Would I have forgiven Kit for sleeping with another woman? It’s a question I’ve asked myself endlessly. From the vantage point of encroaching middle age, I have compassion for his youthful insecurity (and a kind of dismayed wonder that I never picked up on it at the time). Ironically it’s the sort of betrayal I might have forgiven later in our marriage, when I knew what time and pressure can do to a relationship. But at twenty-one I was passionately, inflexibly in love. He’s probably right; it would have been the end of us. I wish it had. I wish he had merely broken my heart when he had the chance. Young hearts are like young bones; they bend. They mend.
I won’t ever be able to forgive what followed; the systematic denigration of a vulnerable woman, of a rape victim, mortified about what she had unwittingly done to me, and traumatised by what had been done to her. Beth wanted to be a friend as well as to have one; he did not deserve her loyalty and though I wish she had told me the truth at the time, I can’t blame her for keeping quiet. To think that Kit even made me doubt her original story about the rape; it sickens me. Worse, though, than the infidelity or the process that followed it, is this. Kit waited until we knew that Beth was going to live before he told me about the glass and the fire. For the first two weeks, her life hung in the balance and I visited him twice in this time. His remorse then was only for sleeping with her. If Jamie Balcombe’s knife had been as accurate as Kit’s, if its blade had gone deeper into her breast, the extent of his deception would have gone to the grave with her. The betrayal flayed my skin, but his cowardice chips the bone. It poisons the marrow.
Chapter 65
LAURA
3 April 2015
I bought grapes, and only realised when I was in the lift that I hadn’t got the seedless kind. That’s what you get for going food shopping on Green Lanes. She was in the North Middlesex Hospital, two floors above the maternity unit. For the first fortnight, when she was in intensive care, fighting for her life as my own superficial bruises healed, visiting was strictly family only. I found out later that this wasn’t hospital policy but something her parents had insisted on. They didn’t want anyone – me, Antonia, certainly no one else associated with the Balcombes – to see her. But she was three days out of the ICU now and security was relaxed.
Still, there was a sense of trespass as I walked the long grey corridor to her ward, clutching my paper bag of fruit. As I approached, a dumpy little woman with dark grey hair shuffled out. It took me a few seconds to laser away the puffs and pouches of age and understand that this was Beth’s mother, last seen in the lobby at Truro. She had crossed the watershed of middle age into elderly; her face and body had gone shapeless, her hair was white and only the livid inner rims of her eyes gave her face colour. Shame forced me behind a wheeled screen. I clutched my paper bag so hard that it tore. A couple of grapes detached from their stalks and rolled unevenly across the corridor into Mrs Taylor’s path. I cringed, bracing myself for the telling-off I deserved, but she was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice the obstacles. I waited until she was gone, binned the fallen grapes and turned into Beth’s bay.
She was sitting up in bed, eyes on the door. I could have sworn she was expecting me.
‘Hello.’ I set the grapes down on her bedside table, next to the hundreds already there.
‘Gonna start my own vineyard,’ Beth said, with a tentative smile; just as she had all those years ago, testing the water to see if it was ok to make a joke; now, as then, I found that it was.
‘That hospital gown does a lot for you,’ I said. ‘Really brings out your eyes.’
She laughed, then winced, putting a hand to the lumpen dressings on her side.
‘You’re huge,’ she said in awe.
‘Tell me about it. I feel like I’m going to run out of skin.’ I heaved myself into the bedside chair, feeling it sigh beneath my weight. Taking her hand in mine seemed right. Her skin was as soft as I remembered it. Now that I was here, I realised I hadn’t rehearsed what to say. I ought to have arranged things into some kind of chronology in my head.
‘I literally don’t know where to start,’ I said. ‘Kit’s told me everything. Or, I think he has; every time I think he’s finished, something else comes out. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t.’
‘I didn’t know about you.’ It came out with the urgency of something that had been on the tip of her tongue for fifteen years. ‘I was mortified when I found out he had a girlfriend, I was heartbroken, I felt sick; I would never have slept with him if I’d known.’
Then, as an afterthought, less urgently; ‘I wasn’t after Kit, you know; when I was in London. I hadn’t wanted him from the minute I knew about you. It was you I needed, really. Your belief in me, Jesus, Laura, you kept me alive.’
‘I know,’ I said. I felt the relief in her hand; the bones in it seemed to melt. It was time for straight talking, no more pussy-footing around. I refused to drag it out for her like he did for me.
‘He set the fire and let me think it was you. I’m so sorry.’
There was a bewildered silence in which Beth’s eyes darted over my face.
‘Kit torched his own flat? With you in it? Kit?’ Her expression made it clear: I wouldn’t have thought he’d have it in him. I understood; I was still barely used to the idea myself. ‘But why?’
‘Because.’ I could feel the tears coming but I pressed them back. Not because I needed to hide my grief in front of Beth but because I wanted to get as much of the story out while I was still coherent. I owed her that. ‘He knew I’d never turn my back on you without a bloody good reason. So he gave me one.’ I looked at my lap. ‘He reckons you doing your friend’s tyres and then that photo gave him the idea. You know, that you might be a bit . . .’ I twirled my finger at my temple; for the first time it occurred to me that he might have somehow even orchestrated those things. Beth read my face and held up both hands.
‘No, I’m afraid that was all me.’
I let that settle for a while. We all do stupid things when we’re young.