'No.' My voice was loud and it echoed up through the house. 'No, Lucas. Tonight was the only time. We only kissed. It wasn't meant to happen.'
'It wasn't meant to happen? You mean you wanted it to.'
'No, of course not. I ...'
'Look,' said Greg. 'This isn't doing anyone any good. We need to talk about this properly, not like this.' His voice, somehow, was calm and the composure of it seemed to incense Lucas.
'How dare you? How fucking dare you tell me what to do in my house?' He was moving now. He stepped out of the shadows at the end of the corridor and crossed the floor towards Greg. He looked wild. He had clearly been sick repeatedly and the hair along his brow was damp. His eyes were moving fast, flicking between Greg and me as if trying to catch us in some secret communication. He was glowing with anger, a pale rage that altered the air around him.
'Lucas, that's not what I mean. I just think it would be better if we talk about this privately.'
Lucas stepped forward and swung at him with his full might. His fist made contact with Greg's cheekbone and Greg spun round with the unexpected weight of it, putting his hand to his face. Rachel gave a sharp cry. Lucas stood, trembling with anger and with disbelief at what he had done, his fist still clenched in front of him.
Greg was feeling his jaw. There was blood in his mouth, making a red film over his teeth. He swallowed it away. The lack of retaliation seemed to inflame Lucas still further and he swung again. This time Greg turned and so the blow glanced across his ear. Nonetheless, it was enough to make him wince with pain.
'Come on then, you bastard. Come on - hit me.'
'Lucas, stop it.' Danny crossed the hall and grabbed his arm. 'This isn't the way.'
Lucas turned on Danny and I thought for a moment he was going to hit him as well but instead he started to cry. 'He's taking Jo, Danny,' he said. 'He's sleeping with Jo.' He put his head in his hands and sobbed, his shoulders shaking with the force of it. I saw that he was still very drunk.
'I'm not,' I said. 'We haven't. You've got this all wrong. Danny's twisting it. It was just a kiss. It's never happened before.'
'Rachel saw you, Joanna. That's not my evidence.' Danny stepped forward and pulled Lucas towards him, putting his arms around him and holding him. Over his shoulder he looked at me. His expression was unambiguous; he might as well have said it aloud: he's mine now.
'Lucas,' said Greg, swallowing again. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 'This wasn't supposed to happen. And I promise you that tonight was the first time.'
'Fuck off. Just fuck off.' Lucas's words were muffled on Danny's shoulder.
At that moment I caught Martha's eye. She was staring at me with sheer disbelief, as if unable to understand what was happening.
Greg moved first. 'Rachel ...'
'I'm not going anywhere with you.'
'Please. I need to talk to you.' I watched the resistance in her face melt and saw again how much he had meant to her. She let him guide her upstairs to their room. He walked slowly behind her, his hand feeling tenderly around his jaw. I waited for him to turn and glance at me as he climbed the stairs, for confirmation of some sort, but he didn't look back.
Danny took Lucas and led him into the drawing room, closing the door behind them. Martha looked at me in disgust, turned on her heel and walked away. 'Come on, Michael,' she said, her voice icy.
'Martha,' I tried but she ignored me. Michael shot me an ambivalent look and followed her down the corridor to the kitchen.
As quickly as everyone had gathered they were gone. Suddenly I was left alone in the hall and the atmosphere of the place rushed in, all focused on me. I felt as if I were the object of the exclusive scrutiny of a thousand pairs of invisible eyes. My head went light and the place started to shut in around me, the floor moving up in all directions and the walls moving in, coming to brick me up. My chest constricted further and then came the crash of blood in my ears, my heartbeat or the house's, I wasn't sure, just that it was getting louder and louder. My legs felt dissociated from the rest of my body and I didn't know whether I would have any mastery over them but I knew I had to move from that place.
The first few steps felt like dragging through thick mud, as if there were resistance to my going. The pounding in my head grew louder still. I reached the stairs and started to climb. The landings seemed to go on for an eternity and I stumbled on the steps as I went. All I wanted was to put a door between me and that terrible pulsing energy, whatever it was.
