Catch Me When I Fall (15 page)

Jean Difford smiled an irritatingly reassuring smile at me. "I'm
glad to meet you, Holly,' she said. Ive heard a lot about you.' 'What have you heard?'
'Do you know of a place called Glenstone Manor?"
"No, I don't."
Ive booked you in there today.'
There was a long silence. I looked at Meg, Trish and Charlie in turn. Meg and Trish were staring at the table but Charlie looked at me with concern. For the first time in days, I saw love in his eyes. Or pity.
"This feels like a conspiracy,' I said.
'It is a sort of conspiracy,' he said. "We all care about you.
Something's going wrong with you and we think you need help.' "You can't go on like this,' said Meg. "That's for me to decide, I'd say.'
'No," said Charlie. 'At a certain point, one has to intervene."
'You've all been talking about me to each other. Discussing
me.' I turned on Meg. 'This is your revenge, isn't it?"
"No.'
'You weren't at the dentist yesterday. You were setting up this -this ambush.'
'It's not an ambush. It's a plan of action,' said Trish.
'OK-what's this plan of action?'
'You go to Glenstone Manor,' said Dr Difford. 'You'll be assessed and receive treatment. You will stay there for a week or TWO.'
'I don't understand,' I said. 'You're a doctor.'
"Yes.'
'This is what puzzles me. You're saying that I need to go into an institution and you've never even met me."
'I've talked to your colleagues and I've talked to your husband.' At this I flashed a look at Charlie, who had the decency to appear a little shamefaced. "They want to help you.'

I took a deep breath and then I forced myself to smile. 'Obviously this has taken me a bit by surprise,' I said. "Am I allowed to ask any questions before they come to take me away?"
'Ask anything you like,' said Dr Difford, with her infuriating tone of patience and calm as if she were talking me down off a window-ledge.
'Does anybody here think I have a drug problem?" I asked. 'No," said Meg. 'Drink?'
'Not in particular.'
'Then what are you saying about me?"
There was a pause. Nobody looked at me.
'That's for us to discuss at Glenstone Manor," said Dr Difford. 'You all think I'm going off the rails.'
Nobody said anything. :
"Ali right, I had a wobbly few weeks," I said. 'I admit that. I've had a night or two out where things got out of control. I'm not proud of my behaviour but I'm sorting it out. The last few days in the office weren't my finest moments but that's all sorted. You should have come to talk to me about this, Meg, Trish' -I gave them fierce looks -'before going behind my back to some smooth-talking doctor who thinks she can diagnose me before she's even set eyes on me. Especially you, Meg, because you are -used to be, anyway -my friend. As for things with Charlie, I'm aware of my lapses. I know I've got issues to sort out, apologies to make, but that's nobody's business but ours. I'm sorry, but this is a waste of time."
"We've discussed it,' said Trish. 'We think it's the right thing
to do.'
"You should have discussed it with me.'
"We are discussing it with you."
'You're not. You're -" I could hardly speak. I was becoming of with the anger bubbling up inside me. 'Look, it's time to

take the gloves off, if that's what you want. I've admitted it. This week I've had a couple of bad days "
'It's not about this week,' said Meg. 'You know that quite well.'
'Meg and I created this company and in the last year I've been running it almost fucking single-handed. Who has found about nine-tenths of our clients? Me. Who schmoozes them in the evening? Me. Who leads the presentations? Who creates the events? Who dreams up the ideas? Who sells them?'
'Some of us work here as well,' said Meg. 'Boring things, like the accounts. Like clearing up your mess."
'When you were all pissing around not daring to deal with that bully Deborah Trickett, who was it who bit the bullet and fired her? And ever since she's been badmouthing me all over London. That was your .job, Trish. I've spent a year working seven days a week, and when I wasn't working, I was doing so-called entertaining of clients. Things got a bit out of control and now I'm sorting them out. Because that's what I do. Go out and look at my desk,' I said. "If you can find a single mistake, any task that hasn't been sorted out, you can haul me into the bin and inject me with anything you want.'
Trish gave a little cough and I saw she had in front of her some printouts. "In the last few days,' she said, in a businesslike voice, 'you've made some very strange errors. There've been enquiries from clients.'
'Give me that!" I snatched the papers from her and glanced down at them. My cheeks burned with humiliation.
There was a knock. Meg and Trish looked round irritably.
The door opened and Lola's face appeared.
'Call for Holly,' she said.
"Tell them we're in a meeting,' said Trish. 'We'll call back.'
'It's Craig from the people we're doing the event with, eYei,' she said. 'He wants to talk to Holly straight away."

