‘They said they were bastards.’ I recite it like a list. I can’t look at her as I say the words. ‘That they hurt girls, got them really drunk, took advantage of them, sometimes even took photographs.’
Alice folds her arms. There is a look of something close to relief on her face.
‘I knew it,’ she says.
Kat
Water is one of the few things that help: the sensation of weightlessness, the rhythm of breaststroke, the push and pull of it. The spa is dimly lit, womb-like, with the cedar scent of the sauna, of lemongrass oil and eucalyptus. There was a time when Kat might have laughed at the kind of woman who frequents this sort of place, but she doesn’t care what her younger self might think now. What had she known, anyway?
Kat has seen Richard for the last time, she thinks as she dries herself off and makes her way unsteadily to the sauna, her legs tired from the swim. The first of many lasts. Perhaps some had passed without even saying goodbye. The last compliment from a stranger. The last time she’d wake after snowfall, her bedroom strangely bright in the refracted light, the landscape outside otherworldly.
There would be others: the last article she’d write, the last time she’d see her mother; there would be the last time she would wake with the comforting weight of her cat on her belly, the last time her toes would dig into sand, the last time she’d drink champagne, the last time she’d dance around her kitchen to Portishead, her eyes shut, the curtains closed.
Where had she been happiest? At her early days in St Anthony’s, in a way, on cliff walks with Richard; dancing around her room and talking about boys with Ruth. Perhaps she should go there one last time and look at the sea. Perhaps she should buy a bottle of the most expensive champagne she could find, drink it on the beach and walk out into the water. Her younger self would have approved of that sort of gesture at least.
‘It’s Kat, isn’t it?’
She recognises the voice. A Glaswegian accent, less strong than it used to be – smoother, deeper. Kat opens her eyes. The sauna is dark but she can make out a small woman with shoulder-length hair leaning towards her.
‘Nicky Crisp,’ Kat says aloud.
Everyone always used both names for Nicky. She doesn’t see much of anyone from college these days. Whenever she spots someone from St Anthony’s – at a press junket, perhaps, or in the audience at the theatre – Kat avoids them if she can: looking the other way, darting into the loo. She doesn’t know if it’s because she feels so different now, or because she feels so much the same. In fact, she had thought that perhaps she’d recognised Nicky the other week, climbing out of the pool, and had swum extra lengths so she wouldn’t bump into her.
‘I hear you’re at The National now,’ Nicky says.
Kat blinks the sweat from her eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘I like your articles …’ She pauses. ‘Witty – you were always witty – and brave, too.’ She looks at Kat intensely.
‘Thanks.’ Kat never knows what to say when people say her writing is brave. It sounds to her like ‘interesting’ or ‘unusual’, as if they mean something else. ‘They’re not my stories,’ she adds. ‘I can’t really take credit for them.’ She had been enjoying her rather self-indulgent daydream; she slightly resents Nicky for interrupting it.
As the door opens and a third woman joins them, the air cools. Kat stands up, wrapping her towel around her tightly. ‘It’s been nice catching up,’ she says politely.
The words sound disingenuous, but what is the point of it now? Her focus is on narrowing things down, whittling them to a fine point, like the sharpened end of a pencil, a tiny pinprick of light at the end of a dark tunnel. Letting go of things, not taking them on.
‘I’ve seen you here before,’ says Nicky, ignoring Kat’s goodbye. ‘A few weeks ago – swimming – but you seemed in the zone, so I didn’t like to interrupt.’ She gets up herself and follows Kat out of the sauna.
Kat smiles politely. The sweat is cooling rapidly on her skin; she glances towards the changing rooms.
‘Anyway, it made me think of something I’d like to ask you.’ Nicky’s voice sounds as it used to – for a moment, the accent is stronger, more solid. ‘Do you have time for a drink?’
Kat thinks of her empty flat, looking at its empty walls. She doesn’t want to play catch-up, but she doesn’t want to be alone, either. And she could do with a drink.
‘Why not?’ she says, surprising herself.
