I picture him at his desk – a mess the last time I saw it, covered in papers, photographs, a sticky tumbler with just a finger of whisky left in it. He once told me sheepishly that a former girlfriend had called his research on Ruth his Ex-Files. He said, back then, ‘I didn’t tell her that I never really thought of Ruth as an ex – that she was somehow too present for that. It probably wouldn’t have helped matters.’
We had to stop seeing Richard a few years ago. It was awful. I wrote the letter at the kitchen table, as my mother lay upstairs, woozy from the medication, explaining that we loved him, that we would always remember him fondly, but that seeing him was too upsetting – his conspiracy theories, his conviction that she was still alive. It never seemed to end – there would always be one more thing, one more sighting that convinced him, and then his conviction would drag us along with him like a maleficent current. The thing is about hope – you have to manage it. Otherwise it takes over, like water. It might keep you afloat for a while, but eventually it’ll rush away like the tide, leaving you stranded. We couldn’t live like that. It got too hard.
After the shock, the sudden intake of breath, Richard is off, garbling apologies, as if I have called to bollock him for another article about Ruth, or related to Ruth. Something that used to happen a lot.
‘I’m so sorry again,’ he says. ‘It was the arrogance of youth. No, it wasn’t that. It’s just I wanted it so much not to be true. I’m so sorry. So sorry again,’ he says tripping over his words. He pauses for a moment, unsure, perhaps, if I’m still there.
The line crackles. I can hear the shallowness of his breath.
‘Richard, something has happened,’ I begin. ‘No, not that. Something else. Do you remember Nunny?’
Alice
‘The thing I find strange,’ Alice says to Christie over what is meant to be a celebratory lunch, ‘is that he lied about her. It’s not as though it matters now.’ She pauses over her chicken salad. There is a lot she wants to discuss with Christie, but she doesn’t want to come across as too obsessed – perhaps she will start with this simple point and work her way to the weird thing. ‘The lie matters, I mean,’ she elaborates. ‘Not what he did before I came along.’
‘Maybe she hurt him. Maybe he hurt her.’ Christie shrugs. ‘Maybe he just can’t remember. It was all so hellishly long ago.’
‘Have you ever forgotten shagging someone?’ Alice smiles. ‘I bet you haven’t …’
‘No,’ Christie starts. ‘But I’m not …’
‘But you’re not George,’ Alice finishes sourly.
Christie’s too polite to say it, but it’s what they’re both thinking. Alice looks down at her plate. She doesn’t want an atmosphere, not today.
‘When did people change?’ asks Christie abruptly.
They are seated very close to the next table. It bothers Alice. The couple next to them are eating in silence. He glances at his phone, scrolling down the screen every few minutes. The woman, in a white cashmere turtleneck, picks at her moules marinière, listening. This lunch at their favourite pub is meant to be a celebration of Alice’s pregnancy now she is feeling better.
She puts her hand on her belly and smiles to herself. A girl. Just what she had wanted. George, predictably, had been more thrown by the news. ‘But I don’t understand women,’ he laughed. ‘You’re all bonkers.’ Alice smiled and said, ‘You might understand this one.’ And he replied, ‘No, she’ll probably mystify me most of all.’
Distracted, she returns her attention to Christie. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘There was a time at St Anthony’s when everything felt so optimistic. People would leave notes and things in my pigeonhole and occasionally cookies – you know, those warm ones you could buy on the high street …’
‘I think that happened once, Christie …’ Alice smiles.
‘Then, at some point, not long before the boys left, it stopped – invitations to parties, all of it. And people stopped looking me in the eye – except you, of course, and George and Teddy – they were different with me.’
No, thinks Alice. It hadn’t been that bad. It hadn’t been that sudden, had it?
‘Maybe it was the Tory thing?’ she says instead. ‘No one really liked Tories then.’
‘Does anyone now?’ Christie puts her wine glass on the table too hard. ‘Did anyone ever?’
‘Christie!’ Alice giggles. But she was right, in a way. Something indefinable had cooled. That’s how she thought of it. At first, there had been cocktail parties and drinking societies – a big gang of friends. And at some point, the others had drifted away. Leaving what, after all these years, felt like a rather claustrophobic core. ‘Do you think about Dan much?’ she asks.
