The Book of You

by Claire Kendal

  I have forgotten my umbrella. Robert holds his over us both as we walk. He sits next to me on the train and when he lets his arm rest against mine my face goes warm. He stands with me in the taxi-queue at the station, the two of us talking and talking until I reach the front and he carefully opens and shuts the taxi door for me, smiling his slight, closed mouth smile as he watches it drive off.

  As the taxi winds its way up the hill I think only of Robert, imagining what it would be like to sleep with him.

  The instant I walk in the door and see your envelope you are back inside my head, where you want to be. I know it is another photograph before I’ve opened it.

  It is the next step from the last one. The blindfold and gag and bindings are exactly as they were, but you’ve removed my underwear. You’ve dropped them beside me, sliced at the hips so you could get them off without untying my ankles. You’ve uncoiled the whip and draped the last foot of it over my stomach.

  I am forcing myself to think rationally. The whip is just part of your display. You didn’t actually use it on me. I’m sure you didn’t. I wouldn’t have missed the marks if you had. The sore spots and chafing wounds had been on my wrists and ankles. I’m actually relieved to think of them. They suggest that even unconscious I was still pulling at the restraints and straining to get free, trying to fight you. Even if you got off on my struggling, I’m glad of this evidence that I didn’t want you. There’d been red compressions that turned into bruises on my inner thighs, probably from your hands, but those came after you took your pictures. There were no bloodied welts that could have come from your whip.

  I put your photo in my wardrobe with the others. I look at my bed, the sheets clean and never slept in, covered in my newly sewn quilt cover. I think of Lottie curled in the corner of the sagging mattress in that London flat. I haven’t eaten or showered or brushed my teeth. I haven’t taken off my clothes. I am very, very cold.

  I go into the living room and huddle on the sofa beneath blankets. Gradually, I’ve been moving my night-time things in here. I reach onto the side table for my sleeping potion and gulp down two pills, knowing my mother would say I’m getting addicted. I curl onto my side, trying to consider and plot as calmly as I can about what I will do tomorrow, not thinking I will ever sleep but astonished to feel myself floating away, carried by the force of drugs that work as well as any witch’s spell. I am frightened that you wait for me in my dreams, too.

  She was in a golden coffin, holding the death blooms, and Rafe was wrenching them from her grasp, dragging her from the coffin’s white silk lining, throwing her onto concrete that felt like sandpaper. She was on the ground, naked, trying to hide beneath a quilt. The defendants were gathered in a circle around her, tearing the quilt away, kicking her, beating her with a broom. The broom became a whip. They were lifting her high into the air and forcing her back into the coffin, which was displayed on a table. They were holding her down so she couldn’t move, cheering from the sidelines as Rafe climbed on top of her, pressing the thorns of the black roses into her bare breasts with the weight of his body, stopping her from being able to breathe. Robert was standing there, silently watching, a pair of scissors in his gloved hand. She tried to cry out his name but the words made no sound.

  Saturday

  The alarm woke her at 5.00 a.m. She’d taken off her clothes in the night and was shivering in tangled blankets that were drenched with the sweat of nightmares. She groped for the phone and dialled the taxi company she always used, asking them to collect her just before 6.00. She’d worked out every step she would take. She would make the first train of the morning. The timings were tight and that was deliberate; she didn’t want to leave him even the smallest chance of finding her at the station.

  Her life had become a Monday-to-Friday life, where there was no room for anything beyond the trial. But today would be different.

  She showered, soaping away the sour coating of bad dreams, feeling the chill leave her bones as she stood beneath the stream of hot water. She blasted her hair with the blow-drier and twisted it into a careless knot, then chose clothes to keep the warmth in her skin. Boots and thick stockings and a navy wool dress, her usual coat, a scarf her mother had knitted. She threw mittens and a hat and umbrella into her bag, then remembered to toss in her London map. As an afterthought she grabbed her passport.

