That was when I caught sight of the note on the doormat. It was just a piece of scrap paper, lying inconspicuously among flyers for National Trust properties and places to visit.
‘So sorry, darling…’
Happiness overwhelmed me. Instead of using wine to blank out my life, now I was going to use it to celebrate. I was going to smoke at my open window, gaze out over exquisite Grasmere, drink and imagine my life here with Bo. My beautiful woman, my love, my drop of gold.
The time until Saturday passed slowly. I busied myself getting to know Grasmere. I walked round the village, down to the lake, popped into the tourist information office for a bus timetable so I could get out to the far-flung fells around Buttermere and Ennerdale. I visited Dove Cottage, just so I could see the place where Bo had set her novel, so I could wander the rooms around which Bo had moved and sense her there. I reached out and ran my fingers over the display cupboard housing Wordsworth’s ice skates and imagined that Bo had touched this wood, left her fingerprints in the space that I now caressed.
Then I wondered if this was how people behaved when they were bereaved, if this was what it was like to lose someone: to be constantly looking for them in familiar spaces, wishing the force of your love was enough to bring them back, and going slowly mad when you realised it wasn’t, would never be. I recoiled from the thought of it.
On Friday, I woke with no idea how to get through till tomorrow. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked on, marking time. And time was slow.
This is awful, I thought. A love so consuming it had the power to flatten me. But it would be better now I was here, now we could be together at some point of every day instead of snatching moments in the nooks and crannies of the year.
Nine am. At the moment, Bo would be dropping the girls off at school, then beginning that long trek home up the fellside. If I hurried, I could probably catch her on the way, say hello, kiss her, walk with her for a while, listen to her news.
But Bo had said Saturday. She must be working, making up for all those months that had gone by when she’d felt blocked and couldn’t do it. I would just have to wait. But God, I didn’t want to. I wanted Bo to drop everything and run to me, the way I would have run to her, if she would just let me…
I spent the day in bed, reading her books.
I woke up early on Saturday. What I needed, more than anything, was a job that could distract me. For now, I’d do any old thing, then, once the money was ticking over again, I’d find something better. I picked up my iPad, typed ‘Lake District jobs’ into Google and scrolled through the pages. Lots of the jobs were seasonal, and the season was ending, but there were hotspots that stayed open all year round. I fired off emails to the National Trust, a bookshop, and a few organisations offering walking tours. I was sure I could take people for walks.
I showered and dressed, then spent the morning wandering the village again. I visited the church and Wordsworth’s grave and the tiny old schoolhouse that was now a shop selling world-famous gingerbread (though I had never heard of it).
In my head, I played out all the possible ways I could greet Bo when I saw her. Should I just walk over and kiss her delicately, on the cheek? Should I be cool and distant, make it clear I was still pissed off about her long silence, the vicious dumping, and the two-day wait to see her? Or should I just do what I most wanted to do: abandon all decorum and snog her, right there, in quaint, heteronormative Grasmere?
I decided to just see what happened. I’d give it a moment, and respond to whichever way Bo greeted me.
At one-fifteen, I went for one last walk around the churchyard before heading down to the café. I didn’t want to look as though I’d been killing time all morning, wandering aimlessly, unable to concentrate on anything but Bo…
When I got there, the café was noisy and crowded. I scanned the tables and couldn’t see her. I went outside to the terrace.
There she was, right there, sipping tea from a bone-china mug, her glossy lips smiling, smiling.
And there was Gus. And Lola and Maggie.
Bo saw me and gasped.
‘Alice!’ she cried. ‘What are you doing here?’
I was speechless. I looked at Bo and then at Gus and the girls. ‘I…’
Bo turned away from me and murmured something to her husband.
She turned back to me. ‘I have told you to leave me alone,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘I…’
She looked exasperated, like someone at the end of her tether. ‘I have tried to be kind to you, Alice. I have tried to be patient and sympathetic. But there is nothing going on here. I do not return these feelings you have, and I have never given you any reason to suggest that I did. Now, you need to pack your bags and go back to your house in Brighton; back to your friends and your job. You are young, Alice. You have the world at your feet. Go and get on with living, and leave me to get on with living, too.’
People at the tables around us were watching.
Shock rendered me speechless.
‘Please leave,’ Bo said again.
I glanced at Gus, to see what he made of this, but he was busying himself with the children, telling them not to worry.
I left. The shock of it overwhelmed any pain I might have felt. It drowned the anger. Fury. Rage. The desire to go back to that café and split Bo’s pretty little face and her tidy little life in two.
I found a pub with free Wi-Fi, ordered a pint of ale, sat at the window with my iPad and bashed out an email. ‘What the fuck is going on? You’ve just made look like a complete lunatic in front of your entire family. You asked me to move here, and now you’re saying you want nothing to do with me. Is this because of Gus, or is it because you’re a bitch? I have tried very hard not to think you’re a bitch, but at moments like this, I don’t see that there’s any other option.’
