Two Wrongs

by Mel McGrath

  ‘There’s more.’

  Maddy sits back and blinks.

  ‘Mark was also involved with Jessica Easton.’

  Maddy lets out a groan and puts her head in her hands before recovering her poise. ‘How much of this did you know when I came round to your house the other evening?’

  ‘Nothing, obviously, or I would have said,’ Cullen says, hoping the lie lands.

  ‘I’ll admit I’m worried about you, Christopher. First the thing at the hospital and now this mess. How could you have missed this with Mark?’

  This, he thinks. This is exactly why I kept the whole thing under my hat. She always was such a busybody even when we were together. Especially then.

  She presses her lips together, fingernails drumming on her cheek, lost in thought for a while, then straightening herself upright in her chair, says, ‘I wish we could let this one slide, for all our sakes, but unfortunately we’re exposed. We’ll have to find a low-profile way to deal with it.’

  ‘I put it to Natasha Tillotson that she transfers elsewhere with a nice reference to keep her quiet,’ Cullen says. He doesn’t mention Tillotson’s absolute rejection of his idea. He still hopes she’ll come round. If she doesn’t, he has another, more drastic, plan in mind.

  At that moment Alison enters with a tray on which sit two cups, a cafetiere of coffee, a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar and some sugar biscuits and Cullen finds himself hit by an unexpected wave of sadness. If it hadn’t been for that one mistake all those very many years ago, he could have been where Maddy is now, sitting behind a grand desk in a fancy office passing judgement on her ‘inferiors’.

  ‘What about Mark?’ Maddy asks.

  Cullen adopts a thinking pose, as though the idea is only just coming to him. ‘Just off the top of my head here, but how’s about something like this? Ratner agrees to resign with immediate effect “for personal reasons” and signs an NDA and we guarantee a reference? I believe Thirsk is recruiting at the moment. I could put in a word?’

  Maddy drums her fingers on her chin. ‘Leave it with me for now,’ she says, finally.

  Returning to his office but finding himself too tense to focus on his work Cullen tells Tina to cancel his afternoon appointments and drives to the Fig Tree in Clifton where he downs four whisky and sodas before heading home.

  He arrives at the house not long after Veronica has returned from shopping and his heart immediately sinks at the sight of the swag bags from silly, overpriced baby boutiques lined up along the kitchen table, like a drumbeat to his failure. Veronica is nowhere to be seen but from above him comes the muffled sound of footsteps.

  He moves out into the hallway and shouts up the stairs, ‘Hey, I’m home!’

  Veronica comes down the stairs. She is six weeks pregnant, the thing inside her is no more than the size of a pea and she is already cradling her abdomen in a way Cullen finds irritating even in women who have something to show. She knows nothing about the pawnbroker’s ticket, of course, or the unanswered demands from the bank accumulating in the glove box of the Volvo, and he will never be able to tell her, especially now. Of all the things he seems to have – job, house, a mother who loves him, and a small version of himself growing in the womb of his trophy wife, the car is the only thing he truly loves. And what has he done with the thing but make it a vehicle for his shame? The unpaid bills, the demands, the quarter bottles of whisky, hidden away out of sight but never for one moment out of mind. How easy it would be just to drive off the cliffs at Clifton Downs or Leigh Woods.

  He shakes himself free of the thought, and of the mood, remembering how clever he is being, how close to ridding himself of Natasha Tillotson, Mark Ratner and his debts. Going over to Veronica, he gives her a peck on the cheek and to his surprise feels her stiffen and back away. She is not smiling, he realises now, and her face is uncharacteristically stony.

  ‘I see you’ve been shopping. Did you just get back?’ he says, wondering if the source of her irritation is that he is home rather earlier than usual, before she has had time to hide her purchases.

  ‘No, I have been back some time, but I’ve been rather busy.’

  What on earth does Veronica have to be busy about, he wonders. Other than shopping and preparing dinner parties she doesn’t actually do anything.

  ‘I have some questions for you, actually. I only hope you have the answers.’

