Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [115]
Alatea’s throat worked with a swallow. She didn’t move from the doorway.
“A quarter of an hour, I expect.” Deborah tried to sound jolly: nothing to fear from me. “It’s the drawing room I’m interested in, actually. There’s good ambient light and some background interest as well.”
Reluctant didn’t do justice to the manner in which Alatea admitted Deborah into the house. Deborah could feel tension virtually oozing from the woman, and she was forced to wonder if Alatea had a man other than her husband inside somewhere, playing at Polonius behind a convenient arras.
They went towards the yellow drawing room, passing the main hall, whose sliding doors were closed. These revealed more impressive panelling along with windows combining translucent glass and stained glass fashioned in the shape of red tulips and green leaves. Someone, Deborah decided, could indeed have been lurking in that room, but she couldn’t imagine who it might be.
She made light chat. The house was remarkable, she told Alatea. Had it been featured in any magazines? The Arts and Crafts movement was so clean and sympathetic, wasn’t it? Was Alatea interested at all in a documentary about the restoration of this building? Had she been approached by any of the myriad television programmes that featured period homes? To all of this, Alatea’s answers were monosyllabic. Bonding with the woman was not going to be a simple matter, Deborah concluded.
In the drawing room, she switched to another topic. How did Alatea like living in England? It had to be very different from what she was used to in Argentina, Deborah expected.
Here, Alatea looked startled. “How do you know I’m from Argentina?”
“Your husband told me.” Deborah wanted to add, Why? Is there a problem with your being from Argentina? but she did not. Instead, she examined the room. The object was to get Alatea over to the bay window where the magazines were, so Deborah took a few shots of prospective areas in which interviews could occur, easing over in that direction.
When she got there, though, the first thing she saw was that Conception was gone from the fan of journals. This was going to make things tricky but not impossible. Deborah took a photo of the two chairs and the low table in front of the bay window, adjusting for the light outside so as to show both interior and exterior equally. She said as she did so, “You and I have something in common, Mrs. Fairclough.” She looked up from her camera and offered a smile.
Alatea was standing by the door as if ready to bolt. She gave a polite smile and looked supremely doubtful. If they had something in common, it was clear she hadn’t a clue what it was, aside from being women who were, at the moment, standing in the same room of her house.
Deborah said, “We’re both trying for a baby. Your husband told me. He saw I’d seen the magazine. Conception?” She added a helpful lie, “I’ve been reading it for ages. Well, for five years now. That’s how long Simon and I— that’s my husband— have been trying.”
Alatea said nothing to this, but Deborah saw her swallow as her eyes moved to the table where the magazine had lain. Deborah wondered if she’d removed it herself or if Nicholas had done so. She wondered, too, if Nicholas worried about his wife’s state of mind and state of body as Simon worried about her own.
She said, as she took another photo, “We started out au naturel, Simon and I, hoping that nature would take its course. We went from there to monitoring. Everything from my monthly cycles to my daily temperature to the phases of the moon.” She forced a chuckle. It wasn’t pleasant to reveal this sort of thing to anyone, but Deborah saw the importance of doing so and, even, the potential for comfort that such a revelation could bring. “Then, there were the tests,” she said, “which Simon less than adored, I can tell you. After that were the endless discussions about alternatives, visits to specialists,