The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  His face was taut, his eyes downcast. ‘How are you?’ he said, sitting in the chair opposite me.

  ‘I’m well, thank you. Glad all the Christmas stuff is over. How are you?’

  ‘Same. You missed a real fight between Mum and Daisy though. You would have loved it.’

  I laughed. ‘What was it about?’

  ‘I don’t even really know. Dais was pissed off about something.’

  ‘How are her and Radek?’

  Joe looked uncomfortable. ‘You know what they’re like. They’ll get through it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  His eyes flicked to my neckline, where to my discomfort I realized I had not removed the L necklace Connie had bought me for Christmas. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘What’s the L for?’

  I grasped it in my fist, my cheeks flushed. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘It’s just a joke.’

  ‘Did someone give it to you?’

  ‘Yeah. Kelly.’

  He looked confused. ‘You left the flat, Rosie. You vanished.’

  ‘Actually, you left first.’

  ‘I came back.’

  ‘I’m here now, Joe,’ I said, tucking the necklace under my jumper. I felt the instinct to apologize, but I swallowed it down.

  ‘I’ve been worried about you,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ I said. I placed my words between us with the deliberation of a gypsy come to tell her own fortune.

  ‘Right,’ said Joe. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Rosie. I didn’t mean it. What I said.’

  ‘About what?’

  He looked at me pointedly. ‘About you.’

  ‘That I’m tiring? That I’m a psycho?’

  His lips tensed together. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think everyone’s a little bit psycho by the end of the year,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’

  Joe hesitated. ‘But you have changed.’

  I took a light breath. ‘How have I changed?’

  ‘You’re – more focused. Harder.’

  ‘Harder? I feel the opposite, Joey. I’m soft. I’m letting things in. Maybe for the first time ever.’

  He looked worried. ‘What are you letting in?’

  ‘Maybe we’ve both changed,’ I said, avoiding an answer. I wasn’t sure it was precisely true that Joe had changed. I didn’t think he’d changed much in the last few years at all, in fact, but that was because I’d lost all perspective of him. But in this moment I was certain that if he met someone new, then the changes would show. Joe just couldn’t change with me.

  ‘Did they like the presents?’ I said.

  ‘Yep. Thank you for doing that. I should have done it.’

  I waited for a more expansive reply, but none came. ‘Are you back at the flat, then?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Joe paused. ‘And – are you coming back?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said gently.

  ‘Right. You’re not actually living with her, are you?’

  ‘Joey, I think you know it’s best I don’t come back to the flat.’

  He was silent for a long while. No one came to take our order, but neither of us could leave the table. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said eventually.

  ‘I think we need to let each other go,’ I said.

  He stared at me. He seemed to want to say something, but changed his mind.

  ‘I do love you, Joey,’ I said. ‘And we could hang on. Stick it out together – for another ten years, another twenty. You’ll be fifty-four. Fifty-four and still with me. Is that what you really want?’

  I didn’t know why I was abasing myself like this, offering myself as a booby prize to Joe in exchange for his dogged commitment, but I knew I had to make him see.

  ‘Everyone has their ups and downs,’ he said. ‘Mum and Dad – god, sometimes we really thought it was done. But it wasn’t. It’ll never be done. Mum says it’s normal to go through phases.’

  So he’d been talking to Dorothy, then. I was impressed that he’d maybe had a meaningful conversation with his mother, for once. I thought she would have liked it. I was good for something, at least. I was also surprised that Dorothy was potentially agitating for us to stay together.

  ‘But we don’t have to do that, if we don’t want to,’ I said. ‘Do you really want to? How many ups have there been in the last couple of years – and how many downs?’

  Joe looked back up at me. ‘I don’t want not to know you,’ he said.

  ‘That won’t happen. We’ll always know each other. But we can set each other free.’

  ‘When did you start feeling like this?’ he said.

