever going to get. And I know it’s wrong. It would kill me if someone found then read the mad ramblings of my life that I put down into a diary.

  Also, she asks in the letter she left at the top of the diaries to burn them if she’s dead. But then …

  For the past two days, I’ve been cleaning and dusting as much of the cellar as I can, while I’ve been turning over in my head what I should do, scared of what I’ll find if I read them, terrified of what will happen if I don’t.

  What do you do when you’ve got the answers to all your questions in your hands, but to read those answers
would be betraying someone you’ve never met? Someone who never did a thing wrong to you, so why should you violate them so?

  ‘I would read them, personally,’ a voice says. It’s a voice in my head, of course. But it is also the voice of the dark-haired woman in front of me, sitting on one of the stack of boxes, wearing a pink dress with several lines of sequins down the front. ‘You want to find out about me, so there you are: the perfect opportunity.’

  I stare at her. She is exactly like the picture I saw of her on her wedding day. She is radiant: her long, shiny dark hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes big and soft and an unusual not-quite blue – almost indigo. Her skin is flawless and without make-up, her mouth is a perfect bow and striking without lipstick. Her dress is the perfect fit, almost as if it was designed and made with her in mind. She looks like that because that’s the only picture I’ve ever seen of her.

  When I first read the letter on top of the diaries, it seemed as if she was talking directly to me – I was not reading, she was sitting in front of me, telling me what was on the page.

  My gaze wanders down to the diaries, to the letter. The top diary is a reporter’s notebook and the rest of the diaries evolve over time from reporter’s notebooks to bound books to a beautifully soft, suede-like, blue diary.

  ‘Are you her?’ she asks me, just like she did yesterday.

  I say nothing, continue to stare at the words on the page, hoping they will blur under my scrutiny and disappear.

  ‘Are you her?’ she repeats. ‘Are you the one he’s with now?’

  Slowly, I nod my head. Yes, I am. I am the one he’s with now.

  Once I do that, she seems to settle back and starts to speak. And I let myself listen.

  chapter ten

  eve

  28th February 2003

  Are you her? Are you the one he’s with now? Is that why you’ve come looking for me?