You and Me

by Nicola Rayner

  ‘But when I spoke to Ellie, she seemed completely unperturbed by it,’ Caroline says. ‘It was as if she could barely remember.’

  ‘She said that?’ I ask, keeping my face impassive.

  ‘That’s how she put it.’

  I remember Ellie’s description of the colours: blue moving through yellow and then black and finally white – the yellow the most painful, so that afterwards she would flinch at the colour. In the weeks after it happened, she would lie in bed, limp-haired, staring at the wall, and I have often thought how, if you were mapping out her life, the highs and lows of it, that would be the point where she changed from someone irrepressible, hopeful, to someone else. So do I think it’s likely Ellie has forgotten? Well, she might have lost details – trauma mashes up your memory, but I know in my bones that, wherever she is, Ellie would never forget.

  The thing is, I realise, as I scratch at a drop of wax on the table, it’s clear, for whatever reason, she wants Caroline to think she has.

  Close behind that thought, another follows: perhaps Caroline wants me to believe Ellie doesn’t remember. She knows we don’t speak much these days. But why would she do that? To diminish the event? To protect Dickie? Or, by association, to protect herself?

  The memory of Dickie’s aquatic sketches nudges at me. I find I want to see them again. Perhaps there’s something I missed before – some kind of clue to his state of mind – so when Caroline, drained by the conversation, suggests I come and stay, I take her up on her offer.

  ‘It’s the nights,’ she says. ‘They’re the hardest part. I promise I won’t sleepwalk again,’ she teases, touching my arm as we leave the café.

  I make a mental note to lock the door of the spare room this time, if I can.

  34

  When we get back to Caroline’s house, Daisy is in the arms of the same blonde babysitter as before. She is wailing, inconsolable, even when Caroline guiltily takes over, sweeping her from the arms of the other woman.

  ‘Fran, please could you order Maja an Uber,’ she asks, passing over her mobile with one hand, while she smooths Daisy’s hair with the other.

  ‘Of course,’ I say, knowing it’s not the time to point out I’ve never done that and I’m not sure how.

  Finding the app isn’t too much of a problem. I open it and select ‘My trips’ from the sidebar menu, where I can see a couple of journeys from here to an address in Acton.

  ‘Is that your address on Eastfields Road?’ I ask.

  Maja nods from where she’s standing by the sink, drinking a glass of water. Her cheeks look flushed and I’d guess she’s had quite a night of it with Daisy, that she’s keen to be going.

  I’m about to order her car when something catches my eye. And once I’ve seen it, there’s no way of going back, though I wish I could.

  It’s another late-night journey from Caroline’s address, taken quite a while ago, but this one’s to South Kensington in October. I know the date well. It’s imprinted on my memory. The night Dickie died. I stare at it for a couple of seconds and consider taking a screengrab. Then I remember that I’m still using Caroline’s phone.

  My mouth feels as dry as sawdust. I try to swallow, to concentrate on putting my fingers to work in ordering the car. Luckily, Daisy’s wailing blocks out any conversation, so I don’t have to say anything for a while beyond telling Maja her car is on its way.

  I take myself to the loo and sit on the seat for ages, hearing Daisy’s cry echo through the house. Questions race through my mind. Snippets of conversation with Charles and Fiona about Dickie’s drinking – and Caroline’s fear of him – are stirred like sediment.

  Maybe she was frightened of him, says a voice in my head that sounds like Ellie’s. Maybe she had had enough.

  Fortunately, Caroline doesn’t seem to notice any change in me when I return from the loo to a quieter house. By that stage, I’ve splashed cold water on my face and pulled myself together. Daisy has settled down, too.

  On the sofa, hot drinks in hand, Caroline says: ‘I meant what I said about Christmas. I want to do something different. With no association with the past.’

  I take a sip of hot chocolate. ‘I don’t know if he said, but Dickie and I weren’t exactly friends at school.’

  My new knowledge has liberated me. I feel I could say anything now. Anything except: What were you doing that night, Caroline? Why were you there?

