Disclaimer (31 page)

‘Come on, darling, let’s go,’ Robert says.

‘No, you wait in the car if you like, I’m not ready yet.’

Reluctant to leave her, he stays, opening kitchen cupboards and recoiling at the filth. He kicks at a broken cup which has been left where it fell on the greasy linoleum floor. She watches him wander into the sitting room, his hand holding his coat away from the doorway, protecting it from picking up any dirt. He looks around for somewhere to sit, but thinks better of it.

‘Why don’t you wait in the car?’ she says. ‘I’m happy to be on my own for a bit.’ He looks at her, not understanding.

‘I want you to. I’d like to be on my own. Please.’

‘Are you sure?’

She nods.

‘I’ve booked a table for lunch,’ he says. ‘One thirty, Pier Luigi’s – I’m not going back to work this afternoon.’

He is a thoughtful man. He is trying so hard. He leaves the house and she goes to the sitting-room window and watches him get into the car. He takes out his phone and makes a call. It will be to work and she is glad because it means he is not thinking of her, and that gives her a breath of freedom. She has decided to leave Robert. She hasn’t told him yet. She has been thinking about it for weeks, wrestling with herself: stay or go. Now she is clear.

She needs to forgive, but she cannot. She cannot forgive him because she has watched him over the last few weeks manage the idea of her being raped so much more easily than he had managed the idea of her having an affair. Of course he was upset and angry: he felt impotent; he hadn’t been there to protect her. Yet it seems to Catherine that the new truth he was offered was easier for him to swallow than adultery. When she is at her most brutal she thinks that, given the choice, he would rather she had suffered than to have enjoyed a burst of illicit pleasure. He was so hurt. He was so betrayed. He was so angry. He said his anger was because he felt he didn’t know her: that she became a stranger to him. Now he believes he has his old Catherine back. He is wrong: she can never be that woman again. Robert’s Catherine was the one who couldn’t tell him the truth. The Catherine who preferred to strap the burden to her own back rather than share it with him. She was a self-sufficient, independent woman – a Catherine he could be proud of. Not his fault, more hers than his.

She remembers an evening soon after Nicholas came out of hospital when Robert grabbed her hands and said, ‘I’ll never forgive myself, Cath – how could I have believed you would have done that to us? I’ll never forgive myself …’ And every word he said had buried her love for him a little more. He cried, and she cried too, but their tears were travelling in parallel lines. It was too late. They should have cried together years ago.

And there was anger mixed in Catherine’s tears. Robert had looked at those photographs of her being tortured and seen pleasure. He had missed the savagery and seen only lust. He had been too caught up in his own jealousy to see her. She could never forgive him for that. She thought when Jonathan died she would never have to tell anyone; she would never have to prove her innocence. Robert had made her feel that she had had to.

She opens the back door and goes out into the garden. It is drizzling; a soft grey damp that she breathes in as she walks across the patio, putting her hands in her pockets and looking down at the crooked grey slabs, wondering whether Stephen Brigstocke had laid them himself. She steps on to the grass, trimmed now into a lawn, and walks towards the blackened pit in its middle. A flutter of yellow catches her eye, a scrap of tape caught on a bush: a remnant from the short police investigation. A few charred remains have been dragged from the fire and left there: relics which perhaps the police thought would give them some idea of what had happened. But they learned little and concluded that it was an act of desperation by a lonely old man. By the time the police arrived there was hardly anything left of him and what there was had been taken away for examination. She dips the toe of her shoe into the black pulpy mess. Robert had told her Stephen Brigstocke blamed the book on his wife. Was that true? Did she write it? Perhaps; perhaps not. Does it matter? Not really, not any more.

She looks at the house and tries to imagine how it must have been once. A young couple, a small child, their first home together. A cared-for garden, sunshine. A paddling pool? A picnic on the lawn? But this is her memory. It does not belong to this house. She is remembering her and Robert with Nick when he was little, when he was very little. Before that trip to Spain. Nick jumping in and out of a paddling pool, her crouching down by his side, him naked, gleeful, wielding a wooden spoon and Tupperware, which he banged like a drum. Her memory. She imagines that Stephen and Nancy Brigstocke had moments like that in this garden with their little boy. Poor them, poor them, she thinks. She has no anger for either of them any more. God knows, they suffered. She is even grateful to Stephen Brigstocke. He sat opposite her and listened to her story. He didn’t call her a liar. He didn’t make her prove her innocence.

