Dutifully I chinked with her. ‘Happy birthday!’
‘Now then,’ she said, ‘I meant to tell you earlier but it slipped my mind. After you’d gone home yesterday you had a visitor. A nice woman – dreadlocks, multi-coloured clothes. Pierced lip. You were supposed to meet her for lunch.’
‘Julia! Oh Rina, I completely forgot!’
‘That was evident. She was very charming about it.’
‘Did you …’ I took a deep breath. ‘Did you tell her what had happened?’
‘Some of it. She seemed concerned.’
‘Shit. Sorry, Rina, but shit.’ I couldn’t believe the arrangement had slipped my mind, and was furious with myself. I had been looking forward to meeting Julia. I needed to talk to her, and I had completely forgotten what we had agreed. Confusion was one of the four main symptoms of psychosis, along with hallucination, delusion and lack of insight. Oh well done, Hannah, I thought. That’s three of the four boxes ticked. Or maybe even a full house.
I picked the phone out of my bag. It was switched off. I couldn’t remember when I’d switched it off, but when I turned it on, it beeped as several new messages and missed-call alerts came in, one after the other, most from Julia. I felt helpless. I felt useless. I was adrift.
There was no doubt in my mind now, I was losing my grip. I was usually so organized. My colleagues teased me all the time about my obsessive punctuality, my insistence on ordering and cataloguing and making sure everything was noted and in its place and done in the right way, at the right time. Now I couldn’t even remember a simple meeting.
Before I had a chance to text Julia an apology, I felt a gentle hand on my arm.
It was Charlotte.
‘Hello, Hannah,’ she said.
‘Oh hi,’ I replied, as coldly as possible.
She held up a glass. ‘I bought you a drink. Misty said you’re a white-wine lady.’
‘Actually I’m drinking cider.’
‘Oh.’ She put the wine glass on the table. ‘You could always have it later,’ she said.
I thought I would rather tip it into the flowerbed than drink it.
Charlotte played with her hair and fidgeted for a moment. There was a sheen of sweat between her breasts and she was wearing shiny, tangerine-coloured false nails. For the thousandth time I couldn’t believe that somebody like John had chosen to marry somebody like Charlotte and not somebody like me. I could have made him happy. I would have done anything to make him happy – and yet here I was again, incapable of anything apart from waiting on the sidelines to pick up the pieces when his life fell apart.
‘Is there something else, Charlotte?’ I asked rudely. ‘Only there are people here I’d like to talk to.’
Charlotte sighed. ‘Yes, there is. God, this is awkward. I don’t know how to say this, but Hannah, the other day, in the pasty shop …’
‘I haven’t said anything to John.’
‘I know, thank you. I just … Well, he … He told me you were going to Berlin together. To this conference.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hannah, I know what you must think of me – only please don’t say anything about me to John while you’re in Berlin.’
‘John’s my friend, Charlotte. I respect him.’
‘I know you do, and that’s why I’m asking you not to say anything.’
‘Everyone else seems to know what you’re up to. Don’t you think he has a right to know?’
‘He does, yes, only I’m asking you to let me talk to him. It will be better coming from me.’
‘But you won’t say anything!’
‘I will when the time is right.’
‘When will the time be right, Charlotte? When you win the lottery and can manage without John’s money? Or when you find someone richer than him to seduce?’ I was angry, but I kept my voice low.
Charlotte frowned. She seemed upset but I was certain she was play-acting.
‘It’s just …’ She looked up at the sky. She was wringing her pretty little hands with those garish nails. ‘I know what these conferences are like, Hannah, I’ve been to enough of them. They’re terribly boring, full of pretentious old duffers – not you, of course – and the temptation, always, is to drink too much because there’s nothing else to do and—Oh please, Hannah, please don’t say anything to John. I don’t want him to hear this second hand. It has to come from me and—’
She stopped in mid-flow and smiled frantically at somebody behind me. I turned, and it was John. He squeezed past me, and stood beside Charlotte. I saw the fingers of his hand reach out and take hold of hers. Charlotte smiled at me helplessly. John raised his wife’s hand to his lips, and kissed it. Charlotte looked close to tears. I had no sympathy.