In the old coaching inn in Holborn, which Kat didn’t know was there until Nicky darted down a narrow alley, she sits in the corner by the window with the warm burr of voices around her, waiting for Nicky to come back from the bar. She thinks of Richard, of how they’d left things in the pub. She had tried to call – or at least she had found his name in the contacts list of her phone and stared at his number. But what was there to say? The cat was out of the bag. What surprises her most of all is the relief of it: how she feels lighter, unburdened. A secret she had been holding onto all these years had lost its power. Perhaps she should tell him the rest of it.
They’ve had one drink already, during which Nicky largely talked about herself – not that Kat minds. She’s surprised by how much she’s been enjoying herself: the warmth of wine in her belly, drifting in and out of Nicky’s stories. Nicky works in the City, making more money than she knows what to do with, escaping on exotic holidays whenever she can. She’s been telling Kat about a recent adventure in Mexico, where she spent a week on an organised trip and ten days exploring the country on her own. She had ‘an experience’ in a sweat lodge on a beach near Cancún. ‘No, not that kind of experience,’ she said with a quick smile. ‘Spiritual … The sweat lodge is shaped like an igloo and they actually seal you in: push a stone across.’
‘Intense,’ Kat said.
‘It is. You sit there for hours in the dark looking at the embers of the fire – talking and sweating. Remembering things. Sometimes just sitting in silence. All that time in the heat – and it weakens your barriers, you know?’
Dying does that too, Kat thought. You suddenly become aware that you could say or do anything. That social barriers don’t matter as much as you think they do.
‘At the end, you cover yourself with honey and your pores are so open your skin just drinks it up,’ Nicky continued. ‘And then you jump into the sea in the moonlight. Beautiful … Anyway, the point is’ – she stabbed the table with a manicured fingernail – ‘I had an epiphany.’
‘Crikey, I thought I was a lightweight these days.’ Kat barely suppressed a giggle. Nicky is on end-of-the-night revelations already.
‘Shame grows in the dark,’ said Nicky portentously. ‘The truth will set you free.’
‘Which film is that the tagline for?’ Kat laughed. She couldn’t remember Nicky being into all that New Age stuff at college, but whatever helped you get through the day.
Nicky smiled. ‘It’s from the Bible.’ And she stood up to get the next round.
Alice
‘I knew it,’ she says again, almost triumphantly. She thinks of George’s camera hidden in a desk drawer, the white-tie scarf neatly arranged next to it. ‘I knew they were up to something,’ she says more softly.
The moment of triumph is followed by a swift, pulsating nausea. All these years she has been sharing a bed with a person who might have done such things: tied women up, raped them, taken photographs. She has always known George liked skating close to the edge – the buzz and the risk of sex. The bravado of it – even the theatre, the pretence. But this is something else. Things start falling into place. Memories.
Her legs feel strange; she sinks to sit on the floor.
‘Nobody would talk to us,’ she says to Naomi. ‘To Christie and me. People stopped asking us out.’ It sounds pathetic out loud. ‘It’s not the social thing,’ she says quickly. ‘It’s not that I care about invitations, but it’s that they all knew. And we didn’t.’
All those women whom he had damaged. The women he’d had affairs with since. The
furore about the girl he worked with. She realises she has seen only one world when there has always been another one – the real one – out there, running parallel.
‘Where’s your bathroom?’ she asks calmly. She is going to be sick.
Afterwards, Alice feels better. She cleans herself up and comes back to the living room. Naomi has fetched her a glass of water.
‘We don’t know how much is true,’ she says kindly. ‘We don’t know anything, really.’
‘He has a camera,’ Alice says. ‘From that time, but he never uses it any more.’
‘Have you found any negatives? Any pictures?’
‘No.’ Alice shakes her head. ‘He’s too clever for that.’ She smiles as if at an old joke. ‘He hides things too well.’
They are quiet for a moment. Alice remembers her last conversation with George.
‘Did you hear about a girl who looked like your sister while we were at St Anthony’s?’
‘Yes, didn’t I mention it?’ Naomi says quietly. ‘Ruth used to say she had a lookalike.’ She pauses, glances down at her feet where her Jack Russell has flopped. ‘But I never saw her myself. Apparently, this other woman had a thing with Dan. It caused a terrible fight with Richard because everyone thought it was Ruth.’ She shakes her head. ‘But I know Ruth wouldn’t have slept with Dan – she loathed him – so there must have been some sort of mistake.’
