The Book of You

by Claire Kendal

  ‘You sound like you think she deserved it.’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’ You speak too quickly, too insistently, a sign that you’re lying. ‘Of course I don’t think that.’

  ‘But you used the word disobedience.’ Am I only imagining that I’m beginning to wobble? ‘That’s a horrifying word. And it was never a fair promise. You can’t ask somebody never to enter a room that’s part of her own house.’

  ‘Men need secret places, Clarissa.’

  ‘Do they?’ We’ve reached Bath Abbey. The building’s west front is illuminated, but I can’t seem to focus on my favourite fallen angels, sculpted upside down on Jacob’s Ladder. The vertigo I’m beginning to feel must be like theirs, with the world up-ended.

  You take my arm. ‘Clarissa?’ You wave a hand in front of my eyes, smiling. ‘Wake up, sleepyhead.’

  That helps me to remember the point I’m trying to make, though I have to concentrate extra hard to form sentences. ‘There must have been some truly dreadful secrets in that room. It was a place for his fantasies, where he made them real.’

  We’re passing the Roman Baths. I imagine the statues of the emperors and governors and military leaders frowning down at me from their high terrace, willing me to drown in the great green pool below them. My mouth tastes of sulphur, like the spa water from the Pump Room’s fountain.

  ‘You’re better on “Blue Beard” than any critic, Clarissa. You should be the professor. You should have finished that PhD.’

  I shake my head to deny this. Even after my head stops moving, the world continues to waver from side to side. I hardly ever tell anyone about the abandoned PhD. I wonder vaguely how you know, but halt abruptly, distracted by a ring in a shop window. It is a twist of platinum twinkling with diamonds. It is the ring I dreamed Henry would one day surprise me with, but he never did. Moving lights glitter and flash inside the gems like bright sun on blue sea. White and gold fairy bulbs rim the window, dazzling me.

  You pull me away from the glass and I blink as if you’ve woken me. By the time we’ve passed the closed shops in their deep gold Georgian buildings, my steps are no longer straight. Your arm is around my waist, aiming me in the right direction.

  I hardly remember going through the subway, but already we are climbing the steep hill and I am breathless. You are holding me close, pushing or pulling me, half-carrying me. Flashes from the diamonds and fairy lights come back, tiny dots before my eyes. How is it that we are already at the door of the old house whose upper floor is mine?

  I sway gently, like a funny rag doll. Blood rushes into my head. You help me find my keys, help me up the stairs to the second floor, help me to put two more keys into the locks of my own front door. I stand there, dizzily, not knowing what to do next.

  ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in for a coffee?’

  It can’t fail to work, your manipulative little call to my politeness. I think of idiot-eyed Snow White opening the door to the wicked queen and practically grabbing the poisoned apple out of her hands. I think of Jonathan Harker crossing Dracula’s threshold freely and of his own will. I think again of Bluebeard and his bloody chamber. Did he carry each new bride over the threshold and into his castle after she’d leapt happily into his arms? After that came the room of torture she never imagined.

  I try to smile but my face seems not to move as it should. ‘Of course. Of course I am. You must come in for a coffee and warm up while I call you a taxi. It was so sweet of you to walk me home on your special night.’ I’m jabbering. I know I’m jabbering.

  I stand in front of the sink, letting water run into the kettle. ‘I’m sorry.’ My words sound smudgy, as if spoken in a language I barely know. ‘My head is feeling funny.’

  It is such an effort to stand up. I feel like a spinning top. Or is it the room that is revolving? My body seems to be made of liquid. I float down, my legs folding with such pleasing neatness, until I find myself sitting on the slate tiles of my galley kitchen. The kettle is still in my hands, sloshing water from its spout. ‘I’m very thirsty.’ Though the water is splashing onto my dress, I can’t imagine how to get any of it into my mouth.

  You find a glass and fill it. You kneel beside me, feeding the water to me as if I’m a child drinking from a sippy cup. You wipe a drop from my chin with your index finger and then put it to your lips. My own hands still clutch the kettle.

