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‘I look stupid,’ she says.
‘You want me to wipe that off for you?’ he asks. ‘Has it been on long enough?’
He likes to do small, intimate things for her. He likes to shave her, to brush her hair.
‘Sure,’ she says. This invasion of her privacy is both intensely wanted and also uncomfortable, sometimes. It’s when she feels at her most vulnerable.
He takes a face cloth from the towel rail and comes to kneel beside the tub. He dunks the cloth in the water, and she inhales sharply as it brushes her side. Olly doesn’t react, though he’s watching her intently. He squeezes excess water out of the cloth. Sasha’s mouth feels dry.
‘Shut your eyes,’ he says.
She balks, momentarily, at this command, a reflex when he wants to get intimately involved in her grooming, but instead of her usual worry that he’s going to see her imperfections and be put off by them, she thinks, he’s going to push me underwater and hold me there. I’m going to drown like Tom. Immediately, she talks herself back from this fantasy. How ridiculous! Olly would never do that to her. She doesn’t know why she’s even thinking it. Her brain must be overtired.
She shuts her eyes, partly because he’s told her to, but mostly she doesn’t want him to see that she was afraid, even for a moment. If he does, he’ll make her tell him why, and he’ll see it, quite rightly, as a betrayal of her trust in him. He wants her to trust him absolutely. He has one rule: don’t lie tome. Trust is everything, he tells her. Without it, who are we?
He begins to wipe the mask from her face. He applies just the right amount of pressure and moves the cloth gently over her skin. She relaxes a little. He notices.
‘You were tense before.’ He touches her collar bone lightly, where it meets her neck, and she flinches, her eyes flickering open. ‘Easy,’ he says. ‘Nearly finished.’
When he’s done, she sits up and splashes her face. Beads of water hang on her lashes. She wipes them away. Olly comes into focus. His arm rests on the side of the bath; his fingers trail the water.
‘Kitty’s gone out,’ he says.
‘Outout? Where?’
‘I’ve no idea. She didn’t even ask if we needed the car, just took it.’
Sasha considers this. It’s unusual behaviour. Kitty barely leaves the Manor and Sasha can’t remember the last time she did. Most of what they need gets delivered, or Sasha and Olly pick things up in town or in the village. Kitty makes an occasional trip to the hairdresser, but that’s about it, and she always tells them where she’s going and when she’ll be back.
‘It could be nothing,’ she says, although her gut’s telling her otherwise. ‘I’ll speak to her when she gets home and ask her where she’s been. She’s terrible at lying, so I’ll know if she does.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘I don’t either,’ she admits. ‘But her interview was fine.’
She eavesdropped on Kitty’s conversation with the detectives, slipping into the space in the wall between the Music Room and Olly’s study. Kitty’s interview was as bland as they could have hoped.
‘It’s paranoid to worry,’ Sasha says. Saying it out loud helps her to believe it herself. ‘Forget about it. I’ll talk to her later. She’s probably getting her hair cut or going to the dentist. I mean,everything’s up in the air right now. These aren’t normal times. She probably forgot to tell us.’
He scratches his cheek with the back of his nails. He doesn’t look convinced.
She says, ‘We have enough to worry about, don’t you think? Let’s not waste time dwelling on a problem before we’re sure it exists.’
He looks uncertain. ‘Preparation is everything.’
‘I know that. But let’s get the facts straight first.’ It annoys her how he expects her to listen unquestioningly to him and take his word for things, but he won’t reciprocate. She has an idea of how to distract him. ‘Do you think it’s time I messaged Nicole again?’
‘Yes. We could invite her and Patrick over,’ he suggests. Always, he wants to go too far, too fast.
‘Maybe it’s a little too soon for a full-on social invitation. I could ask her if she wants to meet up with me for a walk, or a coffee. Just us girls. She might spill about Patrick.’
Olly smiles. It transforms his face. ‘Great idea,’ he says. He looks boyish, raffish, again. There are so many sides to him, Sasha thinks, and this one is her favourite because it’s the one she fell in love with.
At the time, she had no idea what he was hiding.
30
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
