“Yes,” I agree. Again, she’s undeniably impressive, with her quick, devious intelligence. She barely missed a beat there.
“In that case, I might as well admit it. I was coming here to ask you to blame Theo.” She shrugs. “After all, why wouldn’t you? Your own business is struggling because of this—”
“My business is fine.”
“Really?” She arches a brow. Something in her has changed. I knocked her off balance with my frontal assault, but I can see she has already regrouped. There’s a tension within her, like a vibration: a quiver of anticipation. The eyes are only the tip of the iceberg. What have I missed? “How fine would it be if Haft & Weil dropped you? You’d lose Stockleys, too, I’d warrant . . .”
This is what I’ve missed. I wonder how long she has been planning for this. Perhaps she perennially sees life as a chess game: putting pieces in place to defend her position should certain events come to pass . . . Or perhaps there was never any plan, and she’s just taking advantage of what lies before her. I stare at her, waiting to feel panic or despair, but there’s nothing but the cold, hard fear inside me that wills me inexorably on. And, out of nowhere, tiredness. Bone-crushing tiredness; a wave of it is rolling over me. I pull out a bar stool and sink onto it. “There’s a contract—”
“There’s a clause that gives an out for reputational risk,” she says flatly. “A debatable interpretation, but you’d run out of cash before you could face us in court over it.”
She is right, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of hearing me say it. So I say nothing, and she eyes me carefully, allowing herself a small smile. “So yes, that is what I was going to say. Blame Theo.”
“No,” I answer bluntly. Even before my epiphany in the bathroom, I would have said no. If Tom were here, he would be furious with me; he would urge me to row back, look out for myself, look after my business . . . but no. I want to be better than that; I need to be better than that. In Tom’s eyes, at least, I need to be the Kate I like best. And I won’t let Tom be a Tom that, over time, in the dark hours of the night, he becomes ashamed of. Not even for me. “No,” I say again.
“No,” she repeats thoughtfully. Then she shrugs, the skin moving over her bony breastplate revealed by the V-necked shirt. No fat there at all. Caro has no time for anything superfluous. “That’s what I thought you would say. Though I don’t really understand why. After all, it really could have been Theo, couldn’t it? I mean, who knows?”
“Who knows,” I echo, in barely more than a whisper, fighting the urge to close my eyes. This is the moment to make my move; this is what I’ve been waiting for. But even as the thought crosses my mind, somehow I know it’s too late: it suddenly seems incredibly difficult to funnel words into my mouth, let alone form them in a coherent argument. Something is wrong, something is badly wrong with me, but I have no energy to figure out what.
“Kate? Who sent you the flowers, Kate?” Her voice is overloud; it forces my eyelids open. Perhaps this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question.
“The flowers?” I repeat stupidly. My tongue feels thick. I look at Severine, but there’s no help to be had from that quarter. I look at my glass of wine. It’s nearly empty, but one glass is hardly enough to affect my speech. My head is so heavy that I feel I ought to lie it on the counter; instead, I prop my chin on my hands. I really must be getting ill: why else would I feel like this?
“Look at you,” she says dispassionately. She puts her wineglass down decisively on the counter and pushes back her stool. “You always think you’re so clever, don’t you, Kate? You always have. Clever Kate, trying to show you’re so much better than the rest of us because you went to a state school. No expensive upbringing for you, oh no. You’ve done it all on your own merit.” She’s suddenly very close to me, but I don’t remember her bridging the gap. Did I close my eyes again? “Only now it doesn’t matter how clever you are. Even the flowers don’t really matter anymore. They’re not from a client; a client would send them to your office.” I shake my head, not understanding, but she’s insistent. “They’re from Seb, aren’t they? Now he’s back in London you’re trying to pick back up where you left off.”
“Seb?” Something is wrong. I’m drifting sideways—but no, I’m not, I’m sitting at the counter; it’s the world that’s moving, spinning as if I’m drunk. Severine is next to me, something insistent in her manner; I don’t understand her expression, but then, I never did.
“Seb,” Caro repeats impatiently. “He sent you the flowers, didn’t he?” There’s something else within her now; the rapier edge that has always lurked is now glitteringly, dangerously unleashed, stabbing with an urgency I haven’t seen before. As if she has taken the cloak off the dagger. Why would she do that? What have I missed?
