Hope Blooms in Tuppenny Bridge (Tuppenny Bridge #5)

Chapter 23

TWENTY-THREE

The previous evening

Noah couldn’t believe the insults Isobel was hurling about Daisy. It had been one thing listening to the things she had to say about him—he was, after all, used to hearing all that—but what she was saying about Daisy was unbelievable. He hadn’t even realised she knew words like the ones that were pouring from her mouth in a torrent of rage.

‘And if you think she’ll stay with you, you can think again,’ Isobel snarled. ‘Even someone as desperate as that fat bitch won’t hang around for long. Not once she realises how incredibly dull and stupid you are. How useless. You’re rubbish at everything, aren’t you, Noah?’

He closed his eyes, waiting for the inevitable stream of put downs and jibes.

‘Useless! You only got that job because everyone in this town is scared stiff of your precious Aunt Eugenie. She’s had to pull strings all your life to get you anywhere. I’ll bet you anything she even bribed the people at the university to get you a degree. There’s no way you’d get anything on your own merit because you’re way too stupid.’

He opened his eyes again, staring at her face, contorted with rage. He wondered how he’d ever considered her beautiful. Right now, she was the ugliest person he’d ever seen.

It was as if she could read his thoughts and turned them back on him. ‘Look at you! God, you’re hideous. What did I ever see in you? P-pathetic. P-uny,’ she said, mocking the stammer he’d struggled with for years—the stammer that had only been caused in the first place by her behaviour towards him. ‘All those spots all over your face.’ She jabbed at his freckles with her forefinger. ‘Like a bloody kid. Who has freckles at your age? You’re not a man at all. You never were. Stammering and stuttering like a big baby. Is there any wonder I can’t stand you near me in bed? You’re disgusting. You even fail there. I pity Daisy. She’s going to be so disappointed. Although, the state of her, she’s probably grateful for anything she can get. The only thing I could ever rely on you for was to let me down.’

Something snapped. Noah glared at her. ‘Really? Well, I’m very sorry that I could never compete with your precious Leon!’

The shock in her face gave him a moment’s satisfaction. She slumped against the door, her eyes wide.

‘What did you say?’

‘Did you really think I didn’t know, Isobel?’

Oh, God! What had he said? All these years he’d kept what he knew to himself, but now the truth was finally out.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said faintly.

‘I know exactly what I’m talking about. You and Leon—my friend, Leon—were having an affair. Behind my back. Behind Kat’s back. And you say I’m the disgusting one!’

That was when she spat at him.

‘Making up lies to justify your sordid affair with that tramp,’ she said bitterly. ‘How dare you say such horrible things about Leon! He was worth a hundred of you.’

‘You clearly thought so,’ he said.

‘You’re insane. Leon was with Kat. Everyone knew that.’

‘He was, and they were happy. Like we were happy. Until you and Leon decided we weren’t. Please don’t deny it. You know as well as I do that the time for pretence is over. We’ve lied to each other for long enough, don’t you think?’

She rammed the door harder into his chest. ‘Stop saying such things! You’re just trying to wriggle out of this. Don’t think I don’t know.’

The door slammed into him again.

‘You want everyone to feel sympathy for you, don’t you? You want people to be on your side when they find out about you and that cow from the café. Well, it won’t work. No one would believe your lies. I’ll make sure they all know what’s really been going on.’

‘Isobel…’ He felt exhausted, too tired to argue any longer. ‘Don’t. This is getting us nowhere. I know about you and Leon. I’ve always known.’

The fight had gone out of him. He knew that, whatever he and Isobel had once had, it had gone for good. Maybe he’d been fooling himself. Maybe they’d never had what he’d thought they’d had. He’d been an idiot, believing what he wanted to believe. Needing her. Needing to belong to someone. A family of his own. Huh! Family. He and Isobel had hardly been that.

She let go of the door and folded her arms, trembling. ‘When did you find out?’

Finally released, he slumped against the wall, rubbing his shoulder and collarbone where the door had pressed into him. ‘I suspected for a while. When I got home from university you were different, and Leon was odd around me. Like he couldn’t look me in the face. So, one night, I followed you.’

‘You did what ?’

‘Yeah, I know. Not my finest hour. But not yours either, to be fair. I followed you to Larkspur Common. You parked up in the grounds of Grenley Hall. I left my car on the road and headed up there on foot, and I saw you in the car. I saw you…’

‘You watched !’

‘No,’ he said, his lip curling at the thought. ‘Do you really think I wanted to see that? As soon as I’d confirmed that you two were having an affair I got out of there as fast as I could.’

Isobel sank into the armchair and wrapped her arms around her body. ‘I loved him,’ she said flatly. ‘He was everything to me. We had such a future planned. We were going to leave this place behind.’ She gazed around the living room, her eyes suddenly full of tears. ‘Get out of Tuppenny Bridge for good and just—just live !’

‘I know,’ he admitted.

‘It was taken away from us,’ she moaned. ‘When he died that night, I died, too. Everything I’d hoped for, everything I’d dreamed of, gone. You can’t imagine…

‘I’m so sorry,’ he told her.

Tears rained down her cheeks. ‘Oh, Leon. Why did it have to be you? I wish—I wish I’d been with him in the car that night. I wish I’d died with him.’

‘Don’t say that, Isobel,’ he pleaded. ‘You’re still young. You can still be happy.’

She shook her head. ‘I knew, that morning when we all found out, that I would never be happy again. But I thought… I thought at least with you I’d escape my mother. I thought I could mould you. If I couldn’t be happy at least I could have some control. Happiness was for other people. And I was right.’ She lifted her head to gaze at him. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? I’ve never been happy since that day.’