  I saw the twenty-five-year-old man I’d met at a party nine years ago, full of ideas and jokes, smoking a cigarette. I thought about how when I saw him, I told myself: We could be a couple. He would be a person to do things with. I thought about his warm hands, his attentiveness. His curiosity. His patience that had fizzled, in the end, to nothing. We’d seen each other through a lot.

  I knew I owed Joe an answer, but when did I know that our love had changed? Was it at Christmas, wrapping his mother’s hand-cream? Was it peeing on those sticks and seeing the path my life might take? Was it before all that, when I walked through Connie’s door for the first time? Was it on the beach with my dad? Or had the seed been sown years ago, as happens so many times, when lovers are foolish enough to think everything will stay the same?

  I hadn’t noticed exactly when my love had begun to slip away. No, that is not entirely true. There had been times when I tasted the staleness. The sense of defeat and affectionate despair. Whenever this happened, I had let that awareness lie untended.

  ‘There’s a bit in Connie’s first novel,’ I said. ‘No, wait, Joey – listen – don’t roll your eyes. She says that there’s you, your partner, and then the relationship itself. Love. You have to look after love, just as you look after yourself. You can’t just expect love to sustain itself on its own. We’ve not been looking after it, Joe. And neither of us have wanted to. And sometimes there’s just not an explanation for that.’

  ‘Love isn’t a pot plant, Rose.’

  ‘It is a living thing,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘You’ll make me cry.’

  ‘I think we can cry,’ I said.

  So we did. Quiet tears, the secret still inside me, on a sodden January day. A beginning of grief. A small goodbye.

  *

  An electric sense of my skin, my hands and feet. I did not feel triumphant. But I did, in an interesting way, feel more free. To be always waiting and wanting had been my most natural state to be. To be yearning for something, rather than having the guts to make it real. I didn’t know how much longer that could last. I got out at Hampstead Heath overground station and headed to Connie’s.

  By the time I let myself in, I felt composed enough. Connie was sitting in her favourite armchair in the front room with an open bottle of champagne before her, two glasses waiting. A familiar sight, but this time she was beaming at me, and I felt discombobulated by her air of celebration. It was as if I’d walked through the wrong door.

  ‘Hi, Con,’ I said.

  ‘There you are! Good news!’ she said.

  ‘What?’ For a mad moment, I thought she’d divined what was going on inside me.

  ‘Deborah rang. You know that girl she was talking about at the publisher?’

  ‘The editor?’

  ‘Yes. Georgina. The one at Griffin. Deb decided to target her specifically, rather than a general approach to lots of publishers. It worked, Laura. Deb sent her The Mercurial, and she loves it. She’s going to make an offer.’

  ‘Oh, Connie!’

  Connie got to her feet. I stood there, half-stunned, whilst she wrapped her arms around me and held me briefly. When she pulled away, her eyes were lit up and she looked about forty years younger. ‘Apparently, “the puritanical tension on the Massachusetts coast was a perfect bal
ance to the anarchy and witchiness of Margaret”.’

  ‘Did she actually say “witchiness”?’

  ‘That’s what Deb said,’ said Connie. ‘I like the sound of this Georgina. Would you like a glass?’

  ‘Not for me.’

  Connie looked surprised. ‘Really? But isn’t this is what we wanted?’

  We. The pronoun glowed. ‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘I’m delighted. I’m so happy for you. But – it’s too early to drink,’ I said.

  ‘It’s four p.m. and it’s dark,’ Connie replied. ‘It’s January. I’m going to sell a book.’

  ‘I know. And it’s marvellous. But no, thank you. I’m sorry, Con. It’s just – I’m tired.’

  ‘You’re tired? I’m seventy-three.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, although I could tell she was disappointed. ‘I am more than capable of drinking it myself.’

  I collapsed into the sofa. ‘The Mercurial’s going to be a hit.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Con. ‘But the fact that there is a living soul who is still interested in my writing, and she’s young enough to be my daughter – well, I can’t tell you how it feels, Laura. I’m absolutely delighted. I didn’t think I’d feel like this. I thought I’d be indifferent. Isn’t it terrible that I’m not? I’m delighted. I am.’

