You and Me

by Nicola Rayner

  ‘Fran.’ Charles’s voice comes from the bedroom.

  I pop my head around the door, suddenly conscious of the fact I’m only wearing a bathrobe. So is he, fresh out of the shower. I don’t know how to hold myself or what to say.

  ‘Fiona and the kids have gone out.’ He smiles. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  His voice is different: gentler and inviting. When he is around Fiona, he speaks with a crisp efficiency like her own. But that shell has fallen away now.

  ‘Our bathrobes match,’ I say, because I’m stuck for words and it’s true.

  We’re in his and hers versions, white and fluffy. The lights are dim in the bedroom; someone’s lit candles too, drawn the curtains. The carpet is thick under my bare feet. I realise that I’ve never actually been alone in a room with Charles – not really. At Chesterfield, at the auction, even at the National Gallery, we were alone in a crowd. Now the moment is here I don’t know how to act. In books and films, people instinctively understand how to behave in these situations. They act smoothly, moving confidently towards the inevitable clinch. But I don’t feel smooth and confident. I’m shivering still from my swim. Unable to shake off the cold. Unless it’s excitement. Or fear.

  ‘Where’s Fiona?’ I ask, although I’ve guessed the answer.

  ‘She’s at her parents’.’

  I realise I want her to come back. That I don’t know how to handle this new situation.

  Charles stands, just looking at me. Then he opens his arms for a hug and I go to him, resting my face on his warm chest. I’m still shaking.

  ‘You saw Dickie die,’ he says quietly, sadly.

  ‘I’m so sorry I never said.’ I murmur the words into his chest, grateful he can’t witness the hot shame on my face.

  It’s worse, somehow, than it was with Caroline, because Charles was there himself. It was his face I saw afterwards. A spectator in the way I have been at other times in his life. Intimate moments I shouldn’t have witnessed. And I slipped away when I could have stayed. That would have been the noble thing to do. The right thing. But then I would have been exposed for what I was. Someone who creeps around, watching from a distance, looking through windows, longing to be let in.

  I begin to cry. ‘There is so much I’m ashamed of.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Charles. He pulls away from me and sinks into the bed, holding his head in his hands. ‘I wish I had saved Dickie.’

  I perch next to him. ‘There’s nothing you could have done.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks urgently. ‘You were there. Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure of it.’ I hesitate, steeling myself to continue. ‘Charles,’ I say at last. ‘I’ve been thinking. About what you said before. I don’t know if it was an accident. I believe Dickie was pushed.’

  He looks up at me.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you before, because you didn’t know I was there. But Dickie saw someone he knew just before he fell. I think that person could have pushed him.’

  ‘Caroline said you’d told her something like that,’ he says doubtfully.

  I can tell by the tone of his voice that Caroline still doesn’t believe me.

  ‘I didn’t see who it was.’ I look into those slate-grey eyes I have loved for so long. ‘But I thought maybe I should go to the police – share the information I have. Something doesn’t add up.’

  There are still things I can’t mention. I know if I say anything about Caroline’s Uber trip, she won’t forgive me, so I keep quiet about that. And of course I won’t breathe a word about the woman who looked like Ellie. But I need to do this: I need to find out what happened that night. It will prove my love to Charles, my friendship to Caroline. As long as she didn’t do it herself, adds a quiet voice in my head.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ I ask. ‘To the police. I’d really like you to.’

  Charles takes my hand. I look down at my nails, clean and white after the long soak. ‘If you need me there, I’ll come with you,’ he says kindly. ‘But could we wait until after Christmas – for Caroline’s sake? It’s a hard time, as you know. And she’s just fallen off the wagon. Let’s do it when things have settled and she’s got her drinking under control.’

  I nod. ‘Of course.’

  He exhales and flops back on the bed, sinking into the duck-down duvet. I stay upright for a moment, looking ahead, but he pats the spot next to him and I lie back into the crook of his arm, though in a less relaxed manner than him. We keep still, listening to the sounds of the house: the gurgle of the radiators, the caw of a crow outside. I look up and see us reflected in a mirror above the bed. It occurs to me why Charles and Fiona must have hung it there and the realisation makes me blush from the roots of my hair.