  The calm of a moment ago leaves in an instant and he suddenly feels himself seized by a panic that not even booze or pills can take away. He reaches for the familiar solidity of the table next to him. The room seems pixelated and hazy like the Rubik’s cubes he used to play with as a young teen to pass the time while he hung his head out of his bedroom window in the hope that his mother would not smell the smoke from illicit Marlboro Lights.

  ‘So a gentleman phoned just now asking for a Mr Fanshawe-Drew. I explained that Fanshawe-Drew was my name, not yours, and the gentleman seemed surprised. He was calling about unpaid credit card debts. It appears you have taken out a credit card using another name.’

  ‘Not another name, darling. Your name. Just as you have credit cards in my name.’

  ‘Men do not refer to themselves by their wives’ names unless they are trying to hide something,’ Veronica replies, stiffly. ‘I wondered how many other names you have been using so I went into the filing cabinet in your study.’

  ‘That’s private! You don’t have the key!’

  ‘It is possible to unlock almost anything with a nail file and a bobby pin. What is going on, Christopher?’ Her face is beseeching now.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ he says, desperately playing for time.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Aren’t you now?’ She turns her back and plucks a piece of paper from the kitchen counter. ‘How do you explain this?’

  He takes the paper from her and buzzes his pockets for his reading glasses though he can see well enough already to know that she has found his change of name certificate.

  ‘That was forever ago,’ he says, and it was, actually, or as forever ago as matters. There is a before and after in Cullen’s life that Veronica doesn’t know about, must never know about, particularly now, when they are both on the cusp of parenthood.

  ‘I feel I don’t know you any more. I always assumed Cullen was your father’s name and after the divorce your mother reverted to Salter. Now there’s this Christopher Mulholland person. So, who are you? Who am I having a baby with exactly?’

  ‘Darling, this isn’t nearly as complicated as you’re making it out to be. Mulholland was my stepfather’s name. When my mother married him, she decided to change both our names to Mulholland. After she divorced my stepfather she went back to Salter, which was her maiden name, and I chose to revert to my birthname, Cullen.’ All this is true, more or less, though not entirely the point. Still, he hopes it will be sufficient to placate Veronica who only ever really wants to know that her world is safe and cosseted and free from awkward truths and responsibilities. He fully expects the petitioning for a nanny to begin soon. How else does she expect him to pay for her on an academic salary other than with a little light credit card fraud?

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?’ she is saying now.

  ‘It’s not really relevant to anything is it?’

  ‘Well it might be,’ she says, petulantly. ‘And in any case, it doesn’t explain why I found a credit card bill in the name of Christopher Mulholland.’

  ‘I expect I had an account in that name and never got around to changing it,’ he says, hoping she will grow tired of questioning him. ‘But darling, you really shouldn’t have been going through my things.’

  ‘It just seems so odd and furtive somehow that you would never even tell me your name used to be Mulholland.’

  ‘Because it didn’t, not really, well only for a few years anyway. And if you must know,’ he begins, thinking up a smaller lie as a cover for the larger one, ‘there is a need to cover a small, temporary period of financial embarr
assment. A tiny, tiny loan. Using Mulholland gives me a little wiggle room.’

  ‘But that’s fraud isn’t it?’

  Cullen looks at the heap of shopping bags on the table and senses it would be catastrophic to bring them up right now.

  ‘It’ll all be fine, I promise.’

  ‘Well good, because I don’t think you should be stressing me out with this kind of thing in my condition. It’s simply not fair.’

  ‘By the time the baby comes everything will be absolutely shipshape, I promise.’

  ‘Well all right,’ she says, pouting. ‘But another thing…’

  ‘Yes?’ He smiles sweetly, doing his best to disguise his rising irritation.

  ‘There was a bottle of Valium in the medicine cabinet.’

  ‘Was there? I didn’t know.’

  She presses her mouth into a moue and, in a scolding tone, says, ‘Don’t give me that, Christopher, and don’t think I haven’t noticed it’s not there any more.’

