‘Someone came to see me: George Bell’s wife.’
Kat feels the muscles in her legs involuntarily tighten at the mention of George’s name. ‘Why?’
Richard picks up a beer mat on the table and then puts it down. He won’t quite look at Kat. ‘She thought she saw Ruth.’ He glances up. ‘On a train coming from Scotland.’
There’s the urge to laugh again. Stronger now. What’s the matter with her? ‘That’s ridiculous.’ She goes for a reassuring smile instead. Over the years this would happen. Something would happen to make Richard think of Ruth – specifically that Ruth was alive; that she hadn’t drowned that night – and he would want to meet and discuss it with her after everybody else had lost patience with him.
‘That’s what I said to her: that it sounded insane.’ Richard looks a little more relaxed. ‘Actually, because of the Bell connection, I guess I was a bit ruder than that. Anyway, that was before I heard the news from St Anthony’s.’ He is quiet for a moment. ‘I can’t bear the thought that someone hurt her,’ he says softly.
Kat takes a sip of her gin. She wonders how to start telling him her own news. Maybe she’ll have a cigarette first and tell him with the second drink. She doesn’t want to talk about Ruth all night. Not tonight. In the first years after she’d gone, Richard and Kat would meet up at irregular intervals, ostensibly for comfort or to remember Ruth, but really for increasingly bitter postmortems.
Kat chews the inside of her cheek. It had been messy. They had both almost always drunk too much. There had almost always been a fight. Once or twice it had ended up in bed. Those years had been among the worst of her life. Her coke habit had got a bit out of control. ‘I am broken,’ she would tell strangers in bars over a round, or a line off the toilet seat. ‘Life has broken me.’ And they would laugh as if she were joking or – no better – compete with their own stories of brokenness.
At its lowest ebb it had looked as though she might lose her job, but her features editor took her out for lunch and told it to her straight: fearless and catty (’scuse the pun), she was a good journalist. But the coke would have to stop. And the sleeping with her interview subjects. It made things messy. And Kat listened and she found not God but work. And it saved her.
She takes a gulp of her gin.
‘It was weird, though: she was so convinced she’d seen Ruth.’ Richard is looking at her expectantly.
‘For fuck’s sake, Richard.’ Kat puts down the glass a bit too hard. ‘Let it go. Let it all go.’ She sighs, says more kindly: ‘She’s gone. She has been gone for fifteen years. They even have a skeleton now. I know it’s unbearable, but it’s looking very likely that she was killed by some sicko.’ A memory springs up, unbidden, of Dan’s mouth on Ruth’s. Her friend thumping George at that party. She swallows. No good would come of encouraging Richard’s conspiracy theories. ‘It’s over,’ she says definitively.
He shakes his head. ‘I know, I know.’ He looks away from her out of the window. ‘Does it sound sick to say: I’d like to see the skeleton, once they know for sure it’s her?’
Kat shakes her head. ‘I’m sure, if they can, Naomi and her mum will let you.’
She puts her hand on his and gives it a squeeze, then places hers on the table. It is close enough that she can, just about, feel the tiny hairs on his hand brushing against hers. She thinks: I would rather this proximity than heaving, panting sex with anyone else in the world. She thinks: I would give up a lifetime of tidiness and security and stability for an afternoon in a grubby pub with dim lighting and the sensation of your hand close to mine. She thinks: but I have. I have sacrificed all those things for crumbs such as these.
‘Have you given up?’ she asks eventually.
‘What?’ He is still distracted.
‘Smoking. Have you given up smoking?’
‘Aren’t you bothered by this, Kat?’ he says, moving his hand away from hers. ‘You don’t seem remotely shaken. They’ve found what could be Ruth’s body and at the exact same time someone arrives convinced she’s seen Ruth. And what about Nunny?’
Kat sighs. She thinks of the scene she has been rehearsing in her head. It had not gone like this.
Richard drains his drink and looks, for a second, as though he might leave.
Well, fuck him. Fuck them both. The rage, years old, is in her throat now.
‘I bet it was someone else she saw on the train,’ she says quickly, too quickly. ‘Can you remember that girl who looked like her? I bet it was her. It kept happening.’
