Remember Me This Way (17 page)

‘Live in the moment,’ he used to say. ‘Never go back.’

I am about to turn and run away when Nell opens the door, breathless. On her shoulder lies a tiny baby, a shock of dark hair, purple cheek against white muslin.

‘Oh,’ I say before I can stop myself. Small babies sometimes catch me out.

She smiles and opens the door to let me in, making a gesture to indicate the baby is asleep. She is plumper in the face than I remember and her thick brown hair is longer. She is wearing red woolly tights and a knitted green dress. We greet each other, as quietly as we can, and I follow her along a narrow passage, straining my ears, and down a few stairs into the kitchen.

I look around for clues. It is an untidy room – washing-up in the sink, piles of paper on the work surfaces. Parrot tulips, in different colours, spill from a jug on the table. The kitchen units are pale grey; one wall is peacock blue. A huge corkboard is pinned with household detritus: letters and phone numbers, a child’s drawings. No sign of Zach – no oil paints or rolls of paper. I check the backs of the pine chairs at the table for a messenger bag, casually slung. But there are just kids’ clothes and tea towels, and a man’s zip-up fleece. Not his. Zach would never countenance fleece.

On the floor, a small, cross-legged boy in dungarees is building a tower with blocks of Lego. ‘And another one down,’ he chirrups as the tower collapses.

Nell lays the baby carefully in a Moses basket in the window. Outside, up some steps, is a small garden.

Would you conceal a man from his wife if you had children in the house?

‘Lizzie,’ Nell says, turning. ‘I’m so sorry about Zach. It’s just awful. But it is lovely to see you again.’

She stretches out her arms. I move towards her for the statutory hug – the bereaved are embraced a lot – but she turns, just as I reach her, to throw the muslin over the back of a chair.

‘Such a lovely baby,’ I say, to cover my confusion. ‘Boy or girl?’

We both peer in. ‘Girl,’ Nell says. ‘Gladys.’

‘Gladys. I love those old-fashioned names. Clever of you to find one that hasn’t been used up.’

Nell doesn’t respond. ‘She’s six weeks,’ she says, and adjusts the baby’s blanket. Above it a tiny fist furls. I stroke the baby’s head, touch her hand, which grips my finger.

‘You and Zach – you didn’t have children?’ Nell asks.

‘No.’ A tug of discomfort, a stirring.

‘Coffee,’ Nell says, straightening up. ‘And then a good old catch-up.’

She rattles around with the kettle, fetching the mugs down from a cupboard, asking about my journey, apologising because she meant to make a cake but didn’t have time, instructing Pidge instead to dig out those ‘yummy’ biscuits from the treat jar. ‘Right, right, right,’ she keeps saying, ticking off the sequence of small actions that are required. I watch her, checking her eyes and the muscles at the corner of her mouth, for any indication. I don’t think she would have asked whether we had children if Zach was here. But still – her manner is odd, a strain runs beneath the surface. She knows something.

Finally, clearing the table with her elbow to make space for two mugs of coffee and a plate of oat crunchies, she sits down. ‘Jolly good,’ she says, half sighing. ‘So.’ She looks at me and then quickly away. ‘How utterly sweet of you to come and visit me.’ I hadn’t noticed how posh she was last time – she’d seemed more Estuary than Bloomsbury. Parenthood, I’ve noticed, often brings out people’s true origins.

‘I wish we had seen more of you,’ I say, taking a sip. ‘We had that nice lunch, and then . . . I don’t know. Life took over.’

‘God. Yes. It’s so close, Brighton from London, but psychologically . . . weekends we just seem to
flop.
And then having kids – bloody hell, you never have any time for anything.’

‘Zach wasn’t great at communication,’ I say, still testing the waters. ‘Some people have a knack with friendship. He didn’t. I think he longed to see more of the people he loved. I don’t know what stopped him. Pride, perhaps. Shyness.’

Nell laughs, but there’s a brittle edge to it. I look at her carefully. ‘OK, well, not shyness,’ I say.

‘Maybe not shyness,’ she repeats.

Is she trying to tell me something? ‘He did compartmentalise his life, though, didn’t he?’ I say, still scrutinising her features. ‘Work, Cornwall, childhood, the Isle of Wight . . .’

‘The Isle of Wight?’ She removes her hand from her chin, tucks a hank of hair behind her ear.

‘Where he grew up,’ I say.

‘I thought it was Wales.’

