The back of my hand is a crimson, sticky mess. Twice I’ve applied a coat of lipstick, twice I’ve sloughed it off like it’s laced with arsenic. I look at my pallid face in the harsh yellowy glow of the strip lights that illuminate the office loos: not flattering. Not that it matters: it feels so wrong to be making myself look pretty—to be making myself look more alive, in a way—so that I can slip into an evening that should belong to no one but Sally. Right now I’d do anything to get out of it. I scrabble around in my handbag for my phone.
“Hi.”
“Where are you?” says Jules. “You sound like you’re underwater.”
“I wish I was.” I can feel my voice rising, that petulance I sometimes get with my big sister. “Why did you say that stupid thing to me when we went to the museum?”
“Because sometimes I’ve got a really big mouth.” She’s not laughing at me, but she’s soft with it. I feel my heart start to slow, the tide of my fear receding a little.
“Yeah, you have. Now I’m feeling totally paranoid. What if he thinks that’s what I’m doing? Hanging around waiting to pounce?”
I rub at my lips again, making sure every last trace of color comes unstuck. I think of that high-pitched vibrancy that Sally had, like life was an extreme sport that she could play better than any of us; how can it have been simply ripped away from her? I can’t even bear to consider the other option, the idea that the game had become such an endurance test that she was the one who blew the whistle on it. Is the piquancy of it not just in the tragedy but also in the insane, egotistical thought that I somehow could have stopped it? As though somewhere inside me my twenty-something self still endures, like a Russian doll held inside the shell of a larger one, stubbornly insistent that she is the one person who could have dragged Sally from the rapids that were pulling her down? I think of Madeline, the greatest casualty of all of this, marooned on the floor of the gift shop, and sharp tears start to prickle. I’m really not sure I should be doing this. I’ve no right to this grief; the last thing I want to do is ask him to comfort me.
“He invited you!” says Jules, pulling me back to the moment.
He did, it’s true, but since then I’ve only heard from him once, via a businesslike e-mail that arrived two weeks ago asking me to meet him on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice in—I look at my watch—thirty minutes’ time. Oh God.
“This is the last time I’m seeing him,” I say, meaning it. It’s too complicated, too hard, the danger of doing more harm than good too great. It was all very well feeling sentimental
when I thought I’d never lay eyes on them again: now the reality is here I’m fairly sure I can’t handle it.
“Just get through tonight. You’ll be fine. Call me from the loos again if you have to. We’ll have a debrief tomorrow.”
I hang up, pull down the dress I’m wearing, a shapeless black cotton thing that’s normally banished to the furthest recesses of my wardrobe where it belongs, and go out in search of a taxi.
I’m a few minutes late, and I scramble out of the taxi, thrusting a note at the driver, anxiety turned back up to maximum. He’s standing by the impressive stone archway of the building, the collars of his camel cashmere coat turned up to take the edge off the biting wind. I feel an illogical surge of guilt for abandoning him there, this almost stranger, waiting in the cold for me to deign to make an appearance. He doesn’t see me approach.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, touching his arm.
He turns, looks down at me. For a second it’s almost as though he’s surprised to see me there.
“No need to apologize,” he says, turning on a smile that I sense requires some effort. “It’s lovely to see you again. Very decent of you to submit yourself to this.”
He leans down to kiss me on each cheek, and I feel a blush rising up in response to the almost imperceptible brush of his lips. I try and breathe out my paranoia, find my center. I take in the impressive building, steeped in history, fiery torches blazing at the inner entrance. There’s a fierceness about the welcome it offers.
“Are you ready?” I ask him, hoping that he hears in my voice that if he wasn’t, if he wanted to turn tail and run,
I’d run with him. I somehow think there’s a glimmer of recognition, a second where he strains toward my almost imperceptible offer, but then his sense of duty reasserts its iron grip.
“As I’ll ever be.” He looks down at me. “If you find it too ghastly for words I won’t be offended if you make an early exit. Sally always despised this kind of thing.”
A little ripple of shock runs through me, making it hard to breathe, the past tense still so brutal.
“No way,” I tell him. “It’s one for all and all for one.”
One and one and one makes three.
“Shall we?” he says.