  She glances at the fire. ‘He was mean to you – he told me that. But I think you might have been surprised by how much he’d changed.’

  I gulp my drink again. It’s too hot, but it gets me out of having to say anything.

  ‘My colleagues at Haven – they loved him,’ she continues. ‘A lot of people who end up working for charities have some personal connection to that cause. He would come and talk to people, really listen to their stories.’

  She’s working so hard, like she always has, to make him seem kind. Sympathetic to the plight of women. Sensitive. That’s what you might do, isn’t it? If you needed to persuade people you had a happy marriage.

  ‘I just thought I should tell you,’ I say. ‘Before Christmas – I thought I should mention it. It’s not right to pretend.’

  ‘If I ask you something, will you give me an honest answer?’

  I nod. In my experience, people asking that question never truly want what they say, but normal niceties matter less to me in this moment.

  She tucks her pyjamaed legs under her. ‘What did you make of Dickie?’

  I swallow, choosing my words carefully. ‘We didn’t always see eye to eye,’ I say. ‘But when Dickie cared about someone, he really cared.’

  I don’t add: until he didn’t.

  ‘That’s why I like you, Fran – you tell it how it is,’ says Caroline, looking pleased.

  I aim for a modest smile and return my gaze to the fire. Caroline might have things to hide but she’s not the only one. As I sit in her living room, sipping hot chocolate, I try not to think about how I watched Dickie fall to his death all those weeks ago and never said a thing.

  35

  In the spare room I lock the door behind me, as planned. I lie in bed listening to Caroline wander from her room to the bathroom – a tap running, a squeak or two from Daisy and then her mother’s murmur. I wonder what Dickie would make of me, Freaky Fran, here with his wife and daughter.

  When the house is quiet, I get out of bed as quietly as I can, creep to the desk and open the drawer where Dickie’s sketchbook was, but, to my disappointment, it’s nowhere to be seen. Caroline must have moved it.

  After everything that’s happened tonight, I’m worried I’m not going to sleep. I want to ask Caroline about her trip to South Kensington, but I need to decide how. It’s not something to do late at night when I’m alone in her house. Caroline doesn’t seem dangerous, but I check my bedroom door is locked again before I get into bed. It’s all become so messy, so unsettling.

  I long for someone to talk everything through with. For someone non-judgemental. For Ellie. She’s the one who knows the best and worst things about me, in the way siblings do. I’m the same with her. It’s the closest I’ve ever got to seeing the world through the eyes of another person, to feeling their pain.

  The day everything changed between her and Dickie, we’d gone along to watch the boys in a rugby match. It hadn’t even been Ellie’s idea; it’d been mine. Charles and I were in upper sixth by then. I knew there wouldn’t be many more opportunities to watch him play and I wanted to take advantage of every chance I had. You could tell how pleased Dickie was to see Ellie there, though, raising a happy hand in greeting when he saw her – about as bold as writing a signed love letter at Chesterfield.

  They shouldn’t have lost: with Charles, Dickie and Tom all in the First XV by then it should have been a shoo-in, so the mood was sour afterwards. Wellington were the school to beat and they gloated afterwards, riling the boys up. Someone – I think it was Tom Bates – muttered something about how it was unlucky to have
girls at a match. His father was in the navy, with its own superstitions about women, which was probably where he got the stupid idea from, and before too long the rest of the boys joined him in blaming Dickie for being distracted.

  Dickie was the scrum half – it was his job to get the ball from the scrum and spin it out to the backs who’d run with it. He wasn’t a leader like Charles, the team captain, or big like Tom, the number eight, who headed the scrums, but Dickie usually excelled at scrabbling for the ball in this terrier-like way. It was true that perhaps his mind wasn’t on the game that day, but he didn’t deserve what happened later.

  It was a social dance that Saturday and, though the boys’ preparation wasn’t as lengthy, or as obvious, as the girls’ – for whom things might start early in the afternoon with soaking and shaving, plucking and primping; I was a little hazy on the details because I tended simply to wash my face with Mother’s oatmeal scrub and run a comb through my hair – you could tell Dickie had made a particular effort that night with gel in his curtained locks and buckets of aftershave. That was how we found him, standing with his hands in his pockets next to the upright piano in the party room waiting for Ellie, the same bright smile on his face from earlier.

