Precocious (22 page)

The wedding was a little idyll. It exceeded my expectations in every way. Everyone says it’s the best day of your life and this is the whole problem with marriage, surely? Everything that comes after the wedding, this day of hyperbole, of almost overwhelming
pleasantness
, is bound to disappoint.

Even my parents – usually surly and uncommunicative, often with people generally and almost always with each other – were merry and sociable. I actually saw them hold hands. We were both products of so-called ‘happy marriages’, Dave and I, or at any rate, we both had parents who stayed together. Mine seething with barely concealed resentment, mother raging and occasionally leaving, father saying nothing; his so calm and level-headed and fair about everything, you could easily believe they were self-medicating.

But everyone was at their best that day; the whole event was suffused with a kind of warmth I’d never experienced before.

Wedding days are always remembered, like childhoods, as warmer and sunnier than they really were. The photographs are always flattering, and deceiving; they don’t capture the moments of stress; everyone is smiling; there’s no way of knowing from the pictures that the bride can barely breathe, laced into her corset, unable to sit down, much less eat a meal.

But there is a moment I remember with total clarity, exactly as it was. Just after the meal that I couldn’t eat, Dave and I slipped away from the party for half an hour, walked in the gardens behind the hotel.

There was the overwhelming smell of freesia (
meanwhile
,
in today’s new world, I hover in the conservatory, stare through glass at your garden
). And there were sweet peas, and lily of the valley. Sweet, old-fashioned flowers.

As we walked, fingers interlinked like shy young sweethearts, I suddenly wished everyone else would go home. Everything had changed for us now; we were public property. I felt as though we had made our vows not just to each other but to all of these people. They were our witness; they owned pieces of us. It terrified me, made me want to run away.

Of course, the evening would roll on and be wonderful, twinkling with candles and stars, and I would forget my fears. But for that half an hour, while it was just us, it was just Us. Us in beautiful clothes, showing our best side to each other, but still Us. And we were Ours, away from the camera flashes and the kisses, we were ours, and each other’s. And I knew that moment was perfect, and would never ever come back.

And now I find myself staring out of a window, clutching a half-empty bottle of champagne, wondering how the hell I got from there to here.

‘Anyway,’ Addison’s blustering voice snaps me away from my memories like a command, ‘it wasn’t me who was the star witness. It was the girl’s mother. Where did you get her from, Imogen? What a coup!’

Imogen Cartwright smirks. She hadn’t had to do too much. She’d questioned Alice about the problems she’d shared with you. A picture emerged of a vulnerable girl with a troubled home life. A violent father and a mother too weak, or too drunk, to leave.

‘And why did you tell Mr Morgan all of these things?’

Alice was silent for a moment, looked down. In her navy skirt suit she looked like a child who’d raided her mother’s wardrobe.

‘Alice. Why did you confide in Mr Morgan about the things that were going on at home?’

‘I felt he was … my friend.’

‘Anything else? Something you might have mentioned in an earlier statement, for example?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Let me see if I can help you out.’ Imogen lifted a piece of paper and looked at it as though for the first time. In the mechanical voice that signifies quotation marks she said, ‘“I told him stuff, coz I knew he had a weakness for girls with problems.”’

There was a strange, barely perceptible shuffle from the jury, and the air in the courtroom moved. It was as though you could hear their minds beginning to change.

From this point Imogen Cartwright was relentless in depicting Alice as a conniving, sexually aggressive, devious girl who had set out single-mindedly to seduce Henry Morgan and in the process wreck his career. The picture didn’t sit well with the pale young woman in the dock, who occasionally shook her head and whispered ‘no’, but otherwise looked beaten. I stared at her bitten-down fingernails. I stared at my own.

As Mr Addison rightly pointed out, it was Alice’s own mother, however, who would prove to provide the turning point.

Alice had looked horrified when the woman with bleached blonde hair and a haggard expression took the stand.

‘Lies,’ she said simply. She had a lisp that meant she spat at the microphone with every ‘s’. ‘It’s all lies. All that about her dad hitting me? A load of rubbish. It never happened.’ Her bold, unblinking eyes were the only resemblance she bore to her daughter. ‘You won’t find a single person, apart from Alice, who’ll say that it did.’

