What She Left: Enhanced Edition (22 page)

‘I might have not always made the best choices when it comes to men, but I’m not stupid,’ she said.

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘So why are you treating me like I am?’ She fixed the same stare on me I’d seen over the mackerel. I turned away: a hostess trolley, a caramel-coloured sofa, a hi-fi system with records stacked against it. ‘That’s you all over, Jem – you’re full of opinions about everyone else, but ask you one damn simple question about yourself and you’re floundering. I can’t work out if I love you or hate you more. It’s an easy one with myself – it’s hate, hands down it’s hate every time.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t hate me,’ I said. ‘Don’t hate yourself.’

‘I’ll tell you what love’s for – it’s because without it we’re just bodies banging against each other. Having an affair’s bad enough, but it makes it worse somehow if it’s just sex. It’s more disrespectful.’

‘Disrespectful to whom?’

‘Don’t play the innocent. Your wife for starters, or have you conveniently forgotten about her again?’ She put her cigarette down. ‘I could have just about lived with what it would have done to Fliss if we were going to live happily ever after. If we’re not, then you’re merely treating me like … like
a lump of meat
. If we’re not, then I’m acting like one.’

‘I read an interesting paper today on mitochondrial DNA,’ I said.

She started sobbing and it occurred to me how different Fliss looked when she cried: quieter, older, more composed. That moment – comparing these two women’s pain – was the first time I’d ever known what it was like to properly hate myself. I reached out, traced the definition of her spine with my forefinger. ‘Liz, darling, don’t be like this, don’t cry.’

‘You’ve never treated me like I’m precious. You care more about people who lived thousands of years ago than you do me. Don’t I matter?’

‘Of course you do, you know you do.’

‘I don’t, how would I – you never tell me. I feel so dreadfully
lost
.’

Why do we all have to be so damn fragile
, I’d thought, but I must have said it out loud because I heard a faint voice answer: ‘Fragile? Fragile? I’m positively robust compared to how I used to be.’

Liz got drunk very quickly. She flirted with other men. She knocked some glasses over. When I tried to touch her she said she couldn’t do half a relationship.

We’d stood, Liz and I had, in front of the Titians and Caravaggios in the National; she’d said she didn’t care who saw us, she didn’t give a damn, life was too short. We’d had a weekend in Dorset, ambled along the shingle on Chesil beach and listened to the waves. Driven to the sea at Beachy Head in my TR7, the car that Fliss joked was a symptom of an early midlife crisis, and drank champagne with the roof down in the salty breeze. Part of me had wanted to rush straight home and
tell
Fliss, tell her about how far you could see and the little lighthouse and the sheer vertiginous magnificence of that white drop. Rouse her gently from sleep, she’d been
in bed by the time I got back from that particular ‘weekend symposium’, and say, ‘Fliss, Fliss, you’ll never guess where I’ve been.’ It had been such an extraordinary day it seemed only natural to share it with her. A bit of me had wanted to take her to the same spot so she,
Fliss
, could experience the same joy that Liz had, so I might see the same smile on her face – she smiled so rarely these days – as had burst on to Liz’s.
One damn life simply isn’t enough
, I thought, and the impossibility of the situation again winded me.
You’ve
let
yourself love two women, you stupid, selfish man
. The words of a master, History or Classics, echoed around the room as if he’d been addressing a dog: ‘You’ve been a silly boy, Cooke,
silly
.’

‘Jeremy Cooke, well I never!’

I wheeled round. Martin Collings. He’d worked with Fliss when she’d been at UCL. They’d kept in touch.

‘Martin, how lovely to see you,’ I said, peering over his shoulder. Liz had gone to the lav. We’d been stood in the kitchen hardly speaking; neither of us wanted to bring the evening to a close – we were both separately terrified about what might come next.

‘I’ve been positively atrocious,’ Martin said, ‘I haven’t been in touch with Fliss for an aeon. Is she here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not.’

I scanned the room for Liz. She was drunk and had been gone for ages.
Please
, I thought,
please have walked out on me
.

‘How’s your work? You still preoccupied by the dead?’

Liz re-emerged and stood next to me. She fell against me. There was nothing, no connection, no intimacy, just weight. ‘I love you and I hate you; either way you’ve blown it, you stupid prehistoric old relic!’ She kissed me on the cheek. It was a goodbye kiss: tender and wet and cruel. I tried to
catch Martin’s eye; I could almost follow his train of thought, the apparatus of his mind going into overdrive.

Liz left the room and I made the hand gesture of someone drinking – as if to say haven’t got the foggiest what that was about, ignore her, she’s drunk. Neil Diamond started playing and she went, wobbling, into the living room as if drawn by the music, as if she’d remembered she’d left something in there.

‘What are you playing at, Jeremy?’ he asked.

‘Playing at?’

The music stopped and then started again. REO Speedwagon. I heard Liz’s laughter and I felt strangely calm: as if it was out of my hands now. He’ll tell Fliss and it’ll be better than carrying this huge caliginous secret around. But something made me persevere with the lie, the cliché. It was like a part I had to play.

‘You’re not thinking … Oh how positively hilarious. She’s my assistant, the latest recruit to the department. To be frank, though, she’s got a bit of a problem with the old vino.’

I visualized Fliss putting some food down for the dog, sliding the bolt across the back door and climbing the stairs to bed. ‘These infernal academic parties, you know what they’re like, bound to drag on so I’ll probably stay away overnight,’ I’d told her.