Why is he looking at her like that? The colour is draining from his cheeks. Everything feels as though it is slowing down. The background noise seems to fade away. It is so slow, so quiet she can almost hear the synapses in her memory straining to make the connection. And then they do.
‘What kept happening?’ Richard is still looking at her.
She thinks she’s going to be sick. ‘I’ve lost my thread,’ she says quietly.
‘What kept happening?’
Kat looks out of the window. It’s getting dark. They won’t have that cigarette now, huddled around a lighter. He will leave. Leave the pub. And she won’t see him again. She could say it now. Say: I’m dying. Say: I love you. I have always loved you. And now I’m dying. But instead she looks him in the eye and says: ‘They kept on getting confused. People who didn’t know Ruth very well would mistake her for this girl. And vice versa.’
He blinks. ‘A doppelgänger.’
‘Yes, I know. It’s ridiculous. That word. Isn’t it? It’s not quite what I meant …’
She has never felt frightened of Richard before, but there is something about the way he is staring at her. His eyes look flinty, hard, like one of her mother’s boyfriends used to, before he said or did something terrible.
Richard puts a hand over hers and gives it a squeeze. He doesn’t know his strength. There’s the searing pain of her knuckles crushing together.
‘Richard, fuck!’ She pulls her hand away. But he is still looking at her, not at all apologetic. It was a lie she’d always stuck to, her one last betrayal of Ruth: No one looks like Ruth, she’d said. She’s one of a kind.
He gets up to go. ‘I think that is exactly what you meant.’
Naomi
Sometimes I miss alcohol. I was never a particularly heavy drinker – never sought the sort of oblivion Ruth did – but there are certainly moments when I could just do with a quick nip of something to level out the nerves. I settle to make the call from Carla’s home office. The space is tidy, impersonal, with none of our usual clutter – just a box of tissues on the coffee table at the centre of the room, a small bookcase with her psychotherapy textbooks.
It’s a Saturday, but Carla’s working at the centre for the day and, while she doesn’t disapprove exactly of my contacting Alice, she is calling me more often from work at the moment, has started asking, ‘Have you meditated today?’ or ‘Do you want me to book you an appointment with Jill?’ How do I explain? I don’t want to speak to Jill, one of Carla’s colleagues at the centre. I want to speak to Alice. Everything has changed.
As always, the news came when we least expected it, while I was chatting to my mum’s gardener at the cottage, admiring the vegetable patch. Suddenly, my mother was running across the lawn, a hand raised to interrupt us. Our family liaison officer had been on the phone.
‘It’s not her.’
It’s not her. I still say the words over and over to myself now as I did when I first found out.
I don’t know what to make of this development, but I do know that something in me has changed since I found out; something in me has woken up.
I half-dial the number three or four times before finally making my fingers complete it. I want to speak to her at home, not at the gym or wandering around the shops. I want an old-fashioned conversation where we are both in our houses and able to think straight. As the call connects, there’s a moment’s silence in which I think of hanging up, then the phone begins to ring. I imagine it in
an old-fashioned hallway in their Notting Hill house, on a console table perhaps, a polished floor, heels clicking across it.
‘Hello?’
A man’s voice. His. I didn’t really know him at St Anthony’s – by the time I started he and Ruth had long broken up – though I knew who he was, of course. Everybody did: president of the union, leader of the pack. I never understood what Ruth, who didn’t like any sort of club, saw in him. She tried to explain once, when she was very drunk, but all I could understand of what she was saying was that she liked the way he smelled.
My voice sounds thinner than I would like as I ask: ‘Can I speak to Alice, please?’
‘Who is this?’
I remember the way he speaks: plummily, a hint of humour, like he’s enjoying a private joke with himself.
‘Naomi Walker.’ I can’t help myself. ‘Ruth Walker’s sister.’
The warmth vanishes from his voice. ‘Right.’
He approached me once at a party, in my first year. I was standing on my own, waiting for Ruth, and he appeared next to me out of nowhere. ‘We’ve been rating the freshers,’ he said, nodding back to his group of friends on the other side of the room. ‘And I thought you’d like to know you’re the only ten in the room.’
