Penny looked up with an angry stare, tears pouring down her battered face.
‘No he doesn’t. You’re wrong. He would never hurt me on purpose. He loves me.’
‘I’m sure he does, but I also know that he hurts you. Listen, on the night of Ellie’s dinner party, I was sitting opposite you - do you remember? Well, right behind you was a huge mirror. When you were talking to Tom, Gary put his arm round you. Everybody would have thought it was an act of affection - but I saw Penny. He lifted the sleeve of your dress and put his hand inside. Then he pinched you. Hard. And you weren’t surprised. It made you jump and spill your wine, but only with pain, not with shock. So it wasn’t the first time. And anyway, I could see other bruises on your arm. That’s why I wanted to get you out of there.’
Penny’s face was flushed with more than the tears. It was a flush of deep embarrassment.
‘I’m so ashamed,’ Penny whispered.
‘I know that’s how you feel. But you shouldn’t. You’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing at all. For some reason, it seems to be human nature to take responsibility for other people’s actions. But Gary’s the one who should be ashamed, not you.’
Bullies were often arrogant bastards, though, and Leo could bet money on Gary managing to believe that none of this was his fault. She prided herself on her cool detachment with clients, but today it was letting her down as she looked at this broken woman, who was still trying to defend her useless husband.
Penny shook her head with some force.
‘No, Leo. You don’t understand. He doesn’t mean to do it. It’s only when something has happened that’s disappointed him. He struggles to control himself at those times. But we can go weeks with him being happy. He can be quite affectionate then.’
Leo could picture the scenes in this house. She sensed that Penny would be practically delirious with joy and gratitude if Gary hadn’t hurt her for a week or two. But it would be a type of manic euphoria, as part of Penny’s unconscious mind waited for the inevitability of the next time he would turn on her.
‘What do the girls think, Penny? Doesn’t it upset them?’ Leo asked.
‘They don’t know. It’s not usually his fists, you see. But when I said I was going to talk to you about my hopes for the future, he lost it completely.’ Penny blew her nose, and Leo felt a stab of guilt that she had caused this to happen.
Penny continued. ‘But there’s something else bothering him, I know that. His reaction was too strong for a simple suggestion that I talk to you. He went absolutely berserk - there’s no other word for it. That’s why he had to take the girls away - because there was no hiding this.’ Penny pointed to her eye. ‘I had to say I was ill, and the girls weren’t allowed to see me in case I was contagious. We couldn’t let them catch a glimpse of my face.’
As well as the tears on Penny’s cheeks, beads of sweat were standing out on her face and neck.
‘You know, you could take your cardigan off,’ Leo said softly. ‘I know about your arms, and there’s nobody else here. You’ll pass out in this heat.’
She slowly did as Leo suggested, and from her painful movements Leo guessed that it wasn’t only her eye that had suffered a punching from Gary’s fists. But she studiously avoided looking at Penny’s arms, and focused on stirring the cup of tea that she didn’t want to drink. Once Penny had managed to remove the cardigan, she sat clasping both arms as if to hide the bruises, but when it became obvious that Leo wasn’t looking and wasn’t about to comment, she seemed to relax slightly.
Leo didn’t let her eyes stray. She looked either at her cup of tea, or at Penny’s face. In her peripheral vision, though, she could see that most of the bruises were to the soft flesh on the underside of the arms - the part that would undoubtedly be the most painful.
‘When did it start, Penny? Is this a recent thing?’
Letting her arms fall to her sides, Penny looked up to the sky, as if that would stop the tears from falling.
‘We hadn’t been married long. We got married when Gary was at university. He was doing his architect training - you’ve probably