So sea bass with lemongrass and Sancerre followed, and Eddy and I did indeed manage to talk about the financial settlement, though I was left with the disquieting impression that he didn’t actually say all that much. Clearly the fair thing to do was for each of us to keep what we had owned before we met – me the house; he his po-faced ‘loft apartment’ in Hills Road, where he had held court in bachelor princedom before our marriage. Each to our own – our own cars, our own furniture. We could come to some arrangement about the things we had bought together – which over a little less than three years did not amount to very much.
He regarded me with those wide grey eyes, nodding, and I was encouraged by the lack of opposition (then again, why should he object?) but now that I thought about it, I could not recall any actual agreement.
‘So what do you think about that?’ I asked him. I felt flushed and oddly relaxed – we are going to get through this, I thought. We are going to negotiate this like grown-ups, and maybe, perhaps in time . . .
‘I think we need more wine.’
‘That’s a given,’ I said wryly. ‘But what do you think about the plan for mediation?’
He glanced into his glass, offered it a tiny smile and put it on the table.
‘I think, why are we talking about this now?’ he said, turning that smile on me. ‘I thought the rule was that after ten we didn’t discuss business.’
Lily’s wall clock said it was ten o’clock exactly.
‘That rule was for work, not business,’ I murmured, unaccountably blushing. ‘And it applied when we were still married.’ I drew back into my corner of the couch.
But he was leaning forward, his arm snaking up the sofa towards me.
‘Margot,’ he said, in that sultry golden voice of his, ‘we are still married.’
I opened my mouth to object, to draw away, but his lips were on mine, and he tasted so good, so sweet, and I’d been so lonely. I was opening up to him, letting his arms meet around my back, feeling his hard chest and tight belly against me, and I was shaking, I wanted him so badly, I . . .
I . . .
What the hell was I doing?
I pushed him away. ‘No.’
He rocked back, clearly surprised, as I ducked out from under him and rolled straight to my stockinged feet.
‘I think you need to leave.’ I folded my arms tightly across my chest.
‘Margot,’ he pushed his blond hair out of his eyes, as though stunned at my changeability. ‘What’s the matter?’
I was trembling, the floor shaking beneath my feet.
‘You left me for another woman and now you’re here on a booty call, that’s what the matter is.’ I rubbed at my face, which now felt cold and damp, like the rest of me – drained and humiliated. ‘How dare you? How fucking dare you?’
‘I didn’t see you objecting . . .’
‘Pay attention, Eddy. This is me objecting. This is me objecting right now.’ I flung out my arm and pointed to the door. ‘You sleazy bastard. Put your shoes on and get the fuck out.’
Something flashed in his face then, a series of emotions at war with desire. Should he be conciliatory, apologetic? Should he feign ignorance of what had offended me? Should he be cheeky, seductive? But mostly he wanted to be angry that I had exposed him, and that was what won out.
‘You’re mental, Margot. You’re crazy.’
‘Get out!’ I bellowed. My own shame was vanishing now, consumed by a very real anger, a furious rage. ‘Get out of my house and don’t come back!’
2
‘I don’t know why you make me do these things,’ Chris says. His voice is broken, as though he’s on the brink of tears. ‘Why can’t we just be happy? Why can’t you just be grateful?’
Katie does not reply, does not seem to be expected to, even though he has removed the gag. He’s not even looking at her, in any case. Her chest hurts and her right side, from shoulder to hip, aches as she huddles on the dirty tartan blanket.
She had tried to hit him with the mug and its scalding contents and run for the door, but she gained only a few seconds before he caught up with her, and his fury had been terrifying, unlike anything she could have imagined. She’d been sure that she would die, and was surprised to find, in the aftermath, as she wheezed through bruised ribs, that she hadn’t.
He threw her down the steps, back into her cellar prison, and left her there without food and water for a long time.
This is his first reappearance.
‘I have tried and tried my best for you.’ He rubs at his sallow face with a kind of frantic energy, which she knows bodes ill. ‘You girls, you’re all the same.’