When I reached my room, I slammed the door shut and braced myself against it, as if there were something outside pushing to get in. I waited until the feeling had passed and the pounding had retreated a little. There was a spare inhaler on the bedside table and I took hit after hit on it until my hands were shaking from the overdose. Then I pulled my suitcase out of the bottom of the wardrobe and started packing. There was no method to it, just speed. I grabbed at things indiscriminately, snatching handfuls of the underwear I had started keeping in the chest of drawers, throwing my hairdryer and shoes into the bottom of the case.
There were heavy footsteps along the landing outside and the door cranked open. My stomach turned over. It was Lucas. We looked at each other as if across a great stretch of unfamiliar terrain. His eyes moved off me and took in my suitcase on the bed and the tangle of tights and T-shirts beside it. 'What can I do?' he said. For a stupid moment I thought he meant with the packing. His face was raw. With the strain first of being sick and then crying, his eyelids were puffed and pink, his eyes shot through with blood. The discoloration was made more striking by the graveyard pallor of the rest of his skin.
He closed the door behind him. 'It's my fault,' he said. 'I screwed it up.'
'Please, Lucas. Don't.' I turned away, unable to look at him.
'I didn't do enough things right. Tell me what I should have done differently. Tell me. I should have stayed in London, shouldn't I? Jo, if I could go back now ... I'll try,' he said suddenly. 'I'll get another flat in London; we'll just come back here at weekends. That would change things, wouldn't it?'
I didn't say anything.
'What if I asked for my job back? I know you don't approve of me living on Patrick's money. What if I told Danny to move out?' He came round to the end of the bed, forcing himself into my line of sight. 'Tell me what I can do. Please. For God's sake.'
'Nothing.' Saying the word was so difficult. It felt like cutting a mooring line, setting myself adrift from him, or him from me, and from everything we'd shared, all those years of the best friendship I'd ever had. I felt as though I were floating, my head a whirl of sorrow and regret and the desire to be free.
His eyes filled with tears again. 'Nothing?'
I shook my head as gently as I could.
'Jo, I'm begging you. I'm telling you I'll do whatever you want me to do as long as you'll stay with me,' he said, his voice getting louder.
I wanted so much to be able to give him an answer, the one simple thing he could change so that everything would come right again. But I couldn't. 'That's not what I loved you for,' I said. 'I loved the old Lucas, the self-determining, independent Lucas. I needed you to be you, not changing.'
'I can do that. I can. Jo, listen to me. I can go back.' He moved now so that he was in front of me and took me by the shoulders. He was gripping me hard; even through my jumper the pressure of his fingers was hurting my collar bone. The air around him was rancid, undercut with the smell of vomit. Careful not to anger him further, I stepped away until he was forced to let go of me.
He started to cry again. 'I love you,' he said but the words that once would have made my heart swell now filled me with despair. And, although I could barely admit it, I was frightened. I'd never seen him hit anyone before tonight. Alcohol and shock had vanquished the usual moderate Lucas. 'I love you,' he wept. 'And I need you to stay with me. I need you.'
'I can't.'
'You're one of the only people I have left. You can't leave me. Don't you understand? Don't you see that?'
I forced the lid down on the case and dragged the zip round, catching a pair of tights that had come free. I tore them out of the zip and shoved them back inside. There were possessions of mine scattered all over the house but I couldn't stop for them now. 'I've got to go,' I said, moving back.
'You can't.' Suddenly Lucas dropped to his knees. A low crooning sound came from his throat. He snatched at my trouser leg and when I looked down at him I saw that his reddened eyes were full of a terrible anger. 'If you go now, you can never come back,' he said.
I said nothing and pulled away. I didn't recognise this possessive, frightening man. Grabbing my suitcase from the bed, I turned to open the door and, as I did so, he stood and grabbed at my jumper. 'You bitch. You won't even give me a chance.' His face was crazy with grief.
'Lucas, please, let me go.' I was in tears but they were tears of desperation and fear. I could feel them running down my cheeks and into my mouth. Every fibre of me was straining to go. The key to my car was in my pocket and my hand felt for it, checking it was there.
'I can't,' he said. 'I can't let you. I can't let you leave me.'
He lunged for me, grabbing at my bag, my shoulders, shaking me, hurting me. His hand caught a clump of my hair and pulled it so hard I thought it would be torn from my scalp. Even though he was thin, his body was strong. I don't know what would have happened if Danny hadn't appeared in the doorway and pulled him off me. In Danny's arms again, Lucas stopped fighting and let me go.