  You rise again to set the glass down and turn off the tap. You lean over to take the kettle from me. ‘It hurts me to think you don’t trust me.’ I can feel your breath in my hair as you speak.

  You pull me to my feet, supporting my weight. My legs are barely working as you move me towards the bedroom. You sit me at the edge of the bed and crouch in front of me, leaning me into you to stop me from falling over. I can’t keep my back straight. I am weeping.

  ‘Don’t,’ you whisper, smoothing my hair, murmuring that it is so soft, kissing away the tears streaming down my face. ‘Let me put you to bed. I know just what to do with you.’

  ‘Henry …’ I try to say. Speaking seems too difficult, as if I have forgotten how.

  ‘Don’t think about him.’ You sound angry. You look deeply into my eyes, so that I must close my own. ‘The Munch painting, I know you were thinking of us, imagining our being together. We both were.’

  I am completely floppy. I feel as though I am made of waves. I am slipping backwards. All I want is to lie down. There is a rushing in my head, like the sea. There is a pounding in my ears like a drum beat, my own heart, growing louder.

  Your hands are on my waist, on my stomach, on my hips, on the small of my back, moving over me as you unfasten my wrap dress.

  I only ever meant for Henry to touch this dress. I made it for the birthday dinner I had with him seven months ago. Even though we both knew it was all but over, he didn’t want me to turn thirty-eight alone. Our last night together. A goodbye dinner, with goodbye sex. This dress was never meant for you.

  I am trying to push you away but I might as well be a child. You are pulling the dress the rest of the way open and sliding it off my shoulders. And then the room tips, and everything that follows is shadowy. Broken images from a nightmare I don’t want to remember.

  She was so immersed in writing that the rasp of the jury officer’s microphone startled the pen from her fingers, making it shoot across the quiet area where she was sitting. ‘Will the following people please come and stand by the desk for the trial that is about to begin in Court 12?’ Her name was the first to be called, giving her an electric shock. She shoved the notebook into her bag as if it were a piece of incriminating evidence she didn’t want to be seen with.

  Two minutes later she was hurrying after the usher with the others. A heavy door sprang open and they were in the hidden depths of the building, winding their way up several flights of draughty concrete stairs, padding across the linoleum of a small, overly bright waiting room, then stumbling through another door. She blinked several times as she realised that they were in the courtroom. Her name was called again and she filed into the back row.

  Henry would have refused the Bible but Clarissa took it from the usher without wavering. She meant every word of the oath, though her voice was faint.

  Sitting next to her was a prettily plump, dark-haired woman whose necklace spelled her name in letters of white gold: Annie. As if through a haze, Clarissa glanced farther to the right, where five defendants sat only a few feet away, flanked by police guards. Annie was studying the men with undisguised interest, as if daring them to notice.

  The judge addressed the jurors. ‘This trial will last for seven weeks.’

  Seven weeks. She’d never dreamed she’d be that lucky.

  ‘If there are compelling reasons as to why you cannot serve on this jury, please pass a note to the usher before leaving. Tomorrow the Crown will make his opening remarks.’

  She groped for her bag, tugged down her skirt as she stood to make sure it hadn’t ridden up, and lurched after the others. As she pas
sed the dock she saw that if she and the nearest defendant were each to stretch out an arm, they would almost be able to touch.

  She squirmed off her mittens as she boarded the train, found the last empty seat, and took out her mobile. A sick wave went through her. Four texts. One from her mother. The others from Rafe. It was actually restrained for him, stopping at three.

  She didn’t smile, as she normally would, when she read her mother’s – Coffee is not a breakfast food. Nothing could inure her to his little series, however harmless they might seem to somebody else.

  Hope you’re sleeping. Hope you’re dreaming of me.

  Keep getting your voicemail. Will phone later.

  You’ll need juice and fruit and things with vitamins. I’ll come to your flat.