  ‘Fran,’ he says quietly, ‘why were you in the lake?’

  ‘I just wanted to …’ I glance away from the reflection. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Did you want my attention?’ he says quietly. ‘For me to rescue you?’

  We catch each other’s eyes in the mirror and I nod. I can feel a trickle of sweat in the hollow of my throat.

  ‘You like me, don’t you?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’ve always liked me.’

  I stay as still as a doll. Now we’re here, lying in bed, I don’t know what to say next. With Gareth I had been able to explain and he had understood. He had patted my hand and said we could still be companions, that the other stuff wasn’t so important to him either, but with Charles I can’t find the words. I hear Dickie’s laughter then, ringing in my ears. Freaky Fran, you finally have your chance and you’re going to blow it.

  ‘Charles,’ I say in the end. ‘I’ve never … you know. I don’t know if I’m like everybody else …’

  He takes my hand in response and gives it a squeeze. There’s another silence. I hear a car in the distance and I wonder how long we have – if this will be our only opportunity to lie like this.

  ‘Do you remember that time you caught me and Juliet together?’ Charles pulls me closer, murmurs in my ear. ‘Perhaps you just like to watch.’

  I don’t respond. My face burns with shame.

  ‘We knew you were there but I think Juliet enjoyed it, having an audience.’ His breathing is thinner; I feel the thump-thump of his heart through the robe.

  He means in the sports hall at Chesterfield, how I followed him there one evening, not sure exactly what I wanted. Juliet was one of the athletics prefects, so it was her job to check the students had left the sports complex at the end of the night. I’d hung around, waiting for ages in the girls’ changing room, just sitting there in the dark.

  When I’d heard heavy breathing, a moan from the boys’ changing room next door, I’d crept towards the sound. I can’t remember what I told myself. Perhaps that someone was in trouble, that they might need help. Or maybe it was simple curiosity. Nosiness. I don’t know, but the door was ajar. They’d left it like that. Juliet supine, facing the ceiling, her eyes closed, her school skirt thrown up. The back of Charles’s head, bobbing up and down. Her eyes opened, just for a second, and she saw me. The brief shimmer of pleasure I’d experienced shattered like fireworks.

  I ran back down the corridor, out of the sports hall, to the boarding house, where I got into bed with all my clothes on and feigned a migraine.

  ‘Some people just enjoy watching.’ There are whisky fumes on his breath. ‘Maybe you’re like that, Fran? A voyeur.’

  He’s a different Charles then, his face hot and close, his hand heavy on my bathrobe. I don’t like it; I don’t understand. I want to pull away, so I can admire him again from a distance. This is too cramped. Too strange. And there’s another thought – something I try to push away as hard as I can. Juliet isn’t the only woman I’ve seen him kiss like that. If it had just been her, it wouldn’t be so bad.

  I curl away from him – only a fraction but he senses it, takes his hand off me.

  There’s a long silence between us.
/>   ‘Is this real to you?’ he asks in the mirror. ‘Or is it just an old schoolgirl crush?’

  I glare at him. What a ridiculous, childlike word. Meaningless, reductive. The way I feel about him has always been so much bigger than that. Anger wells up so quickly I find I want to hurl something at him for misinterpreting everything. For mistaking my love for sordid desire.

  ‘A crush?’ I want to say. ‘Are you insane?’

  But almost as quickly as it started my rage U-turns into grief. I sit up. My shoulders tremble, and I swallow hard, but it’s too late. The emotion of the day spills out in furious tears. Maybe he’s right, I realise. Maybe it’s all just an idea. Maybe the most important thing in my life isn’t real.

  ‘Fran.’ He leans forward to touch me, but I rear away, abandoning myself to paroxysms of grief.

  When I finally manage to speak between the sobs, I don’t want to talk about my feelings for Charles any more. It’s not even him I’m thinking about; it’s not his name on my lips.

