He led me up the staircase. The second-floor landing was broad, room-sized itself, and some of the floorboards were in disrepair, rising at the corners, nails loosened and protruding. At least six doors led off the space, each of them closed. Dan opened one of them a fraction and said, “Do you mind if I cover your eyes?”
“Do you have to?”
“It’ll be worth it.”
He stood behind me and put his hands over my eyes. We shuffled through the doorway together, awkwardly. Claustrophobia crept up on me again. The only thing worse than being openly watched is being watched when you cannot see.
Just as I felt I needed to escape him, he pulled away his fingers—“You can look now!”—and I found myself in a room almost identical to the one I’d fainted in yesterday.
It also had views on two sides, with one side offering the same outlook into the woods as downstairs, but from this height it was possible to see the spread of the sky and over the top of the tree canopy where evergreens were interwoven with the bare branches of trees that had waited out a long winter and now, early in April, were longing for the weather to warm enough that their buds would burst into leaf. The view from the other set of windows would also have been of the woods, but it was mostly obscured by the boughs of a majestic cedar tree that grew on the lawn of our house.
“Lucy?” Dan said.
I turned away from the view, looked at him, and gradually the rest of the room came into focus around him.
Like the kitchen, it had been fully renovated. The paint smelled fresh, and the moldings had been restored so they were as stiff-peaked, crisp, and white as the meringue on the top of a pie. I took in the polished paneling, a veined marble fireplace with an elegant hearth, and the gleaming oak floor. I recognized a chandelier I’d admired months ago, in a high-end antiques shop that I’d felt too intimidated to enter.
“You got the chandelier?” I asked, though it felt as if I had to force the words out.
“I know you love it. What do you think of the desk?”
“It’s huge.”
“It’s all for you. I made the space for you to write in. I organized it while we were in the cottage.”
He looked so proud. I ran my fingers over the desk’s surface and felt no attachment to it. It had none of the sweet charm of the desk in the cottage or the unthreatening modesty of the small kitchen table I wrote at in our flat. This room felt like a gilded cage. It was overwhelming, ridiculously grand. He surely wants me to work, I thought. And why has he put me in here, where he knows the view will torment me?
“Don’t you want this room?” I said. “You should have it. You deserve it.”
“This is for you. You need it. You have deadlines to work to,” he said. How loaded that word had become since I had gotten deadlines, when he was the one who wanted them.
“Okay,” I said. My voice sounded small.
He pulled me to him, unexpectedly, and his fingers trailed into the small of my back and slid beneath my waistband. I caught my breath. I was confused. It was so long since we’d been intimate. My body wanted him, but I didn’t want this. Physical acquiescence felt like acceptance of the situation, like giving him what he wanted. I wasn’t ready for that, and I didn’t think he should get it so easily, not after what he’d done, but his hands were insistent, and I couldn’t stop myself from responding. I had been so starved of physical affection.
As he kissed me again, more deeply, I thought that perhaps I should be grateful because this house and this beautiful renovation might just be the best and most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for me. And then I didn’t think at all.
We made love in the beautiful renovated office and it felt like it had at the beginning of our relationship, not the first time, because that was like the blind leading the blind, but a bit later, when we got better at it and were still delighted with one another. I forgot myself for those precious minutes and afterward I watched Dan dress and said, “I love you. Thank you for this,” and I thought I meant it.
“I love you, too,” he said, though it wasn’t quite the moment it might have been, because he was struggling to get one of his legs into his trousers. He went downstairs. He wanted to check on something or other. I wasn’t really listening. He still had the flushed excitement of a kid in a candy shop.
I put myself back together and stood in the center of the room. I felt myself drawn back to the window, transfixed by the aerial view of the woods.
I imagined the trees dissolving, one by one, until only the understory remained and then that, in its turn, disappeared and all I could see was earth. Protruding from it slightly, almost unnoticeable, even with the landscape stripped bare, was the slightly domed roof of a sunken building.
It was a place I hadn’t revisited since Teddy disappeared.
The bunker.
8.
Over the next few days the blows kept coming and I had no choice but to keep on absorbing them.
Dan announced that he had given notice on our tenancy of the flat while we were in Devon and a sheaf of flat-pack boxes was delivered there.
“A condition of buying the house was that we complete the sale very quickly. It was buy it or lose it. And you don’t want to stay here, do you, when we could be there?”
I did want to stay here. I wanted it more than anything. This was my home. All the belonging I’d ever felt was to this place. My imagination had formed and re-formed wall and ceiling cracks into images that fed into my work. Every surface knew my fingerprints as well as I knew its texture. The daily blend of noises—the ticking pipes, car doors slamming outside, the creak of a certain floorboard beneath the carpet, and all the others—was a soundtrack whose rhythm the clack of my laptop keys, even the beating of my heart, had kept time with. Hearing the soft click of the door behind me sounded like a sweet, safe welcome every single time I returned home. I wasn’t ready to leave it.
But we had only a few days to move out, and while Dan sat on the floor and constructed the packing boxes, our landlady, Patricia, who lived downstairs, called round with a tin of homemade shortbread and cried. Mascara bled down her heavily powdered cheeks.
“As soon as you got famous, I knew you’d go,” she said. “Don’t forget Patricia, will you?”
She was prone to exaggeration, but I was susceptible to her pout because I felt fond of her. I hugged her tight, catching a faint whiff of alcohol, and we held each other so long that her bony shoulders dug into my chin and strands of her hair fell from their tortoiseshell comb and became entangled with my earring.
Dan asked if he could leave a couple of small boxes in her flat for safekeeping, so they didn’t get lost in the move.
“It’s only paperwork. I’ll collect it in a few days’ time,” he said.
“Of course, darling,” she replied. “Happy to help.” But she still looked mournful.
“Don’t be fooled,” Dan said after she’d gone. “She’s already got new tenants lined up.”
“What’s in the boxes?” I asked.
“Stuff I don’t want to lose track of.”
“Why don’t you just label it? Bring it in the car with us.”
“Better safe than sorry,” he said.