You must have felt smug, self-satisfied, as you lay on the sofa watching us innocents taking everything at face value. Remember, we talked about Hitchcock putting his good people on the right hand of the screen, and the evil characters on the left? You explained that that made you the evil one, because of where you were sitting. Felix and I were enjoying your joke, but you were laughing at us, really, at our gullibility. And when Felix said he was “in the middle and could go either way,” you must have thought, He has no idea! I’m going to send him clearly in one direction! And from that day onwards you did exactly that—you set about making him seem dangerous, sinister, a threat to your life. I realize now that the only time I ever actually saw Felix appear to be harmful was that day on the river, when he held you under the water. How long were you down there? I wonder. Was it truly long enough to justify your state when you came up for air? You were heaving, and limp, and sank into his arms as though you were about to expire. But, Tilda, you were acting, weren’t you? That’s what I believe now. And I have to acknowledge that you’re very good at it—a real professional.
From then on, it was all about the bruises on your arms, those little ink spots. Not just the fact of them, but the way you hyped up the drama, dashing into the bathroom when I pulled up your shirtsleeve, emerging sort of spacey, as though you were covering up deep distress. And I recognize now, Tilda, that you were always capable of desperate measures when you were on a mission, that you have a long history of extreme behavior. Liam made me realize the truth about your self-harming at school—that you did it in order to gain admiration from your friends, to show off your troubled soul to an audience. You’re a narcissist—covering up your self-loathing with a fragile, empty show of how special you are, deeper than the rest of us, emotionally, even spiritually. Well, it’s crap. That’s what. Total garbage. I’m angry with myself for falling for it so completely, and I think of those times that I snapped and raged at Felix, even drawing a knife on him. No wonder that, by the end, he wanted to keep me at a distance.
I see now that all your behavior is deception. You’re endlessly acting. That time when you went out of Curzon Street, for fags, and I surprised you with a tap on the shoulder. You started, like you had been stung by a wasp, immediately turning it on. You seemed so ragged, distracted, distressed—it was hard to get your attention for ordinary things, and I blamed Felix. Always, Felix. I didn’t see the artifice, not for a moment. And I have to ask myself why that was. Partly it was you, and your craft, so excellently executed; but mainly it was me. I had bought into your narrative, weakly, naively, and now I was looking for corroborating evidence. I was alive to it. My heart was open. And every time I found something, I felt somehow vindicated, and motivated to rescue you. Just as you wanted, Tilda.
How lucky that Felix had obsessive compulsive disorder, categorizing his shirts in white boxes, arranging the crockery and cutlery so perfectly, everything painstakingly cling-filmed. Once I might have seen all that and thought how eccentric! I might even have found it endearing. But, guided by you, Felix’s peculiar habits became sinister—your message was always the same. Look how weird he is. Look how he controls me. You added violence to the mix, and I was hooked.
I even think this—that when you went to France and I asked to stay at Curzon Street, you planted the memory stick in the pillowcase especially for me to find. You knew I would find it, because of our childhood mind games, because of your history of hiding things in pillowcases. And what did I discover? An account of your strange psychosexual relationship with Felix, of you surrendering to his control, emotionally and physically. Of violent sex. But none of it happened, did it, Tilda? You were riffing for my benefit. Having fun. No purple vase was ever hurled at your head. You made it up, along with the cracked mirror, the thousand shards of glass. I realized this when I spoke to Francesca Moroni, who told me that Felix was never violent, and I believed her. So, dear sister, you made a stupid error. You were relying on me being nosy, ferreting about in your flat, finding the memory stick. But it’s my nosiness that made me go one step further than that—seeking out Felix’s ex and asking her embarrassing questions, the sort of questions that most people would never ask. I suppose it’s possible that he became violent only after he met you—but, when you think about it, really think—the evidence is rather thin, isn’t it?
It’s funny—I got to the truth by working out that I was the obsessive one, far more so than Felix. When I used to eat your things, it was because I felt a compulsion not just to be part of you, to be synthesized with you, but paradoxically, also to resist being dominated by you. It was logical, at least according to my way of looking at it—my act of devouring your hair and your teeth showed that I owned you just as much as you owned me. These days, I’ve displaced the urge to eat bits of you with an obsession with understanding you. I’ll never be able to do that, not completely. You shine too brightly, and dazzle me so that I can never see inside your head. I know it, and yet I try and I try. And maybe arrival doesn’t matter, maybe the quest is enough because it has taught me one crucial fact—that you are malevolent. I know what you did Tilda, and I know how you did it.
49
The taxi rounds a steep, shady bend and pulls up alongside a white wall in a patch of late-afternoon pinkish sun. I see a metal gate, an entry pad and the house number—1708. The cabdriver grunts the fare at me, and after I pay he drives off without a good-bye—so I’m left standing in the road, my parka over my arm, my heavy bag weighing me down—I’m a refugee from a wintery place, disconcerted by the sunshine and some foreign insect that’s making a high-pitched, rasping sound.
The buzzer is answered by a man with a familiar American accent—like Felix’s, but slightly looser, a more conciliatory tone.
“Lucas? What are you doing here?”
He buzzes me in, and I heave my bag along a narrow terra-cotta path overhung with heavy foliage that only partly masks the pool, a blue flash over to my left, one level down, and at the end of the path Lucas waits in the doorway of the house, leaning on the frame with one arm, seeming weirdly nonchalant. He’s wearing a pink linen shirt, and for a second I think I recognize it as Felix’s, worn as Felix never would, ostentatiously unbuttoned, not tucked in.
“I want to say hello, sister-by-marriage,” he says. “But are you my former sister-by-marriage now?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I don’t care either, and I drop my bag on the floor. “Where is she?”
“Upstairs. She’s getting ready, beautifying, for a movie premiere—it’s later this evening. She said to send you up but not straightaway because she’s in the shower, so come on through and let’s give you a drink of something. You must be shattered. What would you like, Callie? A cup of tea, or a lime soda, or a glass of wine?—all we have is sparkling; Tilda likes it.”
I notice all we have—we, like he’s living here. And Tilda likes it, like he knows her habits. I take the sparkling wine, an attempt to settle my nerves, and we sit side by side on a low squarish sofa, while I look around, assessing Tilda’s new home. It’s darker than Curzon Street, dark tiles on the floor, wooden kitchen cabinets, trees and shrubs advancing on the French doors. Would Felix have liked it? I think not. It’s not exactly jumbled, but the lines aren’t clean, and there are cushions, and curtains with swags, paintings on the walls of hills and sunsets. Not as crazy as Mum’s, but not a million miles away either.
“Were you here when it happened?” I may as well come to the point.
From his attitude on the sofa, I can see that he doesn’t register the tension in me. He thinks I’m merely curious. “Yes. I’ve been staying for a few weeks—I have a job here. Another house.”