It’s an effort, but I manage to turn my head to her. The rest of the room is blurry, but Caro is in pin-sharp focus. “No, Caro, he didn’t. He loves his wife.” At least, I think, I hope he does. He certainly ought to. Then: dear God, why am I feeling like this?
She snorts dismissively. “Rubbish. That won’t last.” She frowns. “But he really shouldn’t be sending you flowers when we have an understanding.”
I stare at her. “Understanding? Don’t you know? Alina’s . . .” My words peter out. There’s too much to overcome for them to be born into the world, too much effort in creating them, moving my mouth and tongue, using my breath. This time I really do lay my head on the counter.
“Alina’s what?” demands Caro, drawing disconcertingly near to me. She angles her head to match mine. I’m close enough to see that her irises are curiously devoid of flecks or variation, a flat, uniform, alien blue. “Alina’s what?”
“Pregnant,” I manage to say, then I close my eyes. Must sleep, I think. Then—no, I mustn’t sleep, I have a plan to execute, this is all wrong, what have I missed? With a gargantuan effort I open my eyes. Caro’s face is still right in front of me. “What have you done to me, Caro?” I whisper.
She ignores me. “Pregnant?” she hisses, disbelieving. “No. She can’t be.” For once I see everything she’s thinking displayed on her face: her mind is racing down avenues, searching for alternative truths. “I don’t believe it.” Only she does believe it; I see the moment when that happens, and it’s desperately sad to watch: the outer shell falls away to reveal her awful hurt and fury and grief, laid bare for all to see, the vulnerable thirteen-year-old cruelly wounded once again. But there’s only Severine and me to witness.
“What have you done to me?” I whisper again. My eyelids are drifting closed.
“Pregnant.” I hear her almost spit the word. Then, “Pregnant,” I hear her say again, but thoughtfully this time. She’s already regrouping; the shell is already patched up and lacquered back into place. Once again, it’s admirable, if psychotic.
I try to force my eyes open again. There’s an important question I should be asking. Asking again. “Caro. What have you done to me?”
She’s gazing into the distance, but on my words she glances back at me. “Flunitrazepam,” she says succinctly. “About enough to fell an elephant. Also known as Rohypnol, or roofies. Mostly it hits the headlines as a date rape drug, but did you know that a study in Sweden found it was the most commonly used suicide drug? Lara would like to know that, I’m sure . . .” She frowns again, or maybe she doesn’t. I’m losing my ability to focus. I don’t understand what she is saying. A malicious smile crosses her face. “I know you, being such a clever Kate, must be thinking that no one will believe you committed suicide . . .”
Suicide?
Suicide. Caro is murdering me. Has been murdering me for a good while now, surely, for this drug to have taken effect to this extent. I should feel something about that, and I do, but it’s a small feeling, a tiny glowing ball of panic, smothered deep within me beneath cotton-wool layers of exhaustion and apathy. I can see what’s happening, I can see what’s going to ha
ppen, but I seem incapable of being anything other than a detached observer. The cold, hard, fear-forged Kate is gone, blasted away by mere chemicals; she may as well never have existed.
But . . . murder. How long has Caro been thinking of murder? Whilst I’ve been wondering . . . I’m not sure if I’ve said that out loud; Caro’s head turns to me, so perhaps I did speak. “I’ve been wondering . . . if we would have been friends . . . if I hadn’t been with Seb. Whilst . . .”—it’s almost funny; a gasp of a laugh escapes me—“you’ve been planning murder.” I think she stops in what she’s doing, I think her face is thrown into uncertainty for a moment, but my eyes are barely open. After a moment, they drift closed once more. I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t jumped off the wall into Seb’s arms; if I’d turned to Tom instead. How would the spider’s web have been spun then?
