by L. Smyth
She took another sip of her wine.
Soon Marcus returned to the subject of my life – what I had been doing, what I had been reading.
‘And how are your studies?’
‘Fine, I think.’
How like a parent he was.
‘Do you see Colin a lot?’
‘Who?’
‘Colin. Sorry, Professor Montgomery. He teaches you, does he not?’
Oh.
‘Well not anymore actually. This term I’m taking modules with several … well, PhD students mostly. Montgomery taught me last term a little.’
‘He and Marina had some issues.’
‘Yes.’
‘We were at university together, Colin and I.’ He glanced at Elena, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was busy looking at me. ‘He’s an odd fellow.’
I was surprised by this admission. ‘In what way?’
‘Oh, you know, how he is,’ Marcus waved a hand – a little swat like Marina’s – and topped up my glass.
I sipped the wine tentatively, self-consciously – careful not to slug it. I thought about mentioning the episode at the bookshop in the train station around New Year, how that had caused me to think weirdly about him … but I said nothing.
Marcus looked at me pointedly. ‘I’m assuming you know about his past,’ he said. ‘Marina must have told you.’
I struggled to stifle a smirk.
‘The women …?’ I stumbled.
‘Not to mention the students.’
I felt a short zing of something – resentment, perhaps.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘What happened?’
‘Well he was … indiscreet with a student,’ he said. ‘It was years ago, and consensual of course. But it wasn’t cricket, what with the regulations and so on.’
It was resentment that I felt, definitely. Here was another thing she had neglected to tell me.
Marcus continued: ‘They gave him a slap on the wrist and sent him to Northam.’
‘A slap on the wrist?’ I sipped my wine cautiously.
‘Well yes,’ Marcus smiled. ‘There was a tizzy about it, but at the end of the day it was two consenting adults.’
The wine began to take its effect: I could feel the alcohol pulsing along my synapses, making my face numb.
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘what do you mean “they” sent him to Northam? Who sent him? How?’
Marcus looked at me. It was an intense expression: like he was trying to communicate something to me, while simultaneously trying to figure something out.
‘He was working at Charlton in the US, the same university as me. And then it was … revealed, among staff, so he had to leave. Northam had sister ties and they were looking for a new English professor, so I sent a strong recommendation. As did a few other professors. It worked.’
‘I didn’t know that academic circles worked like that.’
Marcus shrugged. ‘Anything can work in whatever way you like, provided you’re persuasive. Anyway, it’s much harder to find competent lecturers than you think – they have to be willing to accept the pay packet, experienced enough to draw in students …’
‘Still …’
‘Well, in any case, it happened and everyone benefited from the move.’
I put down my fork. I had lost my appetite. Marcus laughed and tapped my plate.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’ve hardly touched the fish.’
‘I’m sorry, I just – I didn’t know that about him,’ I said quietly. I wondered why he was telling me all of this.
‘Good. There’s no reason you should. He’s a superb teacher. That’s what matters.’
A question hovered on my tongue. I looked at my plate. I breathed slowly, feeling the wine work itself around my brain. The room seemed very hot all of a sudden, full of gold leaf and garish bright lights. I couldn’t feel my mouth, but I somehow knew that it was moving. It was emitting words beyond my control.
‘He was a bit odd though,’ I said. ‘I mean towards Marina.’
Marcus looked startled then.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I wonder if … you know …’
Elena coughed into her napkin. A silence descended. Waiters circled around other tables. I heard metal cutlery clink against china.
Eventually Marcus said: ‘I’m not sure I’ve been clear. The Charlton business was a long time ago. Colin was a lot younger, and the boundaries were a little blurry in those days. He has known Marina for a long time, since childhood. There is … no, there is no way.’
We all avoided each other’s eyes. There was another tense silence: this time longer. The waiter arrived and began to shell out our side courses. I stared at his hands, focused on the way he prised the silver dishes from the stack. One, two, three. As he walked away, I stared after him, noticing that his apron was undone at the back. My chest was still tight.
