The House of Secrets by Sarra Manning (18)

 

She hadn’t expected Freddy to reply to her letter but he had, even sent it on the mail plane so it would reach her in a timely fashion. How like Freddy to insist on having the last word.

At least they were finished now and Libby was glad of it. Still the world turned and the sun shone and she was no longer that desperate, half-mad creature she’d been at the start of the year when the days were sharp with cold and so very grey.

Now, it was impossible for Libby not to feel cheery and uplifted when the pink blossom on the trees danced above her head as she walked to school each morning. On warmer days, she took the girls to the heath for their lessons. Instructed them to choose a tree, or a flower, even a blade of grass and become that thing. Libby could hardly believe she was being paid to come up with such nonsense, but the girls had fun, standing in the long grass, waving their arms back and forth and shrieking.

She’d even made friends in the staffroom and often ate her lunch with Beryl, the headmistress, and two sisters who taught art and music respectively and shared a flat in Hendon.

And anyone who saw her with Hugo, walking through Highgate Woods hand in hand, though the detective was long gone now, would have thought Libby didn’t have a care. She had colour in her cheeks, her hair was back to a riotous shade of red, and she had a ready smile on her face as they passed other couples making the most of the late-afternoon sun, people walking dogs, children chasing balls along the paths. Libby watched a small girl, no older than three, with a man who could only be her father for they had the same features, both crouched down to inspect a ladybird clinging to a leaf.

‘It’s only now that you look so happy, that I realise how sad you were before,’ Hugo said and Libby turned to him in surprise. She’d thought she’d put on a pretty good show back then.

‘Sad? Not really,’ Libby assured him in a bright voice and she swung the hand that was holding his, thinking that it would make him smile, but he just carried on looking at her with that steady expression of his.

‘Please don’t lie to me, Libby. Aren’t we past all that by now? Aren’t we friends, you and I?’

They were past a lot of things. Like the pretence that they were doing this – meeting not once a week, but twice now, always holding hands, chatting about this and that – to gather evidence to satisfy the King’s Proctor and grant Hugo his divorce.

Lately, Libby thought about Hugo when she wasn’t with him; how his smile, hard won and rarely given, lit up his features and made him look younger. Less often, she wondered what it might feel like if he kissed her. He’d be quite masterful, she’d decided, though it would take him ages and ages to make up his mind to do so. She’d even started to notice the way other women looked at him with keen and considered interest, sometimes even glancing back as Hugo passed them.

So, they weren’t friends but the word that would sum up exactly what they were remained elusive and for all their closeness, there was still one secret that she hadn’t told Hugo.

‘There was a reason I was sad when we first met. You see, I haven’t always been entirely honest with you. I’m not really a widow,’ Libby confessed in a breathless rush. ‘My husband, Freddy, he’s alive and kicking somewhere in Spain.’

‘I wasn’t sure,’ Hugo said carefully. ‘You did turn out to be a teacher, after all.’

‘Though not entirely respectable,’ Libby said and it seemed a lifetime ago that Mickey Flynn had introduced them in that bleak hotel lobby. ‘We got married last September, decided on an extended honeymoon in Paris so Freddy could write a novel, though writing a novel really meant sitting round in bars with a lot of other people who said that they were writing novels too.’

Libby and Hugo exchanged a wry smile, though she doubted that he’d spent much time with nascent novelists. ‘Sounds quite dull,’ he ventured.

‘The dullest,’ Libby agreed. ‘All they ever wanted to talk about were the novels they were supposedly writing.’ Then her smile vanished. ‘I took ill. Had an operation. It was a horrible business, made more horrible because while I was in hospital he, Freddy, left me.’

Hugo squeezed her hand and didn’t say anything but that little gesture made Libby feel rooted instead of hopelessly adrift. ‘What kind of man does that to the woman he loves?’ he asked quietly, almost as if he were talking to himself.

It was a question that had haunted Libby; the answer too unpalatable to consider so she always shied away from it, like a rat scuttling away from the light, back into the shadows.

‘He never did love me,’ she said now and hoped the truth would finally set her free. ‘Not really. Not at all. He only married me because I was carrying his child.’

Libby expected, and was dreading, Hugo to turn away from her, unhand her, because he was so proper and upstanding and would never countenance any thought of babies conceived out of wedlock, but his hand was still holding her, his gaze concerned, kind even.