Katie remains silent. She has been a prisoner in the cellar for . . . four, no, maybe five weeks. She would strike off the days on the stone as a calendar, except that she has no way of telling when one day has ended and another begun. Anyway, marking the stone might make her captor angry, and Katie will do anything, anything at all, to prevent that from happening again – though whatever she does, it’s never quite enough.
‘What do you think would happen if I turned you over, eh? If the others got wind of you, got their hands on you? You can’t imagine the things they’d do to you.’ His eyes are huge, almost comical, though she knows better than to laugh. ‘They’re ruthless. They know no mercy, I tell you. There’d be nothing left of you but a red wet stain on the floor.’
She has heard this story many, many times before. He tells it again and again, almost word for word, as though it is a script, an oath, a prayer. He is part of a gang, which seizes and holds young girls for sex. She is constantly being told how fortunate she is that Chris has protected her so far from their more violent demands. He could revoke this protection at any moment.
All Katie knows is that she has to hang on until somebody finds her, or Chris makes a mistake. She imagines rescuing avengers charging in here, sweeping her up in their arms. To her surprise, it is not her dad she dreams of coming down here and beating Chris to within an inch of his life while her mum carries her to safety, but Brian; his huge beefy arms, his soft blue eyes that can go very hard indeed if, as he often says, someone “is taking the piss”.’
Chris swipes at his own eyes with his fingers.
‘Why do you do this, Katie? Why?’
Now he does seem to want an answer.
She thinks for a moment, and because she is young and convinced that evil is not a universal condition, because the longing to be back with her mum and Brian is a physical ache as terrible as her crushed ribs, she tells the truth:
‘I just want to go home.’
She bursts into tears.
Her voice is tiny, quavering in the dark space, but still he flinches, as though she has slapped him, and his little red eyes swivel down to her, with their ever-present rage and a tinge of fear.
‘What are you on about? I already told you. You can’t go home. You’re dead if you go home.’
‘I know, you said, but . . .’
His fist hits her hard in the temple, and her teeth clack together, stamping her tongue with cuts. Her mouth fills with blood.
‘Do you think I’m lying? Is that it? DO YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SOW?!’
He launches himself at her.
And as the terrible evening wears on, she finds at one point she is lying on her belly, her cheek crushed into the stone floor. On the wall opposite, under the swaying light of the bulb, she can see thin words etched on to the bricks nearest the floor, like hen scratchings. From here she can read them: ‘12/1/1998 BETHAN AVERY’.
3
It was Saturday morning, and only just dawn. The rehearsals for the school play over at St Hilda’s started at ten – we were putting on The Duchess of Malfi for Christmas, and we’d all taken to calling it, behind the head’s back, ‘The Anti-Nativity’. Estella, the drama teacher, managed our teenage actors and Lily, the art teacher and my comrade-in-arms during the interminable staff meetings the head held, was leading the costume and set design side of
things. I was there more in the capacity of a runner than anything, but it was all good fun, and later Lily and I would have a late lunch and a gossip in town.
At the moment, it was a good thing to keep busy.
I was faintly hung-over – feeling seedy but not sufficiently so to justify any more time spent in bed. I threw the covers off, willing myself to get up, finding I didn’t quite have it in me.
Eddy, I thought to myself, with a sick lurch of guilt and regret.
I forced myself on to my feet anyway. I felt worn out. I had dreamed of Bethan Avery. Before climbing into bed, I had Googled her, and spent hours on a Wikipedia trail full of stolen children and their murderers, each link leading to a new page, before I had dropped the whole thing in disgust and headed for bed.
But the damage had been done, and I had tossed and turned all night long, rebuilding the dead girl in my dreams. All I remembered now was someone offering me a thighbone wrapped in silk. ‘Oh God,’ I’d replied, paralysed with dread. ‘Is that Katie’s? No, no, it’s Bethan’s. Definitely Bethan’s.’
