It’s true. I know both things, and both things are true. Reuben is good and bad, all at once. So is Laura. And so am I.
I look down into my lap, away from the window. ‘Let’s not talk about him,’ I say, with a wan smile.
Her phone lights up. I can see it’s Tabitha. She doesn’t look. She places it in her handbag. Later on, she texts me. Just a funny meme. I send one back.
Wilf asks if I want to go and see Mum and Dad at the end of June. ‘I’m going next week,’ he says.
‘Maybe,’ I say.
The new relationship, forged in prison, feels too delicate to bring out into the open yet, like a loaf of bread only just beginning to slowly prove.
We’re walking side by side to a restaurant in Covent Garden. It’s almost empty, the cobbled streets speckled with puddles. Everyone’s gone inside, the early summer already ended. A couple of smokers stand underneath a dripping awning. Wilf waves at one of them – a colleague, he tells me.
‘Doesn’t really matter either way,’ Wilf says. ‘You can do what you like.’
‘I might come,’ I say tentatively.
‘Good,’ Wilf says, linking his arm through mine as we walk. ‘I’ve been meaning to show you something,’ he says.
‘What?’
He gets his phone out. ‘You probably don’t even want to know now,’ he says. ‘But I thought I would …’
I take the phone from him. They’re texts. Texts between Reuben and him.
How was she today? Reuben has said. Wilf fills him in, and he asks again, two days later.
And then, one of the latest texts. They stopped when I got out. It’s too hard to go, Reuben’s written. I miss her too much.
Wilf shrugs. ‘He did really miss you,’ he says.
‘I know.’
He puts an arm around me.
And it’s not a fair trade-off, and it’s not a consolation prize, and I may have lost Reuben, but if I hadn’t handed myself in, I wouldn’t have Wilf. And that seems, somehow, to be right. Just.
41
Conceal
It’s time.
I remember his address. Of course I do. I’ve never been, but he spoke about it all the time. Ed was one of those people who would tell you all aspects of his life: his uncle who liked fishing; that he was struggling to find a table to fit in his round dining room; how well his garden plants were blooming. He used to refer to his house by name – Oakhalls – as though it was a person.
Oakhalls, Chiswick. It was easy to find. I’m surprised I’ve never been, when I come across it. It’s a house to have gatherings in, with a trellis up one side, the wide, arched doorway framed with flowers. It’s enormous. Somehow, in all his sharing, he had never quite conveyed to me how nice it was. Set back from the road, with a white frontage – in Chiswick. It must be worth more than a million pounds. They bought well, he would say – I can see it now – with a wave of his hand.
It’s only just after eight o’clock in the evening but the street feels quiet and isolated, as though it will be antisocial to ring the bell. I do it, anyway, although my hands are shaking.
It’s time. I’m ready. I take a deep breath as I see a shadowy form moving beyond the frosted glass, magnified and then re-magnified, refracted over and over.
A woman opens the door. His wife. I recognize her immediately from the hundreds of iPhone photographs Ed showed me every Monday. Of barbecues and days out ice-skating and visits to National Trust properties. She probably liked me, once, I think, as I study her face. There’s recognition. A dawning, eyebrows up, an almost-smile.
‘Is Ed around? Sorry to call so late,’ I say.
I wonder at my own politeness, considering what I am about to do. I’m breathless. I’m always breathless, but it’s particularly bad right now. The nerves, I suppose. It’s as if my body slowly disintegrated, during the accident. And, even though I’m better now, the scans clear, all fixed, put together again, it’s like I am cracked, fractured, less able than I was to sustain all the things a body should be able to rely on: nerves, a quick run for a bus, adrenaline.
‘Yes,’ she says.
She’s wearing a skirt that touches the floor and a long necklace, which clunks like a wooden wind chime as she steps aside. I marvel at these people who do not wear pyjamas on Friday nights in their own homes. Perhaps they dress for dinner. Ed was always oddly formal, in some ways, eating leftover pasta salad with a knife and fork brought from home on the counter of the library bus every lunchtime, wearing beige pullovers and matching shirts underneath.
Ed appears behind her, and I’m shocked by how much he’s aged. By how much everybody seems to have aged. He’s much more tanned – a recent holiday? – and has lost absolutely all of his hair, his bald head covered in liver spots. He’s more stooped, too; I notice a prominent hump, see the curvature of his spine. He is … he’s old, I realize with a start. My Ed.
‘Joanna,’ he says. Or rather, he doesn’t say it; he mouths it. Joanna. His lips form the ‘O’ and then the ‘A’ of my name.
‘Ed,’ I say simply.
His wife steps aside and – to my surprise – he comes out the front and shuts the door behind him, using a hand behind his back. He knows, and she knows, and they all know, I find myself thinking – the thought as automatic as my own heartbeat. But it doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter any more. I have to keep reminding myself.
I stand awkwardly outside his front door while he stares up at me. He’s shorter than he was. It’s something more than his hunched form. He has lessened, somehow.
‘I …’ I say.
He stares dispassionately at me, his eyes huge behind his glasses, saying nothing. He’s making it hard for me. I contacted everybody except Ed, after I left. I didn’t contact Ed once, not even when I needed a reference. Even though he had been a friendly colleague for six years. Even though he was Ed. I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough.
‘Joanna,’ he says again.
I scrutinize his face, trying to tell.
He shrugs helplessly, looking up at me. ‘I …’ He holds his hands out, then shrugs again. Smiling and looking sad. ‘You left,’ he says, eventually.
‘Yes.’
He stares at me for a long time. Two, three minutes. His eyes are roving over my features. ‘I never thought you’d leave,’ he says softly.
His dark brown eyes are on mine and our gaze is speaking a thousand words that we can’t verbalize.
‘Did you …’ I start to say, but the words dry up in my mouth, like an outgoing tide that cannot reach the same spot on the shore. I am reaching, and reaching, but after two years, three in December, countless losses, an accident, I cannot bring myself to say it. I can’t articulate it. It is as if my crime has moved to a sad, unspeakable, black part of my soul. The shame and the noise and the panic would be too much.
He reaches for me, then, and I see, after the shock and the sadness my rejection must have caused him, underneath all of that is sympathy. Of course. Of course he’s sympathetic. He’s Ed. I was so certain I knew how the people in my life would react that I didn’t bother even trying to tell them.
He meets my eyes now, and he knows. I grasp it so fully, it’s as though the knowledge has materialized, fully formed, on his circular driveway in front of us. It’s not the hazy paranoia of two years ago. It is knowledge. I think that perhaps he didn’t know then, but he does now, somehow.
He steps towards me, and I back away, a horse about to bolt with fear. He reaches a hand out to touch my arm, then stops, his fingers steady in mid-air. He’s wondering what to say, I see, as he scrutinizes me.
‘You know,’ I say.
He nods, once. Less a nod and more a certain, downward confirmation. I can’t say another word.
‘I figured it out,’ he says. ‘I asked some questions, after you left in haste. After you behaved so strangely, on that day in the office. I asked some questions and I pieced it all together. Nobody else knows,’ he adds.
I’m grateful for that. It spreads through my bones like the sun on the first hot day of the year, warming me.
‘The clothes.’