Afterwife (31 page)

Jenny stared at her silently for a moment, slowly becoming aware of a disturbing undertow to the conversation. It could have just been a turn of phrase…but it did appear that Cecille was attached to Ollie in a way that was not strictly within the terms of her au pair contract. “Cecille,” she ventured gently, “Ollie is on his own. He’s very handsome. Well, um, I hope I’m not speaking out of turn but I could imagine it might be easy to develop…” She felt the heat rise on her own cheeks as she spoke and tried to cover them with her palms.

“He is amazing man, Jenny. He makes me laugh.” Cecille’s eyes glazed over dreamily. “And I love the way he plays guitar. He is like…like poet.”

“Cecille…”

She looked up defiantly. “I
love
him, Jenny!”

Oh, God. Jenny squeezed shut her eyes. “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”

“He is first man I love.” She put a hand against her heart, her face glowing. “But this love, this love hurts a lot. I didn’t know love hurt so much.”

“Oh, Cecille. You need someone your own age. Ollie is grieving. He is just not…not available.”

“Oh, no, Jenny, he loves me too,” she said matter-of-factly.

She heard a loud rushing in her ears. Then the long extended screech of bus brakes. The room started to sink away from her. She slumped her head into her hands. Why wouldn’t he fall in love with Cecille? She was lovely. And beautiful, if you ignored the zits on her chin. It all made a sickening kind of sense. He’d rebounded into the golden open arms of youth, someone with whom he had no past, no baggage, someone who didn’t look at him and see the missing black shape where Sophie should be, like a figure scratched out of a photograph.

“You are only one who understand, who knows him well like I do. Tell me what to do, Jenny. Please tell me what to do,” Cecille begged. “I try everything to understand him. Everything! I try to understand Sophie too. Every little thing about her. What he loved about her. What he…”

She got it then. “Cecille,” Jenny said, suddenly seizing the moment by the scruff of the neck, “I do understand, I really do.”

“You do?” Cecille’s shoulders dropped, unburdened.

“I do,” she said in a soft maternal voice. “And I also understand now why you took Sophie’s letters from the bottom drawer of Ollie’s chest of drawers.” Cecille flushed and stared down at the table. “You did take them, didn’t you, Cecille?”

I
n the shadowy gloom of the guest bedroom Jenny held the letter with trembling hands. She had folded the other love letters, placed them carefully back in the box, the ones from starstruck admirers going back years: Sophie had been a hoarder of the brokenhearted and besotted. But not this crumpled tormentor. Flicking on the sidelight, she pulled it out of its envelope and smoothed it over her bent knee, making herself go through the horrors all over again, and again, until it finally sank in. No matter that it made her feel faint, that reading it was like giving blood.

The postmark? Almost two years old. At that point she and Sam would have been madly in love, freshly in love. Wouldn’t they? Oh, God. What party? There had been so many parties in the early days. Had he made a pass at Sophie? He must have. But why hadn’t Sophie told her?
Why?
The betrayal winded her again. It made Tash’s revelations about Dominique pale into insignificance. She was strong. She could take anything, even her best friend dying. But she wasn’t sure she could take this.

Rage boiled up against Sophie. Wasn’t Ollie enough? And why had she kept the letter? Was she planning to show her one day? If so, she’d left it pretty damn late. Too many questions. She started to weep. Even in the best-case scenario—Sophie had repeatedly told Sam to fuck off—there had been secrets where she would have once sworn on her life that there was nothing but confidences. And why the hell did she wear a red dress to meet Sam? She knew the dress. The vintage one. With the slit up the side. It was Sophie’s favorite. And walks? Lunch by the river?