I also remembered Eddy was crying on the couch but wouldn’t tell me why, keeping his face covered with his hands. It had shocked me. I found it nearly impossible to imagine Eddy crying over anything.
I shuffled downstairs to make a cup of tea. I shoved our wine glasses into the dishwasher, deliberately forcing myself not to remember the humiliating events of the previous evening. I sat down in my nightshirt at the kitchen table and shivered – the kitchen has always been a cold room.
Through the window I could see the violent rose-gold of a brilliant dawn. It was going to be a pretty day.
I forced myself into my run, driving out my ghosts with each step, and when I got back I made sourdough toast and tea while I considered the early papers. After an hour or so of letting my tea grow cold, I decided that I wouldn’t entirely fritter the morning away. I had the other ‘Dear Amy’ letters to answer. I emptied out the contents of my bag and immediately put the essays back inside it. No thank you.
The letters lay tumbled out in front of me. I picked up one with an expensive-looking watermarked envelope, directed in a light, sloping hand. It contained a short missive admonishing me for mentioning that adoption or abortion was a possibility for the fifteen-year-old in last week’s issue, who had grown great with child after a night of passion with a member of the local rugby club.
The next was from a woman who I was sure had written before about the same thing: a husband who beat her up for her child benefit, after pissing his own allowance away down the village pub – a woman who needed a dialogue, not the occasional one-off. I read it again, rubbing my temples, and once more considered tracking her down before dismissing the idea. It would be a gross breach of faith and confidentiality. Instead I listed the women’s organizations I knew, with a note that I used to volunteer for the nuns in a women’s refuge and could vouch for the work they carried out.
The third was the killer. A lonely old man wrote an heroic elegy to his dead wife, describing wandering through his Edithless house; touching her things, arranging her photographs, passing the flowers she had planted, dead in their boxes and tubs. His children were trying to persuade him to go into a home, and though he couldn’t blame them, he wasn’t going to move away from Edith’s house. He could never have borne it. Still, it was terribly lonely, all the same.
I wrote the standard reply, listing all the local help groups and social clubs, but it was plain to see that he didn’t want social clubs. He wanted Edith.
After that I packed it in for the day.
After rehearsals, Lily treated me to lunch at the Oak Bistro, and despite the oncoming winter the day was bright and crisp and even a little warm, as though it had wandered in lost from another season. Boldly, we decided to eat in the walled garden, in splendid isolation. I ordered the tiger prawn linguine; Lily, raging carnivore that she is, went for the chargrilled rib eye without comment or apology.
It’s one of the things I really love about her.
‘You should ask them for a sabbatical at that paper,’ said Lily as we waited for our food, crossing her legs before her and making her elaborate patent-leather high-heeled boots creak.
‘The Examiner? What? Why?’
‘Don’t you have enough on your plate?’
I shrugged and regarded the contents of my glass of Prosecco. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘It’s a divorce, Margot, not a particularly large gas bill.’
‘Both are common.’
‘Oh, don’t do this,’ she said, tossing her long hair over her shoulder. This month, it was white-blonde with lavender streaks and mint-green tips.
‘Do what?’
‘Minimize everything. It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing. All it does is piss people off because they know it’s not true and then it will make you sick again . . . don’t look at me like that.’
I kept looking at her, in that way I was not supposed to be looking at her.
‘Margot, I’m warning you . . .’
‘I’m still not seeing what good whining about my woes to the world will do.’ I put the glass down. ‘Besides, he dumped me for someone richer and prettier . . .’
‘And older.’
I managed a rueful smile. ‘It’s just too embarrassing to discuss in public. Better educated, too, which is the thing that stings most.’
‘Better educated.’ Lily snorted, her red lips contorted into a scowl. ‘She’s a professor in metallurgy. How’s that meant to make you a better person? How do you hold together a truly riveting dinner party with your anecdotes about smelting and mass-scale lead production?’
I burst out laughing.
‘It’s indium tin production,’ I corrected her. ‘They use it for touch-screens.’