‘Sometimes,’ Christie says carefully. ‘He was unknowable, wasn’t he?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ Alice smiles.
‘Yes. Maybe,’ Christie snorts. ‘Teddy isn’t.’
Alice glances back at the woman next to them picking at her mussels. She thinks of Teddy’s sweaty hands on her knees.
‘I know he fancies you, Al,’ teases Christie. ‘I can just tell,’ she says smoothly, not giving Alice the chance to say anything. ‘Well, I don’t have to sometimes. He’ll just say.’
‘He’ll say, “I fancy Alice?”’ She tries to keep her voice light.
‘Something like that,’ Christie agrees. She takes a gulp of wine. Motherhood has made her a speedy, efficient drinker. ‘Did you fancy Dan?’
Alice shakes her head. ‘He was beautiful, though, wasn’t he?’ She tries to think of Dan’s face, but it’s hard to picture it precisely. His features shift. Tall, dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones. She can’t remember anything concrete. His long legs stretched out in his faded Levis. The way he looked around a room, only giving you half his attention. ‘I don’t miss him,’ she adds coolly. She would never say that in front of George.
‘Does George ever talk about him?’ Christie asks.
‘Never.’ Alice shakes her head. She takes a sip of water, then says quickly, without giving herself time to think about it, ‘Something strange happened.’
‘Something else strange?’ says Christie.
‘Yes,’ says Alice, not knowing quite where to start. ‘Something else strange.’
‘OK.’ Christie waits for her to continue.
‘You’ll think I sound mad.’ Alice glances to her left, where the woman on the next table has paused too, her fork in mid-air, waiting to hear what Alice has to say. ‘But there’s a photo collage on George’s desk – you made it for his thirtieth.’
Christie takes a sip of wine.
‘I was looking at it when I was dusting a while back,’ Alice explains, then smiles slyly. ‘Not dusting exactly.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Christie grins. ‘Checking what he’s been watching on his laptop? I had to show Teddy how to clear his history recently. Honestly, it’s embarrassing – we share a computer …’
‘No,’ says Alice. ‘Not that. Sometimes, I just go in and look for …’
‘Clues?’ Christie laughs.
Alice glances crossly to the woman on the next table, who hastily makes a show of mopping up her sauce with a bit of bread.
‘Something like that. Something to do with what he gets up to – or got up to – when I’m not around …’
‘Darling, honestly.’ Christie rolls her eyes. ‘It’s good to have a few secrets in a marriage.’
Alice waves her hand impatiently. ‘Anyway, after I saw the girl and before George said anything about their fling, I just had a premonition that he knew her, you know? And anyway, there’s this photo on his desk from our university days, from the memorial ball …’ She knows this is where it gets ridiculous.
‘And?’ Christie prompts.
‘I thought I saw a girl with red hair in the corner of the pic.’
‘Oh, Al, that could have been anyone.’
‘And …’ Alice pushes on. ‘I told George: that I thought I’d seen her in the pho
to, but the next time I looked at it, the red hair had gone. It had been cropped out.’
There is silence. Christie puts her fork down.
‘That seems a bit strange,’ she says carefully as if, in truth, it is Alice who seems a bit strange.
Alice feels flushed. Now she’s said the words out loud to another person, they sound ridiculous.
‘Maybe I imagined it the first time.’ She begins to back-pedal. ‘Could I have done? I have been dreaming weirdly since I got pregnant.’
‘Yes,’ Christie nods enthusiastically. ‘Yes, it’s probably something like that. My dreams were always completely bonkers when I was expecting. And I’ve had those lucid dreams before, you know, when they are so realistic and you are in the very room, just doing things slightly differently. That would be it … you dreamed of dusting – or snooping – and you saw the picture in your dream.’
‘Otherwise, what am I saying?’ Alice laughs uncomfortably. ‘That I imagined the girl in the photo? Or that George or someone else’—though, Alice thinks, who else could it be?—‘has cropped her out?’
