Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘Why did you write to Joanna?’

  ‘Somebody showed me the magazine,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they thought. I’d been raped by somebody famous.’

  ‘Do you mind telling me about it?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  I kept my eyes on the notepad, and occasionally made a scrappy little doodle that might look like shorthand. Michelle spoke with the weary familiarity of somebody telling an anecdote they’d told many times before. At the time of the incident – she used that odd word, maybe because of the police and court proceedings – she had been eighteen years old, and was at a party in the country just outside of Gloucester. It was being thrown by a friend of her boyfriend (‘Tony was my boyfriend then,’ she explained). On the way to the party, she’d argued with Tony, and he’d left her there and driven off with two mates to the nearby pub. She was cross and embarrassed and she’d got drunk, she said, on cider and cheap red wine and an empty stomach. By the time she met Adam, the room was spinning. She was standing in a corner, talking to a friend, when he and another man came in.

  ‘He was good-looking. You’ve seen his picture probably.’ I nodded. ‘There they were, these two men, and I remember saying to Josie, "You have the blond one and I’ll go for the dish."’

  So far, this was Adam’s story too. I drew a droopy flower in the corner of the pad.

  ‘What happened then?’ I asked. But Michelle didn’t really need asking. She wanted to tell her story. She wanted to talk to a stranger and be believed at last. She thought I was on her side, the journalist-therapist.

  ‘I went up and asked him to dance. We danced for a bit and then started kissing. My boyfriend still hadn’t come back. I thought that I’d show him.’ She looked up at me to see if I was shocked by the admission, by the sort of statement that must have been brought out under cross-examination. ‘So I did start it all off. I kissed him and put my hands under his shirt. We went outside together. There were other people outside already, kissing and stuff. He pulled me towards the bushes. He’s strong. Well, he climbs mountains, doesn’t he? When we were still on the lawn, with all these people watching, he unfastened my dress a bit at the back.’ She gave a sharp little intake of breath, like a half-sob. ‘It sounds stupid, I’m not naïve or anything, but I didn’t want –’ She stopped, then sighed. ‘I just wanted a laugh,’ she said lamely. She put up both hands and pushed back her dark hair. She looked too young to have been eighteen eight years ago.

  ‘What happened, Michelle?’ I asked.

  ‘We moved away from the others, behind a tree. We were kissing, and it was still all right.’ Her voice was very low now, and I had to lean forward to catch what she was saying. ‘Then he put his hand between my legs, and I let him at first. Then I said I didn’t want that. That I wanted to go back inside. It felt all wrong, suddenly. I thought my boyfriend would come back. He was so tall and strong, and if I opened my eyes I could see his eyes staring right at me, and if I closed them then I felt horribly sick and the whole world lurched. I was pretty drunk.’

  While Michelle described the scene to me, I tried to concentrate on the words, and not make any picture out of them. When I looked up at her to nod encouragingly or make some affirming grunt, I tried not to see her face properly but to let it become an unfocused blur, a pale expanse of skin. She told me that she had tried to pull away. Adam had pulled her dress off her, thrown it behind them into the darkness of bushes, and kissed her again. This time it hurt a bit, she said, and his hand between her legs hurt, too. She started to get frightened. She tried to get free of his arms, but he held her more firmly. She tried to scream, but he put his hand over her mouth so no sound came out. She remembered trying to say ‘please’ but it was muffled by his fingers. ‘I thought if he could hear me begging him, he would stop,’ she said; she was near to tears now. I drew a big square on my notepad, and a smaller one inside it. I wrote the word inside the smaller square: ‘please’.

  ‘Part of me still didn’t believe this was happening. I still thought he would stop in the end. Rape doesn’t happen like this, I thought. It’s a man in a mask jumping out of a dark alleyway, you know the kind of thing. He pushed me down on the ground. It was all prickly. There was a stinging nettle under my calf. He still had a hand over my mouth. Once he took it away to kiss me, but it didn’t feel like a kiss any longer, just another kind of gag. Then he jammed it back. I kept thinking I would be sick. He put his other hand between my legs and tried to make me want him. He really worked hard at that.’ Michelle looked through me. ‘I couldn’t help feeling some pleasure, and that made it worst of all, do you see?’ I nodded again. ‘To want to be raped: that makes it not rape, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then he did it to me. You don’t know how strong he is. He seemed to enjoy hurting me as he did it. I just lay there, all limp, just waiting for it to finish. When he’d done, he kissed me again as if it had all been something we’d agreed to do. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t do anything. He went and found my dress, and my knickers. I was crying and he just looked at me as if he found me interesting. Then he said to me, "It’s just sex," or "It’s only sex," or something like that, and he just went off. I got dressed and I went back inside. I saw Josie with her blond man and she winked at me. He was dancing with another girl. He didn’t look up.’

  Michelle looked numb, almost unmoved. She’d been through this too often. I asked, in a neutral voice, when she had gone to the police. She told me that she had waited a week.

  ‘Why so long?’

  ‘I felt guilty. I’d been drunk, I’d led him on, I’d gone behind my boyfriend’s back.’

