There was a sense that Nina had stepped back from the feeding frenzy that was my character assassination, as if she had not been the one to start it in the first place. Now, her interest was intellectual, her focus widening to the bigger picture, to the moral welfare of British society as a whole. The feature included a photograph of her standing with the Prime Minister and his wife at a drinks party.
Whatever her own complaints of harassment, it seemed to me she was doing very well out of this story.
The journalist commented next on my status as a Luddite:
One of the oddities of Emily Marr is that she rarely used the myriad social networking sites that characterise her generation. Her last contribution to her Facebook account was almost a year ago. For this reason we have relatively few images of the woman whose dangerousness lay in her physical allure.
‘She was really into vintage clothes, and that ran into other things,’ says a friend. ‘She was a bit of a throwback. She only had the most basic mobile phone and hardly used that. She didn’t have a clue what Twitter was.’
Almost all those quoted spoke of me as if I were deceased, though the writer kept his options open in his closing remarks (I thought of journalists as amateur barristers: always they put the case for the prosecution):
It is a central irony of this affair that Miss Marr’s one official public appearance, at the inquest into the deaths of Sylvie, Alexander and Hugo Woodhall, became of interest only after it had taken place, and therefore we do not have a single photograph of her entering or leaving the coroner’s court (by law, photography is not permitted inside). Miraculously, she continues to evade journalists and photographers, who have since spared her none of the doorstepping treatment afforded other attractive young women in the media spotlight. One of the few recent images we do have, in which her face is partially concealed by a hat, was taken outside the Hertfordshire hospital where her father is a long-term patient in the dementia unit. There is no evidence of the trademark blond mane and sex siren styling, the bewitching beauty that we must take others’ word for. The Emily Marr who wrought havoc, the overnight sensation, seems to have vanished as suddenly as she appeared.
This was borne out when I phoned the hospital and was told that visits to her father’s bedside had fallen away notably in the last month. ‘I haven’t seen Emily in quite a while,’ the ward sister admitted. Have intrusions into her private life caused her to curtail contact with her ill father? This is certainly the view of Matt Piper. ‘I think everyone should just give her a break and let her get on with her life,’ he comments. ‘She hasn’t actually done anything illegal, as far as I can see.’
But others, Nina Meeks and the bereaved Woodhall family among them, are quick to suggest that a more likely reason for Miss Marr losing interest in her father’s care is that another man has entered her life.
If so, we can only hope that her new romance is an altogether quieter one than the last.
At the very time I was reading this strange work of half-truth, half-fiction, Dad had passed away. Phil was already at the hospital, had been with him at the end, and I was very grateful for that. Having previously deferred to me in all arrangements for Dad’s care, he now took one look at me and reversed our roles.
‘Come with me, Em.’ He slipped a hand under my elbow and held it firmly. ‘I’ve just been told we can see him.’
I’d heard that to see a dead man was like seeing him sleeping, but it was not; it was like seeing him dead. Absence of life compressed the room with its cold magnetism, our two intruding figures obscenely thermal, glowing hyper-real. Hard as I tried, I could not keep thoughts of the three Woodhall deaths at bay, even this personal tragedy of my own was contaminated by theirs: my own father versus a woman I’d met twice for two minutes and two boys I’d never met at all. Of course, I felt guilty for weighing them up like that, but guilt consumed so much of my existence at that time, it was a feeling that had lost all shape and size. Every thought I had felt wrong then; I could not trust my sanity.
After we’d said goodbye and begun arrangements to get the death certificate issued, we thanked for the last time the staff we’d got to know over the last year. Phil suggested I go home with him to Newbury and I agreed.
As we drove, we were too splintered with shock for coherent conversation. Whenever he spoke and I glanced up in response, he radiated even in his devastation the pure, unmingled relief of being allowed to live and perhaps I did the same.
Only once, when we were close to arriving at his house, did we address the fact that his sister had become a media hate figure.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t phoned you,’ I said. ‘It’s been difficult.’ I did not add that paranoia had caused me to suspect – against any physical evidence – that my phone and email had been hacked.
‘What the hell’s all that stuff in the papers been about?’ The way he said it, I knew it was not just from the perspective of fresh bereavement, but of a general lack of comprehension that what I’d done should ever have become of wider interest. ‘I thought it was just someone with the same name as you at first, and then I saw the pictures. Are you with this surgeon guy or what?’
‘Not any more,’ I said, and I began abruptly to cry, the sobs breaking in horrible tumultuous convulsions that sounded hardly human. I surrendered freely to it, not knowing who I was crying for: my father, Arthur, myself, all of us.
Phil said nothing for some time. Eventually, when he did speak, he was choking back his own emotions: ‘Oh, Emily,’ he said. ‘This is not a good day, is it?’
‘No.’
And I truly did not think there would ever be one again.