‘Are you talking about Berlin?’ he asked. ‘Charlotte’s so pleased you’re coming with me, Hannah. It lets her off the hook.’
Charlotte nodded miserably.
‘But it won’t all be work,’ John continued. ‘We’ll be put up in rooms in a mediocre hotel, not in the city centre, granted, but we’ll have coffee-making facilities and a trouser press, all mod cons. We’ll have to sit through a couple of boring presentations and make small talk with a lot of intellectuals – although really you don’t even have to do that. I could be the official face of the Brunel Memorial Museum and you could do exactly what you wanted. Stay in bed, watch movies, drink gin …’
I could not smile.
‘Don’t you mind your husband going away with another woman?’ I asked Charlotte pointedly. ‘Won’t you be lonely?’
Charlotte swallowed. Her face was rigid with tension. ‘I’m used to it,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep myself busy.’
‘What’s not to like, Hannah?’ asked John. He was a little drunk. He waved his glass around with enthusiasm. ‘This trip is basically a free, short cultural break with a stimulating talk on the dialectical relationship between curators and spectators thrown in.’
‘But—’
‘Good. Anyway, I must circulate. My beautiful wife and I are off to talk to Misty and her boyfriend about popular culture and street art. I’ll see you later.’
As he moved on, Charlotte turned to look at me over her shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry …’ she began, but I turned away before she could finish the sentence.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
MY LAST A-LEVEL exam was the worst. I struggled to fill the allotted white space, finished forty-five minutes before the end and sat at my desk, doodling. When the invigilator finally said, ‘Put down your pens!’ I couldn’t wait to escape. I picked up my bag, went into the cloakroom to wash my hands and, while I was there, overheard a conversation between two of my classmates that made me realize I’d completely misinterpreted one of the questions. The last little part of me that was holding on to the hope that I might secure a place at a good university crumpled up and died.
Mired in self-pity, I wandered up the High Street, went into Bottoms Up and bought a four-pack of cider and a quarter-bottle of gin. I caught the bus as usual, but didn’t get off at the Trethene junction, riding on past the petrol garage until I was the only passenger left. I walked back to the church, the carrier bag of alcohol weighing heavy on my arm, and went through the churchyard and out of the gate on the other side, to sit on the bench beside the spot where Ellen and Jago first made love. Once sat down, I opened the first can of cider.
As the sun set, I lay on the bench with my knees hooked over the armrest, watching the sky change colour, the undersides of the clouds illuminated and changing from white to yellow to apricot, orange, gold, pink and scarlet before the sky eventually faded to nothing. I sat up then and watched the night roll in over the sea, and I saw the cows grazing, swishing their tails, their shadows growing longer and longer until they merged with the hedge shadows and all the shadows were one, and a tractor, in the distance, made lines in a crop-field as the day died away. I felt a great emotional affinity with all of life, and at the same time was as lonely as the moon. I emptied all four cans o
f cider, weed behind a bush, which was difficult because my balance wasn’t very good, had a bout of hiccups, which I managed to stop by knocking back several mouthfuls of neat gin, and then fell asleep on the bench, with my head cushioned by my bag.
I was woken, some time later, by Jago. He had been driving round the lanes in the Escort, which had finally been restored thanks to Mr Brecht’s money, looking for me. He helped me up off the bench, held my hair out of my face as I threw up into the hedgerow, and put his arm around me to stop me staggering and falling as we walked back through the churchyard to the lane where the car was parked.
‘I really, really love you,’ I told him, holding onto his waist, as we stumbled together between the graves. The night was Cornwall-black, pitch-black, dark as a wrecker’s soul.
‘Thanks, Spanner,’ Jago said.
‘But I really really don’t want you to keep sneaking around Thornfield House when Ellen comes back because it’s far too dangerous.’