  First, though, she’d turn his own tactics on him. When the taxi driver rang the bell she told him she’d be down in a minute. Quickly, she dialled his home number – he’d given it to her too many times to count. She was careful to punch in 141 first so he wouldn’t be able to see who was phoning. He answered, startled out of sleep. Her stomach lurched at his voice – it went against all of her instincts to put herself in the position of hearing it when she didn’t have to. She cut off the call without saying a word herself, secure in the knowledge that he was five miles away and couldn’t track her. Then she dashed out the door.

  She was taking a risk. For all she knew they might not be home. Or they might not let her in. Warning them she was coming certainly wouldn’t help. But she wasn’t going to let herself think beyond getting there.

  By 8.30 she was in London, standing in front of their carefully tended Edwardian terraced house, gathering the courage to knock. Before she could, the door opened, though only a few inches, and a well-groomed, brisk-seeming woman in her mid-sixties peered suspiciously through the crack, demanding to know why she had been loitering there for five minutes.

  There was no time for preliminaries or politeness. ‘Because of Rafe Solmes.’

  The woman’s hand trembled slightly and her lips were pinched. ‘Are you his friend?’

  ‘No. God no. The opposite of his friend.’

  ‘You would say that.’ The woman began to shut the door.

  ‘Please.’ Clarissa stuck her foot in the crack. ‘He’s making my life impossible.’

  ‘Allow me to close my door.’

  Clarissa could hear someone coming down the stairs, quickly, noisily– a man’s tread, she thought– but she didn’t move her foot. ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘I need to know what happened to Laura. You’re her mother, aren’t you?’

  ‘Charlotte?’ came the man’s voice.

  The woman shoved hard against the door, making Clarissa think the bones of her foot would fracture despite the heavy protection of her boot. ‘How dare you,’ the woman said.

  Horrified with herself, Clarissa stepped back and the door slammed.

  She didn’t know what to do next. She stood there, contemplating knocking again, knocking and knocking until they let her in, but she knew she’d totally blown it. She sank onto the low wall that ran along their footpath. She bent over, her elbows on her thighs and her head in her hands. She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, numbly; the rare interlude of blankness was a relief.

  After a while she became aware of voices talking urgently on the other side of the door. To her astonishment, the letter slot opened. ‘Wait,’ the woman said through it, grudgingly.

  It was ten minutes before the door opened again, this time widely. The man stood there, hardly taller than Clarissa. He wore dark grey trousers and a black sweater. He smelled of shower gel. He was probably in his late sixties, but he looked as if he still possessed a wiry strength.

  ‘You’re the woman who’s been calling us,’ he said, and Clarissa nodded yes. ‘You don’t give up, then.’

  ‘I couldn’t. I can’t.’

  He said nothing more but moved aside, motioning for her to enter. She could smell toast and coffee, which made her queasy rather than hungry. It struck her as she limped after him that nobody knew where she was. She was walking into the house of strangers and nobody knew. The rules she lived by, the rules her mother had drummed into her, were being ripped up by the day.

  The walls of the corridor leading from the front door and through the house were covered in family photographs. At the centre of them all was one girl. Clarissa didn’t doubt it was Laura.

&n
bsp; A pink swaddled lump in the arms of a younger version of a smiling Mrs Betterton, looking down at her new baby. A toddler taking her first steps towards Mr Betterton – his hair dark brown, almost black, back then – crouched and holding out his arms. A teenager standing between her proud parents at her sixth-form graduation day. In her early twenties, dressed as a bridesmaid, posed with the rest of the wedding party.

  She was recognisable at all ages, always fair and slight, delicate featured, strikingly pretty. But she froze at about thirty; Clarissa felt a stab with the realisation. Thirty was as old as she got – about the age Gary said she’d been during her relationship with Rafe ten years ago.

  Clarissa thought of the woman on the cover of the magazine, trying to work out if it could be Laura. The colouring was similar, but with the bottom half of the woman’s face obscured and the lurid lighting it would be almost impossible to tell, at least for a non-expert. The Laura in the photographs was happy and free. As far away from the magazine cover as it was possible to be.