  ‘What made you decide to report it then?’

  ‘My boyfriend heard about it. We had a row and he walked out on me. I was confused, I went to the police.’

  Suddenly she looked round. She got up and left the room. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself before she returned, carrying her baby. She sat down again, with him bundled into the crook of her arm. Every so often she put her little finger into his mouth, and he sucked it contemplatively.

  ‘The police were quite sympathetic. There were still some bruises. And he… he did things to me, there was a doctor’s report. But the trial was awful.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I gave evidence and then I realized that it was me on trial. The lawyer asked me about my past – I mean my sexual past. How many people I’d slept with. Then he took me through what had happened at the party. How I’d had a row with my boyfriend, what I’d been wearing, how much I’d drunk, how I’d kissed him first, led him on. He – Adam – just sat there in the dock and looked all serious and sad. The judge stopped the trial. I wanted the ground to swallow me up – everything was dirty suddenly. Everything in my life. I have never hated anyone so much as I hated him.’ There was a silence. ‘You believe me?’ she said.

  ‘You’ve been very honest,’ I said. She wanted something more from me. Her face seemed plumply girlish and she gazed at me with an urgent look of appeal. I felt so sorry for her, and for me too. She picked up the baby and pushed her face into the squashy concertina of his neck. I stood up. ‘And you were brave,’ I forced myself to say.

  She lifted her head and stared at me. ‘Will you do something about this?’

  ‘There are legal problems.’ The last thing I wanted was to build up her hopes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in a fatalistic tone. Her expectations seemed low. ‘What would you have done, Sylvie? Tell me.’

  I forced myself to look into her eyes. It was as if I was staring down the wrong end of a telescope. A fresh sense of my double betrayal flooded me. ‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ I said. Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Do you ever get up to London?’

  She frowned in puzzlement. ‘With this?’ she asked. ‘Why would I want to?’

  She seemed quite genuine; and anyway the phone calls and notes seemed to have stopped.

  The baby started
crying and she lifted him so his head was butting up under her chin. He lay against her chest, arms akimbo, like a little climber pressed against the rockface. I smiled at her. ‘You’ve got a gorgeous little boy,’ I said. ‘You’ve done well.’

  Her face broke into an answering smile. ‘I have, haven’t I?’

  Twenty-two

  ‘You did what?’

  Until then I had always thought that the expression about jaws dropping was a metaphor or a poetic exaggeration but there was no doubt about it: Joanna Noble’s jaw dropped.

  On the train back, already shocked and distressed, I had suffered a virtual panic attack as it occurred to me for the first time what I had actually done. I imagined Michelle ringing the Participant and asking to speak to Sylvie Bushnell in order to complain or add something to her story, and discovering there was no one of that name, and then talking to Joanna instead. The trail to me was hardly long and winding. What would Michelle feel about what had been done to her? A further, and not entirely irrelevant, question was what would happen to me. Even if I hadn’t exactly broken the law, I imagined myself explaining to Adam what I had done.

  I settled the matter, to the extent that it was possible, immediately. I phoned Joanna Noble from a call-box on the way home and was at her flat over in Tufnell Park at breakfast-time the next day.

  I looked at Joanna. ‘Your ash needs tapping,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she asked, still stupefied.

  I found a saucer on the table and dangled it under the teetering cylinder of ash at the end of the cigarette in her right hand. I tapped the cigarette myself and the ash snowed down on to the saucer. I braced myself to amplify the stark sentence of confession I had just spoken. I had to be as clear as I could possibly be.

  ‘I feel very ashamed, Joanna. Let me tell you exactly what I did and then you can tell me what you think of me. I rang up Michelle Stowe and I pretended to be a colleague of yours working on the newspaper. I went and talked to her and she told me about what happened between her and Adam. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to find out and I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. But it was wrong. I feel terrible.’

  Joanna stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. She ran her fingers through her hair. She was still in her dressing-gown. ‘What the fuck did you think you were doing?’

  ‘Investigating.’

  ‘She thought she was talking to a reporter. She thought she was making a brave declaration on behalf of rape victims and instead she was satisfying your nosiness about what your hubby’ – this last uttered with bitter contempt – ‘got up to with his little cock before you were married.’

  ‘I’m not trying to defend myself.’

  Joanna took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘You gave her a false name?’

  ‘I told her my name was Sylvie Bushnell.’

  ‘Sylvie Bushnell? Where did you get that from? You…’ But then it was all too much for her. Joanna started giggling, then laughed uncontrollably. She put her head down on the table and banged her forehead lightly twice. She took another drag and started coughing and laughing at the same time. Finally she controlled herself. ‘You’ve certainly got a taste for the jugular. You should be doing my job. I need some coffee. You want some?’

  I nodded and she boiled some water and spooned the ground beans into a cafetière as we talked.

  ‘So what did she tell you?’

  I gave a summary of what Michelle had said.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Joanna. She didn’t seem especially disconcerted. She poured two mugs of coffee and sat back down opposite me at her kitchen table. ‘So what do you feel after your escapade?’

