The flashbulbs hit me like a shove to the chest. I stand frozen. Across the road, a couple of Chinese tourists in socks and shorts take pictures of them taking pictures of me. Then the lights ripple as one, an electric-eel slither away from me. I’m still blinking in shock when Kit comes out and it’s Mac who gets to him first. He rushes up to Kit and embraces him. No brofists or manly back-slaps for these two: Mac holds Kit like a baby, rubbing his back. It doesn’t seem to bother either of them how public this is. One of the paparazzi actually tuts, and looks at me, his thoughts as clear as if he’d spoken them. I’m the picture he wants. I’m his money shot.
‘Come on, Laura,’ he says, and the attention is back on me. Kit pulls away from his brother and the individual flashes become a white wall of light as I take a single controlled step into his wide arms. I turn my face away – they’re not getting this part of me – and hold my husband properly for the first time since the morning he sailed for the Faroes. We dock together in the old way, the first way, because he feels as lean as he was when I met him. Kit’s fingers find my face. He tilts my chin, brushes a stray wisp from my cheek and, closing his eyes, brings his mouth down on mine. We hold the kiss; dry but not chaste. We’re too well-established for proper desire these days but some kind of muscle memory stirs in me. It’s still there. It will always be there.
We move apart slowly; lips first, then bodies, and hold hands and pose for the cameras.
‘Give us a proper smile,’ says one of the photographers. We’re all teeth and shiny eyes.
‘Have you got a statement, Kit?’ says a woman with a microphone.
Danny Hannah steps in front of us. ‘I’ll be speaking for my client.’
‘What happens now?’ says Adele, looking more like a little old lady than I have ever seen her.
‘We get the fuck out of Dodge,’ says Mac. He nods to the opposite pavement to where Ling has managed to hail a black cab.
We leave Danny Hannah to address the press, and pile into the taxi. A photographer on a bike scoots alongside us as we chunter with frustrating slowness down Old Bailey and then left down Ludgate Hill. The cab driver gives him the slip on Cheapside, indicating left then swinging the cab right, and by the time we reach Holborn we are alone. I check the street; a row of yellow lights shines behind me at head height. There are plenty of taxis. I tap on the driver’s windscreen. ‘Can you pull over here, please?’
Ling knows, but Adele, Mac and Kit exchange startled glances.
‘Laura?’ says Adele. It’s her I feel worst for.
‘I’m sorry, Adele,’ I say, stepping backwards on to the pavement. ‘I couldn’t humiliate him in front of the cameras.’ While she digests what this means, I turn to Kit. I told him this was coming but I can see from his expression that he has never stopped hoping I would change my mind. He can hope for the rest of his life. ‘They’ll be asleep for a while now. Just give me a couple of hours to get my head around everything. If you come round at six, you can be there for bath time.’
It’s an instruction. He nods.
I slam the door on them and let Ling hail us a new taxi. It’s not until we are safe in the back seat that I finally let myself cry.
Chapter 64
LAURA
30 September 2015
Kit told me everything, across a scratched plastic table in a prison visiting room. There were ugly, gulping tears from him but the verse/chorus/verse of his confessions was punctuated with the same refrain. ‘I did it for you,’ he kept saying. ‘I did it for you. One little fuck-up, that’s all it should have been. It wasn’t worth throwing away the best thing that’s ever happened to either of us, for one moment of madness. I did it all to save us.’ Of all his various excuses – Mac, work, his dad – I did it for you is the most offensive. How could anyone who loved me, anyone who knew me, do something so cruel in my name? It’s a weird, stunted love that would rather put me through fifteen years of crippling anxiety than hurt me once. Too weak to live his life without me, he would rather live with me broken and ill than lose me. He has not only taken away my future with him but ripped out my past, too.
With visiting hours limited to two ninety-minute sessions a week, Kit had to drop his bombshells in instalments, like a Victorian novelist teasing his reader. Each chapter peeled off another layer of my skin. The afternoon I made him tell me the details – the tea tent, the sleeping bags – I made a connection: the soapy smell of him the day I arrived in Cornwall. He’d been in the shower, washing her off him. I thought then that that was the day I was peeled back to the bone. I cried so hard that evening that I graduated from tissues to kitchen rolls to towels. I thought that we needed a new word for this kind of crying; nothing in the dictionary came close to capturing the force of it. Maybe other languages have words for these tears of grief and anger and betrayal that feel powerful enough to kill you, but there is nothing for it in British culture.
He has said more than once that he wishes he had turned the knife on himself and in my worst moments I agree with him. ‘You have no idea what I’ve been through,’ he said last time in a desperate bid for sympathy and for the first time his words plucked at my sympathy reflex because he is wrong about that. I understand how it started. I obviously understand what it is to hold back. For years I thought it was my lie that could wreck us. I concede the parallel; but really, it is the difference between a valley dividing mountains and a line drawn in mud with a stick.