He wanted to tell her that couldn’t possibly be true, but looking back on their life together he wasn’t so sure.

‘I tried to make you happy,’ he told her quietly. ‘I did everything I could to make it up to you. It was never enough.’

‘You married me, knowing how I felt,’ she said, dazed. For a moment she stared at him as if she was absorbing the reality of the situation. ‘You never said a word. Why?’

‘I never said a word to you ,’ he said heavily. ‘But I had plenty to say to Leon.’

She wiped her eyes. ‘You confronted him?’

‘I did. We had one hell of a row. I reminded him that we were supposed to be friends. I told him—’ He swallowed down tears at the memory. ‘I told him that I loved you. That you were everything to me, and had he forgotten that he was supposed to be in love with Kat? He told me his relationship with Kat was just kid’s stuff. That he’d grown out of her. Like she was some old jumper or something! He told me he was sorry to hurt me, but that he wasn’t going to give you up. Not for anything or anyone.’

‘You see?’ She sat up straight, her voice eager. ‘He loved me, too! Real love! Not the pathetic excuse for love you’ve offered me all these years. We had passion. We were soulmates.’ She gave him a scornful look. ‘As if you could ever have persuaded him to give me up!’

Every word she said was another wound. What had he done to her?

‘You’re right,’ he said at last. ‘It was a fruitless exercise, but I had to try. He wasn’t budging though.’

‘And what did you do then?’ she asked, her eyes glittering with anger and tears.‘When he told you he wouldn’t break up with me. What did you do?’

‘I told him I hated him, that we were no longer friends, and that Kat was worth ten of him. Then I swore that I wouldn’t let you go, and that I’d kill him if he tried to take you away from me.’

She gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You hit him?’

‘No. I didn’t hit him. I walked away and left him.’

Her lips twisted in a sneer. ‘Of course you did. What else would I expect? You wouldn’t have it in you, would you?’

Noah’s stomach seemed to have knotted, and he thought, for one awful minute, that he was going to be sick. ‘As it turned out,’ he said bleakly, ‘I didn’t have to hit him. That was the night. The night he was killed.’

Isobel rose slowly to her feet. ‘What?’

‘That night, after he and I had the row, he went to pick Ben up from the party, and he never came home.’

‘And you never said a word,’ she whispered, clearly dazed. ‘I was heartbroken. Beside myself. You stood there, comforting me, pretending to be devastated?—’

‘Not pretending,’ he said. ‘I was devastated. You really think I wished that on him? He was my friend, and when I heard he’d died nothing else seemed to matter. I forgave him in that instant. And of course I comforted you. You needed me.’

‘I needed Leon ,’ she said. Her face was pale, and her eyes suddenly seemed huge. ‘I could have been happy, Noah. I could have been happy . Do you have any idea how I suffered? Trying to keep my grief to a suitable pitch while everyone around me fawned over Kat? Kat! She meant nothing to him, yet all anyone cared about was her feelings. It was like I didn’t exist. And then you asked me to marry you! Knowing that! Why? Why would you do that?’

‘Because I still loved you,’ he said simply. ‘And because you needed me.’

‘No.’ She shook her head and walked slowly towards him. ‘It wasn’t because of that, was it? It was guilt!’ She stopped in front of him. ‘You knew it was your fault! You knew that your stupid row with Leon, swearing to him that he’d never have me, had distracted him. That was why he crashed the car, wasn’t it? Because he was thinking about that! Worrying that you’d stop us being together somehow. Oh!’

She clutched at her hair, desperation in her tone. ‘The times I’ve gone over and over that night. What could have happened to make Leon crash the car. He would never have driven if he’d had a drink, so I knew it wasn’t that. Had a cat run into the road or something? Had there been a mechanical failure that the investigators had missed? I went over and over it, tormenting myself with reasons for his accident. And all the time the answer was staring across the breakfast table at me every bloody day, lying beside me in my bed every night, droning on at me in that whiny, stuttering voice of yours. You did this! It was your fault.’

He didn’t answer. He had no words. How could he deny it when she’d just voiced the very thing he’d feared all these years? The secret he’d carried with him all this time. That the argument he’d had with Leon had somehow caused the accident that night. He’d told Leon he would kill him if he tried to take Isobel from him, and somehow, he’d done just that, without ever meaning to. He would never forgive himself for that.

‘You took him away from me,’ she said. ‘The man I loved more than anything in the world. You robbed me of the future that should have been mine.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, knowing two little words could never make up for everything he’d taken from her, any more than the years he’d spent with her, trying to make her happy had.

‘You killed him,’ she said, sounding dazed.

For a long moment she stood still, as if in a dream. Then he saw the realisation on her face like she’d finally awoken, the dullness gone to be replaced by that flash of anger he knew all too well. Her mouth twisted with rage, and then her fist landed on his face, and he was reeling.

Noah didn’t have time to absorb the shock of that first punch. As he staggered into the kitchen Isobel moved like quicksilver to stand in front of him. Something hit him in the eye and the agony made him drop to his knees. He felt a sharp pain on the top of his head and, dazed, he put his hand up, feeling the wetness of blood on his fingers. As more blows rained down on him, he covered his eye, aware that something was badly wrong. It was already swelling dramatically, and he wasn’t sure what he should be most worried about—that, or the blood that was running from the top of his head into his hair.

He’d told Isobel the truth. Now she was going to deal him her brand of justice.

Maybe, he thought, as he went sprawling on the floor and through blurry eyes saw her pick up the meat tenderiser, it was what he deserved after all.