  There was a strange atmosphere that evening – too meek and calm, as if someone had planned something. Which, of course, they had.

  Ellie and Dickie had been goofing around most of the night, but when Des’ree’s ‘Kissing You’ came on, they started to dance together in the centre of the room, with their hands on each other’s shoulders. It began as them fooling around, but you could tell how happy Dickie was from the way he looked at Ellie and I thought to myself, as I watched them, that if they became girlfriend and boyfriend, Charles might realise that we belonged together too. He and Juliet were nowhere to be seen at this stage, though I’d spotted them earlier in the corner of the room, watching Dickie and Ellie, Charles’s arms slung around her shoulders in a bored manner as if he’d really rather be doing something else.

  It was while Dickie and Ellie were dancing that a silent signal was exchanged between the boys and they pounced, surrounding the pair of them on the floor and separating them.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked a boy in Ellie’s year – less intimidating than one of my peers.

  ‘They’re debagging Dickie for losing them the match.’

  He didn’t join in but he folded his arms, as if waiting for a show to begin. It was Tom Bates who grabbed Ellie and pulled her out of the way, while the rest of them were on Dickie like hyenas, removing his shoes, then pulling at his trousers.

  ‘Stop it, guys,’ he shouted at first, trying to keep it light-hearted, but his cries became increasingly anguished – you could hear the crack in his voice, the desperation – with Ellie there and all of us girls – and of course they’d chosen a moment when there were no adults in the room to prevent it from happening.

  Group mania took over, gaining momentum like a boulder rolling downhill. I looked around frantically for Charles, for Juliet, for someone with the power to stop it, but there wasn’t anybody. Just a squirming scrum with Dickie buried at the bottom of it all. They had his trousers off by this stage and Will Lovell was going for his boxers. Will was a slight guy, like Dickie, not solid like Charles or Tom – perhaps he knew, that if it hadn’t been Dickie, it could have been him. Perhaps he was pleased that someone so popular was getting his comeuppance. Either way, he made the most of his moment, glancing around him like a magician – after all, the act would have lost its power if no one had been there to see it.

  There was a whoop at the unveiling from the boys, giggles from a couple of the girls and then it was done.

  I turned away – I had no interest in witnessing Dickie’s humiliation – and made my way over to Ellie who had launched a knee into Tom’s privates and pulled free. She ran to Dickie.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  He was sprawled on the floor clutching his trousers to his groin, snot and tears smeared over his cheeks.

  ‘Just fuck off, will you? Leave me alone.’

  Ellie blinked a couple of times in shock. Dickie had never spoken to her like that before. She went over to Will, who was brandishing the boxers like a flag, and pulled them sharply out of his hand. She returned them to Dickie, sitting up by this stage, and dropped them at his feet, and then she did as he requested and left him alone.

  We heard later from Meilin, who’d missed this sorry scene, that a rumour had been started – by whom we didn’t know – that the whole thing had been Ellie’s idea, that she lured Dickie with a dance in order to humiliate him in front of everyone. Vengeance, perhaps, for the way he’d bullied me years before. It was just a stupid story, but enough people believed it. Ellie’s looks won her enemies, as well as admirers. She tried to tell Dickie, on numerous occasions, that she’d had nothing to do with it, but he never spoke to her again.

  It was an event that taught me two important things.

  The first was that Chesterfield could be as brutal for the boys as it could for us girls; it was a place where you couldn’t trust anyone, where tender alliances and secret desires were seedlings that could be wrenched away from you if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t guard them with everything you had.

  The second was that someone out there didn’t want Ellie and Dickie to be friends.

  And look where that led.

  36

  The next day begins with an unexpected message from Charles.

  I don’t s’pose you can meet me again at the National Gallery for lunch?