  She wanted a friend to turn to, to show the texts to; she wanted a friend to tell her what to do. She used to have friends before Henry and fertility treatments took over her life; before she let a married man leave his wife for her; before other women stopped trusting her; before she found it too hard to look at their disapproving faces and see her own bewilderment at what she’d done mirrored in them.

  Henry and her friends wouldn’t mix, but she still should have found a way to obey that cardinal rule, the one that says you should never let a relationship interfere with your friends. Now Henry was gone, and Clarissa was too abashed to try to get her friends back. She wasn’t even sure she deserved them, or that they’d ever forgive her.

  She thought of her oldest friend, Rowena, whom she hadn’t seen for two years. Their mothers had met in the maternity ward, cradling their new babies as they gazed at the sea from the hospital’s top-floor windows. There’d been play dates in infancy and toddlerhood. They’d gone all through school together. But Rowena was another friend who didn’t get along with Henry. She and Rowena had grown so different, though; perhaps Henry only hastened a breach that would have happened anyway.

  She tried to shake away the self-pity. She would need to try harder to make new friends. And if she didn’t have friends to consult at the moment, at least she had the helplines; their information leaflets had arrived in the post on Saturday, just one day after she first spoke to them.

  She texted him back. Don’t come. Don’t want to see you. Very contagious.

  As soon as she pressed send she regretted it, remembering the advice every one of those leaflets repeated in countless ways. Wherever possible, do not talk to him. Do not engage in any kind of conversation. She knew her lost friends would have said that too.

  She wished she hadn’t given him her mobile number. Nothing else had worked to get rid of him the morning after his book launch party. Not being audibly sick in the bathroom. Not swallowing three painkillers right before his eyes for her throbbing head. Not even her visible trembling made him see she was so unwell he needed to go. The number had been a last-resort payoff to get him to leave – if only she’d had the foresight to make up a fake number instead of using her real one to fob him off. But she’d been too ill to think clearly.

  She dialled Gary. Compelling reasons, the judge had said. What might these be? Pregnancy, perhaps. Or breastfeeding. She had no compelling reasons. A line manager who would be mildly inconvenienced by her absence was not a compelling reason.

  Clarissa tried to sound sorrowful and as if something shocking had been done to her. ‘I thought it would only be nine days. Two weeks at most. That’s what all the stuff they sent us says, but I somehow got picked for a seven-week trial. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Didn’t they give you a chance to say you couldn’t? You’re vital to this university.’

  She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘I’m not. Not like doctors or teachers. Even they don’t get out of it. Even judges don’t. The secretary to the Head of the Graduate School is hardly a key worker – though of course I’m touched by your unique sense of my importance.’

  ‘But you didn’t answer my question.’ On rare occasions Gary could muster a serious boss tone with her. ‘Didn’t they give you a chance to get out of it?’

  She felt no qualms about the lie. ‘No,’ she said. She was home; the train was pulling into Bath. Her skin prickled, usually an unfailing warning that she was being watched, but she knew Rafe wasn’t in the carriage. She couldn’t see him on the platform either. ‘No, they didn’t.’

  Tuesday

  The traffic fumes were making her eyes burn. She was walking from Bristol Temple Meads station to the court and the roads were so wide and alike she wondered if she was lost.

  She was trying to concentrate on the route, the barely known landmarks – she was sure she remembered that purple wall to her right from yesterday – but Rafe was crowding out everything else, as usual.

  Friday, 30 January, 10.00 a.m. (Four Days Ago)

  It is my last day at work before jury service; my last day of having to avert you. On Monday I will disappear into the court building and you will not know where I am.

  I place my documents and reports on one of the fixed wooden chairs in the large lecture theatre and my bag on another. I take the seat between them, hoping these small battlements will deter you from sitting beside me. Such a visual signal of my wish for space would work with anyone else. But not with you. Of course not with you. Nothing works with you.

  You are standing over me and saying ‘Hello, Clarissa’ as you move my papers onto the floor and sit down. I’m unfairly, irrationally furious with Gary, for insisting that I attend this meeting in his place. You are in the aisle seat, making escape more difficult – I’d been foolish not to see that coming.

