When Louise was a teenager, and into her early twenties too, it was all the rage to talk to your girlfriends about the intimate details of your sex life – the mechanics, the quirks, the sounds, the things that went wrong. Nothing was off limits. But then something happened. Around the time she and Sam got together, her friends started to think about getting married, and actually to do so, and she found that those conversations tailed off. Was it because they had made their choice, and couldn’t admit to anything that was less than perfect? Not so easy to laugh at the sexual foibles of someone you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life with. Not so funny any more.
The conversations where she might have been able to bring up her own sex life dwindled away, and she didn’t want to be the one to introduce the topic. She would have liked to have had someone to confide in, to check how far from the norm their sex life was, especially in the last couple of years when things got really out of hand. She reads obsessively on the subject, googling BDSM and rape fantasies, reassured when she sees studies that say this falls within the ‘normal range’ of fantasies, horrified when she reads articles linking it to real sexual violence.
Things got worse the second time Sam was passed over for promotion, and then again after Henry was born. He thought that motherhood would level things out, that he would become the important one. But Louise’s business went from strength to strength and he was left behind. But of course she could never leave him behind. Not him, the only one who knew her. If only Louise had known what he had done, how very different things might have been. Who might she have become without a lifetime spent building a wall around her to make sure no one could get in? Of standing on cliffs or bridges wondering what it would be like to just give in, to step forward and not have to be any more?
Sam always felt the need to prove himself, to prove that he was still the dominant force in her life. He should have known that he didn’t have to prove anything to her because she loved him so completely, had always loved him since the days when she watched him flirting with Sophie Hannigan in the school cafeteria. Louise had always thought there was nothing he could do that would make her stop loving him. Nothing at all.
Chapter 39
2016
I am totally rigid, my stomach drawn in so tight that it’s holding the rest of my body together. I could be made of glass, hard and smooth and cold to the touch. One move could shatter me. I keep perfectly still on my chair, hyper-aware that Henry is asleep only metres away.
‘What happened?’ I don’t sound like me, my voice thin, barely denting the silence that fills the kitchen, this room where we spent so many nights talking, eating, laughing. Carefully, I pull my hands from his and place them, trembling, in my lap.
‘Do you remember that night, Louise?’
Of course I remember. He knows I do.
‘I was good, wasn’t I?’ He sounds like Henry, seeking my approval. ‘To start with? I had you alone in that classroom and I could have pushed you much further, but I knew you were scared so I stopped. I was good. You remember, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Urgent hands on green satin, his fingers digging into my flesh harder and harder, his tongue in my mouth, everything hot and blurred. And then me, alone in a classroom, my back against the cold wall, cursing myself for my inexperience, my frigidity.
‘You wanted me, but you were scared. You didn’t deserve to be forced, Louise. Later on you enjoyed our games as much as I did, didn’t you?’ The pleading tone is back and I nod, the reflex to make him feel better still strong in me. ‘But you weren’t ready, not then.’
I remember how humiliated I felt when he left me in the classroom, and I am surprised to feel a pang of sympathy for my teenage self. I’ve never felt sympathy for her before, only guilt and disgust and shame.
‘But Maria, she was different. I’d heard the stories about her, we all had. The things she had done. I didn’t need to feel bad about doing anything to her, because there was nothing she hadn’t done before.’
I want to tell him they were all lies, those stories, made up by someone else who had thought he could take what he wanted from Maria Weston, but I am frightened of him now, so I say nothing. If I let him talk, help him to believe that whatever he did wasn’t his fault, maybe he will go.
‘I saw her leaving the hall, stumbling and clutching at the doorframe for support, putting a hand to her mouth. I followed her down the back path towards the woods. She was panicking, didn’t know what was happening to her, needed to get away. I wanted to make sure she was OK. After all, I knew what she had taken and she didn’t. I was looking out for her.’ He turns his anxious face to me.
I try to look reassuring. I nod; yes, you were looking out for her.
‘Just before she got to the woods, I saw her trip and fall so I called out. She turned, and I ran to catch up, asked her if she was OK. That was what Sophie saw. She’d been watching Maria too, following her, to see if she was coming up on the E.’
‘Sophie saw her that night? She never said.’ I think of Sophie when I went to see her at her flat, laughing about the friend request. What, the girl who drowned? Her studied unconcern must have masked a fear and guilt that matched mine.
‘I didn’t know either, not until she called me after you’d been to see her at her flat.’
‘Why didn’t she tell the police, at the time?’
‘She was like you, wasn’t she?’ says Sam. ‘So scared of what you had done, of what would happen if anyone found out. She just thought it was better to say nothing at all. That was all Sophie had seen, after all. Me and Maria, walking down to the woods. When we spoke on the phone before the reunion, I thought I’d persuaded her that it was nothing, that she should forget it. But then at the reunion, she kept going on and on about it. She was frightened, rattled by the Facebook messages; she wouldn’t leave it alone. I think she really thought there was a chance Maria was still alive, and that I knew something about it. She was drunk, and her voice was getting louder and louder. People were starting to look round, to wonder what we were talking about. She was going to cause a scene. I had to get her out of there.’
‘Where…’ The words stick in my throat. I breathe deeply and try again. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I told her I’d remembered something from the leavers’ party, something that might help her, suggested we go for a walk outside to talk about it properly. She was desperate for answers, couldn’t agree fast enough. I said…’ His voice falters. ‘Louise, you have to understand, I only did what I did because I needed to protect my family. I didn’t want my children to have a father who was in prison. I didn’t want this one bad decision I made when I was sixteen to ruin their lives. I couldn’t let that happen.’
I nod vigorously, desperate to appear supportive.
‘I said we should walk down to the woods where we couldn’t be overheard,’ he goes on, his voice quieter now. ‘It was really quite cold by then, so we got our coats, and I put my hands in my pockets, and I could feel that there were gloves in there, so I put them on, just to keep my hands warm, you know?’