But the worst bit, worse by far, was that Sam had wanted Sophie, not her. How stupid to believe that Sam had picked her out from the ark of gorgeous women and said, “You. You’re the one, Jenny. The others don’t do anything for me.” It was all flooding back
now. The things she’d ignored. The way Sam used to stare at Sophie. The way they sometimes held each other’s glances a little too long and she’d been surprised at the intimacy of their conversational shorthand. The way he always seemed angry with Sophie for no apparent reason. Was it the anger of a man who couldn’t have her? Or had he? Oh, God. She spun further into the vortex. There was no way out of it.

Curling onto her side in a fetal position, she wiped the tears and snot away with the back of her hand and shoved the letter under her pillow. She must hide it, she realized. Ollie must not see it. Clearly he had never read it, of that she was sure. He would have pulped Sam if he had; all hell would have broken loose. No, Ollie had been in the dark. Just like her. And now he couldn’t know. Not after everything he’d been through.

A bang from downstairs. The front door? She flicked off the sidelight quickly, as the sound of something heavy dropped to the ground. A bag? Coughing. She knew that cough! Ollie was home. She tensed, coiled, a buzz of excitement overtaking her misery. Do not say anything about the letter, she told herself firmly. Say nothing. Scared she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut, she decided feigning sleep was the best policy.

Eyes squeezed tight, she listened to the soft scuff of his feet on the stairs, the wooden floorboards, the creak of Freddie’s door opening. There was silence for a few moments, then footsteps again, the creaky closing of Freddie’s door, the heartstopping opening of hers. Through the filigree of her wet lashes, she could see his floppy-haired figure silhouetted in the doorway. The mattress depressed as he sat down on the edge of the bed. She wished she’d not decided to pretend to be asleep now. She wanted to sit up and lick his face like a puppy. He was a survivor like her. He was…he was everything, the only light in the grayness.

“Jenny,” he whispered, placing a hand gently on her shoulder. She caught the dry air smell of airplane on clothes. “Are you awake?”

She lay there rigid.

“Jenny?”

Her eyes pinged open. The sight of him sitting there was still a shock. She’d been anticipating him in her head all night and here he was. Warm, human, smelling of airplane air and chewing gum. “Ollie.”

“Sorry, did I wake you?” In the gloom she could just see his eyes were amused like he knew she’d been faking sleep. A strand of dark hair curled over one of his eyes and she longed to nudge it gently aside with her fingers so she could drink in the whole of his face at once. In his presence the terrors of the night—the past, the betrayal—began to fade and take on a surreal, blurred edge like something that had happened long, long ago. There was no one else she wanted sitting on her bed, she realized. Not even Sophie.

“You are a star, Jen. Thank you so much for coming over.” Ollie’s breathing was a soft, animate thing in the darkness.

“No problem.”

“Have you got a cold?”

“Yeah.” She sniffed.

The bedsheets crumpled in the darkness as he moved closer, the curve of his back sinking into the curl of her stomach. They fitted together perfectly. Like he’d been ergonomically designed. They lay like this in the darkness for a moment, their breathing synchronizing slowly. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Jen.”

“I’d do anything.” The words twanged in the darkness. She wished they sounded less sexual. She was very grateful for the dark. “To help, you know.”

“I know.” He had a smile in his voice now. “Cecille okay?”

Cecille. Her name spoken out loud spiked the intimacy.

“Yeah, she’s been sweet.”

“Good, good.”

“But she’s in love with you.” It just shot out before she could help herself.

He paused for an eternity. “I know.”

“She’s too young, Ollie.”

“She’s twenty.”

She bit hard on her lower lip. There was nowhere else in the universe she’d rather not be now. Anyone else other than Ollie she’d want sitting on the side of her bed.

“You’re angry.”

“Imagine how you’d feel if you sent your daughter to a foreign country to work for a family…” She turned onto her side away from him and stared at the black wall, convincing no one. “Oh, what do I know? Do what you bloody well want.”

He surprised her by tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.

“Nothing happened, Jen.” His breath was warm on her bare shoulder. “But, tell me, how long am I meant to live like a monk?”