This struck me as a deep and meaningful statement and one that demonstrated what a caring and thoughtful person I was. I began to cry the loud, self-pitying sobs of the young and inebriated.
‘Shut up,’ said Jago. ‘And there won’t be any more sneaking around. I’m going to take Ellen away. We’re going to America.’
‘America!’ I repeated. My head was too thick with drink to take this in.
Back at number 8, Mum took one look at me and said, ‘We’d better sort you out before your father gets back or you really will be in trouble. Go and run her a bath, Jago.’
She sat me down at the kitchen table, put a blanket around my shoulders, and made me drink some cold water. I was sick again. There was a pain inside my skull as if someone was hammering in my brain.
‘What on earth brought this on?’ Mum asked.
‘She messed up her exams,’ said Jago. ‘She’s worried she won’t get into university.’
‘Is that all? That’s not worth getting all het up about, Hannah.’
I nodded miserably.
‘I never went to university, nor did your father, and we’ve done all right for ourselves.’
I sniffed. I felt the walls of the cottage close in around me until I could hardly breathe. I was like Alice in Wonderland after she’d drunk the growing potion.
‘But I want to be an explorer,’ I said. ‘And you have to go to university to be an explorer, it’s the only way.’
‘There’s always another way,’ said Mum. ‘You could open a shop or write a book. Or you could volunteer to go and work on a fossil dig.’
I looked at her. ‘How do you know about fossil digs?’
‘Someone mentioned it at church. Their grandson’s spending a gap year somewhere – South America, I think – helping get the dinosaur bones out of a tar pit or something.’
I sat up a little straighter.
Mum smoothed my hair. ‘Although I don’t want you doing that, Hannah. I didn’t carry you for nine months and raise you all these years for you to go off to the other side of the world.’
I snuggled into her.
‘There must be places closer to home,’ Mum said. ‘Do they have fossils in England?’
‘Mmm.’ I nodded. ‘Charmouth.’
‘Charmouth,’ Mum repeated. ‘Charmouth wouldn’t be so bad.’
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE BERLIN CURATORIAL conference partner hotel was in Schönhauser Strasse, a pretty, five-storey building that looked, to me, exactly as a German hotel should look – all shutters and windowboxes, tall windows and steep gable-ends. The taxi John and I had caught at Tegel airport dropped us on the pavement outside, and we went through a revolving door into a small, carpeted foyer. The porter took our bags while John checked us in, and then we followed the porter up a narrow staircase to the second floor. Our rooms both faced the street, but were at opposite ends of the corridor.
‘You wanted rooms together?’ asked the porter.
‘No, we didn’t,’ I said quickly.
I had found the experience of travelling with John a little awkward. He had been polite and attentive, letting me take the window seat on the plane, lifting my bag from the carousel and so on. He was the perfect companion, but every time he mentioned Charlotte or his daughters or even his plans for the future, the weight of the truth I was hiding from him grew a little heavier on my shoulders. I had been quiet during our journey and resolved to spend as little time alone with John as possible. I was looking forward to being at the conference, where the conversation would be more general, less specific.
There was to be a black-tie gala Willkommen dinner for attendees that evening, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt venue in the city centre. John and I agreed to meet in the hotel bar at 6.30 p.m., and we parted to go into our separate rooms. Mine was exactly as I had expected it to be – small, clean, impersonal, but pleasant and comfortable. I enjoyed a small frisson of pleasure from being in a different city, doing something different, being somewhere else. I opened the window wide and looked out. The street below was busy with traffic and pedestrians. I liked looking at the different signage, the German words with their Gothic fonts, and inhaling the spicy, mouthwatering smells of Bratwurst, onions and sweet fried pastries rising up from the pavement vendors. Even the texture of the air felt different.
My phone beeped to alert me to a text. It was from Rina. Lily-cat is fine. Don’t work too hard.