  I laughed. I’d never seen her this animated. ‘And I’ve got so much to thank you for,’ she said.

  ‘No you haven’t. You wrote it.’

  ‘But you made it very easy for me, all that typing, all the delicious food. Just your being here. You’re a bloody godsend.’

  I poured her a glass of champagne and she told me that, according to Deborah, Griffin would publish that summer providing the money was enough. If they agreed the contracts, a round of edits would apparently be coming Connie’s way, but they were minor; Georgina didn’t want to touch it much. ‘Do you think that’s a good thing?’ said Connie. ‘Do you think she’s scared of me?’

  ‘She hasn’t met you. You should meet her. Then she’ll be scared of you.’

  ‘I am not a scary person,’ Connie said. ‘I’m a pussycat.’

  I hesitated, remembering what Deborah had told me that evening she’d come round for the pizza – how Connie disliked journalists, how she resisted interpretation. ‘Have you thought about what it’s going to be like, being published again?’ I said. ‘Talking to people about your work – do you think you’re ready? There’ll be questions. Why you haven’t written – they’ll want an angle.’

  Connie was silent for a moment. ‘I’ll give them an obtuse one,’ she said.

  ‘Connie, it’s not funny. What are you going to say?’

  She swallowed her champagne. ‘I’ll say I didn’t think I had anything worth writing. It’s the truth.’

  ‘But why now? Con, why have you written it now?’

  Connie snapped her head towards me. ‘Why are you always asking me that?’

  I felt my cheeks flush. ‘I’ve only asked you twice.’

  ‘That’s more than enough.’

  ‘I – just think you need to be prepared.’

  ‘Fine. I wrote it now because it felt right. And I felt ready.’

  ‘Ready . . . for what?’

  Connie made a noise of exasperation. ‘For god’s sake. I don’t see why I have to defend myself to you. Is this your attempt at press training me? Can’t that wait?’ She frowned. ‘Or is it something else?’

  I closed my eyes. ‘I’m fine.’

  She snorted. ‘Come on. Spit it out.’

  ‘The thing is, Con,’ I said. I opened my eyes. I twisted my fingers together, over and over. I couldn’t look at her, but I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. I needed her to know, I needed her to make it better. ‘Well. The thing is. I went to the doctor—’

  Connie put her glass down. ‘Oh, god. Laura, are you ill?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  I dared to look up at her. Her face was a mask of shock, and I was sure, as I continued to wait for her to say something, that my time here as Laura Brown was over. Connie would not tolerate me in her house. The news of this baby would change everything for her. The dynamic between Laura and Connie would implode, I would slink away as Rose, and my mother’s story would fall through my fingers, again.

  1982

  33

  Elise would say she was going surfing, and Connie would drive her out to Malibu. Once Connie was gone, Elise and Matt would load up the surfboards onto his car, under the pretence they were visiting other beaches. Instead, they made stop-offs at motels along the Pacific Highway. In whatever hired room they found, varying in ambience and quality, sometimes paid for with Shara’s dollars, and other days with Connie’s, Elise tried to exorcise her rage on Matt’s body.

  Connie had no idea what Elise had witnessed between her and Barbara by the pool, but she had begun to comment on Elise’s behaviour, asking her why she was so quiet, why was she so angry, why all this surfing, why wouldn’t she talk? Elise couldn’t bear these interrogations; she couldn’t face the conversation that might come. Better to run, better to leave it all behind. Just over a week after their first time together in the motel with the shell-pink light, Elise suggested to Matt that they should leave.

  ‘Leave?’ he said. ‘But where will we go?’ As if there were no such thing as planes or other countries.

  Elise swallowed her irritation. He was not as adept at her at this. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, lying back in the mussed bed-sheets. ‘It’ll come to me.’

