by Claire Dyer
* * *
And now it’s March. She’s sitting in her car in the service yard at the back of the office. The Grundon bin is next to her.
It’s late. It’s the day of the accident and she has watched the horrendous scene of Vita telling Boyd unravel before her eyes like they were all in some god-awful movie.
Vita and Boyd are still at the hospital. She hasn’t told Richard the news yet and he hasn’t been in touch to see where she is. She has no idea how she is going to atone.
It was not supposed to end this way.
Boyd
It’s the day after. Sleep is impossible, the space next to him in the bed stretches for miles and the quiet is devastating. And, every time he closes his eyes he sees her: the lorry hitting her, the obscene spiralling of her limbs. He hears the soft crunch of her body as it hits the tarmac, the squeal of brakes, her scream, that last puff of breath on her lips.
He turns away from where she should be next to him but the dawn is already pushing against the curtains and so he gets out of bed and, pulling on his joggers and a sweatshirt, he goes downstairs.
Vita’s already there. She’s sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a tartan blanket and nursing a mug of tea, yesterday’s crossword is on her lap. She hasn’t started it.
‘I didn’t hear you get up,’ he says.
‘I didn’t want to wake you.’
‘I wasn’t asleep.’
‘No, I didn’t sleep either.’
He leans against the kitchen counter and stares out into the garden. His mind is like a kaleidoscope and Honey’s face is in every fragment, and her voice and the feel of her skin, that soft cry she’d cry when he made love to her, her terrifying dreams.
‘What are you going to do today?’ Vita asks him.
‘Go to work.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘I have to do something, otherwise I’ll go mad.’
‘I don’t think you should.’
‘I need to. I need to keep busy. You know how I am.’
Of course she does, he thinks. It was like this last time.
Every inch of him feels numb. If someone was to come along and pinch him, he wouldn’t feel it, but still he gets dressed, stepping carefully around the spaces that Honey’s things used to fill.
He tries not to think of Vita and how she will spend the day. Will she see Colin? Will she go to her studio and paint yet more of the stupid bloody dogs she hates to paint? Will she sit on the sofa with her cold tea and undone crossword and grieve? Yet again, he thinks, I’ve brought chaos down on Vita’s head and she really doesn’t deserve it, any of it.
* * *
Trixie’s already in the office when he gets there. She looks exhausted, her face is pale and blotchy as if she’s been weeping and although she looks busy, moving things around on her desk, her movements are hesitant and wary.
‘You’re in early,’ he says as he sits down and switches on his computer.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she replies.
‘No, neither could I.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
She moves over to stand next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m so very sorry,’ she says.
‘It’s beyond words. I can’t make sense of any of it. Did she say anything to you, about leaving, about her past? Did you know she was pregnant?’
‘Pregnant? No!’ Trixie says, her voice small and barely audible. ‘I didn’t. Oh God. That just makes everything so much worse.’
‘Did you know she wasn’t really Honey Mayhew? Her real name was Tracy Jones apparently.’
‘I knew she’d had a chequered past. She told me she was convinced someone was out to get her. Maybe that’s why she changed her name? She told me … She told me what the medium really said.’
‘She what? Do you think this is what it’s all about?’
‘It could be, part of it anyway.’
‘What did the medium really say?’
‘That she’d fall, that whoever it was who was coming after her would find her.’
‘Was she leaving me?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Who else knew?’
‘Vita did.’
‘Vita?’
Trixie doesn’t answer him but her hand is still on his shoulder. He can feel that she is trembling.
Boyd’s screen flickers into life. His screen-saver is a picture of Honey. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘She’s everywhere.’
It is quiet in the office, just the faint hum of their computers and the buzz of the fridge in the small kitchen. And then into this quiet, Trixie says, ‘I did it to protect you. But I didn’t mean for it to end this way. You have to believe me, Boyd.’
There is an awful pause. Boyd turns his head to look at her. Her eyes are bright and glittering. She looks an almost-stranger to him.
‘What did you do?’ he asks.
Trixie
‘What did you do?’ he asks.
How can she tell him? Her reasons are buried so deep that they’ve taken root in every muscle and sinew. She has no idea how she is going to get the words out.
‘There’s so much you don’t know,’ she says.
‘Then tell me.’ He is staring straight at her. His left eyebrow is not raised this time, his lips are set in a firm line. He terrifies her.
‘Can …’ she says.
‘Yes?’
And then the words come. All of them, everything she’s ever wanted to say to him.
‘Can you imagine,’ she says, ‘what it’s been like for me? First you and Vita – I tried to convince myself that I could cope with that, after all there was a sense of rightness to that: you and Vita, me and Richard. But then when William died and you and Vita split, I had to stand by and watch that, too. I waited. I waited for you to see me. See me, Boyd. But you never did. I’ve been here from the very start, remember? When it was just you and me and Harrison’s Residential. When Vita was painting portraits, before William was born, I was here. I did everything because of you. I was the next in line.’
She pauses, swallows, then continues. ‘Why didn’t you choose me, Boyd? And you never asked what it was really like for me living with Richard, how much I’ve had to put up with. You never guessed, did you? And then there was Honey. And I knew, I just knew that she’d end up hurting you.’