Chapter 21
Emily
It was ironic that I was forced out of my home just as the press ceased to plague me in it. Inevitably, the other tenants and neighbours had complained to my landlord about the ongoing drama and he had written to give me notice, mentioning that the Friends’ Association had been particularly insistent on my removal. It was senseless protesting against the order, as senseless as continuing to imagine that Arthur was going to materialise at my door one day and declare the whole seven-month estrangement water under the bridge, beg me to pick up where we had left off.
Instead I was the one begging: my brother, to let me stay for a while. He said yes before consulting his wife, for which I was tearfully grateful. If the request had been deliberated properly and then refused, I would not have blamed either of them for a moment.
I left Walnut Grove two days before the funeral. Packing up was unutterably sad. I still recalled that joyful interlude – the half an hour or so between Arthur’s announcement that he had found a love nest for us and Sylvie phoning to tell me she knew – when I’d imagined a lovely, lazy period of notice in which I would visit the emptying flat and marvel at how my life had changed since I’d moved into it the previous winter. In that version, when I locked the door for the last time I’d be walking away towards a new life, if not out of reach of those I’d hurt then certainly protected from them. Protected by Arthur.
Instead, I’d stayed and the flat had been refuge and cage in one. I hated being in it as much as I longed to stay there for ever. And I loved it, if only for the first trysts with Arthur it had contained. I can’t stop touching you, Emily…
Now I was the untouchable.
I had little furniture of my own and what I had I donated to a local charity, which sent a van to collect it. Many of my clothes I sold back to the vintage shop I’d bought them from, across the road from my old place of work. Charlotte had paid me a month’s severance, as well as the previous month’s work in arrears: I was not penniless. I also had half of the deposit from the flat, paid far more promptly than any I’d applied for in the past. Everyone wanted a clean break from me, the sooner the better.
The collection of hate/fan mail I tore into shreds and mixed in the bin with food remains. I had few personal bits and pieces: a folder of financial documents, some family photos, a postcard Arthur had giv
en me soon after we confessed our love for each other. In a pile of old papers Matt had left behind, I made a fitting discovery: a print of the photograph the Press had used in Nina’s first piece about me, the one from Matt’s cousin’s wedding that had since been used over and over. Matt had been cropped in that first publication, but he was here now, exuding that sardonic detachment I’d once found so attractive. Next to him I looked insubstantial, unearthly, a ghost in a pink and green dress come back from troubled times to haunt him. There was a card attached: Dear Matt and Emily, Thank you for your beautiful gift and for sharing our special day with us. We hope the enclosed photo will help you remember in years to come! Love Gemma & Nick x
It certainly would, I thought, and I decided to keep the picture, as much in tribute to Matt’s recent kindness as anything else.
I put everything left in my backpack and got the tube to Paddington, where the train left for Newbury. It was unseasonably warm, too hot for the hat, and so I debuted my new haircut, which I’d ‘styled’ myself a few days earlier at the bathroom mirror (out of necessity, not madness – I couldn’t risk being recognised in a salon). Cropped short, the blond mostly grown out, it was not the look to attract a second glance. The early-March sunshine warranted dark glasses, which helped conceal my newly gaunt face. I’d lost so much weight I looked ill, the victim of some unspecified wasting disease. The old Hollywood curves were no more.
On the train, even as the miles stretched and stretched between the city and me, I thought I could hear the mutters from Nina and Sarah and the other residents of Walnut Grove: ‘Good riddance, Emily Marr.’
I see now that it was too much to expect that we’d be allowed privacy at my father’s funeral, but at the time I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was anaesthetised with grief, little thought spared for my media persecution, and I had not warned the police or even the funeral director of the possibility of intrusion. But the internet had gone restlessly on and I supposed details must have leaked on to the various Emily Marr forums; astonishingly, there were still people who were interested.
We noticed them as soon as we arrived at the burial site, even before the hearse had pulled in.
‘It’s not just photographers,’ Phil said, bewildered, ‘there’s a whole load of gawkers as well.’
‘Ghouls,’ said Julie, quicker to understand the situation and rightly disgusted. ‘What kind of a person hangs out at the funeral of someone they don’t know?’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. Gawkers and ghouls, that was what I inflicted on my poor father as he was laid to rest.
‘What’s happening, Dad?’ the younger of Phil’s kids asked. ‘Was Grandad famous?’
‘No,’ Phil told him. ‘Nobody’s famous. They’ve got the wrong man.’
‘Emily!’ Having spied me, the gatecrashers began calling out my name in a horrible gleeful chorus. ‘Emily Marr! There she is, wearing that dark headscarf!’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Phil muttered under his breath.
It was easier for me to ignore them – I was used to it, after all – but I felt terrible guilt for the distress it caused the other mourners. I was glad I’d got Julie to search out the headscarf for me. If photos were taken, even with a long lens, they’d get no satisfaction from me.