  Chapter 40

  Honor

  ‘I called Madeleine Ince,’ Honor says. ‘I know you said to wait, but…’

  ‘How’d it go? You look like you could use a stiff drink.’ Alex picks up two glasses, throws in a couple of ice cubes and brings them over with a bottle of Jameson’s. The TV is on with the sound turned down and there is the smell of something cooking in the oven.

  ‘It was a shitshow. I completely mishandled her.’ Though she was embarrassed to admit it she’d screamed at the Vice Chancellor. It was so unlike her but the rage she’d been keeping at bay for years had come roaring and ballyhooing to the surface. Men like Reynolds. Men like… She stops herself mid-thought. Don’t go there. Not now. ‘She’s only interested in saving face. But if Avon doesn’t launch some kind of investigation into what’s happening, try to get to the root cause, I’m worried this is going to continue. And who’ll be next? By the end of the conversation she was threatening to kick Nevis out of the university.’

  ‘Fuck,’ says Alex, putting down his glass. ‘If you’ll pardon my French.’

  ‘It’s like whatever happens, however many students start jumping off bridges, they’re just going to keep on denying there’s a problem.’

  ‘They have a lot to lose. Reputationally.’

  ‘They’ll have a lot more to lose if a suicide contagion takes hold. How will they explain that away?’

  ‘My guess is they’re not thinking about the future.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Nevis about it?’

  ‘No. Perhaps I should. I’m absolutely sure that Nevis knows something. She’s just not saying what. But things are so difficult between us already and I don’t want to provoke her into cutting off contact. Not now.’ She feels the heat rising up into her face. Act in haste repent at leisure. Wasn’t that what Zoe used to say? Not that Zoe took much heed of her own advice, did she? She sighs deeply.

  ‘You don’t think Nevis would do anything…’ He tails off.

  ‘That’s the thing. I don’t know.’

  She watches Alex go into a small cupboard beside the wood burner and bring out a small pack of loose tobacco, some papers and a baggy and, balancing the paper on his knee, begin to roll a joint.

  ‘This was a fortieth birthday present. Three years ago and I haven’t opened it. Now seems like it might be a good time,’ Alex says.

  He passes her a slender, neatly built spliff and holds out the lighter. She lights and takes a deep breath of smoke which catches and spasms into a rolling cough.

  ‘Taste of my childhood,’ Honor says, righting herself.

  ‘Ha!’ Alex pours them both another drink. For a moment there is a meeting of eyes before Honor looks away. Something happened on that trip to Bath, Honor thinks. She has spent so much of her life stuck in the mud at the riverbank but on that trip she looked at Alex, still bravely navigating the currents midstream, and saw someone that, at some distant point, when all this was over, she might love.

  ‘There are two things I’ve been keeping from Nevis which I think could really impact on her stability, on her sense of identity, on everything, really. All these years I’ve told her that her mother died in a traffic accident, but that’s not true. Zoe killed herself. But I haven’t been able to tell Nevis that without telling her why. And I’m afraid telling her why might destroy her. But now, with all this going on, and, you know, they say suicide runs in families.’ Her chest is vice-tight now and her breathing is coming in short pants, like a dog in the sun. She manages to blurt it out just before her throat seizes. ‘I’m scared, Alex.’

  A moment passes. Rising, Alex moves closer and quietly lays his arms around her. ‘We’ll figure it out.’

  She takes in the warm, spicy man scent of him and closes her eyes. The seconds go by, then the minutes. Oh how good this feels and how necessary now. ‘Thank you,’ she says, lifting her head from its spot on his sweater and opening her eyes. Behind Alex the TV continues to flicker. An image catches her eye. She holds her breath and, pulling away, says, ‘There, on the TV. Turn up the volume.’

  His face registers her alarm. He turns and freezes. His eyes are on the screen now too. As he reaches for the remote a woman’s voice can be heard saying:

  Police have cordoned off the northern section of the Three Lakes nature reserve and are appealing for witnesses. At this time they are unable to confirm the identity of the dead woman and are not commenting on the cause of death.

