The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  Afterwards, it was Shara who would drive her home into West Hollywood back to Connie. Elise would walk into the bungalow, exhausted but in an undefinable way still unsatisfied. She would lie on the bed, thinking of all the shores in the world and the bodies of water in between them. Huge, infinite conglomerations of ocean and sea, rivers, rock pools and lagoons, the real and imagined terrors, the beauty of their surfaces and the mystery of their life beneath.

  *

  As she sat by the side of their bungalow swimming pool, Elise would press the bruises from the ocean. They were buttons of consciousness in a reality where nothing made sense except her body. Connie saw the bruises. ‘What are those?’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s just the surfing,’ said Elise.

  *

  In August, a month after her birthday, she decided to tell Connie that she’d forgotten the day she’d turned twenty-three. She stood in the doorway of the spare bedroom, which Connie had turned into a writing room. Again, as with the house in London, it felt there was an invisible line hovering on its threshold that Elise felt she could not, and should not, penetrate.

  Connie looked confused, almost stricken. ‘Oh my god. Your birthday. Oh, Elise. I am so sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Elise. ‘You’re busy.’

  ‘That’s no excuse. Oh, this is awful. How could this happen?’

  Elise felt the familiar tug of abandonment inside her – both of being abandoned, and of wishing to walk away herself. It was an alluring feeling, a fair justification for behaving badly. She tried to ignore it. ‘It just happened,’ she said. ‘I’ll have other birthdays.’

  ‘What can I do?’ said Connie. ‘I know. Let’s have a party.’

  ‘I don’t need a party.’

  The telephone rang on the bedside table. The women looked at each other. They didn’t even need to speak. ‘Her ex beat her up yesterday,’ said Connie as the phone continued to trill. ‘She’s got a black eye. A tooth came out. They thought she might have concussion.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘They’ve had to suspend filming, and we were nearly at the end of the schedule.’

  ‘Oh my god, Connie. Answer it.’

  ‘She wanted to come round, but I can put her off.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Of course.’

  Connie rushed to the receiver and lifted it up. ‘Hello? Hi, Barb.’ She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I will do something about your birthday, darling,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s a promise.’

  *

  An hour later, a car pulled up outside the bungalow. Elise peeped from behind the living-room curtain. Gingerly, Barbara stepped out of the back seat. She was stooping, with a pair of huge sunglasses on her face, her handbag slung over the crook of her elbow. It was a strange sight – Barbara looked slighter and too bony, dressed in a powder-pink pantsuit, like an tropical bird with unreliable knees, stalking slowly back to her nest.

  Connie was already at the door. ‘Oh, darling,’ Elise heard her say. ‘Come on in, now.’

  The three of them sat in the calm cool of the living room. Barbara, with seeming unselfconsciousness, removed the glasses from her face. Elise swallowed, staring. ‘Hi, ladies,’ Barbara said. Her right eye was almost completely swollen shut, and was shiny, weeping in the thin line between the upper and lower lids. The skin was a range of vivid plums and blues, fading to a reddish brown around the edges of the bruising. The other, lower side of her jaw was slightly swollen.

  To Elise’s shock, Barbara dropped her sunglasses, put her head in her hands and let out a deep sob. Her shoulders were shaking up and down. Elise felt pinioned to her armchair, knowing it was not her place – in whatever pecking order they were in – to go and touch the goddess and lift her upwards to her former glory.

  Connie rose instantly and put her arms round Barbara. Barbara slumped inside her embrace. ‘Connie,’ she said, her voice muffled.

  ‘It’s OK, Barb.’

  ‘I had to come to you,’ said Barbara, pulling away slightly. ‘I’m sorry. I just – I couldn’t be in that house on my own—’

  ‘Barb, you’re always welcome,’ said Connie.

  ‘He could have done it anywhere on me. He always used to. But he went for the face.’ Suddenly, Barbara reared back from Connie to her full sitting height. ‘Just fucking look at me. How the fuck am I supposed to work?’

  ‘I’m sure Bill and Eric can figure it out.’