‘Ten?’ I didn’t understand.
‘The only ten out of ten. The best-looking girl here.’
I didn’t know what to say – that it was immaterial how he rated me? That I wasn’t interested in men anyway? I felt fragile back then, as if I were wrapped in cotton wool. After Miss Wick it was a long time before I felt things properly again. I forgot how to interact with the world in a normal sort of way.
At the other end of the phone, there’s a muffled sound of conversation. Then Alice, sounding worried, says, ‘Naomi? I’m so glad you called.’
A door slams and I can hear her breath slightly ragged. I find myself wondering if Alice was at the same party, if George approached her next, if he marked her out of ten, too. I never knew how to handle men’s advances back then. Anyway, in the event, Ruth came along and said: ‘This is my sister, George. Fuck off.’ And that was that.
‘They found human remains – a skeleton in St Anthony’s – you may have heard.’ My words come out in a rush. ‘But it’s not her. I mean – they’ve done tests and it’s not. I thought you’d like to know.’
She is quiet for a moment. ‘How are you feeling?’
The question takes me by surprise. ‘Strange,’ I say. ‘Confused.’
Jacques trots into the room, squeaks to be let on to my lap. I lean back, making room for him, and he jumps on. The heat of his body is a comfort.
‘I spoke to Richard last night,’ I say carefully.
‘Yes?’ Alice sounds flat, restrained. Perhaps she’s worried George is listening in.
‘He said you went to see him.’
‘That was a mistake,’ she says quietly. ‘He was very angry.’ She sighs. ‘I’m sorry: I seem to have upset you both – that wasn’t my intention. I can’t let things go. George would say it’s one of my shortcomings …’ A brittle laugh. ‘But it can help with my job.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe I wasn’t fair to you. Things have been weird for me, too. With the skeleton being found … and Nunny arriving. It feels like something’s being unearthed.’ I can hear the blare of a siren at her end. I wait for it to stop. ‘It would be nice to speak to someone. Maybe we could talk some more? If you’re interested.’
‘Yes, yes, I am,’ she says quickly. She pauses. ‘Tuesday, maybe. I’ve got a client meeting near you. I could come along afterwards.’
I think for a moment. Carla’s at the centre on Tuesday evenings. That would work well for me.
‘Yes, that sounds good.’
Alice is silent for a couple of seconds and I think she’s going to say goodbye, but she says instead, ‘It’s a funny word “unearthed”.’
‘Yes.’ I think for a moment of the dreams, of Ruth running as I chase her through the streets of St Anthony’s, of her shoes left on the pavement like a clue. I pause. ‘It feels as if there’s something I don’t understand about that night,’ I say, stopping short of explaining what I really think, what I really feel: that it’s as if Ruth is trying to tell me what happened.
With Alice in my house again, I feel shyer. She looks, in her Chanel suit, fresh from work, as immaculate as she did the last time I saw her. I wonder for a moment if that’s how I looked to Miss Wick. She used to say she liked to mess me up. The way my hair would come alive when we made love, the way I’d sweat.
I need to talk about the night Ruth went. It is a night I have revisited so many times, from so many different angles: Ruth’s, Richard’s, mine. I have even talked about it on autopilot, switching myself off from the content, letting my mouth and hands do the talking, so I don’t have to think about it too much: the last time I saw her.
I’m not sure how to begin. So I begin with Jane.
‘The night Ruth went missing – you’ll remember it – it was the memorial ball,’ I start.
The student union had spent an obscene amount of money on the party – with dancers, performers on stilts, comedians, a champagne bar, vintage photography studio, fireworks. But the truth is I can barely remember anything about the evening at all.
‘I’d been seeing this girl,’ I continue. ‘She was only my second girlfriend.’ Jane appears in my mind like a snapshot: her pale, round face. ‘My first was a Spanish conversation teacher at school,’ I add without meaning to. I try to allow myself a brief ironic smile, to make it all appear like ancient history. ‘I know. Disaster.’ I feel my breathing change as I talk about her. I look out of the window. The wind tugs keenly at the sheaves of ivy on the fence. ‘Actually,’ I try to say casually. ‘Actually, she broke my heart. Miss Wick. Twice. So …’ I let the words fizzle out.