Meg and Trish exchanged glances. Meg stood up. Ill go and take it in the office," she said.
'Holly,' said Charlie, his voice dripping with pity, 'we're only thinking about what's good for you.'
'This is the question,' I said. 'Are you going to drag me forcibly, against my will? I don't think you'll stoop to that. Anyway, it's probably illegal. Trish won't let you do something that isn't in the rule book. I'm not going to this Glenstone Manor. I'm going to stay put, and I'm going to come to work every day at nine o'clock and leave at six o'clock and show you how calm and rational and well-behaved I can be. If I do things you don't approve of, or if I make mistakes, come and tell me about them.'
There was a long, exceedingly awkward silence until Meg came back into the room. She sat down looking flustered. 'Well?' said Trish.
Meg ignored her and looked at me. 'If you're going to do off-the-wall things like sending packages of kitchen implements and books of poetry to important clients with whom we haven't yet signed a contract, I think it might be a good idea if we all talked it over first."
"Sorry," I said. I should have the word tattooed on my forehead to save time.
'What were you thinking?' said Trish. 'We needed that job.' 'He wants to see you tomorrow,' said Meg. 'So they didn't walk away?'
Meg looked embarrassed. "He wants to talk about it tomorrow.'
"With all of us?"
'He said he wanted to meet Holly."
'You still should have talked about this with us,' said Trish. 'And we haven't come to a decision.'
I could see that their resolve had crumbled and I stood up.

'I'm sorry you had to go to all this bother,' I said, very politely. "And I'm sorry you've been worrying needlessly."
I turned to Charlie. 'We should talk,' I said. 'Can I take you out to dinner tonight? I've got a lot to say. A lot of apologies to make.'
He looked at me for a long moment. "Ali right, Holly,' he said. 'That's the only kind of therapy I need.'
It was like a play having to be abandoned before the final scene. I saw Meg and Dr Difford sharing a muttered exchange on the way out. I didn't care, I had other priorities. I had a life and a marriage to sort out.

16

We found a quiet Italian restaurant round the comer with a table in the window. Charlie drank a beer and I sipped mineral water while we watched people walking past, hurrying to get out of the rain. I reminded Charlie that when we first met, we would sit in restaurants and look at the people at other tables and try to guess what their stories were. He forced a smile. He was making an effort but he was clearly angry and hurt as well. He leaned over the table, close to me so that nobody else could hear what he was saying. 'I thought about just walking away and never seeing you again. But then...' He stopped and stared at me, as if he was struggling with something in his mind.
'Yes?"
'I don't know. It's all such a mess. But you're not yourself.'
"Oh, please, don't you start. What? What are you thinking?' He took my trembling, cold hands between his and told me that we were going to sort things out, whatever it took. He said this was our anniversary dinner, and if we weren't celebrating exactly, we were making resolutions. The next year of our marriage was going to be better. It was going to be a real marriage. We were going to look after each other and he was going to help me.
I had wanted to talk. I tried to say that I didn't need any help because I really was going to change, had indeed already started to change, he would see, but he hushed me and said we would discuss all of that later. First I had to rest and recover. I started to say, indignantly, that I wasn't ill, but he said I should let it all be. "Sometimes you don't need to articulate everything," he said.

I opened my mouth to argue, but all of a sudden the fight went out of me. It was as if my mind had been cut into segments. I was neatly sliced into anger and defiance, humiliation and shame, grim irony, rampant irritation and a sluggish indifference. None of the slices seemed to connect with each other, and I didn't know which bit of myself to speak with. I asked him, pathetically, if he still loved me but he didn't seem to hear. So I said, out of
the blue and surprising myself as well, Ive lost my key." 'What?'
'I've lost my key,' I repeated. 'It's not on my key-ring.'
'You're always losing keys,' he said, stopped in his tracks. 'What's this got to do with anything?'
'I don't know. I just wanted to tell you.'
'Ali right, you've told me,' he said. Til get another one cut and you get yourself a key-ring that doesn't come apart all the time.'
We ordered a simple meal, just risotto and salad. Charlie had a glass of wine while I stuck to water. We ate warily, almost in silence, as if we were unfamiliar to each other, circling cautiously.
Charlie seemed different. Over the previous weeks he had been evasive, tetchy, ill-at-ease, resentful. Some of this was his own fault and had made me angry, which had made him worse, which had made me angrier. And, God knows, some of it had also been an understandable reaction to my behaviour. Sometimes I had thought that what had started out as a marriage had become a psychological experiment in which two people were confined in a small space to torment each other to death.
Now he seemed calmer, almost contented, as if he was in control, as if he could protect me. He'd made his decision about us. It was a face I had never seen before, and it made me want to crawl into his arms. It also made me want to drag myself into a deep, dark hole and sleep until spring came again. I did the next best thing. I ate a few forkfuls of warm, comforting risotto,

took a sip of his wine, then let him take me home in a cab. He ran me a bath and after I had soaked for a long time I climbed into bed. I lay there and stared at that fucking horrible sculpture and it stared back at me, accusing me of terrible things, until Charlie came in with a mug of tea and a digestive biscuit. It was like being a child again. He turned the light off and stood in the doorway watching me, watching over me. I wrapped my arms round my pillow and pretended to sleep and at some point I was no longer pretending and the long day ended at last.