We arrive into the genteel scrum of a drinks reception, held in an elegant, high-ceilinged function room. It’s dove gray, with elegant white cornices, a warm light shed by the heavy chandeliers that overhang us. I take off my coat and pass it to an attendant, realizing as I do so how badly I’ve pitched my frock. It looks like I should be picnicking in a park, while all the other women are swathed in great puffs of taffeta and velvet, like they’ve knocked off a ball gown from the curtains hanging in their stately homes. I knew in my heart it was wrong, but the wrongness is born out of respect, not disrespect. I long to tell William so, but he’s too distracted to notice, surveying the scene with something that looks like trepidation. I wish that I’d gone further outside, made absolutely sure that he knows that he’s not alone with his grief. I spot a few people shooting darting glances in our direction, looking away before they’re duty-bound to come over and acknowledge what’s happened. There’s a few double-takes at the fact he’s with
a woman, but he seems utterly oblivious to it. I sense a certain innocence about him, that same innocence that refuses to allow for the possibility that Sally could have ended her own life. Because he is a million miles away from thinking of any woman but the wife he’s buried, I’m sure he imagines that no one else would jump to such a sordid conclusion.
“Let me find you a drink,” he says, but as he moves away he’s assailed by a frightening brunette, hair lacquered into a rigid helmet. She must be about my age, but you can tell instantly that she’s the kind of person who came out of the womb middle-aged, most likely clad in a padded waterproof vest.
“William, my deepest commiserations,” she booms. The fact that her voice is indeed so deep almost makes me want to giggle. I keep wanting to laugh at the most inappropriate moments, the pressure searching for release.
“Thank you very much,” he replies automatically. “And thank you both for your card. It was much appreciated.” He looks over to me, but she runs on before he can introduce us.
“Such a shock,” she says. “I was saying to Rory, is it worse to watch someone suffer, but have time to say goodbye, or have them taken in an instant but know they didn’t endure too much?”
“I don’t think I could answer that question,” says William evenly, as I try not to gasp at the sheer insensitivity of it. Now Rory appears, a squat, gingery character with a bald patch that he’s attempting to conceal with a fierce commitment to side-combing.
“So sorry,” he says, awkwardly clapping William’s shoulder. “Such a shock.”
“Yes, yes it was,” says William. “This is Olivia, she was a great friend of Sally’s. She’s been very kind to Madeline and me over the last couple of months.”
The bad-hair couple turn in unison, finally forced to acknowledge my hovering presence, taking a long hard look at me before they deign to address me.
“I’m Trixie, pleasure to meet you,” says helmet-head, hand shooting out like she’s launching an attack. She gives me a long look, woman to woman, exuding suspicion from every pore.
“Hi,” I say, cringing.
“Rory,” says Rory abruptly, with a stiff nod, before settling in to stare a bit more. He turns back to William. “So I gather you’re here a few more weeks? Waiting for the dust to settle?”
“In a manner of speaking,” says William, grabbing a waiter and pulling a couple of glasses from his tray, his hand shaking as he passes me one. For a few weeks? I look at him, surprised, and he gives a small nod, acknowledging the truth of the fact. I can’t quite work out if it feels like a good thing or a bad thing. “If you’ll excuse us, I’ve just spotted Graham Fox over there. I must just go and have a brief word.”
He draws away and I follow, Trixie’s beady little eyes boring into my back. I’m half expecting him to duck out, to need a breather to discharge the awkwardness of that horrible encounter, but it turns out Graham Fox really does exist. He’s a little less charmless than the BHC but he’s hardly a bundle of laughs. He deals with the messy business of Sally’s death with a couple of brief sentences, then moves to grilling William on various incomprehensible transatlantic power wrangles.
As I stand there, shifting from foot to foot, I’m suddenly blindsided by a bolt of grief so much less complicated than what I’ve felt so far. Perhaps it’s because Sally feels so close right now, as if I haven’t taken her place here, but squeezed in tight next to her. I miss you, I think. I miss the fact that you would have found these people even more gruesome than I do, that if you were here we’d be trying to score as much free champagne as we could, getting increasingly, inappropriately hysterical at the horsey wives and their terrible outfits. I miss you—I always did, even when I hated you. Did you miss me?