‘Go on,’ he prompted gently. ‘Please tell me what happened, Libby.’

There had been a time not that long ago when telling people what had happened was like suffering through it all over again. Libby was stronger than that now. Able to lift her chin and say: ‘I was carrying Freddy’s child and then suddenly I wasn’t. Freddy, he took me to hospital, saved my life, I suppose, and sat by my bedside day after day even when he was told to go and then he did go, never to return. Left a note with one of the nurses.’ Libby made a helpless, fluttering gesture with her free hand. ‘That’s about the long and the short of it.’

‘The way he’s behaved, the way he’s treated you, it’s abominable,’ Hugo said harshly. He stopped walking so Libby had no choice but to stop walking too. There was a bench, which looked out onto a clearing where squirrels madly gambolled, and they sat down. ‘I still feel the worst kind of heel for the way I treated you in Brighton when you were so unwell, but to walk out on you when you needed him most… he’s no kind of man at all. You’re better off without him, believe me.’

‘But I’m not really without him when we’re still married.’ Libby looked over at Hugo who was opening his cigarette case. ‘The law makes it impossible for us to forget the people who’ve wronged us. No matter how much you want to be done with them, never see them again, sever all ties, you can’t.’

‘Never mind that the person that you’ve married has made a mockery of all the vows they swore in the presence of God and fifty guests.’ Hugo lit a cigarette with an angry inhalation of breath then handed it to Libby. It was an oddly intimate gesture. ‘If your Freddy’s amenable, and it sounds as if he would be, ask him to give you grounds for divorce. Or if your stomach’s strong enough for it, you have evidence of your adultery if you name me as the co-respondent.’ Hugo shrugged. ‘I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’

Libby blew a series of smoke rings. A stagehand had taught her how when she was fifteen and she’d never lost the knack. She’d been told on numerous occasions that it was common, but she found the action soothing. ‘You’d do that for me? Risk your reputation even further? Because if it was just your divorce, then people, your friends, I’m sure they’d know the evidence was cooked.’

‘My reputation isn’t worth a brass farthing. I’m either a cuckold or an adulterer, the details make no difference,’ Hugo said and Libby hated his faithless wife in that moment.

Hugo was a thoroughly decent sort. There weren’t very many men like that. Lord knows, apart from her father, Libby had never met one. She took Hugo’s hand and she liked that despite the fact that there was a fancy car showroom in Mayfair with his name on the door, his hands were rough and calloused. He’d told her that he still liked to tinker under the bonnet of the cars when he had a chance. They were capable hands and she wondered what they might feel like on her, working her as if she were an engine that wouldn’t start.

There was no point in having thoughts like that.

‘You’re a good person, Hugo,’ she said. ‘You deserve to be happy.’

‘We’d have to make it watertight, the evidence,’ Hugo said and Libby thought that he might not have heard her, as he ran his thumb along her knuckles, traced the pale blue veins that threaded their way up the back of her hand. ‘I’d rent a flat, make sure a detective saw us coming and going at the kind of hours respectable people don’t keep. Embracing at the window. Shocking passers-by with our scandalous behaviour.’

He shot her a look that verged on pantomime villain and Libby laughed. ‘My goodness, we’d be the talk of the neighbourhood!’

‘If you really wanted to make a clean sweep of it, escape the clutches of the dreaded Millicent, you could live in the flat in the meantime,’ he suggested casually as if he weren’t offering Libby the one thing she wanted above all others.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. It was what her Aunt Dolly used to say to young actresses bowled over by bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates left with the stage door keeper. It was sage advice never taken.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Libby decided as she stood up and brushed imaginary crumbs from her dress. ‘Shall we start back? It will be getting dark soon.’

Hugo didn’t stir immediately but sat there in a contemplative pose, legs crossed, arms folded, lips pursed as he looked up at Libby standing with her hands on her hips. ‘I’m not sure you entirely understand my motives,’ he said.

‘Don’t I?’ Libby frowned. She suspected that it was more than a friend simply offering to do her a favour, but what kind of favour could it be from someone who was more than a friend? ‘Could you explain these motives to me then?’

Hugo shook his head and smiled as if it were obvious. ‘Can’t you tell when a man is in love with you?’