I careered between absolute confidence—there was nothing to uncover; she’d give up eventually—and the most extraordinary panic. But I should admit that my fear was escalating. I became convinced that she’d find the one loose thread that would reveal my involvement.
I replied to her email at the end of the month. It was a Friday. I should have been visiting Marnie, but she’d called me on the Monday to say that she’d been invited to the launch of a new restaurant, and could we please pause our plans for just one week. I stayed late at my desk and when the work was finished—all of it; even the tasks that had been on my to-do list for months—I responded to her email.
I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to reply. But thank you for the apology.
What do you think? Was it too sycophantic? I wanted her to like me.
I’m concerned that you’ve become obsessed with us, and really we’re not worth your time.
It was obvious that her fascination was more than academic.
There’s nothing further to find. My husband died in a tragic accident. The same is true of Charles, who—as you already know—was my best friend’s husband. It’s devastating, and a horrible coincidence, but really that’s all this is. I expect that this email is redundant by now.
I didn’t.
I’m sure your investigations have led you to this conclusion. So it’s probably not even worth me saying this, but I’d be really grateful if you would stop investigating us, and stop writing about us, because we really need to find a way to move on with our lives.
She replied seconds after I pressed send.
Let’s meet.
I replied: No, thank you.
She wrote I have something you’ll want to see.
I think that’s unlikely. I replied. But tell me what it is, and I’ll let you know.
I looked around the empty office. It was nearly nine o’clock and everyone else had left hours earlier. I gave my phone a small shake, as though that might knock loose the next message. But my inbox was still empty. I ran my thumb down the screen of my phone, refreshing my emails again and again. I kept it lit up on the office kitchen counter as I washed my mug in the sink. I kept it in my hand as I switched off my computer. I turned it off and on again after pulling on my coat, as though something might have happened in my sleeve. I kept it held in front of me as I walked out of the building and toward the station.
I lay in bed that night with it beside me on my pillow, the volume turned right up. I was shocked by every single message: the automated complaints update that arrived late in the evening, emails from retailers that had gathered my details without my consent, a generic travel update with information for the following day.
But there was nothing from Valerie.
I waited and waited, but I must have fallen asleep eventually because just moments later the alarm on my phone was ringing; it was time to get up and visit my mother. I did as I always did: going into the bathroom, having a shower, getting ready. Which, of course, was when the message then arrived.
I found it when I returned to my bedroom ten minutes later, one towel fastened around my chest and another like a bandage shrouding my hair. I tried to keep my head steady as I read.
Something happened the week before, she had written. I don’t know what. But your neighbors (they seem like fun girls) were leaving after midnight to go out and they saw you return. They said that you were dripping wet and that it looked as though you were crying. It’s no secret that you went to visit Marnie and Charles every Friday. They said you normally returned around eleven. So what happened that week?
“Nothing,” I said aloud. And then: “Shit.”
I knew that I had to reply, because my silence could be misinterpreted. But I didn’t know what to write. Because I couldn’t confess the argument without giving myself a motive. And it wasn’t just the content of her message that had startled me, but her means of acquiring that information, her so-called evidence. She had been in my building. She had been right outside my flat. She had been speaking to my neighbors.
I sat on my bed and the towel wrapped around my head fell loose and my hair dripped cold down my back.
Crying? No. But I was certainly drenched, so it might have looked that way. I walked home from their flat that evening. Which is why I was so much later and so much wetter than normal. But there’s nothing more to it than that.
I pressed send.
You shouldn’t stare, you know. It’s rude. And don’t you know that some people really do enjoy walking in the rain? They find it refreshing. It’s bracing, in a way, to be so close to nature.
She didn’t reply.
I reread her messages from the previous day and clicked the link in the signature block at the bottom of one of them. It took me straight to her website. And there—again, in red type and in block capitals—were the following words:
BE PATIENT. THERE’S MORE TO COME.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
February came and went and I didn’t hear from Valerie again, and there were no updates on her website. I was still working all the sunlight hours and, even when the clocks shifted forward, I didn’t see daytime. I saw nearly no one that month, other than Marnie. She cooked for me, as she always had, and she talked about her pregnancy: how it felt physically—the stretching and aching and straining—and emotionally, too—the weight of being responsible for another life.
“It’s so strange to be here without him,” she said every time we saw each other. “I can feel him in this building. I can smell him sometimes: his aftershave, and a very masculine, slightly musky smell that always makes me think of him.”
“But it’s important,” she would say, “to focus on the future.” She would tell me about new opportunities: she’d been sent baby bowls with suction bases that stuck to tables and was considering dedicating a space on her website to recipes for children. “I can’t simply marinate in my grief,” she said more than once. “I have to build a life for me and for the baby.”
She often talked about the years ahead, and what came next, and how her life might look without him in it. And sometimes it seemed that she forgot to mention me. I felt as though it was my responsibility to reinsert myself into the story.