‘There, see? It was so utterly fascinating the first time you told me that it stuck in my memory.’ She topped up her glass and mine. ‘Honestly, Margot, you’re worth ten of her. Ten of him, if we’re getting down to brass tacks. Greedy fucking chancer that he is.’
‘Lily . . .’
‘Well . . . it’s true.’ She reached into her bag, her heavy bangles clattering against one another. ‘Never mind him now. I’ve something to show you, I finished it this morning in rehearsals.’
She pulled out her sketchpad and handed it to me. It was a picture of our latest staff meeting, in two panels. The first was entitled ‘How We See Him’, and it was a caricature of Ben, the headmaster, leaning over his desk, shouting at us. His face was dark with rage. He sported a judge’s wig and full academic gown, and was carrying a huge paddle. The three of us – Lily, Estella, and I, sat in chairs opposite, only we were tiny little girls in pigtails and school uniforms, clearly terrified.
The next panel was called ‘How He Sees Us’, and this time, Ben was the tiny boy in school uniform, cowering in front of us. The three of us relaxed before him on what looked like thrones carved out of bones – she’d drawn us all as female monsters out of antiquity. Estella the harpy flexed a pair of wings and her birds’ talons crossed over each other at the ankles; Lily’s long hair was a cloud of hissing, multi-coloured snakes, and I sat on the end, leathery bat wings sprouting from my back, curved fangs gnashing against my bottom lip as I leaned forward, glaring at Ben, caressing the razor-wire whip in my clawed hands.
She had, in her light quick pencil strokes, captured me as one of the Erinyes: a Fury, an ancient Greek goddess tasked with hounding sinners to madness and death.
I laughed out loud.
‘I love it!’ I said. ‘It’s my new favourite portrait of me. Makes me look so much more approachable than the picture on the school website.’
She smiled, proud and pleased.
‘I thought you’d like it,’ she said. ‘And that whole chaotic . . .’
‘Chthonic . . .’
‘. . . Underworld goddess of vengeance and rage thing suits you.’ She took the pad off me and peeled the sheet off. ‘If you’d kept up that look at home, E
ddy would never have dared to go elsewhere.’
I snorted out another horrified laugh. ‘You’re such a cow!’
‘I know,’ she replied with a kind of smug pride. ‘And it’s nice to be appreciated. Here,’ she was writing something along the bottom of the picture. ‘Take this. I drew it for you.’
Along the bottom she had penned, ‘Stay mad! Love, Lily.’
I was touched, suddenly terribly moved, and I realized I was in danger of bursting into tears. Because she was right – it had been tough, horribly tough, and humiliating and isolating and all the rest.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ I wiped at my eyes. ‘Thank you.’
She grinned. ‘Don’t say anything. Look, the food’s here. Let’s eat.’
Lily had to get back to her kids, and rather than return to my empty home I took the long route through Coe Fen, alongside the river, to get back to the Corn Exchange.
I struck off along the path through the marshes. I love it around here, especially in the autumn, when the tourists have eased off and the mist and the bowing shapes of the willows are at their most magical. I crunched through the wet, dead leaves. The path turned towards the Mill pub, and I followed it, enjoying the way the rain had made the place smell, while the river lapped softly beside me with its flotillas of parked punts, and the ducks struggled and bickered with one another. Somewhere a long way off a bonfire was burning, and the scent whipped briefly past my nose. It would be Bonfire Night soon, which pleased me, since I love fireworks. This year we would invite . . . but of course, I recalled, with a bewildered and sinking disappointment, we wouldn’t invite anyone over for Bonfire Night because Eddy didn’t live in the house any more and we were getting divorced.
I would have to get some treacle toffee together before then, I told myself. I’m a dab hand at the treacle toffee, me. In fact, I quite fancied some right now.
I had to pass by the Examiner offices to get to the sweet shop, and after briefly weighing up my alternatives, I went in.
There was a letter for me.
Dear Amy Page 3