  ‘They don’t care.’ Barbara let out a moan. ‘They just tell me to change the locks!’

  ‘Barb, I promise you we will figure this out.’

  ‘This is gonna cost the production thousands of dollars in lost time. And then everyone will know that Barbara Lowden is the kind of woman who lets men knock her around. If they don’t know that already, in this gossip sieve of a town.’

  ‘That isn’t true. This isn’t your fault. And anyway, it doesn’t matter what they think. You’re Barbara Lowden.’

  ‘And who the fuck is she?’ cried Barbara. ‘I need a drink, Con. And a Valium.’

  She began to rifle through her bag. ‘That fucking cunt!’ she screamed, and the other two women jumped. Barbara thrust a small pill bottle aloft, like an explorer who has just discovered the Holy Grail – and bizarre and awful as the situation was, Elise was happy to hear the old spirit in her voice.

  *

  Half an hour later, Barbara was calmer, and they sat around the pool.

  ‘Arnica’s good for bruises,’ said Elise. She lifted up her top and rotated on the spot, showing her ribcage, her back, and then lifting her shorts so the other two could see the sides of her thighs. ‘See? I use it all the time. I’ll get it for you.’

  Before Barbara could say anything, she went to the bedroom and got the cream. When she came back to the poolside the other two women abruptly stopped their conversation. ‘Here,’ she said, handing the arnica cream to Barbara.

  ‘Thank you, honey,’ Barbara said, placing it beside her gin and tonic. ‘I think at the moment I can’t even bear to touch it.’

  ‘Maybe in a couple of days,’ said Elise.

  ‘Sure,’ said Barbara. ‘You – er, bruise easily too, huh?’

  ‘Surfing,’ Elise said. ‘I’m taking on the ocean. I’m losing.’

  ‘Well, you never know,’ said Barbara, but Elise wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘Realistically,’ Barbara went on, pointing at her eye, ‘this is gonna take a month to disappear. But I reckon in a couple of weeks the make-up girls will be able to cover it up.’

  ‘Is there no way they can do Lucy and Don’s scenes in that time?’ said Elise. ‘Just rearrange the schedule?’

  Barbara picked up her gin and tonic and took a sip. ‘Actually, that’s a good idea. What would I do without you two?’

  ‘Well done, El,’ said Connie.

  Elise didn’t feel proud. She felt resentful that she was being sucked into this drama that didn’t really involve her, and knew that once it was resolved, Barbara would carry on overlooking her.

  ‘El’s sitting for a portrait for Shara,’ Connie said.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, honey,’ said Barbara. ‘Have you done that before?’

  Elise glanced at Connie, who refused to look at her. Elise’s experience at the Royal College of Art had been discussed with Barbara more than once previously. ‘Yes I have,’ she said.

  ‘I’d love to see the finished picture,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Shara works slowly,’ said Connie.

  ‘I’m having a party,’ Elise said. ‘To celebrate my birthday.’

  ‘Oh! When’s your birthday?’

  ‘It was last month. Connie forgot, so we’re doing it now.’

  Barbara looked between the two women, clearly unsure of what to say. Connie stared at Elise, an awkward smile on her face. ‘I said I was sorry, darling.’

  ‘You did. And it’s forgiven.’

  ‘Can I come?’ said Barbara.

  ‘Of course,’ said Elise. ‘That’s why I m
entioned it. You’ll be guest of honour.’

  ‘Make it fancy dress for me? I’ll come as an Egyptian mummy.’

  ‘We can wait,’ said Elise. ‘I mean, my birthday’s already been and gone, so what’s another month?’

  *

  That night, Barbara stayed over. They put her in one of Elise’s nightgowns, tucked her in the spare bed and gave her another sleeping pill. She drifted away quite quickly. As night fell and the cicadas started up, Connie sat by the pool under the stars, nursing a tumbler with a small tot of whisky in it. Elise came and sat next to her.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Connie said. ‘You made your point to Barbara about your birthday.’

  ‘I was angry,’ said Elise. She sat down next to Connie and put her head on Connie’s shoulder.

