The Sister-In-Law(92)
‘I know she can be a bit prickly sometimes,’ he said, like an apology. ‘But it’s been a difficult year for her – since Jamie and Ella… and everything. She’s worried about you and Dan now – thinks you might take the children and live somewhere else and we won’t see them.’
‘I would never do that, Bob.’
He looked down at me kindly. ‘That’s good news.’ ‘I know our Dan, he’s got a roving eye, but none of them mean anything – you were always his real love, wife, the mother of his children.’
A roving eye? So that’s how Joy and Bob were packaging their son’s infidelity now?
‘And that awful stuff with Ella. It really upset Joy to hear she’d said those things about Dan touching her. Like he said to me, “Dad, I only put my arm around her waist, might have accidentally touched her bum,” and off she goes saying all kinds of things. The world’s gone mad, Clare – and our Dan said she’d been giving him the come-on all holiday, then got all funny and said she was going to the police. It’s all that ‘me too,’ stuff it’s turned women’s heads. Political correctness gone mad, Clare.’
I couldn’t even find the words to respond to what he’d just said This was the other side of Bob I’d only glimpsed before, the part of him that smoked cigars round the back of the house, and ruined his appetite with contraband biscuits before a meal. This Bob was only unleashed when Joy wasn’t around to reprimand, or correct him.
Then he said, ‘But seriously, love, at the end of the day, even if you two aren’t together it still has to be about family. No one else matters – as long as the family are okay, that’s what Joy always says – and she’s right.’
‘Family is important,’ I conceded. ‘I just think that she might take it too far sometimes, protecting the family at all costs,’ I added, thinking of Dan and the way she dismissed the women he’d hurt like it was their own fault and none of the responsibility was his.
‘But at the end it’s all we’ve got, isn’t it, Clare, our family? Joy once told me that if anything happened to our boys, her life would be over. “We have to keep them safe, Bob,” she said. “Whatever it takes…”’
I felt the hair on my arms prickle and suddenly reality hit. I watched him pottering around the beautiful kitchen built on his sweat and Joy’s specifications.
‘Ella didn’t commit suicide, did she?’ I heard myself say into the silence.
He looked at me as he closed a cupboard door, folded a tea towel and eventually Bob shook his head, very slowly. ‘Ella was causing problems for our Dan,’ he said, taking a breath. ‘She wasn’t right for our Jamie, for the family.’ He refolded the tea towel a second time slowly so he didn’t have to look me in the eye. ‘I tried to reason with her, Clare, but she wouldn’t listen, said she’d ruin us all; well, we couldn’t have that, it’s not fair on Joy, the boys, you must understand. You won’t tell anyone, will you? Joy, she’d be so upset if she thought I’d—’ he started, and I saw tears in his eyes.
I couldn’t get my breath. After a year of wondering what happened, of trying to work out Ella’s death, this had never been a scenario I’d ever considered. Bob, the quiet one, the ineffectual washer upper in the background who lived to please Joy and keep her happy.
‘Bob, you can’t ask that of me. This is a woman’s life we’re talking about, not some slight misdemeanour…’
‘But Joy – she’d never forgive me.’
‘You can’t hide this forever.’
‘I have to. If she found out she’d leave me, and I couldn’t bear that, Clare, please. My job is to protect Joy and the boys. “Keep them safe, Bob,” she says… “We have to keep them safe.” That’s why I had to deal with Ella, she was dangerous, not just to our boys – to all of us. She was messing our Jamie around, saying Dan touched her and she was going to tell everyone about you and Jamie and—’
‘You know about me and Jamie?’
He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I’ve known for a long time. Our Jamie always had a soft spot for you – oh, it would never have come to anything, he just wanted what Dan had, always did. That night when you two… we were having our crafty cigars and I saw the way he looked at you in the garden. I blame Joy, she used to buy them the same toys when they were kids—’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Anyway, I went to bed, left you and Jamie in the garden, then later, much later, Joy sent me downstairs for a glass to put her water in, you know she’ll only drink from certain glasses?’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling sick.
‘I heard you both in the living room, it didn’t take Columbo to work out what you two were up to.’ He laughed at his own rather lame joke.
‘Does Joy know… about me and Jamie?’
‘No. It would break her bloody heart, she adores our boys and the idea that one of them… with the other one’s wife… And, like me, it won’t take her long to do the maths. To think that one of Dan’s children could be Jamie’s! Imagine?’ He leaned on the kitchen counter, turning pale at the prospect. ‘I thought we’d managed to avoid the truth coming out but then Ella turned up in Italy. We were sitting by the pool one day,’ he continued, ‘and I heard Jamie telling you that he and Ella wanted custody of Freddie, that she was going to tell everyone. Then there was the stuff she was saying about Dan – Joy told me… and I couldn’t bear it. All that upset, Clare. It was too much. Joy’s heart couldn’t take it.’