For a minute she stares at me in utter incomprehension – and I am reminded, all over again, what an amazing actress she was. Is. It shouldn’t have been James on the stage. It should have been Clare. She is amazing.
And then she sets down her tea and gives a rueful grimace. ‘Jesus. It was a long time ago, Lee.’
It’s not an admission – not quite. But I know her well enough to know that it might as well be. She’s not protesting any more.
‘Ten years. I’m slow,’ I say bitterly. Bitter, not just because my mistake ruined my own life, but because if I’d been a little quicker on the uptake, James might still be alive. ‘Why did you do it, Clare?’
She reaches out her hand to me, I flinch away, and she says, ‘Look, I’m not saying what I did was right – I was young and it was stupid. But, Lee, I did it for the best. You’d have been screwing up both your lives. Look, I went round to see him that afternoon – the guy was shitting himself – he wasn’t ready to be a dad. You weren’t ready to be a mum. But I knew between the two of you, neither of you would have the guts to take the decision.’
‘No,’ I say. My voice is shaking.
‘You wanted it to happen, both of you.’
‘No!’ It comes out like a sob.
‘You can deny it all you want,’ she says softly, ‘but you were the one that walked away, and he let you. All it would have taken was one text, one message, one call – the truth would have come out. But between you, you couldn’t even manage that. The fact is, he wanted out – he was just too much of a coward to make a break for it himself. I did it for the best.’
‘You’re lying,’ I say at last. My voice is hoarse and choked. ‘You don’t care – you never cared. You just wanted James – and I was in the way.’
I remember – I remember that day in the school hall, the hot sun streaming in through the tall glass windows, and Clare saying laconically, ‘I’m going to have James Cooper.’
But instead, he became mine.
‘He found out, didn’t he?’ I stare at her pale face, her draggled hair silver-white in the moonlight. ‘About the text. How?’
She sighs.
And then at last she speaks what sounds like the truth.
‘I told him.’
‘What?’
‘I told him. We were having a discussion – about honesty, and marriage. He said that before we got married he wanted to get something off his chest. He asked, could he tell me something – and would I forgive him? And I said, yes, anything, absolutely anything. I said I loved him, that he could tell me anything. And he told me that at that party where we met up again, his friend had been interested in me – we’d spent all night flirting, I remember. I gave this friend my number at the end of the night – and James said that he found the piece of paper in his friend’s pocket, and kept it himself. He told his friend that I wasn’t interested and instead, he texted me, said that he got my number off Julian, and did I want to go out for a drink.’
She sighs and stares out of the window.
‘He said it had been eating at him all these years,’ she carries on. ‘That our relationship had started with a lie, that it was his friend who should have ended up with me. But he said that Julian was a womaniser, and he’d done it partly for selfish reasons, but partly for me. He couldn’t bear for Julian to string me along, screw me, and then dump me. He was expecting me to be angry – but as he talked, all I could think was that he’d lied and cheated to get me, bent his own scruples. You know what James is like … was like.’
I nod. The movement makes my head swim, but I know what she means. James was a contradictory mix – an anarchist with his own rigid moral code.
‘It was strange,’ Clare is speaking slowly now. I think she’s almost forgotten about me. ‘He thought his confession would make me love him less. But it didn’t – it only made me love him more. I realised what he’d done was for me, for love of me. And I realised that the same was true of me. That I had lied out of love for him. And I thought … if I can forgive him …’
I can see it. I can see her twisted logic. And her one-upmanship: you have done this for me, I have done worse for you. I love you even more.
But she fatally misunderstood James.
I sit, trying to imagine his face as she confessed what she’d done. Did she try to justify it to him, as she did to me? He wasn’t ready to be a dad – she was absolutely right. But that wouldn’t have swayed James. He would have seen only the cruelty of the deception.
‘What did you say to him?’ I say at last. I am light-headed with tiredness and my body feels strange and disconnected, my muscles like wool. Clare looks just as bad – her wrists seem thin enough to snap.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You must have told him something else. Otherwise he would have rung me. What did you say?’