When he lay in bed at night, he could remember certain memories so strongly, it was like he could step back into them – taking Linus to his baby swimming class when he turned eight months and the open, trusting way his baby son had gazed at him underwater as he swooped him down with strong hands, Linus’s dive reflex kicking in as the instructor had said it would, before scooping him up again onto his chest. Father and son, skin on skin, cheek to cheek . . . It felt like an unimaginable luxury now, when his son had still only touched him once since their visit began, and that had been to shake his hand, a politeness to a stranger.
Bell took a sudden breath, pushing him back into the trees, her hands cool on his bare skin, both of them hiding behind a fir as Linus finally turned and made his way back up the jetty, sobbing and lurching onto the stony path and back towards the house.
He could smell her shampoo as she stood just inches away, and he watched her watch his son. She loved him, he could see; it was more than a job for her. She’d lost sight of the boundaries – or perhaps she’d never had them in the first place? Perhaps she too, like him, wanted his family as her own.
He remembered again his first sighting of her – her indignation by the porter’s bike, overloaded and overwhelmed. At first glance, he’d only been able to see her legs, arms and topknot, her angry, pretty face angled around a box of beer. But then, by the maypole, when she’d been laughing and dancing with her friends, she’d seemed to him to be the very embodiment of what it was to be young and free and alive, so different to the girl who’d ended up sitting on her own by the water later that night . . .
The memories ran unbidden then, unspooling quickly like a dropped reel . . . her long hair down and spread beneath him, the midnight sun on her skin, the light in her eyes as . . .
He caught his breath as she turned, just inches away, looking up at him . . . with contempt. ‘Don’t mention a word of this to him. I’ll deal with it,’ she hissed, and without another word she stepped around him, following Linus at a distance, making sure he was safe and that he thought his secret – his lifeline – was still his.
Emil watched her go, feeling the despair seep through him like an ink stain. When he had heard her on the stairs and seen her flying down the lawn, his own feet had instinctively moved too. Not because he feared his son was leaving in the dead of the night – but because he feared she was.
Bell slipped on her bikini and lathered on the suncream, as she did every morning. The days had begun to acquire a rhythm now that the hoarfrost had thawed between father and son. Linus’s excitement at discovering the hotel conference room transformed into a private cinema – with leather sofas brought in, balloons, buckets of popcorn and, of course, his idols on screen five weeks before the ‘entire rest of the world’ got to see them – had changed the prism through which he saw the man who claimed to be his father. Linus no longer saw the wounded beast hauling himself back from a seven-year-long brain injury. He had forgiven him the abrupt entrance into his world, and then the no-show when they stood at his door. He had brought the Avengers to a tiny island in the Baltic, leapfrogging premieres and celebrities and studio heads. Now he knew two things: his father was rich. His father was powerful.
Bell knew it too, watching with silent apprehension as she saw Linus’s excitement begin to grow each day for their next ‘adventure’. It had used to mean ‘snorkelling safaris’ in new coves, or gathering the mackerel nets at sunset, but now they were going on jetbikes, swimming with Seabobs, having McDonald’s flown over from the city as a treat. They had only been here a week, but so much had changed already.
Partly it was down to her and Emil keeping a wary distance from one another. Their showdown in the dining room and then the middle-of-the-night confrontation by the beach had burned them both. Midsommar’s night now belonged to another lifetime, other