Jane was unable to finish the sentence. Felix, her Felix, was looking at her as if he hated her. She didn’t blame him.
‘Just go,’ he said, his voice low and all the more menacing for that. ‘Go back to our room before I do something I regret.’
Finally, she obeyed him, pausing at the door of the children’s room just long enough to watch him lay Joanna on her little yellow bed.
It was probably ten minutes or so before Felix returned to their bedroom. Jane was again by the window, staring out at the lights twinkling across the estuary, trying to overcome the fears that raged within her, threatening everything that she treasured in life, trying to make sense of the senseless. This had been the worst, the worst ever. Jane turned to look at him when the door opened. His face was ashen. There was a resigned grimness about him. He was trembling.
‘I’m so sorry... ’ she began.
There was so much that she wanted to tell him, had to tell him.
But he didn’t give her time. His face darkened with anger. He strode purposefully across the room, and, before she could speak again, raised his right hand, the palm flat, and struck her once across the cheek. The edge of his wedding ring caught her, cutting into her flesh. Her cheek stung. She could feel wetness on her skin. She knew she was bleeding.
It was the first time Felix had ever hit her. The shock of it was far greater than any pain.
‘This is it,’ he told her. ‘I will make sure you never touch our children again.’
With chilling calmness, he turned away from her, walked over to the door, locked it and removed the key, then returned to bed.
Jane wanted to tell him everything that was going through her head. But she was afraid to do so. And in case she hadn’t made sense of it herself yet. It couldn’t be how it seemed, could it? Did she dare confide her deepest fears to her husband? She wasn’t sure.
‘Felix, we need to talk,’ she began.
‘Jane, we’ve talked and talked,’ he replied. ‘Nothing helps. This time you’ve gone too far.’
‘Bu... but, I couldn’t help it, I didn’t know what I was doing,’ said Jane.
‘I know, and that’s the most frightening thing about it, isn’t it?’
‘All I have to do is control what happens to me. I think last night I was halfway to understanding... ’
‘Yes Jane, but unfortunately, we can’t expect our children to understand, can we?’
‘Oh Felix, can’t we just talk... ’
‘Look, in the morning we’ll get the twins up together. Then we’ll see... ’
Felix’s voice tailed off. Jane wondered exactly what they would see. She didn’t ask the question though. Indeed, she didn’t reply at all. He was tired, and he was angry.
Felix closed his eyes and clearly had no intention of opening them again. She didn’t want to join him in bed until he was asleep. But she knew he was not sleeping, just as earlier she had been so sure that he was.
She would have gone to the spare room, for the very first time ever, but he had locked the door.
Eventually she climbed into bed beside him, and lay rigid, her legs and arms straight. Would he hit her again? Later that night, or in the morning? He had never hit her before. It was not in his nature. But she had frightened him half out of his wits. She had frightened her children, particularly poor Joanna. She had frightened herself. Not for the first time, but more than ever before.
The events of the night were laid out before her like a tableau. Mixed up with other things. Other people. Other children. Parts of dreams, or were they dreams? Parts of happenings that were nothing to do with her and her life, and her husband, and her children. Or were they?
Her injured cheek was sore. She reached up with one hand. The little cut inflicted by Fergus’ ring was still tacky with her blood. She reached under the pillow for a tissue and held it to her face.
Being careful only to move her head so that she didn’t disturb him, Jane peered through the half-light at her husband. The moon remained bright outside, shining as strongly as a moon ever can, through the bedroom window. Just as before, before she had again done her best to destroy everything, she could see clearly enough the shape of Felix’s body and the way his chest moved rhythmically up and down as he breathed.
He had fallen asleep again. How on earth could he sleep, she wondered? Felix always seemed able to sleep, whether or not he had been drinking, whatever was happening in their lives. But there had never been a night like this one before. She would not sleep again that night, she knew that for sure. Sleep was her enemy. She had earlier allowed it to overcome her, and look what had happened. It was a wicked trick of nature that this enemy of hers was one no human being could live without.
She had to talk to Felix.
The alarm sounded at six thirty a.m.
Felix stirred then went back to sleep. She shook him gently awake again. He opened his eyes looking towards her. She watched as he began to remember.
‘You have the key to the door,’ she prompted him. ‘You said we should get the twins up together.’
Felix was not by nature an early riser. However, he reached under his pillow for the key to the bedroom door, then sat up at once and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
He led the way to the children’s room without speaking to her. With the resilience of childhood, both Joanna and Stevie seemed to have slept through the rest of the night, and they appeared to have woken without any clear recollection of what had happened.
‘C’mon you two,’ said Jane, in her cheeriest voice, hoping beyond hope that was how things would remain. ‘Daddy’s going to get you dressed whilst I make breakfast.’
She glanced at Felix enquiringly.
‘I sure am,’ he agreed, his voice even more overtly cheery. ‘Now, where are those school uniforms? I know. We put them in the shed, didn’t we, in case the elves and the goblins and the fairies who live at the bottom of the garden needed them in the night?’
‘Don’t be silly, Daddy, elves and fairies and goblins don’t go to school,’ said Stevie, sounding very grown up. ‘Everybody knows that.’
Felix smiled his ‘Daddy’ smile. It stretched from ear to ear and lit up his eyes, so they shone with love. Usually it warmed Jane’s heart and made her feel, even on her darkest days, that all could not be entirely bad with the world. But not this morning.
She left the room and made her way to the kitchen where she prepared breakfast on auto pilot.
About half an hour later the twins came running down the stairs and into the kitchen, fully dressed in their school uniforms. Jane had boiled an egg for Felix. But it didn’t look as if he was coming to eat it. However, the twins sat down at the kitchen table and tucked in to their usual fruit and cereals. At first sight everything seemed normal with them. Although Joanna seemed a little quieter than usual.
‘Are you all right, baby?’ asked Jane.
‘I d-don’t know,’ stumbled Joanna. ‘I think perhaps I had a bad dream in the night. Did I have a very bad dream, Mummy?’
‘Oh, darling,’ said Jane. She felt her heart lurch inside her chest.
‘Oh, darling, perhaps you did.’
She hurried around the table to her daughter’s side and wrapped her arms around her, hugging her close.
At just that moment, Felix, also dressed and ready for the school run, arrived in the kitchen.
‘OK kids, if you’ve finished your breakfasts off you go and get your shoes on,’ he instructed at once. ‘I’ll be right with you.’
His voice was strained. For the first time since the horrors of the night, he looked directly at Jane. His eyes were full of pain. Or might it have been loathing? She realized that for Felix, seeing her clutching Joanna like that must have been all too reminiscent of the scene he had walked into in the early hours.