‘Don’t bullshit me,’ Martin said. ‘I’ve known your wife for a long time, she deserves better than this.’

Liz danced with the man who I’d told I wasn’t her father.
That’s that then
, I thought.
That’s what an affair was like
.

‘You utter shit, Jeremy,’ this friend of my wife said.

Much later – there was no such thing as drink driving in those days, it was 1982 – I crept in and patted Milly when
she clambered out of her basket to greet me and whispered I’d missed her and bathed and slipped into bed and my wife whimpered something I couldn’t make out: it might have been ‘welcome home’ or ‘why didn’t you phone?’ or ‘I’m all alone’. And I lay awake next to the woman who was unlike the one I’d spent the evening with in so many ways, but mostly for one reason: I was married to her. I didn’t sleep. I waited for the phone to ring, waited for that sycophantic toad Collings to seal my fate. The phone never rang.
Maybe I’ve got away with it
, I thought, listening to my wife’s gentle, catchy breathing.

How was I supposed to know what Liz was going to do nine days later, Larry? Should I have foreseen that? Stopped that? We weren’t each other’s problem any more. When the news of it reached me it came as every bit as much of a shock as when I heard Alice had died. A tentative knock on my study door, a colleague, one of the few who was aware of what was going on between myself and her, an expression midway between sympathy and contempt. ‘Jeremy, have you heard?’

Yours as ever,

Jeremy

Dear M & D,

Weather baking, hotel adequate, food dreadful. Lots of pool time and lots of cocktails. Not much sleep. Island beautiful (have insisted we do one ‘cultural’ thing every day!). Look more like a lobster than a salmon! Lots of
Germans, but you’ll be pleased to hear I haven’t mentioned the war once yet, Dad. Was it Fuerteventura we came to when I was a kid? The girls say hi.

Love you loads.

Ax

 

PS: Who says no one sends postcards these days?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Tell me

 

Jem,

 

Attached is a scan of a note I received this morning along with some photocopies of your handwriting and an instruction to ‘compare the two’. I need you to reassure me this note wasn’t written by you because they are remarkably similar. She was eighteen, a fresher, her first time away from home – a note like this would have terrified any girl that age. The spidery writing would have totally freaked her out. If it wasn’t for me, Dave would have buried you. Can’t believe I let you inveigle your way back into my affections – my God, I sent you photographs of Alice as a child! Tell me I haven’t been duped, Jem. Tell me it wasn’t you who wrote this note. Whoever sent it to me said they had confronted you with it, reckoned you were ‘sweating like a paedo in a Santa suit’. I more nearly drank today than at any point since I quit. Bought a bottle of gin in Tesco and sat in the car park with it
on my lap. All I’d wanted was to go to sleep, and to wake up when this was all over. Nine days after we split up, I drank a whole bottle of the stuff. It’s not without reason they call it ‘mother’s ruin’. It never goes away, that craving, it’s like a dull pressure on the back of your brain. You assured me the police would eventually come up with answers about what happened to my baby, Jem, that’s what you said, but they haven’t … All they’ve done is fob me off and run into dead ends, and some of the avenues they’ve explored, frankly I despair … You once referred to the trail we all leave, the trace. For both our sakes, I hope this note isn’t yours. God, who am I to get all sanctimonious?

 

Elizabeth

My phone rang late last night and when the caller introduced themselves as Holly Dickens it took me a second to twig. She was one of the girls with Alice Salmon on the night she died.

Readers may well be familiar with Alice’s story. She’s barely been out of the news since she drowned last month in Southampton. Tipsy, she had got separated from her friends then is believed to have toppled into a river. The ‘could-have-happened-to-me’ nature of the incident has made it a talking point across the nation.

Holly had got in touch because she was aware I’d worked with Alice in a previous job. She asked if we could speak confidentially; I agreed. We talked for over an hour, much of which she cried through. She spoke of her ‘unshakeable guilt’.

It’s become a popular pastime for some commentators,
blaming this young woman and her two pals, Sarah Hoskings and Lauren Nugent, for Alice’s death. As if letting her slip out of sight for a few seconds was a crime. As if we haven’t all been in that situation.

‘How can it be that one minute you’re getting ready for a night out with a friend and the next you’re at her funeral?’ she asked.

But I had no answers.

‘Alice was sitting on a wall outside the chip shop,’ she told me. ‘One minute she was there, the next gone. We only turned our backs for a few seconds. I can’t believe we lost her.’

Between them, they then called her mobile eight times and eventually made the not-unreasonable assumption that Alice had made her own way back to the hotel.

‘She was street-savvy; it never crossed my mind she was in danger, but with hindsight she was in a spaced-out mood all day and we should have checked because she was a bit tipsy. None of us can forgive ourselves.’

I finished the conversation with Holly and remembered my and Alice’s spell working together at the
Southampton Messenger
. Happy days.

A few seconds later, Holly rang again. ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘if you did want to quote me. People need to understand we made a mistake that we’ll regret for the rest of our lives but that we loved Alice.’

These three girls have done nothing wrong. As if losing a friend isn’t enough, they’re also being lambasted for refusing to engage in tittle-tattle about Alice, having stoically stuck by their promise to not comment beyond their official statement. This dignified decision was eminently understandable. It was the product of a wish to respect Alice’s family and it was also, let’s not forget, taken on police advice, for fear doing so could inadvertently prejudice any subsequent prosecution.

I reminded Holly that she shouldn’t blame herself and that
what happened to her could have happened to anyone, that people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones, that there but for the grace of God go any one of us …

 

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