I bathed, unpacked my small case, and sat on the bed while I read through the conference itinerary. A couple of the lectures sounded interesting and I wrote down their times and venues. On the little desk beneath the window was a faux-leather folder full of leaflets and tourist information about things to do and see in Berlin. I picked it up and read about the city bus tours, a brief history of the Brandenburg Gate, Schloss Charlottenburg and Potsdamer Platz. I opened out a small, folded map and laid it on the desk, scanning the names of the bigger cities nearby: Szczecin, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, writing down places I’d particularly like to visit. Then I saw it: Magdeburg.
Just one word, and yet it brought so many memories back to me. Magdeburg, the seat of the Brecht family home. Magdeburg was where Ellen had been born, where she had lived for the first ten years of her life, where Mrs Todd had taken her to recuperate after her father had tried to kill Adam Tremlett. Magdeburg was where the family had rallied round Ellen. It was where nobody noticed quite how badly she had been damaged by what she had witnessed.
With my fingernail, I traced the line of the A2 road that linked the two cities of Berlin and Magdeburg. It wasn’t that far away. I picked up the map, folded it, and tucked it into my handbag. Then I opened the notebook that I’d bought specifically for the purpose of making notes about this trip, so I wouldn’t forget anything that might be useful in the future. I stared at the blank page. I wrote the word Magdeburg and underlined it. Then, although it was whimsical and silly, I wrote Ellen Brecht in large, ornate letters, and I drew a curly, ornamental border around the letters, a border full of hearts and flowers.
Ellen always liked to be the centre of attention.
After that I changed into the only cocktail dress I owned. I’d bought it for the museum’s 150th anniversary the previous year. It was dusty pink, and seemed a little loose on me now. I shifted it over my shoulders until it fell straight. It was a demure dress by the standards of somebody like Charlotte, but I felt awkward in it. I was not used to having bare shoulders. I preferred to be more hidden. It was strange how I, who had been such a podgy child, had grown into such a bony, angular adult. Even though I was alone in the room, I slipped a cardigan over my shoulders and immediately felt more covered and comfortable. I stood in front of the mirror to put on lipstick, eyeliner, mascara, fastened my hair with a clip, slipped into my only pair of heels and, hoping I looked presentable but not flashy, went down the stairs.
John was already in the bar, but I didn’t recognize him at first.
I scanned the room: it was long and narrow, tastefully decorated in classic
shades of maroon and gold. There were a few couples, a group of businessmen, a beautiful girl sitting on her own, and an attractive, long-legged man in evening dress sitting at the bar drinking beer and reading a newspaper. The man turned and smiled at me. I looked away, and then looked back.
‘John?’
He slipped off the stool, took my hand, leaned over to kiss my cheek.
‘I didn’t recognize you without your glasses,’ I said. ‘You look so …’
‘Handsome?’
‘Tidy. I was going to say tidy. It’s not just the glasses …’
John shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, I thought I’d better have a shave.’
‘The clothes. You look … Well, it suits you.’
‘Thank you,’ said John.
I allowed him to help me up onto the neighbouring stool. I was unsettled and hot. I wished I’d made a little more effort with my appearance. I wanted to keep looking at him, to work out why he seemed so very different this evening, but I didn’t want him to notice me looking. I imagined, for a moment, how he must have been as a student, young and tall and rangy. He would have had something of the film star about him. No wonder Charlotte had been attracted to him. No wonder she had chosen him. I only wished I had known him then. I wished he’d met me before he met Charlotte. It was all such a mess, so wrong, and so unfair. He should have been with me.
I pulled myself together.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a shirt that’s been ironed before,’ I said. ‘No offence.’
He laughed. ‘None taken. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress before, either. You look very nice, Hannah. I ordered you a kir royale – presumptuous, I know. I hope that’s OK.’
‘It is.’ I liked kir royale very much, but would never have thought of ordering one myself.
‘So have you decided what you’d like to do in the morning?’ John asked.
I took a sip of my drink. ‘I’d like to go to Magdeburg.’
John raised his eyebrows.
‘A friend of mine – Ellen, the one who died – she lived there for a while. I didn’t realize how close it was to Berlin.’
In Her Shadow Page 21