‘George doesn’t believe there was someone who looked like her,’ Alice says, draining her glass and putting it back on the coffee table. ‘That’s what he said. But then George says a lot of things.’
Where is she going to sleep tonight? How is she ever going to go home?
‘Ruth wanted to prove that she wasn’t with Dan.’ Naomi nudges her dog’s stomach with her foot. ‘And Kat never backed Ruth up – which Ruth was furious about – because, well, she liked Richard, you see. It was a sort of open secret, so if Ruth split up with Richard over this Dan thing then all the better for her.’ The dog rolls back on his feet, trots into the kitchen. ‘But why would George care?’ adds Naomi, thinking aloud. ‘What would it matter to him?’
George’s voice saying, She was a little slut, echoes in Alice’s head.
‘He painted a certain picture of Ruth,’ she says carefully. ‘That she was promiscuous.’
Naomi rolls her eyes. ‘I can imagine.’
‘He said she and Dan had a thing – but why was he adamant that there wasn’t anyone else involved?’ Alice recalls the cropped photograph. ‘There was a redhead there, though, with George and his friends on the night of the ball. There was a bit of her in a photograph I found – red hair, the strap of a red dress.’
Naomi looks up. ‘A red dress?’
‘Yes,’ Alice says. ‘I’m sure of it, from what I could see.’
‘Someone else said something about a red dress.’ Naomi frowns. ‘But I can’t remember who. Ruth would never have worn red. She loved it – her bedroom was covered in red things – but she never wore it. She said it clashed with her hair.’ She glances up, trying to recall. ‘That was it,’ she says. ‘The supermarket psychic – a woman I met in January – she said that she thought Ruth was wearing a red dress. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but she was working at the ball. She might have served this other woman.’
Alice feels a flutter of excitement. She wants the whole truth now. She wants to know all of it.
‘Do you have a survivors’ photo from that night?’ She gets to her feet. ‘I don’t suppose you do? We could look at that. See if we could spot this mystery woman.’
‘No, I don’t.’ Naomi reaches for her phone. ‘But a friend of mine does. I know because I used to hate seeing it in her loo when I went over. She’s taken it down now. Ruth’s not in it, of course, but we might be able to look for other redheads – I’ll ask her to send us a photo.’ She starts to text.
‘Maybe,’ Alice suggests, having a thought. ‘You could ring Richard, too – ask him what he knows about this lookalike.’
While Naomi is out of the room calling Richard, Alice picks up her own mobile and looks at the screen. She can’t phone George; she can’t call Christie. She considers again where she might sleep tonight. She has barely spoken to George since he returned from Spain. Or Morocco, as it turned out. She wonders for a moment if anything he ever said was true. If she hadn’t actually seen him on television, she might start to doubt that, too. But she hasn’t let on that she knew anything about him and Christie. They still didn’t know she’d found out, which suits her perfectly. For two relatively bright people, they’d fucked up, really, messing with one of London’s best divorce lawyers. Alice puts a hand on her belly. It gives her all the power. Not that she would stay in that house. She would make a fresh start. A new part of town. Maybe a new city altogether.
Naomi comes back in the room. Her face is flushed with excitement.
‘There was someone who looked like Ruth,’ she says. ‘Richard is sure of it. Apparently, he met up with Kat recently – and she said that people kept mistaking Ruth for someone else. Someone from town.’
‘As opposed to a student?’
‘Yes,’ says Naomi, pacing. ‘A barmaid or something. Kat doesn’t know exactly.’
‘If she was from town, she might still be there,’ considers Alice.
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ says Naomi. ‘Isn’t it strange that she never came forward? That she looked so like Ruth and yet we never heard.’ She looks down at her phone as it buzzes.
As the survivors’ photograph is so long, Naomi’s friend has taken pictures of it piecemeal. Naomi looks at them with Alice as they come through on her phone. They examine the small jaded faces of the last remaining partygoers looking up from the quad at the photographer in the clock tower. There’s no Ruth, no Naomi, as she’d said, but not a single other redhead in the picture, either. No Alice, of course, who had long been in bed. But, strangely, also no George or Dan.