“I could come and live here for a little bit,” I said.
“Oh, that’s kind,” she replied. “But I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”
“I can come around all the time,” I said. “I’ll help however I can.”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Although I reckon we might need peace and quiet in the first few weeks.”
I felt sure that she’d change her mind. I had once looked ahead to a life with children and I had known that she would still be central in every single way. I saw us together in coffee shops, and on walks in the park with a pram, and passing a baby between us. I felt sure that she would need me. Because everyone says how exhausting it can be, caring for a newborn, and that it takes a village, and how essential it is to have friends and family nearby.
It didn’t occur to me that I might not be the right sort of friend for this next stage of her life.
* * *
I was busy at work. I recruited five new people, two women and three men. The business was growing exponentially—more and more orders each week, new retailers adopting our platform, a permanent sense of panic as our systems, our staff, our setup all proved too immature to handle such a step up.
I sat at the head of a table in the Customer Services Unit. My table was called “Zadie.” Apparently, women’s names made people more comfortable, more at ease, and so every workstation in the building—from the loading bays to the offices on the eighth floor—shared equally ladylike titles. Curiously, there was no Jane. I think the CEO preferred girly, feminine options, names that ended in “-y” or “-ie.”
My new employees sat on the benches on either side of Zadie. The two women
were in their fifties, both recently divorced and desperately in need of a regular wage. There were two young men, new graduates hoping to earn a quick income to bolster their wallets so that they might travel the world: surfing and diving and skiing and seducing naive eighteen-year-olds on gap years. The oldest man was in his early forties. His name was Peter. He’d worked in a bank for over a decade, receiving a six-figure salary and a matching bonus. Until two years before. He had been sitting at his desk in a spacious corner office in a redbrick building in the city when his heart began to accelerate faster and faster, until he felt like it would explode within his chest. He had felt his lungs fill with water, his heart pulsing and pounding and thundering against his ribs, his eyes swelling in their sockets. He had clutched at his chest and his breathing had grown shallower and shallower until eventually he’d lost consciousness.
After a series of tests and checks and scans, he was told that he was fine, nothing medically wrong, all good on all counts. He went back to work the following day and, that afternoon, his heart exploded again. And then the next day, the same thing happened. And then the day after that. Until eventually Peter stopped going to work and simply stayed at home. His doctor diagnosed stress—“as though it were an illness,” he said in his interview, “as well as a state of mind”—and signed him off. Which put an end to the panic attacks. But contributed to the onset of a deep and sticky depression.
He was so honest. He said that the months had stretched into a year, until he’d finally found the courage to attend twelve sessions of counseling in a poky room in a small terraced house in the suburbs. He’d tried to focus on the garish wallpaper and the hand-drawn bluebirds frozen in a moment, or the squelch of the leather chair beneath him, or the thin gray hairs on his therapist’s upper lip, her dangling earrings that skimmed the tops of her shoulders. But she’d outsmarted him and, somewhat unwillingly, he’d found himself revealing his truth: the secrets he’d tucked deep within himself decades ago and the way he really felt about things and people and life (even when his thoughts weren’t thoughts one ought to have about things and people and life).
I was drawn to him immediately, instinctively. He had all the right skills—talking to customers and inputting data—and he said he wanted to start at the bottom rung again, to work his way up the corporate ladder in a more measured way. He owned his every failing in a way that felt completely alien. And not only was he honest with himself, but he was also honest with me, a stranger, yes, but his interviewer, too. I found it so impossible to comprehend. Why would he choose to tell the truth?
Back then, I couldn’t have predicted this moment: me being honest, recounting my lies.
Peter was my favorite of the five new employees. He was also the most competent. He was a natural problem solver. The customers seemed to like him. And the computers liked him, too, which was often the most challenging part of the job. When he was around, I was happier, better at my job, more efficient and driven and confident. I was glad that I’d hired him.
On the last day of March—just six weeks after my new recruits had started—I arrived in the office just after eight o’clock and opened my inbox to find an email from my boss, sent at half past seven, asking me to come to his office immediately, because there was something we needed to discuss and it was important.
I turned around, back toward the elevators, and squeezed in with a dozen others, all on their way to the top floors in their neat skirt suits and pinstripe jackets. My trainers squeaked against the polished tiles. As they exited, at floors five and six and seven, I saw them looking at me, wondering what on earth I was doing heading toward the eighth floor. I suppose they, too, assumed that I was about to be fired.
My boss had an office that overlooked the city, a single-paned glass window stretching from one side of the room to the other. He was sitting at his desk. His tie was undone around his neck and he had shadows beneath his eyes, his dark skin sallow, as though the warmth had been siphoned from within him. The door was open, but I knocked beneath his nameplate regardless. Duncan Brin. Director of Customer Service.
