Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  He shrugged—he didn’t need to use words to convey his meaning: I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about—and I looked at her over my shoulder.

  She was still wearing her apron. It was gray with white detailing and white rope tied around her waist and around her neck. She had a dishcloth in her hand, damp, ready to wipe the place mats. Her head was tilted to the left and her eyes were pinched, squinting at me over the dining table.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. She was looking right at me.

  But before I could reply, she turned to Charles. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Jane?” she said. “What is this?”

  It was too late.

  “He touched you. That’s what you said, isn’t it? When exactly did he touch you?”

  I knew that she was angry, but I was too stupid to realize that she wasn’t angry on my behalf. My heart was thundering in my chest. I know that if I looked down I would see it trembling beneath my clothing and my skin. My palms were clenched, clammy.

  I wanted to say, Oh, nothing, but Charles had puppeteered me into a corner and it was too late to pretend that I had said anything other than what it was that I had actually said. He was smart. And he was a very good liar. Perhaps he was so good that he believed his own nonsense or maybe he was just incredibly convincing, but either way he was cunning enough to trap me in my own truth.

  He’d maneuvered me into the edge of the web and I couldn’t escape with a lie.

  “What exactly are you accusing my husband of?”

  I had hoped that the truth might be greeted with some semblance of compassion, that she might choose to trust me, to fix this problem with me. But I knew then where her favor lay and I knew that it wasn’t with me. And—frankly—I had been ridiculous to hope otherwise. Emma had found the space in which to doubt me. And so of course Marnie would, too. Maybe you will as well.

  Her fingers quivered as she lowered the cloth to the table. Her pale face was flushed. Red blotches were flowering on her neck and mushrooming toward her chest.

  “Well?” she insisted.

  “He assaulted me,” I said. “At your wedding. I’m really sorry, Marnie, but—”

  “Assaulted?” she said, and her voice was steady, deeper than normal.

  Her eyes darted between us.

  I looked at Charles and he was flawless, so clever and so much better prepared than I was. His face was the perfect blend of apprehension—his eyes said, She needs help—and frustration—his tight jaw insisting, You can’t possibly believe this nonsense, can you?—and his posture screaming, I haven’t got a fucking clue what the hell is going on.

  “Yes,” I said, and I looked down at my hands clasped in my lap. “Assaulted.”

  “An arm around your shoulder? That’s what this is. A shoulder?” She was shouting by then, the pitch of her voice unsteady, as though she might cry. “Seriously, Jane. Is that what you’re on about? Is that all this is? Because, seriously, then you need to—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “Not just that. Not at all. He groped me,” I said. The words felt uncomfortable in my mouth. “He put his hand over my top, the top of my dress. And I didn’t say anything then; it didn’t seem right, not on your wedding day. But I had to say something. Can’t you see that I had to say something?”

  She tilted her head and looked at Charles and raised her eyebrow, asking a quiet question. I couldn’t interpret it and so I just continued.

  “I think he would have gone further,” I said, “if you hadn’t come over. I think he was . . . What were you thinking?” I turned to Charles. “If I’d encouraged you. Would you? Or was it just to make me feel small? It’s always that, isn’t it? Because you like to feel bigger and better than everyone else.”

  “Jane . . .” he said. “I’m not sure . . . I don’t know what’s happening here, but I wasn’t looking for anything.”

  He stood up and went to stand beside Marnie, slipping his arm around her waist, coiling his hand into the rope waistband of her apron and rubbing the fabric between his fingers. I felt like a child, caught in a row on the other side of my parents, they towering above me, dictating the facts, I withering in the face of confrontation.

  And then his tone changed and he was angry.

  “Jesus, Jane!” he shouted. Marnie flinched. “It was my wedding day. And you’re my wife’s best friend. I don’t know what you think happened, but . . . for fuck’s sake. My God. No.”

  Marnie nodded slowly and it didn’t really matter if he believed his own story because she certainly did. Her face was thunderous, her eyes lit like candles on a birthday cake, flickering with rage.

  He thought he had trapped me, but there is always another lie, a better lie.

  One day, at some point in your future, someone will tell you that lies breed lies and they will be right, but they will say it as though it is a problem when in fact it is the solution.

  “He said that he wanted me, that he’d always liked talking to me; he asked if I felt the same way,” I said. “His hand was touching me through my dress, and he was fiddling with the edge of the fabric, fingering it, the seams of it. When it was only his hand on me, touching me, I couldn’t be sure, you know. It might have just been too much to drink, not thinking, not noticing what he was doing. But when he started talking, then I knew,” I said. “I knew it was intentional.”

  And she was unsure again.

  And was that a lie? Really? Because I truly think that another two minutes and that’s exactly what would have happened; he’d have said something just like that—I know he would have—because that was the man Charles was. He knew how to use words to manipulate, to construct a story. And the words gave credence to an action that on its own was deemed insubstantial, unimportant, in no way noteworthy.

  But, yes, okay. It was a lie. That was the third lie I told Marnie.

