When I opened my email account now, I saw his name in my inbox straight away; my eyes still seemed to scan for it first. I clicked on it, heart accelerating.
Happy birthday, Katie.
That was all, nothing else – another special-occasion message. And yet it made me deeply uneasy. It was one thing to write at Christmas and on New Year’s Eve but remembering my birthday was different. It wasn’t even a memorable date.
Perhaps it was because the message itself was so anodyne, however, that I made the decision to write back. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, a powerful urge to be free of him which met a sudden, unconsidered conviction that I only needed to tell him to leave me alone in a clear, unemotional way.
Richard, I typed, thank you for your message. I think it would be best, though, if you stopped writing now. We both need to move on. Kate.
I pressed send before I could start agonising about it. Then I clicked into my outbox and saw it there, gone, irretrievable, and a flash of disbelieving panic ran through me. I’d done it: broken my silence and communicated with him for the first time since it had all happened.
It was almost ten o’clock but he was still at his computer, obviously, because his response came back within the space of a minute. You’ve made such a mistake.
Chapter Sixteen
It was a relief to go to work at the café the next day, though I’d hardly slept. I wanted to be around other people, even if none of them spoke to me; I needed the mundane – warming the soup, making pots of tea, clearing the tables – to convince me that the horrors I’d imagined were just the stuff of waking nightmare. All night Richard’s mail had burned in front of my eyes as if the letters had been picked out in flame. The house had seemed suddenly unsafe, porous, as if he might be able to put his hand straight through the walls and reach me, touch the back of my neck. During the slow-moving hours of the night, the sanctuary that I’d come here to find, had tried to create, felt as tenuous as gossamer, blown away on a single breath.
This was the Richard I knew: destabilising the ground beneath my feet. It had started slowly but by the end of our relationship, I had lived so uncertainly that I didn’t trust the earth I stood on not to pitch me over at my faintest misstep. It didn’t even take a misstep: changes came without warning, sudden tornadoes that twisted up from nowhere. I was never allowed to be comfortable; instead I swung between extremes. The highs with Richard were so high: there were times – like at Christmas or in Paris – when I felt I could jump out of third-floor windows and land unharmed. Everything was electric and vivid; I looked at other people and felt sad that they weren’t living at this intensity. But then a switch in him would be thrown and his sudden coldness, his doubts about us, would plunge me into such despair and desperation that I would do anything to claw back even a little of the happiness. And that was how, at just the time I saw that I meant something to him, when he started to talk with that frightening focus about how much he loved me, I felt my power begin to slip away.
First it was the anger about Helen on my birthday and the refusal to come up to the flat. That was the pattern: a great high followed by a bottomless low: the treat of a birthday dinner at Pétrus, all his attention, followed by complete withdrawal. But even his winning me round after I found out he was married conformed to the system: he’d left me alone for a week, let me taste the bitterness of being on my own again before sweeping in with his exulting, overwhelming protestation of love. He had played weak while being strong all the time: he had set a trap in which he was the bait, an animal pretending to be injured to lure in its prey.
Once last year, we had had a whole weekend to ourselves. On the Friday Richard had suggested one of his extravagant dinners but I had wanted something lower-key, the sort of evening I might have had with a normal boyfriend. Reluctantly he had agreed and we went to Putney for supper by the river and then found a cocktail place that was open until two. He was in one of my favourite of his moods, a light flirtatious one that was a soft echo of our early bantering. He was openly affectionate, too, leaning over from his stool to kiss me, fingers gently tracing the embroidery on my evening bag where it lay on the bar.
It was past two o’clock by the time we wove our way out on to the street. It had been one of those unseasonably warm days in May and, even late at night, it wasn’t properly cold. Taxis passed us with their lights on but Richard wanted to walk. I was happy to; I was revelling in him, this glamorous, happy man who I loved and who loved me. Through the caipirinha haze, everything was glossy. From Putney Bridge, the Thames shone not only with the lights which spilled on to it from either bank but with the moon, too, which hung overhead like a big silver coin. Feeling full of love for Richard, life, London, I slipped my hand inside his coat and pressed myself against his side. Waiting for his arm to come around my shoulders, I pressed closer and butted the side of his chest gently with my head. I felt him turn to look at me and I turned my face up for a kiss, alight, I knew, with tipsy happiness.
His expression killed my joy immediately. The affection of only moments before had been extinguished and his eyes were cold – flat, as if there was no one behind them. He turned away, shutting me out of his line of vision, and walked on.
I searched my brain for something to say but couldn’t find anything. I had the same swooping sick feeling as when he had made the taxi drive him home on my birthday, the same sense that I had just taken for granted something about which there was no certainty at all.
We walked in silence for a hundred yards and then he muttered something.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear,’ I said, fearing a snapped response.
‘Entropy, I said. Everything decays and goes to ruin. Good things turn to shit. What was exciting becomes tedious. Love dies.’
My stomach lurched.
‘This’ll fade, just like it did with my wife. It always does.’
‘It doesn’t have to – not with the right person.’