I remember the journey home to London only as a series of snapshots, a sequence of disordered images that deliver themselves to my brain now with the quality of hallucinations. I know I was still drunk and to this day I don't understand how I didn't have an accident. I cried all the way back down the motorway but it wasn't the sort of crying that I had been used to in the past. This was new, a weeping that hurt me and stretched my mouth into a great silent circle of misery from which no noise would come. When I left Stoneborough it was still dark but the horizon was lightening to the east, the intimations of dawn a virulent orange seeping up the sky. By the time I reached London I was driving through the pallid pink-and-blue light of the first hour of a new day. At traffic lights I looked straight ahead for fear that one of the few other drivers on the road at that hour would see my ravaged face.
Martha cut her weekend short and came back that night. I was sitting upstairs in one of the armchairs, clutching a cushion to my chest. When I heard the front door, my heart bumped. I had been dreading her return. I was staring at
Dalziel and Pascoe
on television. I couldn't concentrate enough to follow the plot but Dalziel's big, doleful face seemed to express all the sorrow and uncertainty in the world. The reverberation of the door slamming shuddered through the house. I heard her bags being thrown down and she came up the stairs two at a time.
She stood in the doorway like a Fury. 'How could you?' she shouted. 'How could you do that? To Lucas? To Rachel?' Even her hair seemed angry. Long as it was, it stood away from her head as if it was electrified. She held her hands out in front of her, the fingers stiff with tension, as if imploring me to give her an explanation that would go some way to helping her understand how I could behave like this.
'I didn't set out to do it, Marth. It just happened,' I said limply.
'Bullshit.' Her right hand cut through the air like a blade on the second consonant. 'Even if he had come after you in the biggest way possible, you could always have said no. You could always have said no, Joanna, but you didn't. And now you've dicked over two of your oldest friends. I just cannot believe you did that.' She sat down on the arm of the sofa as if I had pulled all the stuffing out of her.
'I'm sorry,' I said, feeling the inadequacy of the word.
'That doesn't really cover it.' She shook her head. 'Of all people, I thought you'd get it. Anyway, it's not me you should be apologising to.'
'How can I do it? How can I ever tell them how sorry I am?'
'I'm not sure you can.'
'Please help me, Martha,' I said. 'I feel so bad.'
'You should have thought of that before. And I can't help you right now. Don't ask me to.' She stood up to go, as if she had exposed herself to my presence for as long as she could without becoming contaminated by it. 'Because all this makes me ask questions. Like, if you can do this to Lucas and Rachel, what's to say you couldn't do it to me, next time I meet someone I really like? I don't know whether I even trust you any more.'
That night was the closest I have ever come to harming myself. I don't mean anything as dramatic as trying to kill myself; I don't think I am courageous enough for that, or ever could be, even in a situation that merited it. Ending one's own life seems to involve a grandeur of scale, somehow, however despicable or cowardly the reasons for wanting to. No, that night I thought about inflicting pain on myself. In the empty kitchen the knives in the drawer shone with a dangerous glamour and I wanted to know if self harming worked, if the infliction of doses of pain to the outside of the body could lessen the anguish on the inside, however momentarily.
I could not erase from my mind the memory of the pain I had seen in Lucas's face. My room felt like a stifling prison, the air rank with thoughts of what I had done. Every avenue I pursued to try to excuse what had happened offered me a dead end. I tried telling myself that it was just a kiss, nothing more, that the whole thing had been blown out of proportion, but I knew it wasn't true. The kiss was the culmination of weeks of watching Greg and wanting him, wanting to know what it was like to be with him, to sleep with him. To cheat on Lucas. I wept silently for fear that Martha would hear and judge me undeserving of any tears for myself. The hands on my alarm clock moved later and later into the night but it was pointless even trying to sleep.
In the end I left the house and walked. It was hours past midnight and London showed me its nocturnal face, turning familiar streets into a chilly alien landscape. The shops were battened against the night, the grilles locked down over the front of the newsagent's and the shop across the road that handled money transfers and the transport of packages to Poland and Eastern Europe. The street lamps lit dirty canyons between rundown houses, grubby net curtains like restless spirits at the windows on the ground-floor flats of the council blocks up the Dawes Road. Every sound, every rush of litter along the gutter or rustle in the scrubby growth in the tiny front gardens was magnified and yet I walked on.
