She felt a cowardly impulse to lie, to back away from the absolute statement, to protect herself, but something stronger in her held on: the need to tell the unvarnished truth, when she had been lying to him and herself for so long.
“No,” she said. “I don’t. We should have split up on the honeymoon. I stayed because you were ill. I felt sorry for you. No,” she corrected herself, determined to do the thing properly, “actually, we should never have gone on the honeymoon. I ought to have walked out of the wedding once I knew you’d deleted those calls from Strike.”
She wanted to check her watch to see when her cab would arrive, but she was scared to take her eyes off her husband. There was something in his expression that recalled a snake peering out from under a rock.
“How do you think your life looks to other people?” he asked quietly.
“What d’you mean?”
“You bailed out on uni. Now you’re bailing out on us. You even bailed on your therapist. You’re a fucking flake. The only thing you haven’t run out on is this stupid job that’s half-killed you, and you got sacked from that. He only took you back because he wants to get into your pants. And he probably can’t get anyone else so cheap.”
She felt as though he had punched her. Winded, her voice sounded weak.
“Thanks, Matt,” she said, moving towards the door. “Thanks for making this so easy.”
But he moved quickly to block her exit.
“It was a temping job. He paid you attention, so you kidded yourself that was the career for you, even though it’s the last fucking thing you should’ve been doing, with your history—”
She was fighting tears now, but determined not to succumb.
“I wanted to do police work for years and years—”
“No, you fucking didn’t!” jeered Matthew, “when did you ever—?”
“I had a life before you!” Robin shouted. “I had a home life where I said things you never heard! I never told you, Matthew, because I knew you’d laugh, like my dickhead brothers! I did psychology hoping it would take me to some kind of forensic—”
“You never said this, you’re trying to justify—”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d sneer—”
“Bullshit—”
“It isn’t bullshit!” she shouted. “I’m telling you the truth, this is the whole truth, and you’re proving my point, you don’t believe me! You liked it when I dropped out of uni—”
“The hell d’you mean?”
“‘There’s no hurry to go back,’ ‘you don’t have to have a degree…’”
“Oh, so now I’m being fucking blamed for being sensitive!”
“You liked it, you liked me being stuck at home, why can’t you admit it? Sarah Shadlock at uni and me underachieving back in Masham—it made up for me getting better A-levels than you, getting into my first choice of—”
“Oh!” he laughed humorlessly, “oh, you got better fucking A-levels than me? Yeah, that keeps me up at night—”
“If I hadn’t been raped, we’d have split up years ago!”
“Is this what you learned in therapy? To tell lies about the past, to justify all your bullshit?”
“I learned to tell the truth!” shouted Robin, driven to the point of brutality. “And here’s some more: I was falling out of love with you before the rape! You weren’t interested in anything I was doing—my course, my new friends. All you wanted to know was whether any other blokes were making moves on me. But afterwards, you were so sweet, so kind… you seemed like the safest man in the world, the only one I could trust. That’s why I stayed. We wouldn’t be here, now, but for that rape.”
They both heard the car pull up outside. Robin tried to slide past him into the hall, but he moved to block her again.
“No, you don’t. You’re not getting out of it that bloody easily. You stayed because I was safe? Fuck off. You loved me.”
“I thought I did,” said Robin, “but not anymore. Get out of the way. I’m leaving.”
She tried to sidestep him, but he moved to block her again.
“No,” he said again, and now he moved forwards, jostling her back into the sitting room. “You’re staying here. We’re having this out.”
The minicab driver rang the doorbell.
“Coming!” Robin shouted, but Matthew snarled:
“You’re not running away this time, you’re going to stay and sort out your mess—”
“No!” shouted Robin, as though to a dog. She came to a halt, refusing to be backed further into the room, even though he was so close she could feel his breath on her face, and she was suddenly reminded of Geraint Winn, and was overwhelmed with revulsion. “Get away from me. Now!”
And like a dog Matthew took a step backwards, responding not to the order, but to something in her voice. He was angry, but scared, too.
“Right,” said Robin. She knew she was on the edge of a panic attack, but she held on, and every second she did not dissolve was giving her strength, and she stood her ground. “I’m leaving. You try and stop me, I’ll retaliate. I’ve fought off far bigger, meaner men than you, Matthew. You haven’t even got a bloody knife.”
She saw his eyes turn blacker than ever, and suddenly she remembered how her brother, Martin, had punched Matthew in the face, at the wedding. No matter what was coming, she vowed, in a kind of dark exhilaration, she’d do better than Martin. She’d break his damn nose if she had to.
“Please,” he said, his shoulders suddenly sagging, “Robin—”
“You’re going to have to hurt me if you want to stop me leaving, but I warn you, I’ll prosecute you for assault if you do. That won’t go down too well at the office, will it?”
She held his gaze for a few more seconds then walked back towards him, her fists already curling, waiting for him to block or grab her, but he moved aside.
“Robin,” he said hoarsely. “Wait. Seriously, wait, you said there were things we had to discuss—”
“The lawyers can do it,” she said, reaching the front door and pulling it open.
The cool night air touched her like a blessing.
A stocky woman was sitting at the wheel of a Vauxhall Corsa. Seeing Robin’s cases, she got out to help her hoist them into the boot. Matthew had followed and was now standing in the doorway. As Robin made to get into the car, he called to her and her tears began to fall at last, but without looking at him, she slammed the door.
“Please, let’s go,” she said thickly, to the driver, as Matthew came down the steps and bent to speak to her through the glass.
“I still fucking love you!”
The car moved away over the cobbles of Albury Street, past the molded frontages of the pretty sea merchants’ houses where she had never felt she belonged. At the top of the street she knew that if she looked back, she would see Matthew standing watching the vanishing car. Her eyes met those of the driver in the rearview mirror.
“Sorry,” said Robin nonsensically, and then, bewildered by her own apology, she said, “I’ve—I’ve just left my husband.”
“Yeah?” said the driver, switching on her indicator. “I’ve left two. It gets easier with practice.”
Robin tried to laugh, but the noise turned into a loud wet hiccup, and as the car approached the lonely stone swan high on the corner pub, she began to cry in earnest.
“Here,” said the driver gently, and she passed back a plastic-wrapped pack of tissues.
“Thanks,” sobbed Robin, extracting one and pressing it to her tired, stinging eyes until the white tissue was sodden and streaked with the last traces of thick black eye makeup that she had worn to impersonate Bobbi Cunliffe. Avoiding the sympathetic gaze of the driver in the rearview mirror, she looked down into her lap. The wrapper on the tissues was that of an unfamiliar American brand: “Dr. Blanc.”
At once, Robin’s elusive memory dropped into view, as though it had been waiting for this tiny prod. Now she remembered exactly where she had seen the phrase “Blanc de Blanc,” but it had nothing to do with the case, and everything to do with her imploding marriage, with a lavender walk and a Japanese water garden, and the last time she had ever said “I love you,” and the first time she’d known she didn’t mean it.
56
I cannot—I will not—go through life with a dead body on my back.
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm