The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,9

and clambered the length of the dinghy, gesturing to me to move forward and take my place at Ralph’s feet. My hands were numbed by the wind. My body shivered so hard with shock and cold that I stumbled and swayed as I crawled into position, keeping low.

I strained to see in the darkness. Helen unzipped the surfboard cover and peeled it from the top of his body, drawing out his head and shoulders, wrapped in the sheet. I blinked, trying to make out what she was doing as she bent low over him in the deep shadows. I had the sense that she was clasping him to her chest, lowering her face to his for one last kiss.

I turned my eyes away and peeled off the rest of the cover, drawing it from his body like a second skin, then lifted his feet and heaved them up, pushing his legs and raising his hips to the height of the dinghy’s rim. Helen straightened up, lifted his shoulders and chest and, panting, raised them too.

He lay there for some moments, balanced on the edge, a bulky line between the two women who’d loved him most in this life, until Helen signalled to me and we put our shoulders to him and pushed. He flopped over the top, falling with a sudden splash into the blackness beyond. The dinghy blew forward, the waves surged and we were left, the two of us, staring down into nothing but the vast, empty darkness of moving water.

Five

We stowed the dinghy back in the boathouse, then drove off with a crunch of gravel, the heater turned up to maximum. The houses above us, high on the bluff, proud of their views of the sea, were in blackness but I sensed eyes watching us from their windows. Knowing eyes. I thought, This is how it will be. This constant feeling of fear, of being watched, of guilt. This is how I’ll live, for the rest of my life, after what I’ve done tonight.

Beside me, Helen was shivering violently. Exertion, perhaps. Or delayed shock. The engine strained and the heater blew out dust as it struggled to generate warm air.

Neither of us spoke on the drive back. I rocked myself, arms wrapped round bent legs, my feet resting on the lip of the seat. Now and then, I glanced across at her. She seemed to have collapsed into herself, as if she’d borrowed energy to take control in the way she had, to do what she thought needed to be done, and was now in debt.

It was nearly one o’clock in the morning by the time she turned into their road, parked outside their home and switched off the engine. For a moment, neither of us moved. I thought of Anna, alone inside, and prayed she hadn’t woken.

There was a period of silence. Then she said, without turning to look at me, ‘I’ll never forgive you. Don’t get some idea we’re bound together by this. We’re not. I’ll curse you till the day I die.’

I didn’t answer. How could I? I clenched my jaw, eyes staring sightlessly at the bumper of the parked car ahead, trying to keep control of my senses.

She said in the same dead voice, ‘If you fall apart, if you breathe a word of any of this, I’ll take you down. You understand? I’ll say you forced me to help you. That you threatened Anna.’

I couldn’t speak.

She twisted to face me, her mouth hard. She loomed so close that I smelt her breath, stale now, saw the map of jagged red lines across the whites of her eyes.

‘He was my husband. We loved each other. And you destroyed him. Don’t ever forget that.’

Six

My own flat, poky compared with their home, was silent and thick with shadows as I let myself in. I stripped off my clothes and put everything in the washing machine, then started a hot cycle, not caring whether the young man downstairs could hear me. I ran a hot bath and poured bubbles in. All I wanted was to block out what had just happened. Then to sleep for as long as I could.

I rummaged in the bathroom cabinet for the tablets the doctor had prescribed after Ralph left me, took a couple, then dug out a bottle of malt whisky, left over from Christmas, and poured myself a large measure. It burned its way down the back of my throat. I lowered myself into the bath, shivering despite the