I mumbled: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ Marcus said quickly. ‘Frankly I am relieved that you hadn’t heard any of that before.’ He gave a small, forced laugh. ‘I mightn’t have mentioned it to you if I had known that you were ignorant. Don’t get bogged down in university gossip. It’s not what first year is about.’ He smiled again, too broadly. I caught a flash of his brilliant white teeth. ‘First year is about having fun – which I know sounds strange now.’ He poured some more wine into my glass. ‘But you have to take your mind away from what’s happened. We all do.’
At this point Elena cleared her throat. I realized she hadn’t spoken in all that time, she hadn’t even muttered an ‘mm’.
‘Darling,’ she spoke in a smooth American accent. It sounded like coins in a velvet purse. ‘Would now be a good time to ask Eva about the room?’
I glanced from her to him.
‘Yes,’ he said emphatically. ‘But let’s have a toast first.’
Our hands moved to the middle of the table and clinked the glasses against one another. There was a silence as we drank.
Marcus set his glass on the table in front of him.
‘One of the reasons we’re up here—’
‘The main reason.’
‘It’s required of us to clear out Marina’s university room.’ His eyes were heavy with meaning. ‘We had a look around earlier which was, as I’m sure you can understand, very difficult. But there is a lot to clear out and we were wondering—’
‘We were hoping you would help us with the packing.’
My throat went dry. I felt a sudden impulse to escape.
‘There’s an awful lot of stuff in the room, Eva, and we could use an extra pair of hands. We did ask Henry but he … is finding things difficult.’ There was a pause. Marcus looked to Elena again. She was staring at her napkin.
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ she said. I watched her gently playing with the napkin. Sunlight flooded the room and a sharp golden rectangle glinted off her fingernails. ‘We may as well tell her, Marcus.’
The waiter walked past again, still with his apron undone and I couldn’t think about anything except the pieces loose pieces of thread dangling from the tie.
‘It’s not necessary to go into this now,’ said Marcus.
‘Oh come on, I’m sure she knows already,’ said Elena.
I felt cold. ‘Knows what?’
‘Henry has transferred to another course,’ she said bluntly. ‘He’s gone away for a while.’
At the same time, Marcus said: ‘It’s a brilliant opportunity.’
My throat felt dry. I couldn’t concentrate on seeming natural, on making the conversation go smoothly.
‘Where is he going?’ I managed. “I mean – what?”
‘One of my historian friends wants him to work as a researcher. It’ll be in London probably. Perhaps New York.’
‘But … how long is he going for?’ I said.
‘Probably just the year,’ said Marcus. ‘He’s had a very, very tough time of it at Northam.’
I th
ought back to my confrontation with Henry at the funeral: ‘do you have any idea what I am dealing with?’ What had happened to him? Why exactly had he been suffering? Did he know something about Marina’s death that I didn’t? Just as I opened my mouth to ask this, Elena cut in impatiently:
‘Will you help us with the room?’ Her fingers gripped the silver cutlery. She bent her head forward, opened her small mouth and put a tiny piece of lettuce inside it. Her eyes slid up at me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
Understandably I was nervous going – but, I have to say, I was also inappropriately excited. Oddly, I had only ever been in Marina’s room a few times before. Back in those early days of our friendship, she had always asked to spend time in my room instead. The brief moments I had spent in there – waiting in the doorway while she picked up a lipstick; hovering on the bed while she drank the remnants of a vodka bottle and slipped on her shoes – they had always been a stop on the way to somewhere else. Her room was never the destination itself. And while I had been in there, standing or sitting, she had distracted me with some witty chatter so that now I couldn’t clearly remember what it had looked like.