‘It’s a bit 1984, darling,’ Christie agrees. ‘Rewriting history.’
‘Yes, it is mad,’ Alice agrees. ‘Forget I said anything. I’m just being daft. Seeing that girl at the beginning of the year just brought things back – it’s made me start thinking about the past in a way that’s not healthy.’
‘We all do that sometimes,’ says Christie. ‘Things that might have been.’
‘Look, I know Dan was a big part of our lives back then …’ Alice pauses. ‘I know I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t know if he was a good influence.’ She remembers seeing an ex of Dan’s weeping in the post room – the girl wouldn’t tell her why but she had been inconsolable. ‘There was always something weird about the way he treated women, though I wouldn’t have been able to say that at the time.’ There had been other things: off-colour jokes, a couple of end-of-the-night scenes with his girlfriends – not that Dan would ever have called them girlfriends. Birds, maybe. Pulls.
‘I guess the way all of them treated women was a bit …’ Christie trails off. ‘But they got better, didn’t they? We trained them well.’
Alice nods. This lunch was meant to be a celebration of the future, after all, not the past.
‘Well, now George is going to be a father to a girl himself,’ she says brightly. ‘Let’s see how he likes it when the boys are after her.’
‘Absolutely,’ laughs Christie. ‘The chickens are coming home to roost.’
Kat
February 2000
‘Ruth, you’ve got a twin,’ says Dave, a flamboyant third year, who models himself on Noël Coward.
They are sitting in the corner of the college bar, huddled up in hats and scarves. St Anthony’s in February is freezing. The damp creeps off the water, seeps into your bones. The sea is granite-hued, the wind so strong it makes Kat’s eyes water.
Dave takes a drag of his cigarette with a gleeful flourish. ‘I saw her in Annie’s café the other day – well, I say saw, I pinched her bottom.’
‘Obviously,’ says Kat, catching Ruth’s eye and smiling. She has the flickering sense of déjà vu, as if Dave has told this story before, which he does have a tendency to do.
‘From behind, she looked exactly like you – she was even wearing that stripy cowl-neck dress you have …’
Ruth looks at Dave suspiciously. ‘How do you know what a cowl neck is?’
‘Darling, I’m sorry if I disappoint you by living up to the stereotypes but, really, I knew about cowl necks when you were a babe in arms …’ Dave loved his jaded third-year routine. ‘So, anyway, I gave her posterior a little squeeze in greeting and she spun around and was inches away from slapping me. Thing is, I must have looked so terrified that she knew I’d made a mistake and just laughed instead.’
Ruth smiles. ‘You wally.’ She opens her crisp packet carefully, tearing the sides and flattening it out to share with the others. She’s changed since last term. There’s something quieter, more cautious about her. She’s started dressing differently too, in clothes too big for her, as if to make herself seem smaller. ‘Now did she really look like me, or did she just have red hair?’
‘She looked a lot like you,’ Dave says, surveying Ruth’s face. ‘Not as pretty, of course.’ He takes another puff. ‘Maybe she’s your doppelgänger.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kat laughs as she takes a crisp. ‘No one could match our Ruthie.’
Ruth rolls her eyes, tries not to look pleased.
The sharpness of the salt and vinegar stings Kat’s lips. It comes back to her now.
‘There was a guy from before,’ she says. ‘A barman. He was convinced he was shagging you. I thought it was a bit weird at the time.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ruth frowns.
‘At that awful pub, the Two Pheasants. Maybe it was her – your doppelgänger.’
‘I don’t remember that.’ Ruth picks up another crisp.
‘It was way back – at the beginning of last term,’ Kat sighs. ‘Back then I had no idea you were intent upon devoting your entire carnal life to George Bell.’
Ruth pulls a face and throws the crisp at her. As if they’ve summoned him up, George and his entourage appear in the bar for lunch. They enter as if to a drum roll, as if half expecting applause, wearing the same long, dark coats like a uniform.
‘Here they come, the princes of darkness,’ Ruth sighs to Kat.
‘Ignore them,’ Kat mouths and pointedly looks away, out of the bar at the dripping quad outside.