‘But Mrs Webb, why would anyone invent such terrible stories?’

‘That’s just it. That’s our Alice,’ she sighed, ‘always been a storyteller.’

I started as though hearing someone call my name.

From that point on, it was like watching a building be demolished in slow motion. A psychotherapist’s report citing Alice’s anorexia, self-harm, some delusional tendencies; the minor criminal convictions and failed money-making schemes of Alice’s partner Dennis. What had seemed a huge boulder in your path settled to crumbs and dust; just the word of a girl, a troubled girl, her head in her hands.

‘Unreliable witness …’

‘Attention seeking, dangerous and plausible liar …’

‘Any conviction would be unsafe …’

‘In view of Mr Morgan’s previously unblemished character …’

‘No case to answer.’

You’re an avid reader of newspapers, most days. You’re the only person I know who reads every section. Sport, Gardening, Travel. News, Reviews, Business. You even look over the classifieds, although to my knowledge you’ve never bought anything from them. Picking up a Sunday paper after you’ve had it is like sifting through rubble. As neat as you are in every other way around the house, when you read you leave a mess. Pages lie open, folded backwards and over themselves, in the wrong sequence. Articles you’ve paused on are partly obscured by coffee-coloured rings and your doodles, your scribbles.

But today you turn the pages slowly, meticulously; today you are scouring them only for your story.

‘No case to answer,’ you murmur, flicking through the pages, ‘that’s what will be written.’

‘Therefore it’s true’, is the unsaid postscript to your comment; ‘what’s written is true’.

I look at the entertainment section, scan the reviews. Maybe we should go to the theatre this weekend.

My mobile rings; Mari’s name flashes up. I pause, then pick up with a breezy ‘Hello!’

‘Hello …’ she says hesitantly, as though not sure she’s got the right number. ‘Are you okay? Where are you?’

‘What do you mean, where am I?’ My voice is too high, too happy, too sing-song. But I don’t know how to stop it. ‘I’m … here.’ I can’t bring myself to say ‘at home’, it still doesn’t sound right. I get up from the table, smiling at you, and wander out of the room. You aren’t looking at me, you’re still studying the papers.

‘Are you okay?’ she asks again. ‘I saw the news.’

‘I know, it’s great, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course.’ I try to keep the frown from my voice. ‘No case to answer. The whole ridiculous thing thrown out.’

‘Fee,’ she says slowly, ‘he wasn’t found innocent …
she
was found unreliable. There’s a difference.’

‘Is this why you called?’

‘I don’t want to hear this’, I want to say. I want to eat breakfast and make plans for the weekend. I’m done with all the analysis.

‘No, not really,’ she sighs, ‘I miss you, babe. Wanna get together and throw back some wine? Sit up all night talking about nothing?’

A strange feeling, like fear, comes over me. As a general rule I love nothing more than an all-nighter with Mari. We’ve always tended to stay in rather than go out; maybe it comes of beginning a friendship in the days when we were too young and too skint to go to the pub; maybe we’ve been trying to keep the spirit of the old parties going all these years. Most likely we just find being ‘out’ too noisy, too distracting; we’ve always had far too much to say to each other to risk it being drowned out by other people’s chat, by the clink of other people’s glasses.

The thing is, general rules don’t seem to apply anymore. I glance back down the hallway into the kitchen. You’re drinking coffee, looking out of the window now, the papers abandoned on the table. The thought of leaving you, even for a night, fills me with panic. Other people, people outside of these walls, represent danger now. Even Mari, my surrogate older sister.

‘I don’t know,’ I say; met with silence from the other end, I have to keep talking. I’ve always found it hard to say no to Mari. ‘I mean, I’d like to, but I’m kind of busy, I’ve … I’m …’

‘Don’t worry,’ she sighs, ‘I get it.’

‘It’s just …’ Hopeless; I have no excuses.

‘Just let me say one thing, babe. It’s lonely, you know? It’s lonely when no one knows what’s going on in your life.’

And with that, she’s gone.

You’re back at school. I’m back at work, and already the summer seems like a distant idyll and the blot on it that was the court case is receding. ‘Forget it ever happened’ is your mantra, the only thing you ever say about the case, and it’s as though everyone has. The world kept turning, after all.