  ‘Ellie,’ I cry. ‘God, I miss Ellie.’

  41

  When we were children, Ellie and I would leave a glass of sherry and a mince pie by the fireplace for Father Christmas, a carrot for Rudolph. We’d wake early in the room we shared in the cottage in Yorkshire, condensation dripping from the windows, and creep downstairs, where our stockings would hang by the fireplace. There’d be a smattering of icing sugar – snow as we thought it then – with the print of a big boot, the carrot gnawed to its stubby end, the mince pie reduced to crumbs, the sherry vanished. Sometimes I think of Mother crunching her way through the raw carrot, which would have given her the hiccups, eating the mince pie and downing the sherry. Her reward for wrapping and filling our stockings on her own at the dead of night. But where did she find a boot big enough for the Santa print? It was far too large for her. And where did she keep it the rest of the year?

  You don’t appreciate love like that until it’s gone.

  But I’m an adult now and, despite what A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life would have us believe, I know there are no ghosts or angels. No second chances. No way of calling our loved ones back. No way to unsay the terrible things we’ve said.

  And yet I try my best to cast my own spell, think of everything I can do to tempt Ellie back. I fill the fridge with her favourite food – brandy butter, salmon, Brussels sprouts – she was weird like that. A stack of books waits for Rose under the tree, a beautiful vintage-style swimming costume for Ellie. She should face her fears and start swimming again; we should move on from the past.

  Before I go to sleep, I even consider leaving the door on the latch for them, as if they could slip back in the night. It’s a silly thought, really. Ellie has a key, after all.

  Do you remember that footprint Mother used to leave in icing sugar? I wrote in a Facebook message to her last week after that dreadful day at Honeybourne. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. About her. I would love you to come back for Christmas. You’re both always welcome here. Always.

  I haven’t been in touch with Caroline, but I noticed on Facebook that she’s changed her mind – she’ll be spending Christmas with Charles and Fiona, not on her own, after all. I try not to think about how they will all be waking up together, cosy and warm in that golden house, unwrapping presents under the enormous tree in the hallway or by the fire in the living room.

  The last Christmas I spent with Ellie, three years ago, we exchanged presents after lunch, both slumped, full and woozy, on the sofa. After I’d given her hers, she passed me an envelope. Things were better between us by then. I’d had time to get used to the idea of her pregnancy and she’d told me a little about Rose’s father, Roberto, even shown me his Facebook profile – he looked like a poor man’s George Clooney. Handsome, older, married.

  I was a little underwhelmed by the envelope. I had worked so hard, on a tight budget, on her presents. I always found it difficult because she wasn’t much of a reader but in addition to lots of spoiling treats – cashmere socks, Babygros and a few books for my future niece – I’d managed to nab one of the scans Ellie had shown me on her phone, by emailing it to myself, and had it framed professionally.

  Ellie was never much of a crier when we were children – I was always the one who wept, frequently and easily at the injustices of the world, but even when the worst things happened, Ellie would remain dry-eyed and as silent as a stone. That day, though, her hormones must have been wild, because she started weeping afresh at every new present she opened, ‘Oh, Fran,’ she’d say, opening a beautiful edition of The Velveteen Rabbit. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘I can’t wait to read it to her,’ I said.

  But that only made her cry even harder.

  When she opened the final present – the scan – she was so emotional she could barely look at it. She pushed it back into her box of presents, wiped her eyes and handed me the envelope.

  It was a letter from Nationwide about our mortgage.

  I could feel Ellie’s gaze on my face as I read it. As soon as I finished, I began to read it again. It wasn’t a complicated letter but I couldn’t believe what it was saying: Ellie had paid off our mortgage all on her own, without my knowing.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How you did it so quickly.’

  In truth, what I didn’t understand was how someone who had given up her job had managed this. She looked at me so eagerly that I tried to mask how worried I felt. Where had all this money come from?