  You lock your eyes on me, your eyeballs quivering. There is nowhere to hide from your eyes. I want to put my face in my hands, to cover myself. Your cheeks flash crimson, then white, then crimson again with the sharpness of a car’s indicators. I hate to see such clear evidence of my effect on your body.

  And your effect on mine. I am growing hot and my chest hurts so much I fear I will stop breathing. I might faint in front of everybody, or be sick. It must be a panic attack.

  The ceiling is high. The fluorescent lights are speckled with desiccated fly corpses. Though the bulbs are far above my head, they burn into the top of my skull. Even in winter the flies survive in the building’s warm roof space. I can hear one hissing and frying, unable to escape the trap of the lamp in which it has found itself. I fear it will fall on me. But better a fly than you.

  You touch my arm and I shrink away with as little violence as I can manage. You whisper, ‘You know I love your hair that way, off your neck. Your neck is so lovely, Clarissa. You did it for me, didn’t you? And the dress too. You know how I love you in black.’

  And I just can’t bear it any more. As if the top has blown off a pressure cooker I jump up, abandoning my papers, tripping over your feet and legs. You take advantage – of course you do, you always do – and put your hands on my waist in a pretence of helping to balance me. I slap your fingers away, beyond caring whether I affront the Vice Chancellor, who pauses in his opening remarks as all the heads in the room turn to watch me rush out. It makes me want to cry, knowing that it appears as if I’m the one out of control, rather than you.

  Somehow I flee the campus and get myself into the centre of Bath and stumble along my near-automatic walk to the Assembly Rooms. I don’t follow my usual descent into the dimly lit basement, my favourite place, where they display gowns from hundreds of years ago; they are spun of silver and gold, brocaded in shimmering silks, embellished with jewels. Instead, I walk straight through the sage-green entrance hall, between marbled columns the colour of pale honey, and stop just outside the Great Octagon.

  The room is closed. A sign explains that a private function will be taking place in it later today. But I slip between the double doors as if I have a right to, and close them behind me. It is hushed and peaceful in here, surrounded by these eight stone walls; soft light falls on me through the paned windows. I take out my phone, inhale deeply, and dial 999.

  ‘Police emergency.’ T
he operator’s greeting is sing-song and chirpy, as if she’s working in a dress shop and I’m a potential customer.

  I don’t know what to say. I manage ‘Hello,’ though I’m breathing heavily. I must sound like a nuisance caller.

  ‘What is your emergency, please?’

  Queen Charlotte aims her gentle gaze at me from her high portrait, as if to offer encouragement. ‘At work this morning … A colleague …’

  ‘Has there been an incident in your place of work?’

  I try to explain. He sat next to me in a meeting when I didn’t want him to. He whispered suggestively. He invaded my body space. He made me feel upset.

  ‘Right. Is this man with you now?’

  Queen Charlotte’s eyes follow me in concern as I circle the room. ‘No. But he’s stalking me all the time. I can’t get rid of him.’

  ‘Did he physically injure you?’

  The Drake Family are too happy in their ornamental golden frame, posed in their manicured eighteenth-century landscape with their perfectly behaved children. ‘No.’

  ‘Has he ever physically abused you?’

  The sweet Drake baby, sitting on its mother’s lap, should not be hearing this. ‘No,’ I say again, after a long pause.

  ‘Has he ever directly threatened you?’

  Once more I hesitate. ‘Not directly, no. But he makes me feel threatened.’

  ‘Are you in any danger at this moment?’

  I look up, up, up, above the elegant frieze of curling tendrils, craning my neck. Captain William Wade poses in his red Master of Ceremonies coat and stares disapprovingly at me. ‘No.’

  ‘I can see you’re very upset, and that’s understandable. But this isn’t a life-threatening matter. 999 is really meant for life-or-death emergencies.’

  The room seems smaller, as if the tastefully muted yellow walls are drawing closer together. ‘I’m sorry.’ The high ceiling doesn’t seem so high any more. There isn’t enough oxygen in here.