I saw almost no one. Those I did passed me in cars or on the occasional bus, looking out with dull eyes from the safe yellow light. I reached Putney Bridge and stood at the parapet facing upstream, watching the black water underneath. The Thames. Here the river moved quickly along the final miles of its journey, anxious for the sea, but it had come from Oxfordshire, its meander slower there, as though it were reluctant to leave those pleasanter banks behind. I'm not sure how long I stood there: twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. When the cold of the wind began to bite, I turned home.
At the foot of the bridge where Fulham High Street starts in its architectural mishmash of church and office block and the concrete monstrosity of the Travelodge, I felt someone watching me. It was a man by the gates to the park, partially hidden by the stone pillar, coat drawn tight around him as if he were concealing some dangerous or precious object inside it. He was too far from the stop to be waiting for the night bus. I avoided his eyes, and he mine, until I passed him and I felt his gaze dart on to my face like the flicking of a tongue. I walked on, waiting for him to follow me, to catch at my coat, but there were no quickening footsteps, no shadow running to overlap mine on the pavement. When I got home I stood in the kitchen again and felt my pulse as it slowed. It had been a stupid thing to do but I had needed it. It was a trial: I had offered myself up to whatever fate might befall a woman walking alone in a big city in the small hours of the morning. I had dared whatever was out there to come and take me if I deserved it.
I was an exile in my own home. I could not face Martha and, if I had, I doubt she would have spoken to me. We negotiated the communal areas of the house like a sort of no man's land; I would not come out of my room until I was sure that she was in hers or was in the bathroom with the door locked. Any sound of unexpected movement was enough to send me scuttling back in fear.
On Sunday afternoon I heard her go out. I waited for five minutes in case she'd forgotten something and had to come back for it, as she often did, and then I rang my parents. Since Christmas I had spent so much time with Lucas and at Stoneborough that I had neglected them. Our conversations had been getting shorter and shorter and I felt as if I hadn't talked properly to my mother since I was at home for the holiday. I was desperate to speak to her now, to tell her that Lucas and I had split up and to hear a sympathetic voice.
The phone rang for a long time. The cold of the night before was gone, its legacy one of those tricksy spring days that seem to presage summer with a persuasive heat at midday but turn bitter later on. I guessed my parents would be outside making the most of the sun, Mum gardening and Dad reading the paper at the table on the patio, hoping not to be roped in to any manual labour. Eventually, just as I was about to give up, my mother answered. 'Jo, lovely to hear from you. Let me just take my gloves off. I've been pruning.' Even her voice was a balm, making me feel less alone in seconds. 'There we are. How are you? Are you in the country with Lucas?'
'Mum, we've broken up.'
'Oh no, what happened?' She was genuinely upset.
I said as little as I could. I told her that I had begun to have doubts about him, that they had come to a head and we had split up. I couldn't tell her about Greg. She was a fierce believer in proper conduct and would find it an unacceptable blurring of lines.
'That must have been quite a shock for him,' she said, when I finished my account. 'I wondered whether he thought you might get married. After all, you've been close for an awfully long time.'
Her response surprised me. 'You're supposed to be on my side.'
'Yes, of course, darling, but poor Lucas. It's a shame. He was a kind soul, I always had the impression. Thoughtful, even at university. Is there any chance ...?'
'No. None.'
'Oh.'
I had been too abrupt. 'Mum, it's not just that. There were things against us.'
'Like what?'
I couldn't tell her about the strange atmosphere at the house - it would sound ridiculous. 'Well, Danny. He wouldn't accept that Lucas and I were together. I think he's trying to force me out of Lucas's life so that he can have him to himself.'
My mother laughed. 'Jo, don't be so melodramatic. I'm sure that's not true; why on earth would Danny want to do that? He's got his own life to live. But look, darling' - her voice turned serious again - 'don't do anything rash as far as Lucas is concerned. He's a good man. I really did think ...'
I felt a flash of temper. 'Is Dad there?' I asked, rather than risk shouting at her. I knew myself well enough to know that when I was overwrought I couldn't always keep my cool, even with innocent parties.