‘What didn’t I guess?’
His face, his wonderful, kind face looks like someone has come with a scouring pad and rubbed off the first layer of skin. Outside, the day is starting: shoppers are walking by, there are cars, other people’s lives are churning into action. But here, in this office, at this moment, there is only waiting: no emails, no calls, no customers or solicitors’ letters or wide-angle shots of dining rooms to file.
Trixie knows she mustn’t cry. If she cries, she will be lost. She has to tell him. She’s waited long enough. She owes it to him and to herself.
‘I remember,’ she says, ‘one particular day last August. I’d just got home from work. A song was playing on the radio. Sinatra. I‘ve always loved Frank.’
‘Yes?’ Boyd says, he’s shifted a bit and her hand has fallen from his shoulder. She is standing next to him, looking down at his broad back, the precise place where his hair meets the collar of his shirt. She is aching to reach out again and touch him.
‘That evening the neighbourhood was busy with its end-of-day stuff: kids cycling home from wherever they’d been, parents driving back from work or, if they’d already got in, husbands dragging out their lawnmowers to give the lawn what they would be the last mow of the season whilst their wives fixed dinner.
‘When I got home I called out but was greeted by silence. However, as soon as I stepped into the kitchen I knew something was wrong: the counters were full of dirty dishes, empty cans of beer everywhere. I remember one was on its side and was gently weeping small tears of Boddingtons. But what was worse was our gravy boat, the one Richard and I got for a wedding present, in pieces on the floor by the fridge.
&n
bsp; ‘I looked in the dining room then the lounge but no one was there, only an overflowing ashtray, playing cards in piles on the coffee table, an open newspaper, one lone sock on the carpet.’
‘Go on,’ Boyd says. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I looked for Richard,’ Trixie continues, ‘but he wasn’t in our room, nor in either of the boys’ rooms thankfully, but I found him curled up on the sofa in the box room, his hand under his cheek as though he was a child, one bare foot sticking out, the other tucked under his body. He was snoring.
‘I called his name a couple of times and he stirred eventually, accusing me of being home early. But I wasn’t early, it was gone six. I asked him in heaven’s name what had been going on.
‘He told me he’d had a few mates round and that things had got a bit rowdy.
‘It was then, I guess, that the love went for good. If he loved me, how could he treat me this way? And it was then I knew for a fact that I loved you. Even though you hardly ever asked how I was, really was, I’d always loved you, Boyd.’
‘You loved me?’
‘Yes, of course. I still do,’ she says, the words she’d been carrying around for years in her messed-up heart coming out of her mouth at last.
And she loves him because he’s good and kind and huge and honourable and because he’s not Richard, and because it’s her turn.
The gravy boat had been a wedding present, a gift from her mother’s sister, long since dead, as is her mother – and her father for that matter. She remembers how it felt to unwrap it, when everything was so full of promise. Richard’s betrayal of all she’d held dear is, she’s long since acknowledged, a monstrous thing. She’s hated not being important, or central or valued or admired by anyone any more.
Boyd had been the only good thing in her life. And it was then, when she was standing over the shattered remains of the gravy boat that she’d decided she would do anything, and she meant anything, to protect him from getting hurt again, to make him notice her, make him love her.
‘I cut my hand on the gravy boat,’ she says, ‘and the next day as I was putting more paper in the printer, Honey asked me what had happened. I told her it was just a silly accident in the kitchen.’ And she remembers flexing her palm where the skin under the plaster was still stinging.
She’d gone to bed at some point the night before because when she woke up that morning, Richard had still been there, smelling of stale beer and body odour.
He’d muttered, ‘Trix?’ as she pushed back the covers to get out of bed.
Now is the time, she’d thought. Now he’s used the name he used to call me back when things were good, now’s the time for him to reach out and hold me and tell me everything is going to be OK. If he does then I won’t do anything, I won’t do it. But Richard didn’t do any of these things. All he said was, ‘Trix?’ before he turned over to face the window and pulled his side of the duvet over his head.
‘And so?’ Boyd says now. ‘What did you do? Why are you so sorry?’
* * *
Honey was easy meat. She was too gullible and trusting. This had surprised Trixie, she’d assumed it would be harder than it was.
First there was her visit to the stupid medium.
It was Honey’s birthday. Boyd was out on a valuation but had just given Honey his gift and they’d had their cream cakes.
Trixie had said, ‘Fancy a cup?’ to Honey and stood and made her way to the kitchen. ‘Yes, please,’ Honey replied.
Trixie hesitated by the door, leant up against it and said nonchalantly, ‘I’ve heard so many remarkable stories about mediums you know.’
‘Have you?’ Honey looked up at her.
And so she told her the story she’d made up about Mr Right and the premonition about the car and the girl had believed every word of it. Trixie could tell that Honey was lapping it up. It helped when you were talking to someone as superstitious and susceptible as Honey. After all, the girl religiously checked her horoscope every day, did all that not going out a different door to the one she came in business and, in summer, constantly searched for three butterflies together as she believed this would bring her good luck.
