She stepped around me and reached for her jacket, a cheap denim thing she’d flung onto an armchair last night. I remembered the painful suction of her mouth on mine. ‘So I thought we might do business,’ she said.
As I’d suspected. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Wendy, but I don’t have any money to do business with. Seriously, I’m broke. I can show you my latest bank statement if you like?’
She shook her head, a grim smile on her lips. ‘Come on, you’ve got that big house on Trinity Avenue.’
I recalled the way she’d pulled me in its direction the previous night. She must have followed me on the evening of the crash. I hadn’t questioned it; I’d been thinking about getting her into bed. Thinking she was exactly the simple, no-strings partner I needed for the night.
She continued undaunted: ‘You can afford this place as well. That’s two properties in this posh area. You’ve obviously got cash.’
‘I don’t, I’m telling you. I’m going through a divorce.’ Not technically true – yet – but what did that matter?
‘Even so.’ In a sudden move, she placed warm fingers on my wrist and I recoiled.
‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Hey, don’t be like that.’ She withdrew the hand, used it to smooth her hair, touch her mouth, as if she had all the time in the world to indulge me my foibles. ‘Since we’re going to be involved for a while, we might as well get some pleasure out of it. I really enjoyed last night. I thought you did too.’
I was at a loss as to how to respond. If her aim from the start had been to extort money, I could not see why she had needed to sleep with me. There had been no need for a honeytrap, she could have delivered her cowardly message in the pub. ‘I want you to leave, Wendy. Is that even your real name?’
‘Wow, you are paranoid.’
‘What’s the name of the company you work for? You said it was commercial cleaning services? Which department are you?’
‘Why?’ She laughed. ‘You going to complain to my manager?’
She knew full well I couldn’t complain to anyone. I couldn’t breathe a word to a soul about this squalid little episode.
‘You going to tell him I didn’t report a crime?’ she taunted. ‘Maybe I didn’t realize it was serious until I read about it in the paper? Maybe it was only when I saw you in the pub last night that it triggered my memory of a hit and run?’
‘It wasn’t a hit and run,’ I snapped.
‘As good as. As bad as.’
‘No, it was an accident, that’s all.’
That’s all. The words startled us both and there was a pause, a moment of shared honesty, maybe even disgrace.
‘Whoever you are,’ I said, ‘and whatever you mistakenly think you’ve seen, you’ve got the wrong man. Please don’t contact me ever again.’
Any confidence gained or expressed by this punchy little display was short-lived, for the look she gave me as she left was full of exaggerated regret. ‘Sorry, Bram, you don’t get out of it that easily.’
19
‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:20:33
Did hearing about his liaison with someone new make me nostalgic for how it was between us in the beginning?
You’ll have to forgive me, but I prefer not to think about that now, the ‘before’. Before the boys, before the house, before our life in Alder Rise. The bit they call falling in love, though no one ever really falls, do they? In reality, half of us seek, reach, climb; the other half simply stand still in surrender.
I say that, realist that I am, but then an image will surface before I can stop it, an image that defies cynicism and persuades me we were the exceptions: the two of us in a crowded West End bar – our first date – eyes too fascinated by each other to stray to the hundreds of other faces; or an aerial view of a car speeding through the emerald English countryside – our first holiday together – too fast and yet never fast enough.
You don’t need to point out the irony of that. The fact that it was the speed, the rush of the headlong, that got me addicted. The sense of lives colliding.
There’s another image from the beginning, a more painful one: a female figure cartwheeling on a California beach, her long hair touching the sand. A new wife, married after less than a year of knowing him, coming upright to find her husband unbuttoning his shirt, staring out to sea, as if he intends to swim and swim, leaving his vows on the shore with his clothes.
Crazy, really, to have ever imagined that a wife and children could be anything but shackles to a man like Bram.
Bram, Word document
This afternoon I got close. I almost did it, even though I’ve hardly started my story and I’ve committed myself to telling it in full before I act. But you forget how you get ambushed by music here, because the radio stations love their nostalgia and there’s always the potential for an old song that stirs memories you don’t want stirred. ‘Our’ songs when there isn’t any ‘our’ any more. And they were playing that song ‘Big Sur’, a hit when Fi and I started going out. Maybe it was played at our wedding, I don’t remember, but we had our honeymoon in California and drove to Big Sur to see the famous coastline for ourselves. Listening to the song, I could picture myself so clearly on the cliff’s edge, the Pacific monstrous and baying below, ready to smother a million times over the pain of my past. And I thought, since it was all utterly meaningless, why bother leaving my statement behind? Why not go back to my miserable little room and end my life right now, let my version of events die with me? Sitting there, I could feel my toes twitching in my shoes; I could feel the balls of my feet rocking forwards.
Jump, Bram.
20
Friday, 13 January 2017
London, 2 p.m.
Lucy Vaughan’s husband David is a solid, fair-skinned man of about forty, his powers of leadership evident the moment he enters the house, his air of ownership. No sooner has he dissuaded Merle from phoning the police than he is making the calls he clearly thinks Lucy should have made the moment it became clear that allegations of a legal – and possibly financial – catastrophe have been made. If it angers him that neither his solicitor nor estate agent is immediately available, he does not show it. Colleagues of both proffer the ‘strange misunderstanding’ theory, he reports, and promise urgent returns of call.
‘Well, these are odd circumstances in which to meet,’ he says to Fi. Though his speech is self-assured, he regards her with perplexity, even caution.
‘They are,’ she says, unsmiling. It is remarkable how Merle’s presence has fortified her.
‘Mrs Lawson is a bit calmer now,’ Lucy tells him, as if to excuse Fi’s poor manners. ‘There was a scare about the whereabouts of her sons, but we’ve just found out they’re fine.’
That’s the working hypothesis then: it is Fi’s interpretation of events that is at fault and not the events themselves. She isn’t on top of arrangements, she gets confused. As it has been proven with the boys, so it will with the house – and Bram is not here to support her.
Merle, however, is. ‘Bram should have told Fi he was letting the boys miss school,’ she says. ‘Any mother would’ve had a nervous breakdown to discover that.’ She eyes Lucy sternly, as if she should be thoroughly ashamed of herself. ‘I’m guessing you don’t have children?’
‘Not yet,’ Lucy says.
‘Then you’ll have to take my word for it that there is no more terrifying a thought than their going missing. Now, I’m sure Fi is very grateful for the help you’ve given her in tracking them down, but we seem to have another mystery on our hands, don’t we?’ She blazes with intensity, never more charismatic than now, and Lucy gazes at her, spellbound. ‘You obviously understand that Fi disputes this claim about the house and would like you to leave. My suggestion is you do that while we locate Bram and all the paperwork that proves he and Fi are the owners, and then we can arrange a meeting to discuss this formally, perhaps on Monday at your solicitor’s office? In terms of your—’
‘Wait a minute,’ David interrupts sharply, breaking Merle’s hold. ‘We’re not going anywhere. This house was sold to us fair and square.’