  Chapter 41

  Honor

  Alex wants to come with her but this is something she has to do on her own. She thinks of calling a cab but decides in the end that it will be faster in Gerry. It is a crisp evening, the streets long clear of rush-hour bluster and traffic fumes, nothing impeding the journey but the odd traffic light. As she climbs the hill into Kingsdown, the solemnity of the moment hits her. In the next few minutes everything she has worked for, her hopes, her fears for the future may well collide. The bonds between mother and daughter will tighten or irrevocably break and it is for this reason that her legs feel emptied as she walks towards the entrance to the flat and her finger shakes as it presses the video entry phone. A call and a text have both gone unanswered. She waits, hardly daring to breathe. Finally there’s a crackle and a voice says, ‘What are you doing here?’ It takes what feels like forever for Nevis to buzz her up. She closes the door behind her, waiting for the click, then treads over a pile of junk mail and heads for the stairs. What she sees on the second-floor landing makes her gasp. Nevis stands waiting for her, clad in a dressing gown, with her short dark hair plastered, dripping to her head, looking so much like Zoe all those years ago, pulled soaking from the river, that it is as if the two have become the same person.

  ‘You’ve seen the news on TV about the body at Three Lakes?’

  She nods. Her voice is a whisper. Honor catches her daughter’s eye for an instant before Nevis looks away. Even as a little girl she never did like anyone to notice when she’d been crying. ‘Someone texted me earlier.’

  ‘They didn’t name the dead woman on the TV.’

  ‘That’s why no one watches TV news any more.’

  Honor follows her daughter into the living room, the girl keeping her back to her.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ The same flattened tone, one hand absent-mindedly rubbing the groove at the back of her head.

  Honor wonders if she dare approach. ‘I want to know if you’re OK. Do you – did you – know her?’

  ‘Natasha. She was a friend of Satnam’s and the other girl, Jessica.’ There is something so resigned, so sad in her daughter’s voice that it is as much as Honor can do not to break down.

  ‘Oh Nevis, my love.’ Her daughter stiffens and sways a little. A shudder passes through her body and becomes a tremble. An arm reaches for the kitchen counter, the hand fumbling for a spot to settle as she tries to steady herself, her whole body shaking as though an earthquake were happening beneath only her feet.

  And then she goes down.

  Leaping forward Hono
r stretches out her arms and manages, just, to stay the fall but she cannot stop it. Their bodies are entwined, now, each flailing but also clinging to the other. Honor feels herself land first, her thigh hitting the floor with a thud, Nevis landing an instant later, her right leg coming down hard on Honor’s shin and for a moment they are there, slumped in a shocked heap, together.

  ‘Nevis darling, are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, are you?’ Nevis rubs a spot on her upper arm.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Honor says, too shocked to feel any injury.

  They begin to untangle themselves, Nevis standing first and reaching out a hand to help Honor. They brush themselves down. Leading her daughter to the sofa Honor takes her daughter’s hand and notes that the shaking has stopped.

  ‘Rest there and I’ll fetch some tea.’

  When she returns some minutes later with the tea, Nevis, arms clasped around her legs, feet on the sofa, is gently rocking herself. Her eyes fixed on the middle distance, she does not immediately register the tea or her mother. In the dim slant of the light in the room her face appears sheeny with tears. Honor slides onto the sofa beside her. For a long while mother and daughter sit in silence, gathering themselves. At last, Nevis says, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. None of this is your fault, my love.’

  Nevis’s neck snaps round to look at her. ‘Isn’t it? The fact is I left Satnam on Sunday evening when I could have stayed. The fact is Jessica told me she was in trouble and Tash said she was afraid of ending up like Jessica. And the fact is I could have done something, I don’t know, intervened in some way, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything about any of it. Everything was there, all the numbers. I failed to add them up.’

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing to add up?’

  Nevis shoots her mother a look of incomprehension. ‘Everything always adds up. I’m just not quite sure how. Tash told me she was having an affair with one of the tutors, Mark Ratner. She and Jessica must have had a fight about it. Jessica said the fight was over her ex and that she was upset that Tash had taken up with him. It’s possible that she was referring to the tutor. The university found out anyway somehow and they were trying to make Tash leave but Tash didn’t want to go. She told me she was going to talk to them.’