‘Pretend they’re not here,’ I told the children, advice meant for their parents’ ears as much as for theirs. ‘Pretend it’s just us.’
We tried. But being ‘just us’ was what was so devastating about the occasion in the first place.
That was nearly two weeks ago. It will be April before long: springtime, new hope, new life. I probably won’t write much more now; I’m getting towards the end of the story, I think. I couldn’t cope with anything else happening, I couldn’t live with any more loss. In the event, I’ve lost Dad and Arthur, I’ve lost my job and my home. I’ve lost myself.
I’m still living with Phil, Julie and the boys. ‘How are you feeling?’ Julie asks me every morning. It’s taken me a while to realise she’s talking about my sorrow over Dad’s death, not the fact that I’ve been hounded from my home into a state of suspension from which I might never break free. I think that is what I’ll find hardest to forgive in the future, that my own grief has been stolen from me, and that of my family has been tainted.
‘I’m fine,’ I lie. ‘The same.’
At last the story has faded, as it was always going to, and the few journalists who tailed me here have gone, having failed to interview me just as the nationals, the BBC, even a writer for a magazine in New York, failed before them. Someone else is now Britain’s Most Loathed and I wish him or her the briefest and least disruptive of tenures.
Phil and Julie both work full-time and the boys are at school all day so I spend long hours alone in the house. Of course, writing this has occupied me, perhaps even obsessed me. I don’t know if it has fulfilled my original hopes, but I’ve gained something from putting it all down in the right order. Reconstructing it in full before casting it aside once and for all.
When feelings of captivity feel like leeches on my skin, I put on my trainers and go for a run. I pull that black woollen hat low over my ears and eyebrows, and I run to the park a few streets away. I run as if someone is chasing me. When I’ve completed a circuit, maybe two, I ignore my protesting lungs and run back. Once or twice I sit on a bench and look about me, trying to make sense of my changed world – how I came to be separated from all other groups in it, dispossessed, orphaned. After weeks under surveillance, I now can’t shake the sensation of being watched. Perhaps I never will.
I’ve been weaning myself off the medication Dad’s hospital gave me, and a few days ago, when I woke up, I thought I noticed a difference in my outlook. Suddenly I could identify easily what it is that I need: a job, an income, a purpose, however basic, however temporary. Surely no one will recognise me now? If I don’t trust my reflection in the mirror, I need only see the faces of my nephews every time I walk into the room: the matching expressions of incomprehension in their eyes, before they remember I’m blond and smiling Auntie Emily, just no longer blond, no longer smiling.
The problem, as Phil points out, is going to be less my appearance, which is sufficiently altered, as my name. It is a household one now, whether I like it or not. Even if I were to overcome the liability of it to secure a position, at the very least I’d suffer constant curiosity, more likely abuse, from my colleagues. Phil knows about the anonymous threats I’ve received: if just one of the many thousands were to be put into action, I could be hospitalised.
‘I could use a false name?’ I suggested. ‘I could be Emmie Mason or something, keep the same initials.’
‘Is Emmie actually a name?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, but it could be short for Emmeline, or Emilia. I prefer Emmeline, like the Suffragette.’ I smiled, trying, and not quite succeeding, to be playful. Opportunities for humour were scarce these days.
But Phil struggled to get into the spirit of it. ‘It won’t work. If you go through a company’s books, you’ll have to show ID, give bank account details.’
‘OK, then maybe I’ll get lucky and find someone who’s never heard of me? Who’s been out of the country the last couple of months?’
He looked doubtful. ‘You could try. But I bet human resources Google applicants these days. You’re bound to come up against someone who knows all about it. Unless you work for cash and don’t have to fill in any forms or sign anything?’ he added, his face clearing.
‘What work can I do for cash?’ Cleaning, perhaps childcare, babysitting, all of which would require references. I have old references, but they all give my real name.
There was a silence as we both ran out of ideas. I looked out of the window at the suburban cul-de-sac beyond, neither pleased nor displeased with the safe dreariness of it, so different from the Georgian glamour of the Grove. ‘When will I be able to live again?’ I asked, though I hadn’t meant to say this aloud and did not expect Phil to know the answer.
/> ‘Have you thought about leaving for a while? Travelling?’
‘Travelling?’ I didn’t tell him that I am dreaming more and more of the island Arthur told me about, the one on the Atlantic coast of France. I’m dreaming of a remote cottage, a real hideaway, of salt in the air and sand in my shoes.
‘Don’t think I’m trying to push you into anything, but it might be the solution. Go and have a long break somewhere, then when you come back maybe people will be more likely to have forgotten your name.’
‘But —’ I began, but he interrupted me, guessing the fundamental impediment.
‘I can help you out with a bit of money.’ I knew then that he had discussed the idea with Julie. It was what they thought best, the only reasonable option left. ‘I would visit the grave for you,’ he continued, anticipating my second objection too.
The Disappearance of Emily Marr Page 31