She handed the phone straight over. My father had clearly been standing next to her. 'So you've split up with Lucas,' he said. 'What happened? Couldn't you make it work?'
I wanted his support and affection so badly then and his immediate assumption that it had been due to my lack of effort cut me. 'Sometimes things just don't work out, Dad.'
'Relationships are complicated,' he said. 'But I would have thought you and Lucas had enough there to make a go of it.'
'Look, I feel bad about it - can't you tell? Please don't make me feel worse.' I tried not to get angry. I couldn't understand why neither of them seemed willing to give me a sympathetic ear. I had been relying on them as my last source of potential comfort.
'I'm just trying to understand, that's all. I'm your father. I'm supposed to take an interest in your life.' There was a hint of anger in his voice now.
'It's not all my fault.'
'So tell me what happened. I'm just trying to help, Joanna.' 'I don't need help. We're not going to get back together, OK? Just leave it, Dad.' I couldn't tell them that Lucas had attacked me, although part of me wanted to, just to shock them into seeing my side. It felt like too gross a betrayal, though. Telling them would only make me feel that I had let him down in yet another way.
'Well, you're obviously upset and finding it difficult to be polite either to your mother or me so I'm going to hang up and we'll speak again when you're in a better mood.'
'Dad, please listen ...'
'Goodbye, Jo.' There was the fumbling sound of him replacing the handset and then I was left with nothing.
Those were some of the loneliest days I had ever spent. Just the absence of my best friends would have been enough to make them so but in addition I felt that there was a monumental new wall between us, one that I had built and now could never scale. I was on one side of it, the Elysian fields of our former friendship on the other. Even if Lucas and Rachel were not happy now, they weren't barred from being happy again, as I now was, proven unworthy of those closest to me. The future yawned open in front of me, empty.
Without Lucas and Martha, my warp and weft, I saw how thin the rest of my life was. I would have given anything to go back. Now when I reflected on how things had been between Lucas and me, I couldn't see what had been so wrong. I wondered why I hadn't been able to handle Danny. I should have laughed it off, not given him the satisfaction. I had allowed him to work on the few insignificant grains of doubt I had - surely normal at the beginning of any relationship, let alone one that had started like ours - until he had undermined everything we could have had. How could I have been so stupid?
The only familiar structure left to me was work and there was no respite there, either. Although I tried to disguise it with make-up, which soon wore off, it must have been apparent to everyone in the office that I was having a bad time. No one even asked if I was OK. To get through it, I measured out each day into sections, morning, lunchtime and afternoon, and I punctuated each with as many cigarette breaks as I could get away with, and as many trips to the loo and rounds of coffee as possible, anything to avoid sitting at my desk with my thoughts and the inbox empty of any communication from the others.
I ate junk food on my way home - chips, noodles, sandwiches from the twenty-four-hour store - to avoid risking a confrontation with Martha in the kitchen. Up in my room, I cried and ploughed my way through still more cigarettes and a stack of American crime novels, my usual comfort reading, each plot disappearing from my head as soon as I'd finished it, all becoming part of some great churning morass of bodies and damaged detectives and wasted lives.
And Greg didn't contact me.
I don't know what I had expected. When I tried to remember how I thought it might have worked out, I drew a blank. With each day that passed the idea of us getting together seemed more and more outlandish, something I had constructed out of drunken wishful thinking and a crazily overgrown teenage fantasy. How could someone like him choose me over Rachel? Why would anyone choose me over Rachel? I was being punished now for my hubris in ever entertaining the thought. What had happened on the terrace that evening had been nothing but an illusion, an insidious
trompe l'oeil
which, when examined, resolved into two dimensions and left me with a sense only of having been cheated. When I thought about it, nothing after we returned inside showed he meant anything he said at all. He hadn't even looked back as he'd gone up the stairs. I despised myself for being such a fool.
I did consider calling him but I couldn't risk further humiliation. I had his number on the old group emails I read over and over again but if he didn't want me then I would not pursue him. Nonetheless, there were long periods in the office when my mind wandered completely away from whatever tedious piece I was supposed to be working on and instead fabricated reasons for calling him: I was worried about Rachel; I wanted to apologise for the chaos I had caused. But I knew these ideas for what they were: phantom roads that, if followed, led to nowhere but further unhappiness.