  It would be the last lie I’d tell her while Charles was alive.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Marnie asked me to leave. After everything had been said and not said, she stood up straight and said, “I think you should go now.”

  I sat shocked and didn’t move.

  “You can leave,” she repeated. “Now. Please.”

  Charles and I looked at each other and I could tell that we were thinking the same thing, that neither of us could confidently read Marnie’s expression. We could see that she wasn’t happy, not at all, but the anger had dissipated, replaced instead by something less clear. I didn’t recognize the sharpness of her eyes, her pinched lips, rosy as ever but pressed tightly together. Her skin was sallow and heavy, the weight of it sinking into her jaw.

  I saw him tighten his grip around her waist, a gentle squeeze.

  She didn’t respond. She was frozen, her hands fixed against her hips.

  I stood up.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” I said. “But only if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  Did I think she might reconsider? I certainly hoped so. But she didn’t.

  “I’m sure,” she replied.

  I walked into the hallway and plucked my raincoat from the row of pegs. My umbrella had been propped against the radiator and had left a puddle of water sliding across the wooden floor. I put my hand on the doorknob and then turned back to look at them. They were standing exactly as they had been before, side by side, his arm around her waist, but they were now peering over their shoulders and staring at me as though to make sure that, after all of that, I really did leave.

  I let myself out and walked home. It took hours and the rain was relentless, but it was exactly what I needed in that moment. I needed to feel the water soaking through my shoes and my socks and my feet wrinkling within. I needed to feel the wind pulling at my umbrella, to have something to fight against. I needed to march, to stamp, to feel the water splash at my ankles and my elb
ows grazing my hip bones.

  I stood outside my flat and rifled through my bag for my key, and by the time I had found it and let myself in, so much water had dripped onto the carpet that a patch of the taupe fabric was damp, a murky brown. I had a hot shower and turned up the heating and I lay in bed and I couldn’t sleep. I needed to be somewhere else. London was too big and too busy, the people too fraught and stretched, the air too dense and angry.

  I set my alarm and I was still awake when it echoed around my bedroom several hours later. The sun was finally shining and I went to visit my mother—briefly, she didn’t recognize me and I didn’t have the patience for her relentless questions and generic nonsense—and then caught another train, not back toward the city, but farther away, following in the footsteps of a younger version of myself.

  I arrived at Beer in the early afternoon. I had only a small rucksack. I went straight to our hotel, barely recognizing that my legs were propelling me in that direction. Our room was available, just for the one night, on the first floor at the end of the corridor and with the window overlooking the beach.

  I left my bag on the bed and walked outside, toward the coast.

  I stood and stared and watched as the waves rolled in; the sun was out and yet they were angry, smacking against the pebble beach.

  “This way,” I heard him say. “Let’s go this way.”

  I turned toward the cliffs, retracing the path I had walked four years earlier. The beachfront was busy, a draw for young families on a summer holiday and couples in love in their twenties or eighties or anywhere in between. There were very few young women alone, although I can’t have been the first to bring her heartbreak to the beach. There were parasols and sand castles and children shivering in striped towels. There were badminton rackets and windbreakers and plastic shovels in reds and yellows and blues.

  I walked away from it all. I climbed the road, trudged along the pavement. The gulls were still there, squawking and flapping their wings overhead, and I wondered if they remembered me as I remembered them.

  I felt closer to Jonathan than I had in months. I hadn’t been near our maisonette since the morning of the marathon; I never returned. It was packed up and sold without my involvement. And I never visit the places we loved. I haven’t been to The Windsor Castle since that evening and I very rarely pass through Oxford Circus. But somehow there, in a place that felt familiar, the ache sort of seemed to ease.

  I reached the café in the next village and I sat on the same picnic bench and I watched the sea from the same spot, and I was frightened by how much my life had changed. And how much I disliked it. I so wanted to be the other me, the one who sat there with her husband at the beginning of a life together. She was optimistic—uncharacteristically so—looking ahead to future anniversaries and new homes and children and a lifetime of laughter and love. I didn’t want to be the newer version, the bitter, cold one who felt permanently unanchored from the life she was meant to lead.

  I wish I could tell you that I have found a way to move past that version of myself. Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could say now that I have let go of the sadness and the anger, that I have found something grounding and stable and secure? But I didn’t. I haven’t.

  There were no fishermen; they must have been there earlier in the day, when I was lying in bed waiting for my alarm, more than a hundred miles away, in a world filled with car horns and smog. I walked along the shore again, underneath the cliffs, the pebbles crunching beneath my soles, still damp from the tide that morning.

  I noticed the cutaway in the overgrowth at the foot of the cliffs. The thornbushes were dense and the gap was barely visible, but I think I was looking for it, trying to find ways to be near to him. I remembered him marching ahead, zigzagging with the path, clambering over the nettles, so focused on the climb.

  I took my time.