‘How would you know?’ He looked away to the other side of the road. A bus was pulling up at the stop there, a single passenger getting on. The bridge was almost empty; most of those who had been out late had already vanished into the night. A light gust of wind blew from behind him and made his soft cashmere coat billow. ‘You’re a fierce creature now,’ he said, ‘but you won’t always be. You’ll get old and tired, stop really living. I’ll always be like this – this is what I am.’
If I hadn’t had so much to drink, I would never have done it. Full of a sudden fire, I threw my bag on to the pavement and approached the wall. It was between waist and chest height on me, made of stone. I thought about my shoes: heels but only small ones. I could do without taking them off; it was the immediacy of the gesture I wanted, the spontaneity. I put my hands flat on the curved top, feeling how cold it was. Deliberately, no doubt, the wall had been built with no easy footholds; I ran my shoe up the bottom foot or two of it looking for purchase but didn’t find it.
Hurrying, feeling the impact of the exercise slipping away, I braced my toes against the stone and then with a sudden upward thrust, much easier than expected, my knee was on the top. I brought the other one quickly up to correct myself. I was kneeling forward now, my hands laid flat on the parapet stone as if I was abasing myself before an invisible deity. Twenty yards below but seeming much closer, the Thames slipped blackly past, its surface not shining now but gleaming with intent. My stomach lurched again and I tried not to think about what might be in the water, the flotsam and jetsam of London life: bottles and crisp packets and larger rubbish: old tyres, shopping trolleys, cooking waste. Bodies – rats, mice, birds. Possibly humans.
There was sweat under my arms. I had to stand up. Slowly I pushed myself up on to my fingertips and raised one knee. The view tilted in front of me and the cane spirit and lime in my stomach tipped with it, letting a taste of acid up my throat. I paused for a second or two to let it settle and then brought my other knee up. Now I was crouched in an undignified manner, my bottom facing the pav
ement. Come on, Kate, you can do this, I told myself. Just stand up. The parapet’s two feet wide. You won’t fall. I lifted my body, unfolding myself with all the speed of an old woman, hating myself for not being able to override my instinct for caution. The curve of the top stone was more pronounced than I’d realised; I could feel it under my feet, making balance harder still. When I was fully upright, I took a deep silent breath and opened my eyes. There was London again, the lights bright and distinct. It was when I made the mistake of looking at the water directly beneath me, streaming out, it seemed, from between my feet, that the nausea came. Vertigo: the fear not of falling but jumping. There it was, the forward urge in my knees, the fizzing in the muscles of my thighs. I looked quickly up again, searching for the distant arc of the London Eye to anchor myself by. Deep breath.
Richard still hadn’t said anything. I could feel him standing behind me, watching. Carefully I moved my feet sideways and took three or four steps in the direction we were going, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to abandon the pavement and walk an unprotected beam above the Thames. If the drop didn’t kill me, I thought, the current would carry me swiftly away beyond help, to dash me against the pilings of a bridge further down. I imagined my body among the intricate iron under-structure at Blackfriars and another flush of fear swept over me. Girl plunges to watery grave.
Affecting a casual expression, I turned to look at him. His face was serious but the old challenge, less and less in evidence of late, was there in his eyebrows which were raised, faintly suggestive in the way that I had always found so provocative. ‘What are you doing up there?’ he said, no concern or alarm in his voice. ‘You’re scared of heights.’
I risked it. ‘Proving to you that I’m still your fierce creature. I’m not going to get old and boring. This is me – the finished product. I’m the same as you.’
He came forward, smiling, and took my hands. I thought he was going to help me down, catch me in his arms, but instead he stopped. ‘Now lean back,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Lean back. I’ll take your weight.’ The eyebrows went up, daring me. ‘Go on.’
The wind seemed to rush past my ears and the bones in my legs felt fluid but gently I leaned back. Our eyes were locked on each other.
‘You can go further than that. I’ve got you.’
The intensity which I had never found with anyone else burned between us like a power source. I felt suddenly invincible, as if I could do anything in the world. I leaned further, letting the weight of my body rock back from the balls of my feet to my heels. From the corner of my eye I could see the river, directly beneath me. I was out over the edge. Adrenalin was surging in my blood.
It was then that his hand slipped in mine. I felt an explosion of terror, a flashbulb that went off white in front of my eyes, obliterating everything.
He tugged me sharply towards him and I fell on top of him down on to the pavement, nearly knocking him over. He held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe. ‘My darling, my darling,’ he was whispering into my ear. ‘You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. It was an accident; I would never have let you fall.’
From then until he went to work at six on Monday morning, he hardly left me alone. He treated me with a tenderness which was almost overwhelming; if I was within touching range, it was rare for his hands not to be on me, stroking my hair or my face or just lying still on my arm or my thigh, as if he was making sure I was there and that the alternative sequence of events – the one in which I had fallen off the bridge and been carried away by the water – hadn’t been the one which really happened.
After he’d pulled me back down on to the pavement, he had held me tightly against him for what felt like a long time. His arms trapped mine at my side so that I couldn’t move them, as if I were a panicked cat wrapped in a blanket to stop it lashing out, scratching. I wanted to slap him, beat my hands against his chest, express physically some of the terror that had seized me in that split-second when I had thought I was going over. ‘It was an accident; it was an accident,’ he repeated again and again in my ear, like a mantra. ‘I’d never have let you go.’
