The Wife Before Me(51)

‘Our baby,’ she gasped. ‘What are you trying to do?’

‘My baby?’ He knelt before her and grabbed her shoulders. ‘Swear to me it’s my baby you’re carrying.’

‘You tell me you love me yet you have the nerve to ask such a question.’ Still on her knees, she cradled her stomach protectively.

‘As your husband, I’ve every right to ask it.’ He spoke fast and furiously. Her lies and deceit. How could she blame him for being suspicious? Like moths to a flame, she attracted other men with her tight skirts and low-cut tops. In an effort to appease him, she allowed him to help her to her feet. She knew the pattern by now. She had married a man who uttered meaningless apologies, found meaningless excuses for actions that stemmed from only one source. Violent anger. She was no different from the battered wives who she had always imagined as being meek, bedraggled women, worn down by constant abuse. She had refused to equate herself with them. Allowed love to blindfold her. It was easier to be in denial than to admit she had made a catastrophic mistake. Her father had been right all along. Emptiness. Her husband’s eyes were devoid of emotion if one cared to look deep enough into them, as he was now forcing her to do.



* * *



He arrived home the following evening with flowers, a twine-tied bouquet of pale pink lilies and roses. His ability to act as if everything could continue as it did before his outbursts had baffled her in the beginning. Was it a deliberate ploy to normalise their lives in the aftermath or did he genuinely believe his behaviour could be forgiven and forgotten so easily? When he was relaxed – and she was still able to recognise the man she loved – he always dismissed her efforts to reason with him as overreactions, exaggerations, histrionics. Somehow, in the flow of words between them, she had lost the power to argue. In doing so, she minimised his brutality. Boxed it off until the next confrontation.

Unable to tolerate another token of his repentance, Amelia took the bouquet with her when she left Woodbine the following morning. She braked at the spot where her father’s body had been found and hunkered down before the small white cross she had erected soon after his funeral.

Cremation was what he had wanted when he died, he had told Amelia once. Her mother had also been cremated. Both of them had had their ashes scattered from the summit of the Sugar Loaf. She was five when her mother’s ash-scattering took place. The ashes whirling in the wind had reminded her of the starlings that speckled the sky above Woodbine in the evenings.

She had felt unable to let go of John’s ashes until the first anniversary of his death. Billy Tobin had accompanied her and Nicholas to the Sugar Loaf. She had been standing a short distance from Nicholas when she emptied the urn and the wind, turning freakishly, had blown the ashes back into his face. Shocked and repulsed, his hands over his eyes, he had stumbled down the mountain. She had been unable to keep up with him. When she reached the spot where he had parked his car, she discovered he had left without her. Billy drove her back to Woodbine, where she found Nicholas in the bath, scrubbing furiously at his skin.

The white cross on the crest of the grassy embankment had become Amelia’s place of repose. Once a week, she left fresh flowers in front of it, and she stopped there every day for a few moments to remember her father. Not that John was ever far from her thoughts. She removed a bunch of wilting daffodils from a terracotta vase and replaced them with the pink bouquet.

That evening, as she drove past the white cross, she noticed that the vase had toppled over. She stopped her car and crossed the path to the grass. The flowers had been removed.

Below her, she heard the low gurgle of water running, wending its way past clusters of bluebells and cowslips. It sounded louder than usual, rising as it always did at this time of year. The roaring filled her ears… and the choking sensation returned, of not being able to breathe, her face in water… in the bath… Jagged images, their velocity shocking her to a standstill. That was how those images came, like rags fluttering on a prayer tree, too scattered to form a coherent shape.

When she got back to Woodbine, the cloying scent of lilies filled the hall. The bouquet had been returned to the glass vase on the console table. The roses had yet to open but the orange stamens on the lilies arched towards her like vulgar tongues. She entered the kitchen, where Nicholas, wearing a striped butcher’s apron, was preparing their evening meal.

‘How was your day?’ He smiled across at her, knife in hand as he sliced peppers and tomatoes. Minced beef and onions, flavoured, she could tell by the smell, with cumin, paprika and chilli, sizzled in a saucepan on the hob.

‘Busy, as usual.’ She unbuttoned her jacket and laid it over the back of the chair. This game could be played by two. ‘When did you arrive home?’

‘About thirty minutes ago. The traffic was okay for a change. I made good time.’ He added the peppers and tomatoes to the saucepan. ‘I hope you’re hungry. I’m making chilli con carne.’

‘Sounds good.’ Her eyes stung from the spicy aromas as she set the table. She strained the rice, dressed the salad. They worked well together, a coordinated team. When they sat down to eat, he opened a bottle of Merlot. She drank Ballygowan water with a slice of lemon. The flowers were never mentioned.

They wilted over the following fortnight, their leaves browning, the blowsy rose petals falling. Dust from the stamens peppered the console table and their overpowering scent nauseated her whenever she walked through the hall.