  I lie in Caroline’s spare bed looking at the text for a long time, thrilled that he has used the apostrophe correctly. After drafting a few replies in Notes, I go for something breezy but positive.

  I can, as it happens, Mr Fry. 1pm?

  As soon as I send it, I begin to regret it. Mr Fry? Is that peculiar? Should I have made more of the occasion? Less? I jump out of bed quickly and wash my face at the sink, taking a moment to examine it to see if it passes muster. Round and pink, as always, it both does and doesn’t look different from any other day. I flatter myself there’s a glow to my cheeks, a knowing twinkle in my eyes.

  ‘Something is happening,’ I tell myself in the mirror. ‘Your life is changing. You’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. So don’t mess it up.’

  Over breakfast I feel anxious around Caroline. I sit perched at her breakfast counter, while she tries to feed Daisy mashed banana, wondering how I can bring up what I saw on her Uber account. I run through different ways of broaching the subject in my head, but all of them sound abrupt and strange. And I don’t know how she might react. It’s broad daylight in Ealing, I tell myself. Nothing’s going to happen. What are you expecting? That she might threaten you with that baby spoon?

  Still, I delay the moment, asking instead, ‘You know Dickie’s sketches – the ones he did before he died. Can I see them?’

  It’s a bit of a long shot – and I’m not even sure she’ll remember telling me about them, but I want to know where the sketches have gone.

  Caroline stops what she’s doing for a moment, wipes a smear of banana from her forehead. ‘I think they’re in your room. The spare room, I mean.’

  She looks pale today. I heard Daisy cry a couple of times in the night and Caroline’s stumbling footsteps from her room to the nursery.

  ‘Dickie did them when we came back from Oman in October.’ She picks up a cloth and mops down Daisy’s face and hands. ‘I thought it was because he’d been diving – but they’re dark. Not just pretty pictures of fish.’

  ‘Can I see them?’ I ask again.

  ‘Sure.’ She drops the cloth at the side of the sink. ‘They’re in the top drawer of the desk.’

  Daft though it is, I perform the charade of going upstairs to look for the sketchbook when I know it’s no longer where it was.

  Returning empty-handed to the kitchen, I say, as casually as I can, ‘I couldn’t find them.’

  ‘Oh, how strange,�
�� says Caroline, heaving Daisy out of the highchair. ‘Maybe I moved them.’ She smiles. ‘I’m so sorry – I’ve got to get Daisy to nursery this morning. But you know your way to the tube, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I feel like I’ve just been dismissed. Perhaps she’s keen to get me out of the house. Is it possible she’s guessed what I saw on her phone?

  ‘What are you up to with your day off?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say, my hand reaching for my mobile in the pocket of my cardigan, to caress Charles’s text. ‘A spot of Christmas shopping perhaps.’

  After all these years, you might think the effect of him would tarnish in the way silver does, but that’s not the case. His smile when he spots me makes my heart twist. I smile back – I can’t help it – my face aches from the joy of it. He kisses me in greeting on both cheeks and he smells so good – so fresh and clean – like new beginnings.

  ‘I thought we could show each other our favourite paintings,’ he says. ‘Me first. It’ll give you time to think.’

  He takes me to the Rokeby Venus and I blush at her pearly backside lounging in front of us so flagrantly. I do what I often do when I get nervous and regurgitate all the facts I know about her – how her name comes from Rokeby Park, a grand house in County Durham where she used to hang on the wall; how Velázquez, in painting her, didn’t want to give her face, reflected in the mirror, the distinctive features of any one woman, so she remains blurry, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps; and how, because she was supposed to be the most beautiful character in the world, she became a target and was attacked by the suffragette Mary Richardson.

  Charles laughs indulgently and says, ‘Always the straight-A student.’

  I flunked my A-levels in the end. I don’t tell him that. We’d left Chesterfield by then.

  When it’s my turn, I panic and I take him to the Arnolfini Portrait – not because I like it; I wouldn’t say that was the word – but because it’s one of those paintings that stays with you, like the Mona Lisa. No one can pin it down.