‘Aren’t you going to ask about my pride?’ she challenged. ‘How I was able to bear my own weakness, and let him trample all over me like that?’
Though Joely had wondered about it, she simply shook her head. It hadn’t felt like the right thing to ask before the story was finished.
‘He never cheated on me here, in this house,’ Freda went on as if she hadn’t interrupted herself. ‘He always went away somewhere, I rarely knew where, but it hardly mattered. He was gone, I tried to believe he’d be back and while I waited I wrote my books to distract myself, but the fear was always there, eating me up in a terrible, soul-destroying way. That this time I might be wrong. This might be the woman he finally leaves me for.’
She seemed to hold her breath as she turned her hands over, looking at them as though they’d been holding something precious that had somehow vanished. ‘That woman did come,’ she said quietly. ‘It was inevitable, I suppose I always knew that and he did too, but what he hadn’t expected was that she wouldn’t want him. He would have left me if she had. He wasn’t only infatuated with her, he was obsessed with her, I think he even stalked her until her husband threatened to report him to the police. Even that didn’t stop him wanting her, if anything it made him more determined to win her. He was, quite literally, crazy about her and when I found out who she was …’ She broke off and her quiet laugh was drowning in sadness.
‘I advised you a moment ago,’ she said, ‘to think about the others who are being hurt by the betrayal. Your family will always feel your pain, even after it’s over for you. For them the trust will never come back, and even if you can forgive your husband don’t expect them to do the same. In my case, it was my brother who couldn’t go on watching me suffer each time David went away. They used to be good friends, but he couldn’t stand what this new obsession was doing to me. He wanted to confront him, to tell him that it had to stop, and though I didn’t think it would do any good I agreed to let him try.’
Freda paused for a beat before continuing, her hands shaking slightly.
‘He and David were both keen sailors,’ she continued, speaking faster now, ‘So it wasn’t unusual for them to take a boat out together. On this particular day, less than a week after David had been threatened with the police, the conditions were perfect for a bracing sail out into the channel. David had no idea that my brother had other things on his mind, and I don’t know if he ever got to find out what they were … but I suspect he did.’ She swallowed and took a shallow breath. ‘We’ll never know for sure what happened – a fight must have broken out, and one of them went overboard. And then when the other tried to rescue him … I’m sure there would have been a rescue attempt, no matter who went in.’ She said this more to herself than Joely. ‘The police and coast guard were alerted. Their bodies were found not far from each other, about a mile along the coast from here. The search took hours.’
Joely sat watching her, sensing the ache in her heart, the terrible fear she’d have known during the wait for them to come back. It seemed to be with her now, the pain of losing two people she loved so deeply that it had obviously changed her life, turned her into a hermit to live with a grief that she hadn’t even tried to escape.
Joely understood now why she’d advised her to look at who else the betrayal was hurting. ‘Your brother,’ she said softly. ‘You haven’t mentioned him in the memoir.’
Freda shook her head for some time and when she finally looked up there were shadows in her eyes that Joely didn’t understand. ‘Christopher wasn’t a part of that story,’ she said, ‘and I realize you think David is Sir, but you’re wrong. They shared many of the same qualities, for sure, their passion for music, their gentleness of character, and the same name, but they are not the same person.’
For some reason the admission caused Joely’s heart to twist. ‘So is any of it true?’ she asked, suspecting she’d been deliberately misled to this point and knowing she’d be angry if she had.
‘About my husband and brother? Every word of it.’
‘And was your husband’s name really David?’
‘Yes, but we called him Doddoe. David Oswald Douglas Donahoe. It was a name he got at school and it stuck.’
Yet throughout the story she’d just told, she’d referred to him as David, so she had been deliberately misleading.
‘Are you disappointed?’ Freda asked. ‘I think you are, but this is what happens when you make assumptions, you get it wrong. Or you could say I set a trap for you and you walked into it.’
Joely couldn’t deny it.
‘I’ve told you about my husband now,’ Freda continued, ‘to make you forget your belief, or suspicion, that he and Sir are one and the same. Sir was somebody else entirely … Somebody who made the world a beautiful place to be, as long as he was close. He didn’t have to try to do that, it just happened. He shaped my young life …’ Her breath caught in her throat. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I loved him even more than I loved my husband, if perhaps it was because of him and what happened to him that I’m who I am now.’ She seemed to consider this for a moment, though Joely suspected it was a question she’d asked herself many times before. ‘Losing Sir, and in the way I lost him …’ Her words were swallowed by a swell of emotion. ‘He didn’t deserve what happened to him,’ she said softly, ‘and nor did I.’
Joely was in her room sitting cross-legged on the bed as she thought back over what Freda had told her, still unsure of what she was supposed to have taken away from it all other than the warning about the damage betrayal could do to the rest of the family. And the disclosure that Sir, David Michaels, was not David Donahoe.
After, when they’d settled down to dinner Freda hadn’t wanted to talk any more about her own family, or Joely’s, instead she’d wanted to listen to the music Joely had written into the memoir’s most recent pages. Moonlight Sonata, ‘She Loves You’, a selection of American Jazz, an aria from Handel’s Messiah; ‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals.
Before they’d gone their separate ways to bed Freda had said, ‘You’re doing a reasonable job with the story so far, but your coyness isn’t serving reality. If we were writing about a young nymphomaniac I’d understand your reticence, since it’s an illness that requires sensitive treatment not salacious exploitation. The child we’re writing about,’ she put a hand to her chest, ‘the one who acquired more decorum and morals later in life, was little more than a very beautiful, self-absorbed slut at fifteen.’
Startled by the harshness, Joely countered, ‘But one who was capable of love. You said yourself that you loved him.’
‘Yes, yes, I did, but I believe at this point in the relationship the physicality of it was the most important part of it, so I think it should be written that way. Use words that shock you, disgust you even, they will bring you closer to the truth.’
‘The truth,’ Joely murmured to herself as she slid under the duvet, abandoning all plans to chance calling her mother from the balcony tonight when the rain was coming down in torrents. What was the truth? She guessed she’d find out when Freda was ready to tell it, however, she was still determined that Freda herself would have to provide the more sensational aspects of the memoir. She, Joely, was a ghostwriter not a purveyor of porn even if that was how young Freda and Sir had conducted themselves. Who didn’t in the privacy of the bedroom? (She hoped not Callum and Martha, though knowing some of his more exotic tastes … No, she couldn’t go there.)