‘Isle of Wight. I think.’ Is she being purposefully vague? ‘Did he not talk to you about it?’

‘Not really.’ She shakes her head.

How well, then, did she really know him? I think about his head in my lap, my hands in his hair. The well of unhappiness he would decant, cup by cup. The terrible underlying reasons for his behaviour – how his father would fixate on some aspect of his mother’s appearance, or cooking, how he tortured her physically and mentally. And Zach, poor Zach, an only child, desperate for his father’s approval, watching, powerless to intervene, carrying those images into his life as an adult, caught up but desperate to break free. How could I blame him for how he sometimes treated me?

‘It wasn’t a great childhood,’ I say.

‘Oh, really? I know they died a long time ago, but I thought they were loaded?’

‘Big house – Marchington Manor. Nannies. Posh school. Yacht club. All worth nothing if, behind closed doors, your father is a violent alcoholic and your mother is too weak to stand up to him.’

‘I didn’t know.’ She brings her knees up to lean against the table: ‘He must have loved you very much, Lizzie, to have been able to open up to you. I’m so sorry,’ she says awkwardly, ‘you know . . . a terrible loss, it’s such a shame.’

‘Thank you.’ I sigh, rub my face with the tips of my fingers. She’s just embarrassed, I realise, that’s why she has seemed odd. I forget how bereavement can make people uncomfortable.

I sigh again. I have such a sense of deflation, I want to cry. ‘You and Pete meant a lot to him, too,’ I manage to say.

‘Did we?’ Her eye has been caught by a rogue tulip, a pink one. She takes it out and cocks her head to study the arrangement.

‘You were the only people he still saw from Edinburgh. I didn’t go to uni. I studied librarianship on a day-release course. But I know the friends you make at university are important and—’

‘Well, it wasn’t really from university that we knew each other,’ she says, putting the pink tulip back in a different position, next to an orange one.

‘Wasn’t it?’ I lean forward. ‘I thought you studied fine art together? I thought Zach and Pete were the only two mature students on your course.’

‘Pete was a mature student. He and I both studied fine art. But Zach didn’t.’

‘What did he study then?’ Blood infuses my cheeks. ‘Wasn’t it fine art? A different sort of art?’

She laughs. ‘No. Nothing. He wasn’t at the art school, or the university. He didn’t study anything.’ She laughs again dismissively, an edge of contempt. ‘Not as far as I know.’

I take a gulp of coffee. ‘I don’t understand. He said he met you at Edinburgh.’

‘We met
in
Edinburgh, not
at
Edinburgh. If you see the difference. Zach was a shop assistant. He worked in the art-supply shop on Princes Street. DaVinci’s, it was called. We were in all the time before our finals, getting new charcoal, string, endless blocks of paper – displacement activities probably. We used to hang out in the pub.’

Heat in my neck. A coldness in my legs. Another lie. I picture the biographical notes I saw him write for ‘Light on Water’, the show in Bristol that never came off. He had written
Edinburgh College of Art
. ‘So where did he study?’

She gazes at me. ‘He was a good artist, Zach. He had a certain rough talent. No one can ever take that away from him. But he was self-taught. He just had this ability, this sense . . . He didn’t always paint what people wanted to see.’

My voice sounds high-pitched and strained. ‘I thought you all moved to Brighton together the summer after graduation?’

‘Pete and I –
we
did. Pete had a job lined up. He’d been interning at Bull Trout Media in the holidays. I came down with him and found work quite quickly. Zach? It was a bit of a surprise, actually. I mean, obviously we knew him to chat to. He was very helpful in the shop. I also suspected he hooked up briefly with our flatmate Margot. He certainly had an eye for her. And then he just turned up. Here. In Brighton. He hitched down in the September. He found out where we lived—’ She breaks off, frowns. Her nose concertinas. ‘I don’t know how, actually, but anyway he was waiting for us when we got back from work. He loved the sea, didn’t he?’ She rocks her chair back to check the baby in the basket.

‘Yes,’ I say, firmly. I look at my hands splayed on the table, feeling the solidity of the wood. ‘He did love the sea.’

‘And then,’ Nell says, rocking forward, ‘he moved in. We’d rented a flat down in Hove, but it was pricey and we’d been looking for a third person . . . the timing seemed too good to be true. We had a laugh while it lasted. He was such a big character.’

She puts her hand out to cover mine. ‘I
was
fond of him.’