I shuffled up the stairs after Marcus and Elena, trying to stay calm, trying not to catch eyes with her floormates
From the moment I’d read about Marina’s death, I’d spent hours imagining her doing it. In those early February days I had lain in my dark room at night, conscious of the smell of damp emanating from the walls and a nebulous flow of headlights, moving slowly over the ceiling. I imagined tracing my feet along the scratchy welcome mat, flicking the lock, slowly ascending the stairs, opening the door, and climbing onto the windowsill. What clothes had Marina been wearing when she had jumped? Had she been wearing shoes or barefoot? What had her feet felt like against the rug, against the carpet, against the stone? All these scenarios I had imagined vividly.
Yet now, actually embarking on that journey, I found myself thinking instead about how the room was going to look. I couldn’t remember anything specific about it, and even in the hallway the walls seemed to me a different colour than they had been. The wallpaper was a light yellow rather than cool cream.
Marcus stepped up to the door and put the key in the lock. He glanced at his wife. In that moment I saw a brief look of sincerity pass across his face: there was a fragility, an uncertainty, an expectation, that disappeared as his eyes tracked to me. Then he smiled politely. His hand twisted the key and the door opened.
Seeing Marina’s room was a shock. The walls were bare. The shelves were bare. No posters; no pictures. Only one bulb hung in the centre of the room, emitting a thin, ugly yellow beam over a bookshelf stuffed with heavy tomes. There were books of various sizes – heavy and thin, slanting and sturdy – and sat uncomfortably beside each other. Her bed lay in the corner, stretched over with a white paisley sheet, like a death shroud.
‘Did it always look so …’ Marcus paused. ‘Empty?’
I dug my fingernails hard into my palm. I tried to formulate things to say.
What could I say? I wanted to provide him with some comfort, to say that I remembered it brighter, full of photos and memories which she must have taken down when she moved home for Christmas. But that wasn’t what I remembered. Was it? I cast my mind back, and a memory surfaced: standing outside the door before Henry’s party; knocking once, knocking again; hearing her feet shuffle around inside. I’d pushed open the door lightly, and it was then that she had sprung towards me, leaping and laughing, snapping a Polaroid camera in my face and dancing around with her long full ponytail swinging to the sides. I’d tried to just walk in past her, but she leapt in front of me again and the camera had kept on flashing.
Now I tried to think. I tried to see what the room had looked like behind her, whether there had been posters on the walls. No matter how hard I concentrated I could only see her. She lifted her face away from the camera and looked at me again. Her mouth was painted with a dark red lipstick and her eyes, curving upwards, were lined with smudgy black.
I shuddered.
‘Yes. I mean, ah,’ I said. ‘I think there used to be some fairy lights.’
‘Fairy lights?’
‘Yes.’
Elena’s head whipped around. ‘That doesn’t sound quite like Mari.’
‘I know. I think it … Well … it used to look brighter. Somehow.’
‘Somehow,’ she repeated bitterly.
Marcus muttered: ‘Elena stop it.’
‘Stop what?’ she said.
He paused. He drew in a long, deep breath, then shook his head.
‘Stop what Marcus?’ she said again. I could hear her voice steadily straining, ready to erupt. ‘I said, stop what? Stop acting irrationally?’ There was the eruption. ‘Stop acting in a way that isn’t normal? How can you possibly be standing there saying that to me? Your daughter is dead. By choice.’
Marcus’s jaw clenched. His eyebrows furrowed, causing the skin of his tanned forehead to crumple, like a sheet of tea-stained paper.
‘Please,’ he said.
‘That is a fact,’ she continued, at the same volume. ‘And rather than facing that fact – that she is dead – we’re going on as though everything is fucking normal! She died in this fucking room.’
She looked me dead in the eye then, and in the yellow light of the room I saw how red the edges of her pupils were. I thought I could smell something: the hot waft of alcohol.
She breathed hard. ‘I’m guessing you’ve been here a lot right? As Marina’s best friend.’
‘Well … sort of …’
She gave a low, bitter laugh, and shook her head.