But Caro is talking now; I wrench my eyes open again. She is talking, though she is doing something with her glass at the same time. Washing it, I realize, and putting it away, all the while taking care not to touch it with her bare fingers. Now she is rubbing down the wine bottle with the dishcloth, still talking. “. . . But actually everyone will believe it. Even your secretary Julie was saying how you didn’t seem yourself today, how you haven’t for a while. You’ve been overcome with guilt at killing that girl, you see. It’s what they’ll say; your death will be the proof of it. There’s no real evidence to point to any one of us over another; you and I both know Modan’s case is weak, but suicide is as good as a confession, isn’t it? Then this will all go away . . . And, yes, I know you must be thinking that nobody would believe you had access to drugs. But you’ve had a drug dealer’s number stored in your phone for a good long while now. Ever since my party, actually.” She gives a small self-congratulatory smile and reaches for my phone, which is lying on the counter. She scrolls adeptly through the contacts, then pushes it in front of my face, but it’s just a blurred mess of color to me. “You really should put a security code on your iPhone, you know.”
As she speaks I realize I have to do something, and I have to do it now before it’s too late for me to do anything at all. I summon up all the strength I can to make a grab for her, but once again I’ve already missed the moment. The grab is more of a swipe really: she jumps back easily, out of my limited field of vision, and the follow-through overbalances me, tumbling me into an awkward heap on the floor. It feels good to lie down. My cheek is resting against the lovely coolness of my kitchen tiles.
I don’t move. It’s unclear to me whether I even could if I tried. I look at the tiles, at the contrast of their smooth sheen with the uneven texture of the rough black grout; I let my focus relax further, and it seems that I am buoyed up on a sea of pale ivory tiles stretching before me to the horizon.
But Caro is still talking. I’m only getting snatches of what she’s saying, though, and only flashes of vision. It’s simply too difficult to keep my eyes open, and I can’t imagine why I should be trying to. There’s something about Seb kissing her, but I don’t know when that happened: recently, or in France, or years ago as teenagers? It doesn’t matter anyway. Time is stretching out, each event like a pearl on a string, each leading inevitably to the next. Seb was Seb, is Seb, could only ever have been Seb, and in his careless affection for Caro—never enough but sometimes too much—he sparked something in Caro, who could only ever be Caro. And therefore here we are . . . but Caro is still talking, and it’s all of it about Seb, about him sowing wild oats before settling down, how he said she was the only one who understood him, who was always there for him . . .
At one point I open my eyes again and find my iPhone a few inches from my nose. I don’t think it was there before.
My eyes close again.
Something shakes me impatiently and insistently until eventually I open my eyes again. Caro’s face is swimming right in front of me; she has pulled my head up by the hair.
Perhaps she says something—her lips move, but I can’t make sense of it, and she recognizes that; she speaks again, almost defiantly, and this time I understand. “We wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t have been friends.” I see her flat eyes, the intensity within them, and deep down I marvel at it: that insistence, that passion for what she wants. I think I had that once, but the drug has wrested it from me now.
Something bangs. It takes a good while to recognize it’s my own head, lolling back on the floor after she drops it.
Time passes. Or perhaps it doesn’t. I’m an unreliable witness to life now.
At some point I become aware of Severine folding her beautiful walnut limbs fluidly to sit cross-legged beside me on the cold tiles, her eyes fixed on mine, and I feel . . . something. It takes a while to identify it, but I do: it’s gratitude. Gratitude for her continued presence. I feel it wash through me now I’ve named it. Don’t leave. I don’t say the words, but I can see she won’t: for the first time I have penetrated her inscrutability and can read what those dark eyes hold. She won’t leave me. She will never leave me. She will be here until there’s no more here for me. And now I know at long last what the point of her is, why Severine has been here all along. For this. This is where the ribbon of time has been leading for me. There should be no emotion because this was all determined a long time ago. Because Seb is Seb, and Caro is Caro, and Kate is Kate, and Tom is . . .
Tom, I want to say, but the word cannot be formed. There is only thought, and the thought of him, the dream of us that had only just begun to take form, pierces the cotton wool within me a little. Severine is speaking, gesturing at me urgently. She hasn’t done that before, but I can’t hear the words and I can’t understand what she wants. It’s too late in any case. It seems that she’s trying to pick up my phone, but she’s a ghost, bound too tightly by the ribbon of time. Material things are for her no longer. But she isn’t giving up. It’s almost enough to make me smile, if I had the ability to form a smile, the urgency with which she is trying to rally me into . . . what? Something. I don’t know.