The next morning I arrived to find a message from EYEI. It was just the name of the bar round the comer from our office where Craig wanted to meet me after work. With a spasm of embarrassment I thought about the package I'd sent them. What must they have thought? I had a sudden vision of a life spent clearing up after myself. I could explain it away as a joke or a moment of madness or lovable eccentricity or... I asked Lola to go over the road and fetch me two double espressos. When
she returned, I took them to a grim-faced Meg. 'Maybe you should come as well,' I said. 'You don't need me," she said. 'I think I need you too much."
'He specifically asked to see you," said Meg.
I gulped at my coffee, grateful for the scalding sensation on
my tongue. Meg's stood untouched on her desk. 'I don't know,' she said. 'What?'
'Do you have to bet the company every day? We're not like you. We don't need all that excitement.'

The moment I saw Craig at the bar, I realized it was going to be all right. He was half-way through a dry martini and when he saw me he smiled broadly. He started to order me a drink but I

shook my head. It was going to be water for the moment. I was already a couple of martinis ahead of the rest of humanity.
"You're crazy,' he said, draining his glass and signalling to the woman behind the bar for another. "It was just what we needed. Thinking outside the box. Here, listen to this.'
The poetry book was lying on the bar beside his martini. He picked it up and read a poem aloud. I found it hard to follow.
'Isn't that great? I haven't read a poem since I left Oxford. And this thing...' He took the runny honey device out of his pocket. 'It's a functional object,' he said, 'and yet there's something comic about it. I've shown it to people and it makes them smile.'
"I just thought it was funny," I said, and indeed, that was about all I said. My brain was too fuzzed up to speak so Craig told me about the design business and I nodded at the right places, to give the impression of deep thought, and sometimes smiled, to give the impression of sympathy.
After an hour, he stood up and held out his hand. 'This has
been great," he said. 'I feel we've really clarified our ideas.'
I shook his hand.
'Can I drop you somewhere?' he said.
'No. I'm going back to the office,' I said falsely.
'You people," he said, with a smile. 'I'll call you tomorrow. We're going to make money together.'
When I was alone, I ordered another mineral water. What I really needed was a piece of paper and a pencil but I started to make the list in my head. It was a matter of sorting things out one by one. First, Charlie. Second, work. Then there was the other stuff. I had to make that go away. There was that gambling mess. Surely they understood that that was all a mistake. That would be number three on my list. I would deal with it. Somehow. I paid for my drink and asked where the toilet was. The barwoman directed me to the basement. After I had washed my hands I stood and looked at myself in the mirror and smoothed

my hair with my hands. 'One step at a time,' I said to myself.
As I came out into the bare stone corridor, I brushed against a man in a suit and muttered an apology. I felt a hand on my shoulder and I was pushed back hard against the brick wall. I felt it cold through the silk of my dress. Rees's face was looking down at me with an expression almost of curiosity. 'You haven't been in touch,' he said.
I tried to move out of his grip. His hand came up. I didn't feel the blow. I saw it, an explosion of white light, and I heard the slap of his hand on my face. All of my breath was gone.
'You're fucking me around,' he said. 'I don't like that.'
His left hand was now tight on my neck so I couldn't cry out. His right hand stroked my cheek where he had hit me, then it moved down my body, down my breast, my stomach, pushing between my legs through my dress. He leaned against me. I could still hear the sound of clinking glasses and chatter from upstairs. He whispered into my ear, 'You've played with me. You've made me do this. I'm not like this. I was just a normal man with a girlfriend...'
It was crazy. I was so frightened that my insides felt liquid. I knew he could do anything he wanted to me and I couldn't stop him, but even so, even with his hand on my throat, when he started talking self-pityingly about being an ordinary man, I couldn't stop myself laughing.
His face turned almost black with anger. 'You fucking.., you fucking-' he gasped at me. 'How do you like it now?' he said. He shoved a knee in my groin making me cry out in agony, then ripped at my dress. His face came down towards me, really close so I could feel his breath on my face, see the wetness on his lips.
'You fucked me,' he whispered. 'I can do anything I want to you now."
With all my energy, I spat at him, and saw with satisfaction the gob of phlegm on his neck. He lifted his hand and hit me