‘Sort of,’ she said, imitating my whine.
‘Elena,’ Marcus said.
‘Were you even friends with Marina?’
‘Elena.’
‘I know about what you said to her,’ said Elena sharply. ‘And I know that you pushed her.’
‘What—?’
‘She told me,’ she continued, matter-of-factly. ‘She told me about the time you had a fight. You said those awful things and then you … you got physical, you pushed her chair over.’ She stepped towards me. ‘That’s not what close friends do. You should have been supportive. She needed help.’
‘Elena, enough.’
Marcus stepped forward then. He put his arm around her shoulders, gently, and I watched as Elena – almost spellbound – hesitated before relaxing into it. She took Marcus’s wrist in both her hands. Her nails looked fierce and indestructible, like a metal clamp.
Marcus’s voice was child-like: ‘Let’s get some fresh air. OK?’
Elena nodded.
‘Some nice fresh air?’
The question was directed at Elena, who nodded sulkily, but he was looking at me.
I felt awkward and out of place then. It wasn’t clear where I was supposed to look, what I was supposed to stay.
‘I’ll just—’ I stammered.
‘Yes, you stay here. We’ll be back in a moment.’
Alone in Marina’s room, I felt even more uncomfortable than I had before. It felt like I was being watched. I looked at the window and tried not to imagine Marina climbing out of it. I thought about what Elena had said. I wondered what Marina had said about me. I wondered whether Elena had spoken to Henry.
Certain scenarios began to play out in my head. I thought of Marina on the night she died. I imaged her undoing the catch, digging her fingernails underneath the heavy wooden frame, pushing the fingertips in a little further, shunting it upwards, feeling the cold bite of the wind on her face. I thought of a foot on the windowsill, the knee bending up onto it, the palm lying flat and then the elbow crooking, arm straightening and flexing, other arm reaching up to steady herself, the shaky forward-bend of her body as she hoisted herself upwards. Then she would breathe in the last gulp of cold air. Maybe she would look at the stars briefly, see the moon behind the fog. And she would be leaning out, leaning out, leaning out, leaning out …
> I started to feel a spinning nausea. Clearly I needed to distract myself. But there was little that I could do. I didn’t feel I could start packing up Marina’s things – I didn’t feel as though I should be allowed to touch anything. I could hear people playing football on the grass outside. Geese squawking. Footsteps along the concrete.
In a panic I looked at Marina’s bookshelf. That was better. There were many that I recognized. The copy of Doctor Faustus, with which she’d practically bludgeoned the professor. Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë. Frederick Douglass. Her tiny copy of Wide Sargasso Sea, well thumbed. There were other books here too, I noticed – books that I had lent her.
I was fixated by these titles in particular. Being close to them was comforting. They made me feel that I wasn’t crazy. They made me feel that my version of Marina was a reliable narrative: that she wasn’t a eulogy or an obsequious Facebook post or someone who needed help. She was the Marina I had known, after all: someone who had the same interests that I had. She was someone who took my stuff and didn’t give it back.
A shadow passed under the window. I heard Elena’s sharp voice outside, the muffled crescendo of Marcus’. They were making their way back to the room.
Without being entirely conscious of doing so, I felt my fingers edging out of my pockets. My arms reached out towards the bookshelf. I grabbed a large stack of the books, some of them mine, some of them hers. I swept them off the shelf in one swift movement, and stuffed them in my bag.
ix.
The next day I thought about Marcus and Elena. I thought back to what they had said about Henry. I thought about Elena’s warped impression of me, which filled me with anxiety, and that subsequently led to a desire to build bridges. I wanted to let Henry know that I cared about him, before he went to America. I tapped onto his Facebook profile and sent him a message. I apologized for my behaviour at the funeral. Then I wrote:
Marcus told me that you’re leaving
don’t worry, I’m not stalking Marina’s family or anything
They asked me specifically to help clear out her room
I just wanted to check you’re ok