I pressed send. Almost immediately, the message bounced back. I went onto Facebook and typed Bo’s name into the search bar. Bo had removed herself from my friends list, but she hadn’t blocked me. I retyped the message and sent it from there. Then I wrote another one. ‘I suggest you give me some money. It has cost me around £3,000 to come up here from Brighton. £3,000 that you know I haven’t got. Please pay it into my account by the end of today, or I will make sure your husband knows what a lying, cheating cow he’s married to. The bank is HSBC. My account number is 51478934 and the sort code is 40-87-43. Three grand, or Gus will find out. I mean it.’
I drank the rest of my ale quickly and went back to my studio. My hands were shaking. Cold hung in my chest. I ransacked the flat, looking for Bo’s note, but couldn’t find it. I checked my pockets. Not there. Where was it? Where had I put it? I wasn’t stupid, or crazy. I knew that note had existed. I hadn’t dreamed it up, any more than I had dreamed up Bo asking me to move here, any more than I’d dreamed up three glorious nights with her when Gus was away.
I sat down on my bed. There was so much to sort out. I couldn’t stay here, not now. But I was poor. I had nothing, not even a train fare. Jake’s words came back to me: ‘There’s only a floor to sleep on, but you wouldn’t need to pay anything.’
But Jake was Jake. So lovely, so useless, and so distant from me now. I felt I’d aged years since that night I left him.
I wasn’t going to cry. No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t going to think about Bo, and this horrifying love that had gone deep enough to unhinge me. I wouldn’t think about the beautiful woman who’d lain beside me in bed and run her fingers over my skin and said, ‘There can be no one else on earth like you, no other mind more perfectly sculpted to mine.’ Nor would I remember my response. ‘We are twin souls. Identical.’ Or Bo saying, ‘No. Not identical. Opposite. Like life and death, light and dark – one cannot be known without the other.’
I would remember none of it at all, I thought, as I felt something inside me crack open and break. It wasn’t my heart, I knew that. It was everything I was. It was all of me, derelict.
Her Majesty’s Prison for Women
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Yorkshire
As long as I’m outside, I can make it through the days. The troubles start when evening falls and I have to come in and they send us to our cells. Summer is easier than winter. Then, I can just slip beneath the sheets, take a sleeping pill and lie in the black until the bell rings for breakfast. Winter is different, though, when the hours from dusk till night stretch out ahead of me and I have nothing to fill them with but my own thoughts. I try to be strict about directing them. My mind is my escape. I am solitary. I stay far away from the others, and they don’t come near me. I write notes, write diaries, write poetry. Anything to keep me creative and away from that old black cat, despair.
It’s easy to get Prozac here. They prescribe it with no questions, without telling us to seek therapy or counselling, or a deeper cure than chemical sunshine. It is generally accepted that the prison population has every reason to miserable.
No one seems to have any clear idea of what this place is for – whether it’s a holding pen or a place of rehab, a place where we can learn how not to be criminal, so we can live good lives on the outside again. But I’d lived a good life on the outside. And that’s the fact I reflect on the most – how quickly a well-lived, ordinary life can be reduced to this, just by letting the wrong person into it.
That was the trouble. We were a potent mix, she and I. The passion was deep, and shot straight to our cores, where other people couldn’t reach. It was divine love, but when it turned, it dragged us both through hell.
There was a time when I wanted revenge. I hated her for what she’d done to me. Now, all I want is peace. Forgiveness. Another chance. Her.
I would do it differently, if I could do it again.
I’ve already written her a letter. They won’t let me send it from here, but I can send it when I get out. They’ll probably make it a condition of my early release that I don’t contact her, but she’ll want to hear from me, that much I’m certain of. I googled her recently, when they let me have internet access. She’s just had a book out, and although she’s made herself difficult to contact directly – she has no Facebook page, no Twitter account, no public email – I’ll be able to get hold of her through her publisher.
I want her to know that I’m sorry.
Part Three
DENYING
BO
1
The moment of change was easy to pinpoint. It was the day I came home from Northumberland. Before then, I’d been the happy owner of everything I’d ever wanted – a beautiful home, two lovely children, a successful career and a man I could live with well enough. If someone had asked me to sum up my life in one word, I’d have said this: peaceful.
A peaceful life. Unexciting, but vital. You can’t measure the value of a peaceful life until it’s gone.
Alice came at me unexpectedly. After saying goodbye to her, everything felt dreary and flat, like an endless Sunday afternoon with no one to break the boredom. At home the next day, I was meant to be reading a new biography about Dorothy Worsdsworth, ready for a joint radio interview with the author, to see if it shed any more light on the eternal question of whether she’d slept with her brother. But getting down to work was like walking through an intellectual marshland. I couldn’t be bothered with it.
I abandoned work and went to the kitchen. Gus was there, in his usual spot. ‘What are your plans today?’ he asked.
I shrugged and tipped biscuits into the cat’s bowl. ‘The usual,’ I said. ‘A bit of work.’