  ‘I know,’ said Connie. ‘Quite rightly. I deserve to be embarrassed.’

  ‘Barbara’ll wake up tomorrow still thinking you’re the best thing ever.’

  Connie sighed. ‘She’s lost, El. I’m just helping her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s awful. All that money, all that status, and she’s still vulnerable. I wonder if that ever changes?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Elise took the glass from Connie’s hand and sipped. ‘You find it hard, seeing her like this.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I mean, she’ll never be the movie star for us again. She’ll never have the same mystique. She’s a battered woman.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Connie sharply. ‘She’s not a “movie star”, or a “battered woman”.’

  ‘She’s both.’

  ‘You’re being deliberately reductive. You know better than that.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s weird, the way she’s ended up here? Doesn’t she have other friends? People she can trust? She barely knows us.’

  Connie shrugged. ‘I don’t think she really trusts anyone, and I don’t blame her. There’s a connection. There was from the start.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s just because you’re on the outside, so you’re not as problematic?’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘I don’t think she thinks of me as “on the outside”,’ said Connie.

  Elise hesitated. ‘Do you – are you – attracted to her, Con?’

  ‘Am I attracted to her?’

  ‘Well, you just talked about a connection.’

  ‘She’s a beautiful woman, I’d be blind if I said otherwise, but no. No, no. I don’t think of her like that.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You are the most beautiful of them all. Come here,’ said Connie.

  Elise came near, and a tingle ran down her middle into her groin as Connie touched the side of her face with her delicate fingers. She lifted Elise’s mouth to hers and kissed it slowly. Their lips held together for a long while, before they broke apart. Then they sat side by side for a time in silence, staring at the neon stillness of the water.

  2017

  22

  Every day, I sat at Connie’s kitchen table and typed up her story on my laptop. I had no idea how it ended, because she would hand it over in stages, five or six yellow rectangular pages at a time, the writing large and scrawled but still legible, each sentence requiring two lines of the paper. I was diligent, at times awestruck. Her prose was still as good as it had been thirty years ago. There were similar cadences that had appeared in the previous two novels, images repeated, and the themes of learning how to be alone, to manage loss, to enjoy freedom.

  As I typed, I began to be convinced that Connie had cast herself in the role of Margaret Gillespie. This was because Margaret Gillespie was a woman with agency. She was a woman who did things to other women – in this case, her daughter, barely out of girlhood, trapped by her circumstances. It was an ambivalent novel because it was not clear – or at least, not yet – as to whether Margaret wanted to hurt her daughter, to punish her for something.

  It tantalized me that Connie had set this novel on the east coast of America, albeit in the years of the pilgrim fathers rather than when, according to my father, she was there in the early 1980s. The otherworldliness of the place, the elements of sea and woodland, and the harsh conditions seemed to appeal to her. Her colonists were deaf to the fact that this was not virgin land, that there had been natives living on these shores and in these forests for thousands of years, in harmony with their surroundings. Margaret’s discomfort in being there, the patriarchal erasure of natural justice as embodied by Davy Roper and his cronies, and the women around them who cleaved themselves to power in order to maintain an illusion of dominance, provided evidence to me that Connie was critical of colonization, in whatever form it took. Margaret was a progressive, potentially an anachronism, as much as she was an outsider. She didn’t fit into this society Connie had created, and I think Christina did, which was why Margaret felt so desperate.

  Christina herself was an enigma: she could be seen as pragmatic in one light, spineless in another. She wanted an easy life, to submit to its vicissitudes and hope for the best. But Margaret wouldn’t let her. We’ve come too far, she told her daughter, for you to shrink back down to a tiny size.

  I’m not a mad dreamer, usually. If I do dream, it will be that strange, unrecoverable symphony of weirdness and banality, which dissipates in the morning, soon to be forgotten. But at night, Margaret Gillespie began to carry me off until her twisted capabilities might have been mine. I would stand on the beach where Margaret stood in Connie’s imagination, the shore a curved white blade with a line of firs from where the barks of hunting dogs emerged. I knew the woody glory of Margaret’s foraged cooking. I saw minnows turn pink in the water from a character’s blood – though whose it was had not yet been revealed to me in Connie’s pages. Davy’s charisma had been revealed by now – as well as his fists, his misogyny and insecurity, stalking my night times. Christina’s belly swelled, but death was dormant in that symbol of hope, and I would wake up with a jolt.