She went alone to meet Stephen Brigstocke’s solicitor; she didn’t tell Robert about the will until later. It was an odd meeting: the solicitor lacked curiosity, didn’t ask anything about her relationship with his client, even though the will had been changed only a few months before. All quite straightforward, he said, going on to summarize Stephen Brigstocke’s last wishes. She said nothing. It wasn’t until she stood up to go that he handed her the letter. He told her his client had asked him to put it directly into her hand. She didn’t open it then – it took her a few days to pluck up the courage to read it.

It was a faltering, awkward letter: hard to imagine it had been written by a man who’d had a career teaching English. He didn’t want his
gesture to feel like another assault.
He didn’t want her to be
burdened by my legacy.
He assumed she would sell both properties, and his hope was that the
money could be used to make your life and your family’s easier.
He was careful not to use the words
compensate
or
compensation.
He finished up by saying that, by the time she received this, his
pain would be over;
but he wanted her to know:
I am aware that you and your family must continue to live with the pain I inflicted on you.
He ended:
I hope you can forgive my lack of courage.
She puzzled over this. Was he calling himself a coward for killing himself? Or because of the negative he enclosed in the letter which he should have been brave enough to give her in person? A negative which had never been developed, he explained. Dismissed as a dud by both him and his wife. It was folded into the heart of his letter: …
I enclose it for you now.

She holds the small brown square up to the light: shades of darkness with Catherine, a smudge in the foreground, an unrecognizable blur. The feeble winter sun moves behind a cloud, denying her enough light to see the ghost in the frame, but she knows he is there. Stephen Brigstocke searched through the negatives for his own son – instead he found hers.

He would have seen and heard everything from his position in the open doorway. The door which she thought had stayed closed. The door behind which she’d believed he was asleep. But he had got out of bed and opened the door. He was standing looking into the room. The only light in the negative; a small white figure, unmistakable once you know he is there. A little ghost who appeared, then disappeared again without anyone knowing.

She has studied it over and over, securing it on a light box, squinting at it through a magnifying glass, to be sure. He would have heard everything too: her fake groans of pleasure. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t call out to her. He closed the door again and went back to bed, too frightened and shocked to speak. Perhaps he lay there for a while, hiding under the bedclothes, trying to make sense of what he had seen. Perhaps he woke the next morning and thought he had dreamed it. His child’s brain erased the memory of what he saw and heard that night. But it has always been there, this image and memory of his mother. An alien mother whom he could never quite trust, never quite believe in. In that hotel room in Spain all those years ago she had tried to imagine what it would do to her son if he had seen what was happening to her. He
had
seen, and heard. And all through his growing up the signs were there, but she had failed to recognize them.

Yesterday Nick saw the negative for the first time. Catherine feared she’d made a mistake and wished she hadn’t shown him.

‘I don’t remember it … I don’t remember anything,’ he said. He shook his head and studied his small self, but he couldn’t get back into that child’s head. She put her hand over his as tears gathered along his eyelashes. He tried hard not to cry, holding his breath and swallowing down a sob. She reached over, expecting him to resist, but he came into her arms and rested his head against her chest, allowing his tears to fall. He allowed her to stroke his back and hold his head, and she was overcome with gratitude for the chance he was giving her to get to know him at last.

Acknowledgements

The following people are my ‘without whoms’ – thank you all.

Richard Skinner of the Faber Academy for his brilliant guidance, and my fellow Faberites of 2012 for unstinting support; brave friends Nic Allsop, Meera Bedi, Claire Calman and Beth Holgate, who read and encouraged; Tiana Brooke for her inspiration; everyone at Transworld for ensuring the book is as good as it could be; Felicity Blunt for her kindness and unstoppable energy, and all those who work with her at Curtis Brown; and finally my husband, Greg Brenman, for popping me in the shed with a laptop and suggesting I get on with it …

About the Author

Renée Knight
worked for the BBC directing arts documentaries before turning to writing. She has had TV and film scripts commissioned by the BBC, Channel Four and Capital Films. In April 2013 she graduated from the Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.transworldbooks.co.uk

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at
global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain
in 2015 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Renée Knight 2015

Renée Knight has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473509818
ISBNs 9780857522818 (hb)
9780857522825 (tpb)

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1