  I knew I was naïve about the world Ellie inhabited – cocktail bars and nightclubs; men who splashed out on pretty girls – knew, too, how angry I would make her if I framed my worries in the wrong way.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s just such a lot of money.’

  I held off asking where it came from.

  ‘Roberto helped,’ she said carelessly, as if it was nothing. ‘He’s the father of my child, after all.’

  ‘He’s not going to live here, is he?’

  Ellie laughed sharply. ‘No, don’t worry about that. He just wants us to be secure.’

  She began to tidy up our wrapping paper then, scrunching it into tight little balls and throwing it into the recycling box. I was left with the feeling that our presents had shaken things up between us like flakes in a snowglobe, rendering us indecipherable to each other. Unreadable.

  42

  I wake early on Christmas Day with the children next door thundering up and down the corridor, exultant. The day yawns before me. ‘Happy Christmas,’ I say to Branwell and he scowls and begins licking himself furiously.

  The first thing I do is drag my laptop to bed and check my email. There’s nothing from Ellie. Nothing from anyone except a few emails from companies like Pen Heaven and Marks and Spencer, wishing me a very happy Christmas. I watch one of the Christmas ads a couple of times but it’s a story about sisters wearing matching festive jumpers and it makes me feel unspeakably maudlin.

  I drag myself out of bed for a long hot bath. I scrub every inch of my skin until it’s pink and glowing. And, almost out of habit, I think of Charles and wonder what he’ll be doing now. Will he still be in his pyjamas or has he changed into his cords and old jumper with patches at the elbows? Later, Fiona will nag at him to put on something smarter, but for now she’ll let him be comfortable.

  I ruined everything by crying on him the way I did the other day. It changed the atmosphere as swiftly as turning on the lights would have done – or Fiona arriving home. We’d sat upright on the bed until my sobs subsided, with Charles patting my knee from time to time. He found me tissues and a glass of water, but you could tell, more than anything, he just wanted me to go. I’d thrown away my golden opportunity. Then why, on the train back to London, was my overriding feeling one of relief?

  It’s not much consolation against today’s sadness as I imagine them all together. The children will b
e in matching tartan pyjamas, one of the adults in a Santa hat. Perhaps Caroline is nursing a coffee, thinking of Dickie; Fiona gives her shoulder a squeeze and returns to scrambling eggs. Caroline should be with me, I think, with a sudden flare of anger. I understand what it is to be sad at this time of year; I wouldn’t have tried to chivvy her up with crackers and party games. We could have watched Brief Encounter, wallowing in what we’d lost.

  When I get out of the bath, it’s only nine-thirty. It’s going to be a long day.

  ‘Were you trying to kill yourself?’ the therapist had asked about my dip in the lake.

  I’d kept my promise to Fiona and gone to a trial session with the woman she recommended. Out of good will, after Fiona’s kindness, but at that price I wasn’t sure there would be many more. I liked the therapist, though. She was around Mother’s age, sensibly dressed in woollen tights, a corduroy skirt and the sort of flat, stout boots you could climb a mountain in.

  ‘No, it was more of a poetic thing,’ I said. And I tried to explain about The Lady of Shalott.

  ‘Were you trying to get someone’s attention?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. I thought of Charles, of course, but I didn’t want to talk about him. Not to someone who knew Fiona.

  ‘Do you ever think of suicide?’ she persisted.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied bleakly. ‘I think of it. I think of a lot of things I wouldn’t do.’

  I told her a story I’d heard once about a woman who jumped off the Monument to end it all, but whose crinoline skirts slowed her fall like a parachute so she landed alive on top of a carriage. ‘I imagine she thanked the gods and rethought her decision,’ I said. ‘And then, of course, she fell off the carriage and was trampled by horse’s hooves.’

  ‘What do you take from this?’ she asked gently.

  You wouldn’t say she was someone who could just appreciate a story for the sake of a story.

  ‘Don’t jump off the Monument?’ I suggested. ‘Or any building marking a tragedy. It’s in very bad taste – do you know some people say more died jumping or falling off the Monument than in the Great Fire of London?’