He jolted and glanced up. “Jane,” he said. “Come in. Sit down. Do you need anything? Coffee?”
I shook my head.
“You’re early. Not that I’m surprised by that. I’ve been hearing lots of good things about you.”
I felt my shoulders relax, my stomach unfurl, and I sank into the too-low armchair, which was actually an ordinary office chair disguised as something more elegant and which then spun unexpectedly on its axis. I drilled my feet into the floor to hold myself steady.
“In fact, I’ve not only been hearing good things, but seeing the result of those good things myself. Do you know what I’m talking about? I think you do. We’re up on calls, you know that, but we’re up on customers, too—good for us—so that’s not much of a surprise. Not a lot to be done on that front. But what we can do—and what you are doing—is dropping the percentage of customers who call back to complain a second time because they aren’t happy with our initial response. And, more than that, the processes you’re putting in place based on data collected by your team are drastically reducing the number of customers who call at all. Against the overall number of orders, we got a third fewer calls in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last. That’s quite something, right? And that’s your team. Your work. Your recruits. And we wanted to recognize that. Don’t look so frightened. This is good news. We’d like to promote you.”
He reached into his drawer and slid an envelope across the desk. It had my name typed on the front in small black capitals.
“There’s a lot more detail in there, but the gist of it is we’d like you to be our Senior Customer Service Manager. We want you on the strategy. Drilling into the numbers. We want you to keep doing what you’re doing—train up that team!—and doing more of it. Can you do that?”
I nodded. There was barely the space for me to interject and I didn’t know what I’d have said if I could.
“Well, take this, check you’re happy, sign, and get it back to HR. Effective immediately. Well done, Jane. Go-getters. That’s what we’re looking for. Now back to it. Lots more getting to be gotten downstairs.”
I’m not going to pretend that this encounter felt anything other than ridiculous. Duncan Brin was a strange man at best. He spoke only in short sentences and he often shouted them, and he had a bizarre array of hand gestures that accompanied his every word. But odd as it was, it was rather nice, too.
Here was a place in which I mattered. Here was a place in which my efforts were recognized. I meant something to someone. I went back to my desk and I told my new team, and Peter went out at lunchtime and returned with a brown paper bag from the bakery.
“It’s a celebratory muffin,” he said. “For you. To say well done.”
Chapter Thirty
I wish the day had ended there. It didn’t.
Peter and I worked late. I had been developing a new software system for months, and we were going live in just a few weeks. The other four excused themselves between five and six, rushing back to their parents or to their children, to see friends in the pub or to watch the latest play at the National. But Peter had no one to go home to—his wife had left him somewhere in the midst of his depression—and there was no one waiting for me, either.
“You’re a fool,” said Peter, lifting his head above his monitor.
“Pardon?” I replied, thinking I’d misheard.
“You’re a fool, Jane,” he repeated.
I was shocked but not unpleasantly so. I didn’t doubt that I was a fool and in a great many ways. And I felt sure that Peter was a wise man and I was eager to hear what he had to say. I wanted to be distracted.
He smiled and nodded his head in the direction of the large white clock that hung above the door. It had just gone midnight.
“Get it?” he said.
I shook
my head.
“April Fools’.” He grinned and I felt disappointed, and also stupid for feeling disappointed, and also somewhat charmed by his ridiculous humor.
“Oh, very good,” I said. “Although the same can be said for you. We’re both here far too late when there must be something else out there for us to be doing.”
We stared at each other for a moment and it felt nice. In among all the shit that seemed to be floating to the surface, here was something good. I was—for the first time in a long time—being recognized for my contribution and, more than that, here was someone who liked me enough to tease me. I thought that maybe the summer wouldn’t be so bad that year, that perhaps I’d be suitably joyful and buoyant and bright. But it didn’t last long. Don’t you know now that it never does?
Because then my phone rang and we both sat straight up in our seats, startled not only by the noise itself but by its alarming sound, the sharp tinkling tune, too cheery and high-pitched for the middle of the night.
“I better get this,” I said, lifting the phone to my cheek. “Hello?”
“I’ve been trying to get through to a Mrs. Jane Black.” The woman’s voice was clipped, her accent posh and her tone formal. “But I’ve been . . . Well, I’ve spoken to a great number of people who are not Mrs. Jane Black. Have I . . . Are you . . . ?”
“I’m Jane,” I said. I swiveled in my seat so that I was no longer facing Peter. “You’re through to the right person now. Sorry,” and then I added, in a voice similar to hers, “for the inconvenience.”
“My name is Lillian Brown. I’m a nurse. I’m calling from St. Thomas’ Hospital. We have you down as the next of kin for a . . .” The pause as she bent her head to check her notes felt eternal, the rustling of pages and the hiss of her finger against the paper, searching for the right name. “For a Ms. Emma Baxter. Is that right?”
Seven Lies Page 21