  Mrs Betterton stood in her perfect kitchen, neatly dressed in shades of olive and brown: a tweed skirt, knitted sweater, sensible shoes. She was like her daughter, and still beautiful, with her cap of silvery blonde hair cut sharply to her chin and pushed behind her ears, where it obediently stayed.

  ‘My husband only has a few minutes,’ she said stiffly, not offering to take Clarissa’s coat, not offering her a chair at the kitchen table. ‘He has a business appointment.’

  Right, Clarissa thought. Business meeting on a Saturday. She detected a trace of an American accent with the pointed lie.

  Mr Betterton said he could arrive late, earning a darting glare from his wife. He gestured towards a chair, pouring coffee into a deeply blue earthenware mug painted with a hummingbird. He set the steaming drink on the table in front of Clarissa. She thanked him softly and took a sip, not knowing what to say or ask. How could she possibly voice her lurid questions to these people?

  ‘How do we know you’re not his friend?’ Mrs Betterton asked.

  ‘He doesn’t have friends, Charlotte,’ Mr Betterton said. ‘He’s not natural enough to have friends.’

  ‘How do we know he didn’t send you? Is he paying you? He’s done such things before, though not since – not for the last few years. It’s not beyond him, though, to gloat, even now.’

  Clarissa’s hand shook so much she sloshed coffee onto the scrubbed wood of the table. She attempted to mop it up with the sleeve of her coat but the wool repelled the fluid, something she would normally, automatically be aware of.

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’ Mr Betterton applied a towel while his wife frowned behind him. Gently, he squeezed Mrs Betterton’s shoulder. ‘Charlotte, she’s clearly not with him.’ He passed Clarissa a box of tissues, pretending not to notice as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then he turned back to his wife. ‘Do you want her parents to go through this too?’

  Mrs Betterton gulped. ‘We know nothing about her, James. She hasn’t even told us her name.’

  Clarissa apologised and did so, eliciting Mrs Betterton’s immediate demand for identification. She handed over her passport and watched the Bettertons examine it together.

  ‘I can see why he targeted you,’ Mrs Betterton said, dropping the passport on the edge of the table, so Clarissa had to strain to reach for it before putting it away. ‘You look like Laura.’

  So many times Clarissa had asked herself why he’d chosen her. What she might have done to draw him. She’d wondered if it was his jealous admiration of Henry’s acclaim as a poet, and Henry’s charisma and power, that made him pursue her. As if taking the things Henry had – primarily her – would somehow give him Henry’s qualities, and Henry’s life and success.

  But she saw now that that wasn’t what it came down to. She was a type, just like the archetypal victim of a serial killer. Something entirely out of her control. Her colouring and features and hair and body and maybe even her voice and gestures reminded him of someone else’s. Even her profession was the same as Laura’s.

  ‘There’s little we can do for you,’ Mr Betterton said. ‘But we can’t do even that if you don’t tell us more about your relationship with that man.’

  ‘It’s not a relationship,’ she said. But she told them all she could, as quickly and honestly as she could. She didn’t mention the three photographs.

  ‘Could he have followed you here?’ Mrs Betterton said.

  She explained about the early morning phone call, and that the station and train had been quiet. She was sure she hadn’t been followed. She’d watched carefully, something she’d grown good at.

  ‘He knows where we are,’ Mr Betterton said. ‘We can’t move, in case—’ He broke off. ‘It would be better for you if he didn’t discover any connection between us.’

  ‘Why would we want to help you?’ Mrs Betterton asked. ‘What good will it do our daughter now?’

  It was hopeless. She was inexcusably trespassing and Mrs Betterton profoundly resented it. Clarissa stood up. ‘I’m sorry I bothered you. I shouldn’t have come.’

  Mr Betterton looked sharply at his wife before turning back to Clarissa. ‘Sit down, Clarissa. It’s good that you don’t give up. Don’t start now. You need to be someone who doesn’t give up if you’re mixed up with that man. You need to know what you’re up against. You’re right about that.’

  She saw that they hated to say his name. Just as she did.