  Since overhearing her and Deborah’s conversation on the night of the pizza, I had become hungrier for more clues about my mother, yet simultaneously more fearful of what I might discover. So far, Connie had proven prickly when questioned about her life, and only liked to talk about things when she could control the information she imparted. And yet, here she was, handing over her innermost thoughts and workings. All I could do was hope that these pages would give me an understanding of who Connie really was, and through that, who my mother had been. I believed that writers wrote themselves into their fictions, that however they twisted the original idea into a new shape, there was some truth inside it, still. If it was true that Connie had known my mother as closely as my father claimed she had, then surely she was somewhere in these pages? So as I typed, I read, and as I read, I saw my mother as Christina, cowed by the dominance of Margaret, trapped in a marriage she didn’t want but which at least offered her some independence. But how could I be that selective? If I was assigning my mother a role in Connie’s fictions, then I had to give my father one too. And I could not see him in Davy Roper. My father was a caring man, not a monster. I rejected the idea that I was dipping into Connie’s box of letters and spelling any word I pleased, but maybe it was true.

  My dad texted me. HOW R U? he wrote. WE R FINE. As if there was a group of people over there in France, not just him and Claire, a late-middle-aged couple standing on the shore, set loose from his adult daughter, who in turn had set herself upon the wind.

  I’m pretending to be someone else in order to work for a woman who may or may not know what happened to my mother. I’m wandering the woods of her mind in order to find clues. My best friend’s having another baby and although I love her very much, my life is totally at odds with hers, and I am frustrated, how, despite my best intentions, I keep buying into this dichotomy dictated by society that we’re so very different to each other now, even though she doesn’t do that at all. My boyfriend and I are acting like flatmates who occasionall
y have sex, and I don’t know if that’s normal. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in the near future, let alone where I might be in ten years’ time. I’m climbing up a ladder into a cloud, but my foot has slipped off the rung and I’m dangling upside down. Is this what life is, and they just didn’t tell you at school? Am I supposed to be dangling upside down?

  I’m good! I wrote.

  DID YOU READ THOSE BOOKS I GAVE YOU?

  I hesitated. To say I’d read them would lead to endless complication. He would ask me what I thought about them, whether I’d looked Connie up.

  I lied to him. I was getting good at lying. I haven’t read them yet, I wrote.

  YOU DON’T HAVE 2 READ THEM

  I know. But I appreciate you giving them to me

  IT HAS BEEN VERY UNFAIR ON YOU, he wrote.

  The bridge of my nose began to sting. His care and sympathy, and the inadequacy of his words, and his awful text speak in trying to express this, contained too much pathos.

  I’m ok, Dad.

  OK. BUT YOU JUST CALL ME, OK? IF YOU NEED ME. OR CLAIRE. WE R HERE.

  Thank you.

  *

  The end of October turned into November, and for four weeks as the temperature steadily dropped outside and supermarkets emptied their shelves of edible chocolate ghosts and bloated pumpkins, and refilled them with premature yule logs and mince pies, I continued to type up Connie’s novel at her kitchen table. It pleased and even empowered me that this traditionally feminine site of domesticity had been co-opted by our intellectual exercise.

  I’d been working for Connie for six weeks, but it felt longer – as if I had been there for years, as if I knew her from before, and we’d both been waiting for the right time to come together, that we’d trusted the timing of our lives in order for this to happen. This was nonsense, because I’d engineered the whole thing. It was nice for me to think that my getting the job with her contained some sort of inevitability, or destiny, but I had undeniably manipulated the situation to be here. But we did get on well. I seemed to fit easily into the energy of her days, and the offering of her novel to me was something extraordinary that softened the boundaries between us. On the 1st of December I bought her an advent calendar with chocolate behind its doors, and was so happy to see her delight.