‘
Was
?’ She seems to be emphasising something that was in doubt. Such a ‘charmer’, a ‘big character’: there’s a code in judgements like that. Teachers use them at parents’ evenings all the time.

Her reply makes it sound as if I’d simply drawn attention to the use of past tense. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know him very well really. But I’m glad he was happy. I’m glad he met you.’ She half smiles.

Pidge climbs down from the table and says he wants to go into the garden. Nell unlocks the back door but tells him not to get too dirty because a friend is coming to play. I watch as he climbs the steps and sits on the small square of muddy grass with a trowel in his hand. He appears to be digging for worms. Safe, normal activities. Did she just say she hadn’t known him very well? That doesn’t make sense. They were best friends. I know they were.

I take a deep breath. ‘On the phone I said I had some questions and you might think they’re odd. Zach’s accident has left things a little . . . open-ended.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘In Brighton, for example, he didn’t live with you the whole time, did he? He rented a flat on his own or—?’

‘No, he only lived with us for about four months. He moved in with his girlfriend. She had a flat in the centre of Brighton, just up from Churchill Square shopping centre.’

A twist in my chest. He told me I was the first woman he had ever lived with, ever been close enough to even to consider it. But he lied. His body in her bed. Limbs curved. His face in her neck. I dig my teeth into my lip. ‘I didn’t know that.’

She gives a quick, reassuring smile. ‘He wasn’t there for a huge amount of time, either. Hardly even a year. He met you and—’

A sudden, swirling thought. ‘I don’t suppose she was called Xenia?’

‘She was called Charlotte. Charlotte Reid.’

Nell turns to watch Pidge in the garden, but I catch something dart across her face, confusion or guilt. I’m not sure. Her body language is telling me to drop it.

‘What was she like?’

‘She was sweet. Younger, quite a lot younger, than him. She had a high-powered job in the City, one of those smartly dressed girls in trainers who carry high heels in her handbag. When they were going out, we saw quite a bit of them—’ She breaks off, swivels her eyes to mine and then bites her lip as if stopping herself from saying more. ‘She doted on him. I liked her. She was lovely. He could have done a lot worse.’ She brushes some invisible crumbs from the table.

I take another gulp of coffee, harsh at the back of my throat, and cradle the mug. ‘So what happened?’

Nell sighs. ‘She wanted to marry him, and he didn’t want to marry her. The same old same old.’

She stares out of the window again. She’s probably wondering how Zach, who could have had lovely, sweet, high-powered Charlotte Reid, ended up with the odd little person sitting here. And I am feeling guilty that I did, and grateful and heartbroken, and also muddled because neither of us is really saying what we want to. Zach isn’t here and I shouldn’t have come. Amid the ordinary cheerfulness of this house, this life, I feel like an oddity, a splinter in a smooth surface.

The room seems unnaturally quiet. I can see Pidge’s arms moving, but I can’t hear him. And then, I catch a sound – a noise above our heads – two separate creaks, a beat apart.

A shower of dirt hits the glass doors. Pidge has dug his trowel in a little too enthusiastically and sent turf flying.

Nell leaps to her feet, throwing back her chair. ‘Careful,’ she shouts, through the glass.

‘What was that?’ I say.

‘Little tyke,’ she says, misunderstanding or choosing to.

She begins to clear away the coffee cups and I help. As I rinse them under the tap, I strain my ears for more sounds, glancing up at the ceiling. They were footsteps. Someone is up there. Nell has started talking again. She asks after my mother and I explain briefly how quickly, after diagnosis, her condition deteriorated.

‘And your dog?’ she says, with the jaunty enthusiasm I remember from last time. ‘Didn’t you have a dog?’

A twist of anxiety: I haven’t thought about Howard since I got here. Onnie and the key dangling from her finger. I should get back.

‘Yes. He’s been a great comfort to me,’ I say. ‘Does that sound stupid? Zach loved him too.’

‘Not at all,’ she says sympathetically.

I make movements to leave. She takes me to the front door and we hug and she tells me to keep in touch.

‘I will,’ I say in a cheerful sing-song.

The door closes and I walk a little way down the road before I stop. I lean against the wall of a house and stare at a strip of sea pencilled above the rooftops. Is that it? Am I going to travel meekly back to London? She was hurrying me out of the house, I know she was, and of course there could be a million reasons. But those footsteps: I need to know for sure.

Pidge comes to the door this time – I can tell because of the fumbling and the time it takes to open. ‘Oh,’ he says, disappointed at the sight of me. ‘I thought you were my friend.’