‘So,’ I say with renewed vigour, turning back to Alice. ‘I was with Jane – she was older, pretty bossy, and I was a first year then. I think she took advantage a bit.’ I focus on not thinking about how, in the eyes of the world, this was precisely what Miss Wick had also done. ‘My sister couldn’t stand her,’ I add, though that point was neither here nor there. ‘Ruth was with me that evening – at least we got ready together at the cottage. She and Richard had had this big bust-up and she’d gone back to stay with our mum for a week or so, but she’d come back to St Anthony’s on the night of the ball to surprise him.’ I swallow. ‘To get him back.’
Alice, to her credit, doesn’t make a soothing noise from where she’s sitting on the sofa, just asks, ‘Did you see Ruth much that night?’
‘No, not at all.’ I hesitate. I’m not sure how to continue, how much to share. The autopilot version of the story doesn’t include Miss Wick. It doesn’t even really include Jane. ‘I was dancing, I was watching Richard’s band …’ That’s how I usually put it. I had considered telling the police about Miss Wick, but it was just another confusing detail in an already confusing night – and nothing to do with Ruth, after all.
‘Someone from my past turned up. The teacher I told you about? She was at the ball, too. We’d started seeing each other again. I didn’t behave very well,’ I admit. ‘Dropped Jane. Snuck off. Oh Christ,’ I blush. ‘And then Jane caught us. It seemed so dreadful at the time. Then, later, when what happened happened, none of it seemed to matter, really. I didn’t stay at St Anthony’s, as you know. I came back home, went to Cardiff instead. I never saw Jane again after that night. Nor Miss Wick, for that matter. I wonder if we ever would have stood a chance in the real world,’ I say more to myself than Alice. ‘It was a fantasy, really. Still …’ I sigh. ‘It was a pretty potent one.’
‘What about Ruth?’ asks Alice.
‘I told her about Miss Wick,’ I smile. ‘That she’d come to St Anthony’s to be with me. Ruth was thrilled – she was such a romantic and, as I say, she’d never liked Jane. Anyway, after we got ready together she went off to find Richard and was with him for a while – he l
ast saw her at around eleven when his band went on stage. But they had some sort of fallout and Ruth stormed off, spent the evening smoking weed with a friend from her course. Richard was looking for her all night, but he couldn’t find her. Then, she left that friend’s room at three-ish and wasn’t seen again until Dan Vaughan saw her swimming at dawn.’
Alice seems to sit up straighter. ‘He was good friends with George.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
Everyone knew that. They were inseparable those two. Ruth used to call them the princes of darkness. I don’t say that to Alice now.
‘He was a piece of shit,’ she says crisply. ‘I never liked him.’
She looks pleased to be able to say the words out loud. I get the feeling it’s the first time she’s said them.
‘Yes,’ I say cautiously. ‘He wasn’t a nice person.’
I don’t know how freely I can speak about someone who was such close friends with her husband.
‘I’m leaving George, by the way,’ she says lightly as if reading my mind. ‘He’s been fucking my best friend. I think it’s what you call the end of the road.’
I don’t know what to say.
‘Are you sure?’ I ask eventually.
‘About which bit?’ Alice says, brushing dust off her skirt. ‘The fucking or the leaving?’
‘Both,’ I say. ‘All of it.’
I think of Alice as she was in St Anthony’s. The way she would look at George as if she had just won a prize. I feel sad for that Alice. The young Alice back then. I wish I could go back to her and say something.
‘Naomi,’ she says firmly, getting to her feet. ‘What were Dan and he up to at university? Why did people hate them so much? What did people say?’
I make a polite sort of cough. I’m not sure how to answer.
‘Please tell me,’ Alice says fiercely. ‘No one else will.’
I’m still sitting, looking up at her as she stands above me. She is not a stupid woman, a delicate little flower. She wants to hear the truth. She wants to hear exactly what people said.
The Girl Before You Page 24