We’ve settled into a sort of domestic routine, albeit one still flavoured with romance. We leave each other notes. I can’t remember which of us started it; it just seems something that is right for us to do. On the days I leave the house before you, I put one in your coffee mug, or in your trouser pocket. I lean into the steam of the kettle, for warmth, chewing the end of my pen, thinking. You leave them in my make-up bag, or sometimes under the windscreen wiper of my car.

I leave kisses; you write ‘BOO!’ in big letters or sometimes just ‘Good morning’. Sometimes you might write a line from a song, illustrated in your painter’s hand with carefully coloured-in quavers and clefs.

Already we look back at the summer weeks in the same way we look back on all our past times together; they’ve become pages written about somebody else. Funny how when recalling those times you always encourage me to go to the good parts. Your memory’s terrible, or so you say. As the autumn gloom and chills encroach on our evenings, we curl up and you murmur, ‘tell me again about the time we …’ and ‘remember when …’

You sow happy thoughts in my brain, making way, pushing out the bad, the sad.

You assume, of course, that I kept a diary all those years, ‘prolific little scribe that you were’.

‘On and off,’ I shrug. ‘It’s not very organised. Scraps of paper, here and there. Notebooks. And I don’t know how much of it to believe myself, to be honest. Can there be a more unreliable narrator than a teenage girl?’

As soon as I’ve said it I regret it, as a shadow passes over your face, but you quickly laugh.

‘Good to see you haven’t forgotten everything I taught you. When reading any text, always consider the context it was written in.’ You pause. ‘I’d love to see them.’

‘I thought you said the past was the past.’ I feel suddenly protective towards my teenage self, her thoughts (and pretensions) etched onto paper, part deep truth, part self-imposed censorship.

‘Yes, but I enjoy anything you write.’

‘You’re never seeing them.’ I try to end this with a laugh but it comes out cold. You frown.

‘What, are you worried I’d try to destroy the evidence?’

This strikes me as an odd thing to say; we stare at each other for a few moments. Eventually I’m the one to break the silence.

‘Perhaps you were right before and we should leave the past where it is. I sometimes wonder …’

‘What?’

‘Well … perhaps we should be talking about the future. Why don’t we?’

‘Because, sunshine, at my age there’s not as much material. I’m afraid the future is a narrow field of interest for me.’

‘Come on,’ I say irritably, ‘you’re forty-three, not ninety-three.’

‘Okay, so let me ask you – why do you want to? Isn’t it amazing enough that we’ve got here? Can’t we just enjoy what we have?’

I shrug. We’ve got here as a result of my decisions, not yours – you haven’t changed anything, you haven’t left anyone, you’re still in your home. And although I left mine, I haven’t fully, not really, not in a committed way.

‘What is it you want?’ you tease, filling up my glass. ‘Your name above the letterbox?’

You joke but I still have my post redirected, not here, but to Mari’s, from where she in turn redirects it here, in bundles every few days. In fact my only contact with her since our conversation just after the court case has been her handwriting on the letters that drop onto the mat. ‘Please redirect to:’, all her letter ‘E’s written like capitals, and a cross through my old identity, and your address, underlined. We haven’t spoken, or met, in weeks. How many weeks? I count them on my fingers.

I still have things, stuff, as well, at home. Home? Dave’s house? What should I be calling it now? I still have a key, still feel the door is open. I know I could walk back in. So have I actually made any decision? Is it so amazing that we’re here?

‘I just feel in limbo,’ I sigh, and what I really want to say is: ‘we’re still just two people having an affair’. Like millions of people, holding a secret the same as millions of secrets.

I wonder why I’ve only told Mari about you; no one else. Well, I know why I told her at the start; I thought she would understand (which she did), and I thought she might even find it amusing (which she didn’t, not really) and therefore convince me it wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t serious.

I told her because I knew she wouldn’t judge me, so I wouldn’t have to judge myself.

Some friends, while they’d never judge you, act as a sort of mirror, reflecting the truth back at you. Is this why I haven’t told Laura? Or is it because secrecy keeps a thing special?