  ‘How’s this going to pan out?’

  ‘Is it that you’re scared?’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ he said. ‘It’s just, this is all quite fast.’

  ‘What’s happening between us has confirmed something that we already knew, Matt. It’s like a pact. We’ve found each other, a way out, and things can’t stay as they are. You’re always saying you can’t live in that beach house any longer.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘And I can’t be in the bungalow.’

  ‘Why not?’ He sat up, propping himself on the thin pillows. ‘Do you think Connie suspects something?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Elise. ‘What are we going to do – meet up with our surfboards and pretend we’re finding waves until Shara finds us out?’

  He thought about it, and then one day quite soon after, they did it: packed a pair of small suitcases and drove to the airport in his car. Elise felt beneath her bare feet the old cola cans Matt never threw away, rolling round in the footwell, the last of their syrup dried in a fine brown line along their lips. As he zoomed along the opposite freeway to the one she’d come in on four months before, Elise ran the arch of her foot over and over one of the cans, and stared out of the passenger window. The world was there, so near – but every time she touched it, it didn’t give her what she wanted. She remembered Connie, so excited in her sunglasses. Connie, who’d wanted this trip so much.

  It wasn’t until they reached the airport and parked in the long-term stay, that Elise chose Mexico City: a short flight to a very different country. Matt agreed to the destination, and Elise felt good that he was saying yes to her big ideas. Being the one who decided things on this magnitude was a novel experience. A border was being crossed and there was a heightened sense of removal: facts which matched Elise’s feeling of being a fish out of water in her own life.

  ‘Did you leave Shara a note?’ she asked Matt as they queued up at the Aeromexico counter.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘That I needed to be alone for a while.’

  ‘A while? Is that all you said? You should have said you were with me. How will Connie know where I am?’

  ‘They’ll know, Elise.’

  ‘Connie’s sleeping with Barbara,’ she said.

  The woman in front of them in the queue turned round, her expression one of distaste. But Elise wasn’t havi
ng any of it. She stared at the woman until she looked away.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Matt.

  ‘You heard me. Con and Barb.’

  ‘And how long has that been going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. A while.’

  ‘Are you OK?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Course I am.’

  *

  When they got to the front of the queue, Matt bought them return flights, not one-way tickets. There was something so depressing and prosaic about this decision, but Elise kept her tongue mute, her mouth clamped shut, because what was paramount was that they get out of this city. She supposed Matt was trying to treat this as a sort of holiday, a while, a black hole of time. But even if he couldn’t handle the enormity of what they were about to do, she could. She knew she would never set foot in LA again.

  On the plane, the quasi-defiance of gravity was a help. Elise felt miraculous: here she was, in all her messiness, and no one was dead! She and Matt had found each other at just the right time. He was not perfect, but he’d got her out of there, hadn’t he? He worshipped her body, and she knew now – Connie having brutally confirmed this – that no one was perfect.

  Matt seemed to relax, too, as if he had needed to have the ground vanish from beneath his feet for him to come into himself. He held her hand and squeezed it and they looked at each other conspiratorially.

  After the plane landed in Mexico City, they caught a taxi to a street of hotels a stone’s throw from the span of the Zócalo. Elise lay still in their small clean bed, awake next to Matt’s sleeping form, and wondered what Connie was doing now. How long would it take Connie to realize that she’d gone? She fantasized Connie, turning over tables and chairs in search of her, a game of hide and seek. She fantasized Connie’s worry and Connie’s guilt. It gave her a bleak and petulant pleasure.

  By her side Matt tossed and turned, and she wondered how much he thought about Shara. The note he’d written sounded anaemic, and then there was the safety net of the return ticket. It drove Elise crazy that she couldn’t eradicate everything before this new beginning, but she reassured herself that with time, erasure would come. She tried not to think about Shara in her studio, the beautiful, careful painting Shara had finished. Shara, telling her to keep the baby, if ever she got pregnant.