The smell of George’s aftershave catches at the back of Kat’s throat. She glances at Ruth, but her friend’s face is hard to read. Ruth had got into serious trouble for cutting up George’s clothes last term. She’d had to pay to replace them, to see a therapist about anger management. ‘It’s excruciating,’ she’d told Kat. ‘I have to hit things with a baseball bat. I wouldn’t mind, actually, but you can’t do it properly in front of someone.’
‘Are you scared of your temper?’ Kat asked, imagining herself as a psychiatrist in rimmed glasses for a moment.
‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘Yes. Maybe.’
George seems to have forgotten about – or discounted – the incident completely. As he strolls in, he bows in their direction. ‘Ladies!’ he says theatrically, including Dave in his greeting.
Dan, as ever, is just behind George. There’s a cluster of others traipsing in too: bulky Teddy, Fit Felix, baby-faced Jerry, a skinny girl, Laura, who wears very short skirts and likes to perch on the boys’ laps whenever she can.
‘Why do they always go around in such a large group?’ Kat mutters. ‘It’s pathetic.’
Dave smiles impishly. ‘You need me to tell you that?’
Kat sighs. ‘I know you think it’s a homoerotic thing – but, honestly, not everyone’s gay.’
‘Don’t worry – I know you’re not gay, darling. You’ve got all the qualities of a straight girl.’
‘You make that sound like a bad thing.’
Dave smirks into his drink in reply.
‘Nothing touches him,’ Kat addresses Ruth. ‘It’s as if nothing happened between you.’
‘It was nothing,’ Ruth says, running a finger around the rim of her glass. ‘I’m nothing to him, he’s nothing to me.’
Ruth hadn’t shown much interest in anyone else and, as well as dressing differently, she’d started working harder, drinking less, shuffling off to the library at strange times with armfuls of books.
At weekends she was less interested in parties and would drag Kat, usually moaning about a hangover, for windswept walks along the beach. She shared that in common with Richard, with whom Kat had been spending more time, too. She’d started visiting him in his room, usually on the pretence of borrowing a book or an album, and found him restless, pacing, picking things up and putting them down again. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ and they’d go out, walking and walking, following the cur
ves of the coastline, sometimes stopping on the way for pints of cider and cheese sandwiches. Kat couldn’t decide if there was any interest on his part, though he’d never flirt, rarely touch her.
‘This happens to me when things change,’ he said once. ‘The restlessness.’
‘Is there something new in the air?’ she asked.
He smiled. A lovely smile. And pointed at the sky, which was overcast, ‘Viene la tormenta. It’s my favourite bit in The Terminator.’
Kat had wondered if love were like a storm and decided it wasn’t. Not in this case. They had watched Richard’s video of The Terminator together later that afternoon curled up on his bed, sharing a blanket like an old couple. And Kat had huddled in close, her legs drawn up to her chest, feeling the space between them crackle. But it hadn’t happened. Kat smiles at the memory. It hadn’t happened yet. Being in his bed, that was a start.
Now, as Richard wanders into the bar, book in hand, her heart tightens. His short dark hair always looks as though it has never seen a comb and his face is shadowed with stubble, but it is Richard’s assurance she likes the best. The sense he is comfortable in his own skin, even when he is restless, fidgeting, that he knows who he is. Kat glances over at Ruth and she is looking, too. As is Dave, who has the biggest crush on Richard.
‘Hi,’ Dave calls across the bar.
‘Hi,’ says Richard brusquely.
‘Moody. I like it,’ Dave whispers.
‘I like it too,’ says Kat. ‘Come and join us,’ she shouts to Richard.
He looks as though he might say no, but when he’s been served, Richard comes over with his coffee. He looks at Ruth.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ she says.
She’s a terrible blusher, thinks Kat irritably, watching Ruth flush at the neck.
‘Are you feeling better?’
Ruth nods. She looks distracted.
Kat takes off her hat and shakes out her hair. ‘Better than when?’ Richard’s presence changes the dynamic between them. ‘Is it too early for a drink?’
The Girl Before You Page 10