  Mrs Betterton turned her back to them and began to load the dishwasher with the breakfast things. It seemed a paradoxical gesture of consent and protest, but she didn’t try to stop Mr Betterton as he began to recount Laura’s early days with Rafe.

  Mrs Betterton soon interrupted him with flat bitterness, still with her back to them. ‘What seemed like great passion – all those romantic gestures of his – was actually just obsession.’ Clarissa was surprised by how readily she’d spoken.

  Quickly, too quickly, Mr Betterton continued, Laura moved in with him.

  Almost immediately, Laura grasped the extent of his possessiveness, and the impossibility of escaping it. She couldn’t have a bath or make a phone call or receive a letter that he didn’t peek in on or listen in on or open.

  His sexual demands began to upset her. He wanted to try bondage games and she wouldn’t agree. Had Clarissa ever encountered this, with him?

  Mr Betterton had begun to clear his throat between every sentence. He hadn’t been doing that at first; she was certain it was the nature of what he was saying that caused it.

  She answered his question with the slightest negative shake of her head, ashamed of lying.

  Mr Betterton peered doubtfully at her. ‘That’s surprising,’ he said.

  It was pointless, hiding anything from them. They knew the worst, already. ‘I’m sorry. I find it very difficult to talk about,’ she said. ‘But I have encountered that, yes.’

  He nodded grimly and resumed, not pressing her for more details.

  Rafe seemed not to understand any talk of their splitting up or Laura moving out. He seemed not to have any family or any history. Laura was frightened by the absolute lack of anybody in his life but her. There’d been dramatic fights between them, followed by promises that he’d change, that he’d be less controlling.

  The lucky thing for Laura had been his getting the job outside of London. After his post-PhD phase of short-term teaching posts in London he was unstoppably ambitious to secure a permanent academic job in an established university English department. Laura knew nothing would get in the way of his moving to Bath, and that was when she decided to disappear. When he took a day trip to visit his new department she packed her things and left without even giving notice at work.

  At first, she went back to her parents, but Rafe soon found her and hovered and followed and watched whenever he could. Odd nights. Every weekend. Incessantly ringing. Somehow discovering every changed phone number. Refusing to accept it was over. Continuing to speak to Laura and to the Bettertons
as if she were his girlfriend.

  She moved several times but he always found her, probably led there by tracking her parents. He began to send Laura compromising photographs, taken when they’d lived together, taken when she was asleep and unaware, probably after he’d drugged her. Her parents grew more careful in their visits. Once, this drove him into breaking into their house and finding evidence of Laura’s new address and phone number, though they couldn’t prove it. Even if his move to Bath meant he couldn’t watch Laura every day of the working week, the presents and letters and horrible images he’d stored up – so terrible they made Laura sick – never stopped arriving.

  He stole her life. She had no privacy. She was shrinking, not eating, not confident, no longer herself. She’d lost her friends. She’d make new ones – she’d had such charm – but she couldn’t tell the old ones where she’d gone for fear he’d find her through them.

  The police wouldn’t do anything. They just saw it as a broken relationship. He’d never actually assaulted her physically and he was clever. Even the photos looked merely like sex games. There was no way to prove they weren’t consensual – the shops and the Internet are full of perfectly legal toys for perfectly legal S&M.

  Mrs Betterton remained standing but she’d moved closer to them. She was leaning against the kitchen counter. ‘The police are better these days,’ she said. ‘Just in the last few years they’ve got better about this. But too late for our daughter.’

  Laura moved five times, to five different cities, in the two years after she left him. He found her each time. She’d get a few months at most of being free of him. Then she’d turn around and there he was again. They were growing fearful that he really would hurt her.

  At last Clarissa voiced the question she’d wanted to ask since she walked in the door. ‘Where is Laura now?’

  ‘She was hit by a car.’ Mr Betterton’s voice was hollow. He stroked his startlingly white hair, and Clarissa had a conviction that the loss of colour had happened overnight, from absolute shock and grief. ‘He’d found her again. She was about to cross the road and she heard him say, “Hello, Laura. I’ve missed you.” She stepped right into that car, forgetting herself, trying to flee.’