The Imposter, Anna Wharton [romantic story to read TXT] 📗

grateful to be back in the sanctuary of her room. But as she lies down on the bed, she feels something uncomfortable under her neck. She fishes one arm behind her, onto the pillow, and pulls out Puss – Angie’s cloth cat. She nearly drops it in surprise. She sits up quickly, looking this way and that.

‘Who put thi . . .?’ she says to no one but Puss.

But she knows. Isn’t it obvious?

She lies on her bed until the room turns black. She’s grateful for the darkness that engulfs her. She holds Puss across her belly. Only then she hears Maureen calling to her from downstairs. She shuffles out onto the landing; the light is on and it makes her blink.

Maureen stands at the bottom of the stairs with a pile of photo albums.

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I thought this might help.’

Chloe obeys her command to join her downstairs, then on the sofa, side by side, she and Maureen sit down and look again through the same dusty photo albums she’d got out that very first night. This time, though, Maureen pauses over each photograph, searching Chloe’s face for recognition, pointing out everyone, giving her every name. She seems disappointed when Chloe fails to feel what she does.

‘It’s all . . . it’s all such a blur,’ Chloe says finally, knowing Maureen just wants to hear something.

‘Don’t worry,’ Maureen says, tapping her arm, ‘it’ll come back eventually. We can try again tomorrow.’

Across the room, Patrick watches the news on mute, ready to join in with their conversation whenever Maureen attempts to include him. She’s talking to him when Chloe turns the last page and finds the photograph she was thinking of earlier. A day on the beach at Hunstanton. She opens the cellophane protector, and loosens it from its sticky page. It has been years, but eventually the photograph yields and it’s there in her hands. There is something about this photograph that feels familiar. Maureen turns to see her holding it. She points to the place where they’re sitting.

‘Do you remember the steps down to that part of the beach, and the green that ran all the way up to it? Do you remember the carousel? The painted horses? Oh, you loved them. And we’d sit and eat fish and chips on that green, do you remember?’

Chloe nods, just a little, and as she does she’s aware of Maureen turning round to Patrick and saying, ‘Look, Pat, it is coming back to her, I knew it.’

But Chloe is distracted by Patrick’s face in the picture, a different man to the one who sits with them now. She thinks of what he said earlier, about the secrets you keep in a marriage. She pictures again the gun on the back seat of the car, the newspaper article about his arrest. She brings the photograph towards her face. What else has he been hiding all these years?

‘Can I keep this one?’ Chloe says. ‘Just up in my room.’

‘Of course, love. It might even help.’ Maureen gets up. ‘I’m just going to get a tea. Would you like one?’

Chloe shakes her head, yawning. ‘I think I’ll just head to bed, busy day tomorrow,’ she says, and pictures the same insurance building, as if that were really where she worked. It’s amazing how quickly things can feel real.

‘Poor love, it’s getting that bus that does it to you. Pat, are you on a late tomorrow?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Late tomorrow and Wednesday, then nothing till next Monday.’

‘Oh good. Well, you’ll run Chloe into work, won’t you?’

‘Oh no—’ Chloe tries to protest. She can’t risk bumping into Phil two days running, and anyway, she was planning on visiting Nan tomorrow.

‘Honestly, pet, it’s no bother at all,’ Maureen says. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Pat?’

‘Not if you say so, Mo,’ he replies, rearranging his legs on the pouffe.

‘There, it’s settled. Anyway, it would be good for you two to spend some time together.’

FORTY-ONE

Within days, it is a regular thing, Patrick giving her lifts to ‘work’. Chloe managed to convince him after that first day that she missed stretching her legs on the walk from the bus stop, so he drops her there without question and as soon as she sees his car disappear, she crosses the road and waits for the bus back to town.

They’ve left a little earlier this morning. Chloe had hoped that she could steal out and catch the bus before he was up, only when Maureen realized, she had hurriedly shooed Patrick into action, standing over him while he quickly pressed his feet into his shoes.

The fields that they pass are bathed in a soft golden light that has yet to burn through the fog that still blankets the crops, and the radio fills the silence between them inside the car. At Elm House there is no time for awkward silences; Maureen fills them, mining memories as if searching for gold. Evenings in Low Drove for Chloe now are more often spent with faded polaroid pictures scattered across the sofa cushions as they pore over every photo album in turn.

Patrick obediently carries boxes from the storage room up and down the stairs, as Chloe is made to sit on the living room floor among Fuzzy-Felt and Playmobil sets while Maureen encourages her to open each battered box and handle its contents. It is now Maureen who ploughs Chloe for long-buried relics of the past – how the tables have turned. Even Patrick seems pleased to see his wife’s new delight when one tiny gem is retrieved from the deep dark recesses of Chloe’s memory – or something like that.

In the car, though, when it’s just the two of them, Patrick seems less concerned with Chloe’s fuzzy memory, as if part of him switches off the moment they pull out of the drive at Elm House. She can’t explain this about-turn. Outside of Low Drove, he never mentions Angie. Although he never mentions DNA tests either, so Chloe has resisted picking at that particular scab. She wonders