If Honey hadn’t been with Boyd, Trixie may have thought these habits endearing, but Honey was with Boyd, she’d taken Vita’s place, was living in Vita’s house, was stamping all over Vita and Boyd’s grief, had taken Trixie’s place in the queue and was a threat to Boyd’s happiness. So Trixie didn’t consider Honey’s superstitions endearing, she thought they were stupid and wrong-headed and, more than anything, she wanted Honey to …
It is hard for Trixie to finish this thought.
She’d wanted Honey to go, but she’d wanted it to be Honey’s decision. That way she, Trixie, wouldn’t be to blame.
Honey was tapping the card on the desk and staring into the middle distance. Trixie had had no idea what she was thinking as she filled the kettle and switched it on and, as it came to the boil, she felt a small shiver of satisfaction. Maybe, she thought, things were entering the next phase at last.
* * *
Then there’d been the night she and Honey went out for that drink.
She’d rung Richard and told him she was going out and all he’d said was, ‘Oh, OK. See you later then.’
It’d been on the tip of her tongue to ask him what he was going to do for his supper and how his day had been but, she reasoned, why should she bother? He hadn’t asked after her day, or even who she was going out with. As she’d put the phone down, there’d been a dull kind of ache around her breastbone, some kind of longing – for a better, purer life and a connection to the wife and mother she used to be – but she’d shaken these thoughts off. Tonight was going to be about something different, tonight she was going to be someone different.
‘What would you like?’ Trixie had asked.
Honey had asked for a white wine.
‘Anything to eat?’ Trixie said, gazing down at her black skirt and wishing she’d worn something a little less frumpy to work. She hoped Honey would say no. The wine was expensive by the glass.
As she waited for the drinks to be poured, she looked back over at Honey. She was looking down at her phone, her head bent, her neck smooth and golden in the candlelight.
Then, when the barman wasn’t looking, Trixie took the twist of paper from her pocket and tipped a tiny amount of its contents into Honey’s drink.
Back at the table Trixie sipped at her drink. Richard had once told her, long ago when he had to interview fresh-faced new recruits for the bank, that if you are quiet the other person will fill the space left by the words you don’t say, and it was often revealing when they did so.
The wine bar had filled up around them, knots of men were standing at the bar drinking lager from long glasses and the tables towards the front were peopled with couples and a group of friends on a girls’ night out. There was the babble of voices and the soft bass of the bar’s background music. The wine was slipping down nicely, her hard edges were beginning to soften.
‘Um,’ she’d said. ‘You said the word ‘nomad’ just now. What did you mean by that?’ Trixie took another sip of her drink, left a gap in the conversation, hoped Honey would fill it. She did.
As Honey talked, Trixie ran her fingers down the outside of her glass, chasing the beads of condensation. She’d almost finished her drink but Honey, she noticed, had still got half of hers left. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘you were saying about your past …’ She hoped Honey hadn’t spotted that she was pressing her for details now.
Honey took a large mouthful of wine and grinned sheepishly at her. ‘You,’ she said, ‘you and Vita are the only people I’ve ever told and this is because I trust you both. I’ve never had the luxury of being able to trust anyone before and you must promise not to tell Boyd. Promise me?’
‘Of course.’ The words tripped off Trixie’s tongue. She wanted to order some more wine to make sure Honey kept talking but didn’t dare break the moment. As soon as she could she’d suggest a
refill. This was going so much better than she’d dared hope.
And then Honey told her a remarkable story about her being with a man on a boat and how there’d been an explosion and that she’d jumped, swum to shore and how the man had been injured and that she still believed he was coming to get his revenge. Trixie took hold of Honey's hands. She held them for a few seconds and then said, ‘I’ll get us some more drinks shall I? Then you must tell me everything the medium said. I’ve been anxious to know but didn’t dare ask.’
‘No,’ Honey said, ‘I’ll get the drinks.’ And she stood quickly and then was gone, striding away through the oases of light. Trixie prayed, she actually prayed to God that when Honey came back the moment wouldn’t be lost.
The crowds were thickening, the sound of voices and music getting louder. The wine wasn’t as chilled this time and Trixie didn’t enjoy it as much but still she drank as Honey talked, as Honey told her about the medium’s predictions about the step and how Honey was going to fall and how the man from whom she’d escaped would eventually find her.
‘You poor thing,’ Trixie said when Honey stopped talking. ‘How have you borne this? Did you tell Boyd what the medium said?’
‘Of course not. I told him that she’d said that everything will be fine. I wouldn’t want to worry him, he’s too good for that.’
‘Yes,’ Trixie said. ‘He is. But Vita knows, you say?’
‘I told her what I’ve told you and actually,’ Honey paused, tipped her head on one side, her eyes were huge and terribly sad in the low light of their booth, ‘It’s a relief to have done so. I thought I was strong enough to keep my own counsel on this, but obviously I’m not. I …’ she paused again, ‘… once hoped I would be other than I am.’
Trixie let this last comment go because she didn’t quite understand it. Her head was reeling from all Honey had told her. This time she thanked God for her forward planning, the tongue-loosening properties of the drink and what she’d added to it, and for loneliness. There would, she now knew, be a way to finish this.