‘You didn’t. And anyway, it was probably an odd call to take.’
She paid no attention to his answer, saying instead, ‘My parents are away on vacation. I just came up for a couple of weeks while they’re away. There are people here during the day but they like to know someone’s actually staying here.’ Alex nodded, not sure where this was going. He looked at the blazing fire and the neat stack of chopped logs, the look of the place in general speaking of those people who were around during the day. ‘I’ve got a place in the City, so you see, I wouldn’t usually have been here to take your call.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Alex, pretending that he understood now. She frowned a little, perplexed, and he realized she was still struggling toward the point she was trying to make.
‘I come home all the time but being here alone makes you take stock of life, your childhood, things like that. And then you called.’ She looked at him and he smiled a little, showing now that he didn’t quite understand what she was getting at. She nodded as if accepting that she needed to get to the point and said, ‘I wish you could have found out another way. Matt’s dead. He killed himself.’
Alex could still feel that slight baffled smile stuck to his face, the remnant of the final thought before his brain had frozen. He looked at her; she was waiting for a response. He tried to think but it was as if the words existed in some other reality, as if they’d just been spoken on a daytime soap or in a film.
Then the dam burst and overwhelmed him with stray thoughts, questions, panic, confusion. Matt was dead. He’d killed himself. So maybe he wasn’t behind this, but if it wasn’t him who else could it be? Should he tell her that Matt might not have killed himself but been murdered? Matt was dead. Dead. She didn’t seem too upset, and her parents were on vacation when their son had just killed himself.
‘Your parents went on vacation?’
‘Yes.’ She couldn’t see the point of the question but thought it over for a second or two and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I should have said. This wasn’t recent. It was seven years ago. He connected a tube to the tailpipe of his car. In the garage. The gardener found him.’ Alex thought of him sitting in his car, losing consciousness, the mind-numbing irony of him choosing that way out.
‘Seven years ago?’
She nodded.
The barrage of questions was still going on in the back of his head, speculating on what it meant now that Matt was out of the picture. It was overshadowed though, by the realization that someone he’d once thought of as one of his closest friends had sunk into a suicidal despair and killed himself within three years of their last meeting. And the worst of it was that none of them had even known.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Not Matt; it wasn’t his style.’ He couldn’t believe either, that he wouldn’t have the chance now to tell Matt the things he’d wanted to tell him about the night they’d hit Emily Barratt. It was all too late. Everything was always too late. The time he’d needed to speak to Matt was seven years ago, the thought taking shape that they’d let him down. ‘We should have been there for him.’
She took a sip of her whisky and produced a heavy sigh. She was irritated perhaps, and had the right to be. Here he was, one of her brother’s best friends from college, expressing regret and remorse seven years after the fact. It wouldn’t help her either, to know that what he really felt was shame for not having been there, and shame too for having even considered Matt a murderer.
She sat back and rested her elbow on the arm of the sofa, playing with her hair as she said, ‘I have to be honest Alex, I was pretty angry for a few years about that, angry with all of you. He was a different person when he came back from England - sad, withdrawn. Mom and Dad tried plenty of times to find out what it was that was bringing him down but he’d just closed himself off. And I often wondered why he never heard from any of you. I even asked him once and he told me you were probably all busy getting established and it was only natural. Of course, I didn’t think it was natural at all, to have friends who never wrote or called.’
‘You’re right, it isn’t natural, but if it’s any consolation, it wasn’t just Matt. None of us spoke to each other, and until recently we still hadn’t, not for the best part of ten years.’
She looked at him, clear from her eyes that she found no consolation in that fact, and said, ‘Maybe so. But I only saw it from Matt’s point of view, the fact that when he needed his friends they weren’t there. And maybe the rest of you didn’t need that friendship but Matt did.’