I stepped towards the sink to fill the kettle and tripped over the cat as she came stumbling out from her bed by the stove. She was ancient, this cat. I’d had her since I was nineteen. It hadn’t occurred to me when I’d picked up a tiny, playful kitten that one day I’d be stuck looking after a geriatric with feline dementia, who’d lost one eye and used the fruit bowl as a toilet.
I went on. ‘I might walk up to Grisedale Tarn later. Do you want to come?’
He shook his head. Of course not. Recently, he’d become less interested in my company. I didn’t know why. All I could think was that a quiet resentment was eroding him. My work brought in most of our money, and so it was me who made the decisions about our life together. What was more, I’d brought him here, to the middle of rural Cumbria, where he knew no one and where his only chance of meeting people would be if he joined some local society that didn’t interest him a jot. He’d had friends in Oxford – people he’d worked with most of his life, people who understood him. Now, he was drifting away into invisible old age.
There was still tension lingering between us, left over from the conversation we’d had the evening before, when I’d suggested he look for work to keep him occupied.
‘Yeah, like what?’ he’d sneered. ‘A farmhand, or a Sherpa carrying people’s backpacks up and down mountains so they don’t have to do it themselves? Those are the only jobs in Cumbria.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I meant freelance work. Get in touch with your old organisation and say you’re available for projects if they need you.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, and fell silent.
But I heard his unspoken words, his anger with my success, my fame and what he saw as my ability to let bestselling novels fly from my fingertips while all his achievements lay buried in the past. He wasn’t going to fight, I could see that. It was a conversation we needed to stop having.
It hadn’t bothered me, until now. Until Alice.
I went to my study and fired up the computer, with the aim of finding some reviews of this new biography. Perhaps they’d give me enough information that I wouldn’t have to read it. Instead, though, I clicked on to Facebook, scrolled through the endless political posts in my newsfeed from friends campaigning for climate justice, or for an end to the bedroom tax or, curiously from one, for an end to what he saw as the hard-left ban on fox-hunting. I hovered over it, left a comment: ‘Poor countryside-dwelling Tories. Always having their fun ended by the emotional left. They are like helpless foxes, pursued by commie hounds for their blood and taxes.’
I didn’t know why I’d done that, only that the words had slipped from my fingers more easily than the ones I was being paid to write.
Alice never posted politics. Today, her status read:
‘The Girl on the Train ought be renamed The Girl on the Rail Replacement Bus.’
I clicked ‘like’, then went to my emails. There was one there from her, telling me she’d split up from her boyfriend. She joked about it, but the tone was flat. I invited her to stay. It would be good, I thought, to have her here. She’d breathe life into me again.
As soon as I told them a friend was coming to stay, the girls were beside themselves with excitement. On Monday afternoon, they came in from the garden laden with hollyhocks and rhododendrons, then spent half an hour arranging them in jars of water, which they carried to the spare room and set down on the bedside table and the chest of drawers.
Lola said, ‘I’m going to make her some rose perfume,’ and so I gave her four miniature honey pots I’d picked up in London hotels, then Lola took Maggie’s arm and dragged her back outside.
I could see them from the kitchen window as they busied themselves with plucking rose petals and filling the jars with water from the garden tap. I was looking forward to seeing Alice, although I had the odd moment of anxiety about it. Gus thought I was reckless.
‘Are you sure this is wise?’ he asked.
‘I know what you’re thinking…’ I said.
‘I’m just worried. The last thing you need is to take a starstruck young author under your wing – especially one you’ve already said is vulnerable and needy – and for things to go wrong.’
I sighed. ‘I know. But Alice isn’t like Christian. She’s sweet. She’s…’
‘I remember a time when you thought Christian was sweet. You thought he was lonely. Young, sweet, lonely and talented.’
‘I—’
‘How do you know this girl is OK? You’ve spent five days with her.’
‘I just know.’
‘She’s young.’
‘So what?’
‘She wants to be an author. She’ll expect you to help her make it in the world.’
I said, ‘Well, I might be able to help her. She’s very talented. If I can, then I will.’
Gus shook his head. ‘Another one of your causes,’ he said. ‘Another orphan. I sometimes think you look for trouble.’
He spoke with weariness and suspicion. Gus wasn’t a man who found selflessness easy to believe in. The motives, for him, were always dubious. It was against human nature, he said, to care this much about strangers when there was nothing in it for you. I brushed him aside. It was against his human nature, perhaps, but not everyone’s. Not mine.
2
At last, Alice arrived, and there was life in the house again – interesting, adult life; not simply the clatter and chaos of children. I could feel myself coming out of the slump, my mind lit again by someone else who was excited about the things I loved. I took her off, walking the fells. We hiked from Grasmere to Ullswater one morning after heavy rain, listening to the cold rush of the waterfalls and the gentle crash of the lake on the shore.
Alice stood still beside me, held in Cumbria’s rocky edges, and said, ‘It’s beautiful here. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
I said, ‘There’s a link between walking in natural beauty and an increase in mental well-being. Have you ever been aware of it?’
Alice shook her head. ‘I’ve never really walked futher than the kebab shop before.’
‘You should walk. It will make you feel better.’
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