‘When I was at uni,’ he says, speaking in an even lower tone, blotting the droplets of water that have come off the bottom of his beer bottle with a napkin, ‘I had a girlfriend.’
I think back. We overlapped by a year. His final year of Cambridge was my first year at Oxford. I went to see him, five or six times, maybe, at Cambridge. Mum and Dad wanted me to get used to ‘that sort of environment’. And, besides, I wanted to see. I meet his eyes and feel something. Wistfulness, maybe. Nostalgia. That was right before he changed, that final visit, at Christmastime. After that, he began setting up businesses, selling on products for friends. Tuition. The work – the homework – came easily to him. He ran the London marathon right before his finals began. Started sneering at how passive I was, letting life fall into my lap rather than going out and grasping it.
But there was never a girlfriend. Not even a sniff of one, a shared smile, a woman slipping out of his room before I got there. I had often wondered why. He’d had one two-week relationship, in the final year of his A-levels, with a geeky woman who liked role-playing games. She was a slightly dowdy woman who had turned out to be sexually adventurous, and he’d made me laugh about it over Christmas dinner.
‘Did you?’ I say, thinking hard. Perhaps he did. I didn’t know everything about his life while he was at Cambridge.
‘Yeah. Beth,’ he says. His face clouds as he says it, his golden eyebrows drawing together. He pulls his lips inwards, creating dimples either side of his mouth.
‘What happened?’
He inhales deeply then blows the air out through his nose, like a smoker. ‘She died,’ he says. ‘She died,’ he says again.
‘What? When?’
‘We’d been together two months. Stupid, really. I’m not anything. Not a widower. There’s no word for it. But it wasn’t … a fling. I loved her,’ he says.
‘We never knew,’ I say softly, wondering if he suffered as I did, with loneliness, with guilt, with that hollow feeling. Different but the same.
‘I was … I don’t know. It didn’t feel legitimate, somehow,’ he says. ‘I was there. She had sudden adult death syndrome. Died in her sleep. I woke up spooning her. Spooning her body.’ He gulps.
I nod, quickly, my eyes wet. My poor brother, alone at university, barely an adult. No wonder he changed. No wonder he changed so much, so quickly.
He meets my eyes. ‘It didn’t feel legitimate,’ he says, ‘to mourn. So I did other stuff. Lists. Felt insanely jealous of you when you met Reuben. That you had all those friends. I was always rubbish with people, and the one person who had loved me was taken.’
It wasn’t just that we had both suffered. The grief we’d both felt, me causing it and him suffering from it. It was something else, too: it was his comment on legitimacy that had me nodding. For the court proceedings, and for the entire time in prison, I hadn’t felt that Sadiq had been a legitimate threat. That, somehow, it was my fault. And much of it was: my overreaction, my recklessness, my failure to check that it was him. My unreasonable force. But there was something in that illegitimacy. I understood it. Feeling like I wasn’t a real victim, even though, until the point where I overreacted, I had been. Real life was complicated.
‘It was legitimate,’ I say simply, reaching to take my brother’s hand across the table, no prison guards watching.
He grasps it gratefully. ‘It didn’t feel it,’ he says. ‘I’d known her for less than sixty days. We met on a night out – she was brand new to me. I didn’t know of her at all until that night – and then we were an item, but I didn’t tell anyone. It was the end of winter when we first met. Just after you visited.’ He gestures out of the plate-glass window, down to Covent Garden below, then sips his beer. ‘She died after Easter. Do you remember? The one where I didn’t come home?’
I nod again. ‘Yeah.’
We’d wondered what he was doing, the Easter of his second year. He didn’t come home, said he was working in a bar in Cambridge. But then, that summer, he arrived home as usual, as though he’d never left.
‘She died on the Easter Monday.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘That that happened to you.’
I meet his eyes and he nods, once.
‘You can buy a sack of organic potatoes from here and take them home,’ Wilf says, reaching across and pointing to an item in a side box on the menu.
‘No thanks,’ I say, with a faint smile.
He smiles too. ‘I wanted to tell you,’ he says, ‘but instead I was … I don’t know. Barbed. With you.’
‘We were jealous of each other.’
‘I was certainly jealous of you,’ he says. ‘You seemed to have it all.’
‘What? You have – you got a first. From Cambridge. And you have four London properties. And your job …’
He looks at me, not saying anything, his round eyes just staring. Suddenly, I can hear myself. What would I rather have? Reuben and the people in my life – or money and a degree? It’s easy. I’ve never looked at it that way before.
‘God,’ I say. ‘I had no idea.’
‘I know. Why would you?’ he says. ‘But it well and truly messed me up. And Minnie is now … the first woman, since.’
‘At all?’
‘No,’ he says, making a sort of equivocal gesture. ‘There have been girls. But they never stayed over. I just – I don’t know. I just thought … I just thought they’d die, I suppose. How messed up is that? If they stayed with me. It’s like an incorrect thought went into my mind – that I caused it, somehow. And even though I know it’s not true, I couldn’t … I couldn’t get it out of my head.’
I am nodding vigorously again. Everything he’s saying is true.
It’s so easy for false thoughts to pass through the net of your mind, not being caught, and to become truths.
‘Notwithstanding your crime, don’t you think that’s … a harsh assessment of yourself?’ Alan had said once, when I told him I had never studied enough, always procrastinated, was stupid, career-less. And look what had happened: that crime. I’d blinked as he said it. Harsh? No. The Old Bailey had sentenced me to two years in prison. What could be harsher than that?
‘But what is the benefit, Joanna,’ he had said, ‘of beating yourself up, now, about it? Who wins?’
I had answered, simply, ‘Atonement.’
Alan had shrugged, as if to say, Who cares about that?
I keep thinking about that conversation, now. It’s strange to realize you might have been wrong for your entire life.
‘Seen Mum and Dad?’ Wilf asks, spearing an onion ring.
I shake my head.
He gives me a curved half-smile, at that.
But he doesn’t know. They came separately, Mum and Dad. Every single week, just like Wilf. It was better that they were separate. Like I’d split up a tribe, or something. It was healthier. After a few months, Dad reached over the table, and tentatively touched my hands, even though we weren’t supposed to. ‘It doesn’t matter, you know, Jo,’ he had said. I had nodded tearfully, wishing the moment could be extended forever, that I didn’t have to return to my cell, alone again until the next visiting slot. ‘We don’t care.’ That was the closest either of them came to apologizing.
But it didn’t matter. I am a valid person, whether or not I got a degree. Whether or not my parents are proud of me. Whether or not my brother likes me. I tilt my chin up, by myself, now.
Wilf nods, picking up his beer again and ripping the label off. Then he puts it down and reaches for me, and grips my hand with his. His hand is cold and wet from the condensation. ‘I’m glad you’re meeting Minnie,’ he says. ‘Before anyone.’
‘Me, too,’ I say. ‘Me, too.’
37
Conceal
I write the final line of the final scene and break for coffee. It’s funny, but despite everything, my mind has become strangely quiet, stilled. I have no smartphone. No Instagram, any more. No posts on Facebook. People know where I am, of course. I’m not hiding. I am merely … sequestered away.