  I took a sip of coffee. ‘I’m still trying to sort it out in my mind. Rocked. That’s one of the things I feel.’

  Joanna looked sceptical. ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She lit another cigarette. ‘Is it any different from what you read in the paper? Based on what you told me, I would still acquit Adam. I’m amazed it ever came to court.’

  ‘I don’t care about the legal technicalities, Joanna. All I care is what happened. What may have happened.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Alice, we’re grown-ups.’ She topped up her coffee. ‘Look, I don’t think of myself as an especially promiscuous person. Well, nobody does, do they? But I’ve had sex with men to make them go away, or because they went on and on about it. I’ve had sex with people while drunk who I wouldn’t have had sex with sober. I’ve done it not really wanting to, and I’ve regretted it the next morning, or ten minutes later. Once or twice I’ve humiliated myself so that I felt sick with it. Haven’t you?’

  ‘On occasion.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that most of us have gone out into that grey area and played around with what we really want to do. I mean, it’s difficult, but all I’m saying is that it’s not like the man who climbs through your window with a mask and a knife.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Joanna, I’m not comfortable with that.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be comfortable with it. That’s the point. Look, I don’t know about you and Adam. How did you meet?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly having tea with the vicar and all very Jane Austen.’

  ‘Quite. When I met Adam he was rude to me, prickly, difficult. I suspect his attitude to me was a combination of being uninterested, suspicious and contemptuous and I felt turned on by him. The man is sexy, right?’ There was a silence I made no attempt to fill.

  ‘Well, he is, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s my husband,’ I said primly.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Alice, don’t play Pollyanna with me. The man is an epic in himself. He single-handedly saved the lives of almost everybody in that expedition. Klaus was telling me about his life. He walked out of Eton when he was sixteen and made his way to the Alps. He bummed around there for a couple of years before finding his way out to the Himalayas where he spent years trekking and climbing. How dare you find this man before me?’

  ‘I know all this, Joanna. It’s a shock finding this other side to him.’

  ‘What other side?’

  ‘That he can be violent, dangerous.’

  ‘Has he been violent to you?’

  ‘Well… you know.’ I gave a shrug.

  ‘Oh, you mean in nice ways.’

  ‘I don’t know if nice is the right word.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Joanna approvingly, almost carnivorously. ‘You have got a problem, Alice.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘You’ve fallen in love with a hero, an extraordinary man who’s not like anybody I’ve ever heard of. He’s strange and unpredictable and I think that sometimes you wish he was like a solicitor coming home at six thirty for dinner and a cuddle and the missionary position once a week. What was your last relationship?’

  ‘I left somebody for Adam.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was nice. But not like that solicitor you’re talking about. He was good fun, considerate, we were friends, shared the same interests, we had a good time together. Sex was good.’

  Joanna leaned across the table and looked at me closely. ‘Miss him?’

  ‘It’s all so different with Adam. We don’t "do things together", the way I used to with other boyfriends. We’re never just casually, easily, together, the way I was with Jake. It’s all so… so intense, so tiring in a way. And sex – well, sure it’s great, but it’s also disturbing. Troubling. I don’t know the rules any more.’

  ‘Do you miss Jake?’ Joanna asked again.

  It was a question I had never asked myself. I had virtually never had time to ask myself.

  ‘Not for a single second,’ I heard myself say.

  Twenty-three

  It was the middle of March, nearly the beginning of British Summer Time again. There were crocuses and daffodils in all the parks, brighter faces on the street; the sun rose higher each day. Joanna Noble was right. I would never know what happened in the past. Everyone h
as their secrets and their betrayals. No one’s life is untouched by shame. Best keep dark things in the dark, where they can heal and fade. Best put away the torments of jealousy and paranoid curiosity.

  I knew that Adam and I could not spend the rest of our lives together by shutting out the world and exploring each other’s bodies in strange, darkened rooms. We had to let the world in a bit. All the friends we had ignored, relatives we had abandoned, duties we had put aside, movies we hadn’t seen, papers we had failed to read. We had to act a bit more like normal people. So I went out and bought some new clothes. I went to the supermarket and bought ordinary kinds of food: eggs, cheese, flour, things like that. I made arrangements, as I had in my previous life.

  ‘I’m going to a film with Pauline tomorrow,’ I said to Adam, when he came in.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Why?’

  ‘I need to see some friends. And I thought we could invite people round for a meal here on Saturday.’

  He looked at me inquiringly.

  ‘I thought I’d ask Sylvie and Clive,’ I persevered. ‘And what about having Klaus here, or Daniel, and maybe Deborah? Or whoever you want.’

  ‘Sylvie and Clive and Klaus and Daniel and Deborah? Here?’

  ‘Is that strange?’

  He took my hand and fiddled with the wedding ring. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘It can’t all be…’ I struggled for a word. ‘Intensity. We need ordinary life.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t you ever want just to sit in front of the TV? Or go to bed early with a book?’ The memory of my last weekend with Jake suddenly came flooding in on me: all that unremarkable domestic happiness that I had so euphorically thrown off. ‘Or fly a kite or go tenpin bowling?’