Page 59 of The Lie
Michael’s confession, so long awaited, had left a bad taste in her mouth. True, he’d finally admitted his guilt about kissing Grace. Even said he was sorry. But he’d implied the teenager should also accept some responsibility. And he’d totally denied the violence that Grace had written and apparently spoken about in such graphic detail.This cannot be the whole story, she thought grimly, as she climbed into bed, her brain thumping restlessly with what she’d just heard.
42
Finch woke every morning exhilarated, with a feeling of purpose. Luis and Jocelyn’s estancia was huge and wild and astonishing in its beauty. He rode the hills on the beautiful Peruvian Paso horses with such a sense of freedom, refusing to contemplate the people he’d left, the problems he faced, back in England. He knew it couldn’t last, and he made a conscious decision just to live in the moment.
But his backside was agony, despite the paddedbombachasand the famously smooth gait of the Pasos. Paz had not been wrong. The first week he was sore, but he’d expected that. He’d assumed it would get better, though, as his body became acclimatized to long hours in the saddle. But as he approached the middle of his third week in Argentina, riding for up to five or six hours a day sometimes, his bum had gone on strike. It was Marty – Jocelyn’s nephew – who suggesting padded biking shorts under the gaucho trousers.
‘Go get a bunch of them in town. It’ll change your life,’ Marty had told him. ‘I always wear them if I haven’t been in the saddle for a while.’ Finch had done so a couple of days ago, and was relieved at the difference it made – although the raw patches of skin still chafed miserably.
Initially Marty had seemed quiet and shy. Wiry, with untidy light-brown hair and an almost bruised look in hisgrey eyes, his passion was horses. His father, Jocelyn’s brother, owned a stud back in Wisconsin. But get him on a horse, and Marty came to life.
They had bonded over the thrilling gallops they’d taken together over the grey-brown winter hills, without the constraint of the more plodding guests to look after. Marty was confident enough to join the gauchos like a pro in the dusty, crazy, yelling-and-shouting mayhem of the round-up of cattle from the pampas. Finch was in awe. The American even rode like them, jamming his whole boot into the stirrup, tilting his heels up instead of just toeing the stirrup, and holding both reins in his left hand so his right was free for a rope or a gun. He’d earned the respect of the gauchos, big-time. Not an easy thing to do.
Finch, on the other hand, although in love with the Pasos, and considering himself, at the start of his visit, to be a pretty competent horseman, found the gauchos intimidating. Dressed at all times in sweaty shirts and dirty jeans, mostly unshaven, the men with their huge brown eyes and floppyboinas, their heavily accented Spanish, treated Finch with offhand suspicion at first. He was just another foreigner playing at doing their incredibly skilful job. But Finch’s dogged perseverance impressed them and now he’d become friendly with one in particular – a young guy named José.
‘You come with us today?’ he said, one morning, to Finch.
‘Sure he will,’ Marty had answered for him, whacking him on the shoulder as they sat on their horses about to go out.
They spent the morning riding hell for leather as they chased hundreds of cattle into the valley where they began to separate off the young bullocks.
‘Why are they doing that?’ Finch asked Marty, as he drew up alongside.
‘No idea,’ replied the American, frowning. ‘Helluva ride, no?’
They watched in awe and a certain amount of squeamishness on Finch’s part as the men brewed up some strange black liquid in a rusty can, then expertly threw the bullocks to the earth and castrated them – lightning quick – then painted the wound with the black gunge. Finch saw the parts casually discarded in a metal bucket and hoped that was the end of the grisly drama.
But the men then proceeded to roast the bullock balls over the fire on a piece of flattened tin. Finch caught José’s eye, noted his wicked grin, and spent the minutes while the things sizzled away wanting to run. But it was too late. José thrust a plate at him, on which a number of browned balls rolled merrily about.
‘They tasted sort of sweet, a bit gristly. If I didn’t know what they were …’ Finch commented that evening to his friend. They had begged off early, immediately after dinner with Jocelyn and Luis’s American guests, pleading exhaustion, and were now pleasantly drunk, lounging, legs spread, in fold-up chairs outside Finch’s cottage, which sat on the edge of the red-roofed, sprawling ranch house, a half-empty bottle of Malbec on the path by their feet. It was a cold night, but neither felt like going inside.
‘Yeah, made me heave.’ Marty laughed.
‘I’ve eaten sheep’s eyes before,’ Finch boasted. ‘Maybe even sheep’s balls. Same difference.’
There was a long, companionable silence between them. Then Marty spoke, his voice low. ‘So tell me, Rob, what is it you’re running away from?’
Taken aback, Finch didn’t answer at once. The trip, so far, had been everything he’d hoped for: extraordinary new landscape, no one who knew him, and day after day in the saddle – which tired him out so he was asleep almost before he’d taken his boots off. He’d been so grateful not to think. But ‘running away’ seemed a vaguely pejorative term.
Marty was staring at him in the feeble light of the single bulb above the cottage door, those bruised grey eyes considering. ‘You don’t have to tell me, course, but I can see it on you.’ He paused. ‘I recognize it.’
‘Recognize it?’
Marty shrugged. He seemed at ease with himself tonight, away from his doting aunt. Finch thought the wine was probably helping. ‘My wife, Beth, she passed six years ago – a long struggle with her heart.’ He looked enquiringly at Finch, as if he expected a matching confidence, but Finch was dumbstruck.Is he psychic, a bloody mind reader?
‘I’m so sorry about your wife,’ Finch said, rather stiffly, then added, ‘But I’m not running away.’
Marty raised an eyebrow and grinned. ‘You sure about that?’ He reached for his glass and sipped, holding the wine in his mouth for a moment before swallowing as helooked up into the incredibly clear, starry night. ‘Luis told me about your wife.’
And Cami told Cousin Luis, Finch thought. Suddenly all the stuff he’d been holding at bay swooped back, like a flock of starlings, to surround him. He sighed. ‘It’s not just about Nell.’ And then, with the next breath, he was telling Marty everything about his wife’s death. Every detail of those months when he’d watched her eyes become too bright as her face thinned and yellowed, saw her shoulder blades cutting through her delicate skin, the knobbled ridges of her spine as he washed her, the way she shook when she tried to stand. He told this stranger of the agonies he had kept hidden, almost cherished, since she died. Who else could he have told who might understand? And when he’d finished, there were tears pouring down his face.
Of course it’s about Nell. Grace was Nell’s daughter who reminded him of her constantly and whom he’d vowed to protect. Romy was a guilty pleasure, a betrayal of his perfect wife, the perfect love they’d shared, however much he told himself – and Romy – different.
Marty nodded intermittently, listened to his long and rambling account without speaking.
Finch thought of his endless chats with Nell’s photograph. ‘Just recently, though, I was beginning to appreciate things again,’ he insisted, suddenly desperate to acknowledge Romy and everything she’d meant to him. ‘But now …’ He told Marty the bare bones of what had happened with Grace.
‘Wow, cruel.’ The American whistled. ‘So you headed out, left them all to it?’