“I don’t know.” All she knew was that her life was plummeting downward. And she was going to smash into the ground. Everyone in the world was in love with Sophie. Even her own fiancé. Sophie had eclipsed her, even in death.

“I played by the rules. But when did life ever play by the rules?”

“So I guess that’s why you fucked Tash then. What about Lydia? Are you going to do her too?” She was still talking to the wall and hated the way she sounded so stiff and bitter.

“I just want to be free,” he said, so softly she could barely hear him. “Free.”

“You are flipping free!”

He was silent for a long time. “I am not.”

She was the person strapping him to his past. She was the ballast who must be shed. She must get up tomorrow morning and walk away and not come back and let him get on with his life. He must
be free of the past. Of Sophie. Of her. And she must be free of the whole damn lot of Sophie-in-her-red-dress worshippers. She needed her own church.

“Jen.” He slipped one hand on her waist, making her take a sharp intake of breath, pulled her over so she could face him. His eyes were luminous. “I couldn’t bear it if you despised me, you of all people.”

She sniffed tearfully then, unable to hold back the tears.

“Hey, baby, what’s the matter?” His voice was full of such tenderness it made her cry harder. And he’d called her baby. She hated it when Sam called her baby. She loved it that Ollie had just called her baby. “What’s the matter?”

“I…I…I don’t know. I guess I’ve been getting too close to you, to Freddie, to everything up here.” She wiped away the tears crossly on the back of her hand, arching her body away from his confusing touch. There was an intimacy in the darkness and blear of the hour that filled the room with too much possibility. Even the letter under the pillow. Despite the horrors it contained it was oddly liberating. There was nothing that life could throw at her now. “I was Sophie’s best friend. Not yours. Sometimes I forget that.”

He stared at her intently. “But things have changed, haven’t they?”

She heard her heart pounding in her ears and slowly became aware of something in the room, something thrilling and unutterable.

“I didn’t know you before, not how I know you now. You and I, we’re not who we were, Jenny.”

The city rumbled distantly outside the window, yet it felt as though she and Ollie were the only still point, at the very center of the city, the most vital bit of it, and everything rippled out from them.

“You and Sophie were an impenetrable little world when you were together.” His voice broke now. “I would not have been surprised had you backed off after she died. Lots of her friends have,
you know—sunk away like I never knew them. They look at me like I’m a bad omen.”

“People just don’t know how to react.”

“No, it’s not that. It was Sophie who drew them into our orbit, her dazzle, her drama…” He stopped and frowned. “But you,
you
,” he said more urgently. “Since she’s gone you have got bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter. It’s like you’ve come into focus. Sorry, I can’t explain it.” He sank his head down, resting his forehead on her shoulder. “I’m not making any fucking sense.”

But he was making perfect sense. And the darkness of the bedroom was suddenly buzzing and alive like the darkness around a bonfire on a summer night.

“I feel like I’ve gotten to know you for the first time. I feel”—he hesitated, his voice lumpen—“that if you weren’t in my life, in Freddie’s life, it would be a terrible, terrible thing. That’s all.”

She sobbed unprettily. He hugged her tighter. Instinctively, she reached for his head, threading her fingers through his forest of black hair, losing them there, realizing as she did how she’d longed to do this. He took her other hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, one, then the other, another, and with each kiss she felt a liquid tug toward him.

“I know what I want to do and I know I shouldn’t.”

“Don’t,” croaked Jenny hoarsely, wishing he would.

He ran his fingers along her jawline. “You are so beautiful.”

Beautiful! Beautiful? His words fluttered around her head like butterflies. And at that moment, for the first time in many months—years—she actually felt beautiful. A long, soft sigh came from deep within her as if she were exhaling a breath she was unaware she’d been holding.

“I’ve come to see you as mine, just a little bit. I so rarely see you with Sam, it’s quite easy for me to delude myself. I can’t get my head around the fact that you’re about to get married.”

Married.
That
no longer made sense.