Tom. I want another ribbon, a different one. I want us. I want to step sideways, into a time stream where Kate is Kate and Tom is Tom and neither of us are snubbed out by a pearl on the string of time. I want lazy Sunday mornings together and hectic dashes to work on the tube and holidays and home days and workdays and . . . days. I just want days. Days that start and end with Tom. Tom.
I’m slipping further away now. I can’t fight it, and Severine has stopped trying to make me. I want to tell her that I know what happened, that I can see it all now; I want to say that I’m sorry I can’t tell the world, but she knows it anyway and I don’t think she cares. That was never why she was here. She remains watchfully cross-legged on the ivory sea beside me, not moving, not leaving; forever beautiful, forever unsmiling.
I would have liked to have seen her smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I’m waking up.
This is . . . unexpected.
And painful. Oh my God, this is painful. My head, my throat, my stomach, my eyes, but most of all my head, my head, my head . . . It pounds as if the ebb and flow of the blood within it is a violent storm raging against the shore of my brain. Where is that cool, calm ivory sea to lay my hot, aching temple against?
Perhaps I make a movement as I try to open my eyes, because I hear a voice, a woman, but no one familiar: “Kate? Kate, are you with us?” And then light rushes in, swirling around until my brain gets control of it and forces it into blocks of colors and shades: I’m in a room. A pale room, nowhere I know, but it’s instantly recognizable as a hospital.
A plump woman in dark blue scrubs is leaning over me, still saying my name, but I look past her, looking around for Severine, but she’s not there; I can’t see her anywhere, and now I really start to panic. She wouldn’t leave me, I know she wouldn’t leave me; what does it mean that she’s not here?
“Kate? No, shhh, just lie still . . . It’s all right, you’re all right. You’re in
a hospital.” She turns as someone enters the room, but I can’t see who it is—is it Severine? But no, that can’t be right, though I can’t quite remember why that can’t be right . . . “She’s just come round,” she says to them. She turns back to me. “Kate, do you know who this is?”
And then he’s right beside me, reaching for my hand, and the panic dissolves. “Tom.” My voice is more of a croak; nonetheless the relief on his face is staggering.
“You’re back,” he says simply, and lays a hand against my face. I want to move into it, but I’m unsure of my body, of what it can and can’t do. As the nurse suggested, lying still seems safest.
“Was I away?” I croak out. He looks awful. He hasn’t shaved in days, and it’s possible he hasn’t slept, either. I have the feeling I’ve been dropped onstage in the middle of a play without a script or any knowledge of the first act. How did I get here?
“Yes. You’ve been . . . away . . . for two days.” He takes a shuddering breath and starts to say something, but the nurse cuts him off.
“Let’s get you a drink of water and then I just need to check a few things, Kate.” She brings the bed a little more upright, holds some water to my lips and starts to flash lights in my eyes, all the while asking me questions. What’s my name? When was I born? What year is it? Do I know where I am? With each answer the words come easier, as if the route from my brain to my mouth is clearing.
“Did I hit my head then?” I ask suddenly, recognizing the questions as more than information gathering, and then I remember—or do I? The memories are inconstant, jumbled, the colors too strange. “I did, didn’t I . . . I think . . .”
“Yes, you gave your head rather a thwack, I’m afraid. We’ve been quite worried about you.” This is from someone new. I turn my head a little, gritting my teeth against the wave of pain that accompanies the movement, and find the source: a tall woman in her early forties, dark hair scraped back into an elegant bun, standing in the doorway with a faint smile in place. She’s in scrubs, too, but she wears the cloak of her authority over them, further underlined by her enormous diamond studs: you wouldn’t expect to see those on a low-paid nurse. “Welcome back. I’m Dr. Page.” She steps into the room and picks up the chart, scanning it quickly. “And you, I rather think, are going to be fine, after a lot of rest. What do you remember?” she asks, but there’s something in her face that doesn’t quite match the casual tone. My eyes fall on the nurse. She’s busying herself so completely with changing a drip that she must be listening intently. Even Tom has a little tension in his face. Again I have the feeling that I’m missing the script.
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