I chewed that over; it had barely crossed my mind. I certainly wasn’t thinking of her in those terms any more. Risk might have been arousing but actual danger thoroughly wiped out that first visceral desire. I was worried more that Beth was out to get me than she was to have me.
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ I said. What I wanted to say was, if you don’t have the self-control to think twice before turning up unannounced, before showering us with expensive, out-of-proportion gifts, before outstaying your welcome like this, if you don’t possess even these basic social sensitivities, then how can I trust you with the big stuff? This was the kind of mess Laura would have been able to refine into one precise sentence, but all I could come up with was, ‘You must be able to see why I’m uncomfortable. What we . . . it’s bound to slip out, during one of these deep and meaningful chats you keep having. You can both really put the wine away.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say to that, only that it hasn’t come out yet.’ Now she looked awkward. ‘You know, I can see you two are solid. I told you the morning after I didn’t want to be that girl who trashed someone else’s relationship. I can’t change what happened but I can do the next best thing by keeping my mouth shut.’ She looked slowly up and down the body she’d seen all of but there was nothing suggestive about it. ‘You’ll just have to trust me, won’t you?’
I knew, because I do it myself, what she was trying to do. Lock the problem down. Compartmentalise it. Live life untouched by it. It was hard enough for me and I was – had been – a hyper-rational, disciplined man. How could traumatised, fucked-over Beth be expected to master it? Invisible fists squeezed my lungs. It couldn’t continue.
‘Kit,’ said Beth patiently. ‘People keep worse secrets than this all the time.’
‘Not me. Not people like me.’ I thumped my chest to make my point; it knocked air back into me at last.
‘Yes, people like you.’ Her voice was shot through with steel. ‘People exactly like you. Well-brought-up boys do bad things the whole time, and then they lie about it. Haven’t you been paying attention?’
The burst of strength quickly gave way to tears. We were back in the courtroom; back in the field. I couldn’t have pushed her any farther even if I’d known what to say.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Me too.’ She turned her attention back to the pan.
The Vent-Axia ceased its droning and Laura burst from the bathroom. A plume of perfumed steam mixed with the clouds of butter that sizzled from Beth’s pan.
‘Smells amazing!’ said Laura, as she flitted from the bathroom to the bedroom wearing only a towel, water sitting in fat droplets on her slim shoulders. The tenderness I had momentarily felt for Beth was transferred wholesale to Laura.
‘Please, Beth,’ I said, when we were alone again. ‘Please leave Laura alone.’
I felt that she would be in my home for ever; and I knew that I could not survive it.
‘I can’t.’ Beth spoke with genuine regret, like the matter was out of her hands. I realised, with an internal plunge of sorrow, that I had no choice but to take it into mine.
August 2000
Only a year before, I had taken for granted that my wide life would only continue to expand as it had. I had a brilliant degree behind me, a stellar career ahead of me and, the impossible dream, a beautiful girl to love and to travel with. Since Cornwall the pattern had reversed and my life was narrowing to its crisis. Two images, each as terrible as the other, were my default daydream, filling times of repose as a screensaver scrolled across my laptop. The first image was Laura’s face when she found out about me and Beth, my own waking adult nightmare of the storybook drawing that had terrorised her when she was little. The second picture was me, alone in this flat, with all her things gone, staring into the black hole of my future.
I think now that I was quietly having a nervous breakdown. It was a slow leaking of sanity, morality, even intelligence. The undergraduate essays I increasingly neglected to mark were frequently beyond my grasp. I would walk into rooms and forget why I was there; I’d go out to get a pint of milk and stand paralysed before the fridge in the 7–11 before coming home with bread. I started going for eight-hour walks and pretending I was at my department. Occasionally I would accompany Laura on her morning commutes, taking the Tube home again so that I could cry. These private howling sessions in our flat could last all day. They were internally painful, as though previously undiscovered tectonic plates were breaking apart to form new continents inside me. I’d keep one red eye on the clock, ready to travel back into town and accompany her home again.
I was so desperate to be rid of Beth that I retreated into boyhood fantasy again; now, time travel gave way to making Beth disappear, teleported or zapped to a parallel dimension. On a more earthbound level, perhaps she would be offered a job she couldn’t refuse; in New Zealand, for example. Perhaps she would find a new friend at her job, or in her bedsit. Perhaps – and this was the most outlandish, far-fetched notion of them all – perhaps she would simply have her fill of Laura. I wanted it to be painless for Beth. I never lost sight of how much she had already suffered. All the while, their friendship deepened by the day. I’d frequently come home and find the only two women I’d ever slept with cosied up in lopsided friendship, bound in profound, female communication I could never hope to penetrate. I felt stretched, as on a rack, between my duty to see and support Mac and my desperate need to stay at home and supervise Laura and Beth.