‘It’s weird,’ says Alice, thinking aloud. ‘They loved stuff like that – being the last ones standing at a party – and they were definitely still up then.’
‘I was with Jane,’ grimaces Naomi. ‘We had to have a sort of postmortem about me and Miss Wick. She actually locked me in her room – she was crazy.’
‘Is Miss Wick in the photo?’
‘No,’ Naomi smiles. ‘She didn’t go in for stuff like that – anyway, she was waiting for me back at the cottage. Or that was the plan. She wasn’t there when I got back. Maybe she got tired of hanging around.’ She gets up as if she’s just remembered something. ‘I never showed you Nunny, did I?’
She leaves the room for a moment.
‘We never took him to the police,’ she says, returning with a package in her hand. ‘I’m not sure that we will now – I don’t know if we could bear for him to be away from us.’
‘You should,’ says Alice. ‘They might be able to track down who sent him.’
Naomi shrugs. ‘The results from Richard’s handwriting expert were inconclusive. There were similarities to Ruth’s handwriting,’ she says, looking at the address on the Jiffy bag. ‘But it’s very hard to tell with block capitals after all these years.’
‘Still,’ says Alice, reaching to take Nunny from Naomi. ‘It might be worth letting forensics have a look. They might be able to pick up on something you’ve missed.’ She touches the marble eye of the old grey rabbit with her fingertip. ‘What does he know?’
Naomi passes her the Jiffy bag he came in. ‘Look at the postmark.’
‘Oh,’ Alice says. ‘St Anthony’s.’
‘Do you want to go back?’ Naomi asks suddenly. ‘I think we should,’ she says, sounding excited. ‘I think that’s why he was sent from there. And we should try to find this lookalike, too. What if she has been lying low on purpose all these years? What if she knows something?’
Kat
Returning with a bottle of Rioja, Nicky pours a large glass for Kat and then for herself. She looks as though she might return to r
ecounting holiday stories, so Kat heads her off by asking: ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’
Nicky takes a breath. She looks serious for a moment. ‘You know that series you write with anonymous women? When they tell you their secrets?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you like to do one with me?’ Nicky had never been shy.
‘I’m leaving soon,’ says Kat. She takes a gulp of wine. Taking her leave. That’s what they called it. She was taking her leave of the world. It’s funny how letting go of one more thing, saying no, like this, to each assignment, was like letting go of the ropes of a ship, one by one. ‘I can ask whoever takes over.’
‘I’d like it to be you,’ Nicky says. ‘Could you try? Could you fit it in before you go?’
‘I don’t think there will be time,’ says Kat. ‘And it will depend on your story – whether the editor’s interested.’ She sighs. She doesn’t want to talk shop, she just wants to drink, she wants to let go. ‘What do they call the ropes that keep a ship in port?’ she asks. ‘Is it guy ropes?’
‘No, that’s tents, I think.’ Nicky frowns. ‘Lines, maybe.’
The pattern on the seats is a swirling mass that blurs in front of Kat’s eyes. Maybe she has drunk too much too quickly – she doesn’t have the tolerance for it these days, not with the medication. She feels as if she is in water already, bobbing up and down on the tide. She thinks for a moment that she might tell Nicky that she is dying. That would shut her up. She’s done a lot of listening tonight. Nicky and her wonderful life, unimpeded by loneliness or regrets; Nicky and her fabulous stories, her epiphanies. How is she so undamaged? Well, maybe it is Kat’s turn to share.
‘It will depend on your story,’ she says again. ‘It’ll need to be a good one.’
‘How about: I was raped by an MP? A former MP. How about that?’ Nicky’s gaze is steady. ‘I imagine you can guess who it was. It wasn’t just Dan, you see, it was George as well. I never made a fuss at the time. I didn’t want them to think that I wasn’t fun – you know how they’d put it – but I hadn’t bargained for …’ She takes a gulp of her wine. ‘I think maybe you know …’ She is looking at Kat.
The Girl Before You Page 25