I’m more than ready to sit down by the time they summon us through for dinner, having spent the best part of an hour skulking in William’s shadow like a ghost at the feast. He’s tried to include me, but everyone he’s spoken to has approached the conversation like a bullet-pointed meeting, and I haven’t made the agenda. I may be being an inverted snob, but they’ve also made me feel like some kind of serf. Did Sally keep that estuary twang she had? I can’t imagine her without it, and I certainly can’t imagine it landing well in this cloistered, privileged enclave. I hope she stuck it right back to them.
William pulls out my chair for me. “Are you surviving?” he asks.
“Are
you
surviving?” I ask.
“Yes, thank you,” he says, reaching for the menu, and I feel an unexpected stab of anger. How can he be so calm, so measured? This is hideous, these people are hideous, their sympathy so bloodless. “May I pour you some wine?”
“Sure.”
My anger softens as I watch him endure a carbon copy exchange about Sally’s death with some emotionally constipated suit that’s seated to his left. I don’t think I could manage it, if I were walking in his polished, expensive brogues, but I can see that it’s exactly what’s expected of him, that there’s no choice, even though there is. Is this his privileged, twisted version of destiny, a life laid out for him when his name went down for Eton while he was still in diapers? I shake the thought away. We’re more than that, surely we are, more than a sterile sum of our experiences: fate has to be the magic ingredient we can’t predict?
“So what made you extend your stay?” I ask him, sensing a break in the conversation that I can slip into.
“I think perhaps you had a point,” he says, a little wryly. “I decided that boarding school was a little premature, but I did want Madeline to spend some time in England. And,” he looks away, his jaw tight, “let’s just say that New York doesn’t feel like a home away from home right at the present moment.”
“What actually . . .” I start, then trail off. He’s closed himself down, shut me out, the mechanism invisible but the effect instantaneous. He shifts gear, pulls on a smile. “And how about you? What news?”
“A chance to talk” was how he billed tonight, but the opposite seems to be true. It might be the public setting, the exhaustion of fielding people’s clumsy attempts at sympathy, but it feels more fundamental than that. It makes the thrum of fear start up in me again, makes me wonder what unfolded between his warm phone call and touching back down in England a month later. I know that I can’t ask, so instead I let him lead the dance. I tell him about the project—how much I wanted to make it work, and how
frustratingly elusive Flynn Gerrard has proven to be ever since that fateful night.
“I just muffed it so badly in the apartment. I’m worried he thinks I’m an incompetent schoolgirl and he doesn’t want to let me near it.”
“It doesn’t sound nearly as bad as you’re painting it. Anyway, you’ve done the hardest part. You won the pitch. Was the ice queen suitably humbled?”
“Maybe. Something’s happened to her.”
It’s odd. Ever since then Charlotte has been much nicer; so much nicer that I almost wonder if James was right. Neither of us have mentioned her since, so I haven’t given him the satisfaction of telling him so. Besides, I don’t really want to venture back there. I didn’t like where it took us.
“And the other competition?”
“Did I tell you about that?” I say, blushing with embarrassment. I’m starting to notice how he hoovers up facts, absorbs tiny details that I barely remember shedding. I reread the story on a lonely Sunday when I was feeling particularly sad about Sally; perhaps it was the mood I was in, but it felt too structured and crafted, lacking in heart. I tried again, poured all of the emotion that was whirling around inside onto the page, and sent it off before I could waste any more time prevaricating.
“Well done,” he says, when I tell him. “If it’s anywhere near as accomplished as the poem you wrote for Madeline, I’m sure you’ll surprise yourself.”
“Thank you,” I say, touched by what he’s said. It feels meant.
“Will you excuse me for a minute?”
As William heads for the bathroom, I turn to my other side, where I’ve got a kindly, patrician civil servant who I’ve
already spent a little time chatting to. It makes me realize I’ve been a little harsh about the crowd: he asks interested questions and gives me enough insight into Number Ten to keep me agog, while deftly avoiding any real revelations. William’s back in the banqueting hall now, but he’s talking to a group on another table.
“And how do you know each other?” asks Jasper, nodding to him.