Eventually the first wave of shock had passed. He felt the tension go out of my body and took a step back, moving his hands to the top of my arms, holding me away from him so he could look at my face. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said. There was a taxi coming across the bridge and he hailed it, collected my bag from the pavement and helped me in. I was moving through a dream world: it was as if everything was strobe-lit and I was getting only one frame of the action in every four.
Back at the flat, he poured me a large brandy, then undressed me with a gentleness that was almost motherly, removing my clothes carefully, undoing each of the little buttons, hanging my top and cardigan on the padded hangers. I sat mutely on the edge of the bed and watched. It was an accident, of course it was; no one sane would do that on purpose. And yet, in a corner of my mind that I didn’t want to turn a torch on, I knew there was a question: what if he had been testing me, taking that extra step to see how far I would go? And if it was a test, had I passed?
He turned back from the wardrobe, put his arms under my knees and moved me round so that I lay with my head on the pillows, tucking the quilt around me as if I was a baby. Then he took off his own clothes, leaving his boxer shorts on, and slipped into the bed beside me, reaching out to turn off the lamp. I was lying on my back and he put his arm round my shoulders and pulled me to him. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
I didn’t answer but suddenly the shock, terror and disbelief commuted into desire. I wanted to feel his weight on me, have him press me down so that I couldn’t drop away into the blackness. It was a voracious hunger, a statement of survival, but it contained a furious anger, too. I wanted to bite him, scratch him, kick him. I turned and started kissing him fiercely, running my nails over him, through his hair, down his back. In what felt like seconds, I was pinned and I wanted it but I fought it, too. I was as wild as the lions on my bracelet.
As soon as I’d watched Richard’s car pull away that Monday, I’d brought up Helen’s number on my phone. She was often at her office by seven but I’d hoped to catch her before her day really started. I had desperately needed to talk to her but when it had come to pressing the button and making the call, I’d found I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her what had happened on the bridge, any of it. I knew how she’d react to hearing I’d got up on the parapet and she would immediately have condemned Richard for not getting me down at once. There was no way I could tell her about the accident, how his hand had let mine slip. And I hadn’t wanted her to condemn him then. What I had wanted was to talk, to lay my thoughts and feelings out on the table top and look at them, try to order them. She had always been my sounding-board but at that time, at least where anything to do with Richard was concerned, that had been impossible.
The situation had reached a nadir when I’d told her he was married. The day after that dreadful Boxing Day night I’d rung her and told her everything, unable to contain my misery. She hadn’t said I told you so, hadn’t even implied it, but I knew it had to be behind the comforting words. Then I had been beyond caring, had wanted someone to listen with sympathy and join me in condemning him. I had agreed with her that if he ever contacted me again, I had to harden my heart. I had promised.
When I took Richard back after that, I emailed to tell her: I hadn’t been able to admit it face to face or even on the phone. And the morning that I had wanted to talk to her about what had happened on the bridge, I’d understood that I couldn’t. I had used up her sympathy. And I had made my choice: him over her.
Things were different now. In the afternoon, when the last of the five lunch customers departed and I was alone, I got out my mobile and rang her, keeping one eye on the door for new customers or for Mary, who’d gone out for a while. It was when I heard the unfamiliar tone that I remembered Helen was still in Munich and probably in a mee
ting. I hung up without leaving a message; I would call her later.
I’d already tidied the kitchen and swept, so to pass the time before anyone came in for tea, I filled an old ice-cream container with soapy water and started cleaning the tall drinks fridge, taking out all the bottles and scrubbing the glass shelves until I began to get hot. I didn’t see anyone at the door and it was only when the bell rang that I realised someone had come in. It was Chris.
I dropped the sponge into the water and stood up, pushing the hair off my face with my forearm. My cheeks were already rosy.
‘Hard at work? I’ve just been into Harwoods for some varnish’ – he held aloft a tin, the evidence – ‘and thought I’d pop in to see where you are.’
‘This is it,’ I said, looking around the room, not at him.
‘It’s rather nice. I’ll come in for something to eat another time.’ He smiled. ‘Look, thank you for your note; there was no need to write. And there was certainly no need to apologise: accidents happen.’
‘Not to sober people so often.’
‘Ah well – we’ve all done it. And you weren’t that bad – you’ve got a thing or two to learn if you reckon that’s drunk. Think no more about it.’
‘No wonder Peter ran for the hills,’ I tested.
‘Don’t think badly of him. Sometimes he does that, just disappears when he needs to be on his own; it wouldn’t have been because of you. He’d be embarrassed if he knew you thought that. What’s that chocolate sponge like? Have you tried it? I should get back – I’ve closed the shop – but I’ll take a piece with me, if that’s OK.’
I cut him an extra large slice and put it in one of the plastic takeaway boxes.
‘Come and see me soon,’ he said, tucking his scarf into his jacket again on his way towards the door. ‘And don’t wait till you’ve finished your books.’
The Bed I Made Page 16