‘Of course, Rosemary. I think I know who’s behind this,’ I lie. ‘I’m sure it won’t happen again.’
We carry on with the consultation but things are very strained and I’m relieved when I get out of there. Maria is reaching out now; I can feel her icy presence slipping into every aspect of my life. I have a pressing need to talk to someone about all this, and the only person I can think of is Esther. Despite our chequered history, Esther has been kind to me and as I walk down the street away from Rosemary’s flat I call her.
‘Hello?’ I can tell she’s outside, the wind whistling at me remotely from wherever she is.
‘Hi. How are you?’
‘I don’t know. Stunned. I can’t believe it.’ Why don’t we believe it when something like this happens? We see it on the news all the time. Why should we be so surprised when it happens to us?
‘I know, it’s awful. Look, Esther, can we meet? I’d like to talk to you, about… you know, all this.’
‘Really?’ She sounds doubtful. ‘Is there anything to say?’
‘There is for me. I just need to talk to someone. Please?’
‘Well, OK. I am in London today as it happens, I’m on my way to a meeting now, but I could meet you afterwards for a coffee – on the South Bank?’
I turn into Angel tube, wondering as I always do why the escalator is moving a touch faster than the handrail. The platform is busy, and I stand with my back to the wall, breathing in the heat and the smell of dust and burnt rubber. I’ve always felt uneasy on tube platforms at what a small physical movement it would be to throw myself under the oncoming train. We think that the gulf between living and dying is huge, but on the tube platform I am always reminded that it’s only one little step. Today as I press my spine into the oversized tube map on the wall, looking around me nervously, I can’t stop thinking that on a busy day it’s also just one little push. A hand in the back and a brief, hard shove that no one would even notice.
When I get to Embankment I push my way hurriedly through the crowds, desperate to escape the fumes and the crush, emerging into the cold, clear light. I scurry across the bridge, the Thames rolling beneath me, grey-green and dappled here and there by the shadows of fast-moving clouds. Platforms and trains, bridges and rivers – I’m so close, all the time, to death. To the possibility of death. Recent events have added a keenness to the blade but I’ve never been entirely free of it. It has been hovering for years, millimetres from my neck, on the verge of biting into my flesh.
Esther’s already waiting for me outside the Festival Hall, her coat a scarlet stain against the monolithic building behind her. We hug tentatively.
‘Do you want to get a coffee, or shall we walk a bit?’ she says.
‘Let’s walk.’ This conversation will be easier if I don’t have to look her full in the face.
We talk about Sophie first, and although she is of course aghast at what has happened, I can tell Esther is struggling to say the right things. What do you say when someone who made your life a misery half a lifetime ago dies? We move on to the police, who have interviewed Esther briefly already, but who are going to talk to her again in more detail soon. It wasn’t DI Reynolds she spoke to, but one of the underlings. Esther didn’t cross paths at all with Sophie at the reunion so she’s not high on Reynolds’ list. I’ve got to go to Norwich tomorrow for another interview with her, and the thought of it lurks inside me like indigestion.
Esther and I walk in silence for a few moments, our tread punctuated by the trees that line the south side of the river, stark and leafless against the cold, grey-white sky.
‘After you left the reunion, Lorna Sixsmith told me that you and Sam Parker had been married.’ Esther turns to look at me, the wind whipping her hair around her face.
‘Yes, we were.’ I keep my eyes on the river, concentrating on the way the water is frothing around the edges, buffeting a discarded bottle onto the shingle. It still hurts, to think of us together. The pain is like a rope around my wrists: the more I try to wriggle free, the more it hurts.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know… I guess I thought you knew. I don’t talk about it much,’ I say, my voice clipped.
‘How did that happen?’ Esther, realising perhaps that her voice contains too much horrified fascination, qualifies her question. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t have predicted that. I know you liked him at school, but…’
‘You thought he was out of my league?’ I don’t mind. I always thought so myself.
‘Not exactly that. But how did you even end up together? Your parents moved away from Sharne Bay when you were at university, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. I didn’t see Sam for a long time after that. We ran into each other in London years after I’d left university, when we were twenty-five, twenty-six.’ I can still feel the breathless excitement of it, standing at the bar in a pub in Clapham, turning around to ask my friend Lucy what she wanted and being confronted with those blue eyes, almost as close to me as they had been the night of the leavers’ party. I knew him straight away, of course, but it took him a second longer to catch on. When he did though he seemed genuinely happy to see me, pulling me into a hug and then setting me back from him, studying my face and laughing in surprise and delight.
We spent the whole evening together, one of those magical nights that you don’t want to end. The warmth of the day still lingered in the air, and we sat knee to knee in the beer garden, drinking and swapping stories. Alone together in a crowd. Lucy and the others and his friends faded away until we found ourselves out on the street at closing time. When he bent to kiss me my insides turned to molten liquid, and I pulled him closer, my hands twisting and pulling his hair, his arms around me so tightly I could barely breathe. I grasped this second chance at happiness with him with both hands, and although it wasn’t always easy, I held on to it for fifteen years. Until one day, two years ago, I found a text message on his phone that shouldn’t have been there, and I felt it slipping through my fingers like grains of sand.
‘And you ended up married?’
‘Yes.’ It seems wrong to parcel up those fifteen years of my life into such a brief conversation, but I don’t have the words to explain it to Esther even if I wanted to: the breathless exhilaration of being with him; the thrill of the things he did to me; how he became everything to me, at least until Henry was born; the pain he put me through.
‘And your little boy… Sam is his father?’
‘Yes.’ The sort of father who swings him up in the air until he’s giddy with excitement, but doesn’t want to clear up the mess when he’s sick on the floor.