  It had rained and the track was still slippery, mud resting against the rocks and in the hollows where the path dipped. The trail was overshadowed by tall branches with thick bushes on either side and I wondered how long it took for the sun to dry out this small thread of a path. I couldn’t see the sea, but I could hear it. I couldn’t see the gulls, but I could hear them, too. I was very much alone, but I knew that the world was still out there, mere minutes away.

  I reached the steps carved into the pathway, heading left and toward the bank above. That was the route I’d chosen the first time. It took me away from Jonathan, although admittedly only for a minute or two. But there is nothing I wouldn’t give now—no sacrifice too extreme—for just a minute or two together.

  I decided to turn right. There were no steps, just the muddy path, drier now that I was higher, but still slimy and unstable. I imagined where his feet had landed and I placed my boots in their long-gone tread. I pressed myself against the cliff edge and I wondered if his body was once here, hugging these very same rocks. I remembered the feel of his hand against my back. His heart would have been beating calm and steady, though mine was floundering in my chest.

  There were nettles ahead, but I felt confident that everything would be all right this time. The sky above me was a glorious blue, not a cloud in sight, and although I have never been a spiritual person—not at all—I knew that he was there with me. I turned, my back against the rock face, and looked out at the sea, at the waves crashing beneath. I felt giddy, as though I was drunk, almost light-headed with the adrenaline.

  I thought I could do it. I thought that I could be as fearless as he once was.

  I was wrong.

  I continued to climb, my palms gripping the cliffs to my left and my feet moving forward, one in front of the other, a straight line, as close to the rocks as I could possibly be. I stepped carefully over the nettles and I kept my eyes up, looking ahead.

  “I will meet you at the top,” I whispered, mainly to myself but also to the space above the sea. “One day,” I said, “I will find you and I will meet you at the top.”

  I noticed that my hands were trembling slightly and found somewhat unexpectedly that I was crying. Breathe, I thought, but I couldn’t. The air kept catching in my throat, and I found that I was inhaling, gasping, over and over again. My breaths kept spilling from my lungs and congealing in my mouth, rushing so fast and so hard that I was shaking, like my bones were separating.

  I tried to balance my trembling body on the edge of that cliff, to keep my feet fixed in place, but I couldn’t. I shrank, sitting, trying to be as small as possible, hoping not to fall, and stayed crumpled there until eventually I was almost still but for the breaths softly shaking in my chest, hiccuping again and again and again.

  At last, I stood and retraced my steps, back toward the fork in the path, sliding my hand along the rocky edge, not thinking, not feeling, trying very hard not to hurt. I took the other route—the steps on the left, the path from the first time—and clambered to the top.

  I had failed. Again.

  I climbed higher up the grassy plinth. I sat down with my legs straight in front of me and facing out toward the sea.

  And then I cried.

  There have been just a few loves in my life, but I think it’s fair to say that the greatest love of all will have been forged in death. I was madly in love with Jonathan when he died. We hadn’t been injured by the crashing waves and blunt traumas of a long and well-lived life. We weren’t threadbare from a lifetime of ordinary love. We were still obsessed by each other, and the things I loved most—his pedantry, his efficiency, his unique way of folding his socks, his tousled hair in the mornings—hadn’t yet become mundane or irritating.

  If I’m being completely honest, I don’t truly believe that they ever would have. He was always the very best. When he poured two glasses of orange juice in the morning and gave me the first and kept the second for himself, because he knew I didn’t like the thicker, bittier juice at the bottom of the carton. When he let me wear his gloves, because my han
ds were cold even though his must have been, too. When he drove the long distances, because I refused to learn to drive, because I hated the thought of sitting still for that long. When I came home from work to the smell of bleach and furniture polish and knew that he’d cleaned the entire place so that I wouldn’t have to, while I had been out with Marnie, having fun, being happy. When he turned out the lights every night when we went to bed, so that I would never have to climb the stairs in the dark. He loved me in a million little ways. He believed in a love that proved itself, again and again, that was present and generous and never unimportant. That love is forever frozen as it was when he left.

  Marnie is my second greatest love. And yet I felt that I had lost her, too. It was a very different loss. Jonathan disappeared all at once. Whereas Marnie was slipping away. I was the sand: solid and static and stuck in one spot. And she was the sea: being sucked from me, siphoned away by a force greater than either of us.

  There had been a moment in which she might have chosen me. She could have asked him to leave instead. She could have stepped away from his arm around her waist. But she didn’t. Because she believed what he was saying, that he was innocent, that the lies were mine. There are some natural disasters so devastating that it is almost impossible to recover all that has been lost.

  I stood and walked along the grassy verge and back toward the hotel. I contemplated settling the bill and heading straight back to London. But I had committed to paying for the room already and so I unpacked my small rucksack and ran a bath so hot that the steam clouded the metal taps and the mirror and filled the room. I undressed and slid beneath the water, feeling it pull at my hair as my face broke back through the surface. The sun was low in the sky, decorating the tiles in shadow. I heard voices floating up from the road underneath my window, a young girl squealing delightedly and the resonating laugh of a much older man.