The Last Time I Saw You (36 page)

He laughs a nasty, mirthless laugh.

“No he doesn’t. Trust me, I’m protecting him.”

“No you’re not,” I say, fury flaring up inside me. Despite his political savvy, that innocence of William’s is always so obvious to me. It’s one of the things that made me fall in love with him. I hate the fact that he has this viper buried in his nest. “You’re protecting your perfect life.”

I hear a door opening in the background.

“Me and Hannah and Mara and Daddy are going to the Museum of Natural History. It will be very interesting. Are you going to come too?”

“Hang on, sweetheart, I’ll be right there.”

“You’re joking, right? He’s already here, staying with you?” I feel sick, poleaxed by the reality of William’s proximity. Why can’t life be simple? Why can’t we be two stupid, innocent people falling in love under the benevolent shadow of the New York skyline, rather than two bleeding victims, too injured to remember what happiness is meant to feel like? “You need to come meet me right now, or I’ll ring Mara and tell her everything.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Richie demands we meet by the boating lake in Central Park, no doubt hoping that the biting cold will keep our assignation brief. All I can think of is the multiple
Sex and the City
episodes when the girls would trawl around the edge, discussing their tangled love lives, and how much I would envy their imaginary friendships, stubbornly refusing to admit how much of a nerve it hit. I watch the young families who are out for a Saturday stroll, excitable toddlers muffled up in layers of wool, a dog or two adding the icing on the cake. I want that, I really do. I think of James, feeling a stab of guilt at the hurt I’m causing him. It’s not my head that’s stopping me—there’s a million logical reasons for signing up to his plan—it’s my heart. My heart will not play ball.

Richie keeps me waiting a good fifteen minutes, so by the time he does arrive, hunched over in a stylish moss-green pea coat, I am as freezing as he no doubt hoped. He’s every bit as technically handsome as I remember, but he
exudes an air of shifty weakness that cuts it off at the knees. He doesn’t even bother with any pleasantries.

“Why are you doing this?” he says, slamming to an abrupt halt. “Tell the truth.”

“How can you, of all people, question my honesty?”

“That’s just sanctimonious bullshit,” he says, flecks of spittle spraying from his mouth. “You’re no better than me. Scrub that, you’re way worse. Lola and Mara were on the phone for hours last week, talking about the stunt you pulled, throwing yourself at a grieving man. You’re just playing the long game. Trust me, you lost.”

I can’t look at him, frightened of what he’ll see in my eyes; the agony I feel at losing William, a pain so deep that I could sink to my knees and howl. The contempt in his voice makes me terrified of what William would have said, takes me back to how he dismissed me in front of everyone at the funeral. I’m so doggedly convinced of his truthfulness, but perhaps the heartfelt things he said to me in private are no different from the lines James spins hapless girls to get them into bed?

“I’m not,” I say, forcing my voice to stay steady. “It’s too late for me and William, I know that. But I”—the word “love” nearly tumbles, carelessly, from my lips, but I don’t allow it to spill out into the chilly air—“care about him. He’s torturing himself, thinking he could have saved her.”

“Jesus, it was nothing, Livvy! I was totally honest with her about that, she just wanted to hear what she wanted to hear.”

The way he spits out “she,” it’s like Sally’s there in front of him, taunting him, demanding something he won’t give.

“Whatever you think it was, you can’t let him go into the hearing without all the facts. What if the insurance people know more about it than he does?”

I think of him, standing there, all alone, not even a lawyer to flank him. It makes me think of that little boy, straining out of the school picture, trying his hardest to get it right.

“And you think
I
know what happened?” says Richie, with an angry shrug.

“I think you know more about . . .” I gather myself, trying to stay strong. James was right, I’m too ill-equipped for this fight. “About the end than anyone else does.” He looks at me, contempt in his eyes—but beneath the contempt there’s something else, and I’m pretty sure it’s fear. Months spent trawling William’s controlled features for the smallest cues has made me a master. “And I’m not going away until you tell me.”

He jerks his head toward a nearby bench and veers toward it, not bothering to look back.

“You’ve never been married, right?”

“No,” I say. How can he tell? Is it a lucky guess, or do I just exude it?

“It’s a marathon not a sprint,” he says, looking out to the lake, across the vista of higgledy-piggledy families, all doing their best to make it work. It’s funny how that tableau means one thing to me, and one thing to him. “Heard of compassion fatigue? Fidelity fatigue’s not so different.”

I can just imagine him, swilling coffee and preening himself in a marketing meeting for some stupid band: he’s the kind of person who thinks in sound bites, authentic feelings sacrificed on the altar of a good quote. Watching how little his cold, well-turned features register I realize how different it is from William’s kind of impassivity. There’s an emptiness about Richie that I can imagine Sally
mistaking for depth. It was always the ones she couldn’t have who triggered that desperate need of hers. That frustrating distance William can have is, I think, the opposite; it’s as if he was told when he was tiny that feelings were bad, that they must be rounded up and penned in like an unruly flock of sheep. It doesn’t mean that they’re not there, just that they need to be lured out.

“How did it start?”

“She just used to look at me,” he says, and I know exactly what he means. When you got caught in the full beam of Sally’s headlights it was hard to not be blinded. “We’d go away in a foursome, or we’d have dinner, and she’d just give me enough that I couldn’t turn away.” I nearly tell him that I get it, but then I decide he doesn’t deserve even the smallest drop of my sympathy. Is it even sympathy I’m feeling, or is it relief at hearing the Sally of recent years described in a way that I recognize? He turns to me, almost pleading. “But she wasn’t like I expected.”

“What
did
you expect? You liked that she felt dangerous. It was hardly going to all wrap up neatly when you’d had your fix.”

“She said that Mara was her best friend, but Jesus—it was like she wanted to get caught. She’d call all the time, I even found her outside the apartment one night. She was waiting for me to come back from a business dinner, she wanted to . . .” he looks away, then swivels back toward me, “she wanted to fuck in the car, Livvy. What kind of crazy idea was that? My kids were upstairs.”

Oh God, how I used to envy that easy sensuality, that lack of self-doubt. You could see it in their eyes after she’d slept with them, a punch-drunk look they got that made me feel like such a wallflower. It was why it hurt so very, very
much when she crossed that invisible line and tried to take what was most precious to me.

I take out the phone, trying to gather my thoughts, noticing how hungrily Richie is looking at it. I was an idiot not to forward the messages to myself.

“Looking at these, it sounds like you were both going to leave.”

“No!” he says, residual frustration spilling out. He’s been here before. “I never said that.”

“But she thought you were.”

“Sally liked . . .” he balls his hands up into fists, “she liked the big story. I would never leave my family. I love my kids.” He says it like he deserves a gigantic pat on the back for his nobility. “And William loves her.”

That present tense, it hits me in the guts like a wrecking ball. There really is no hope, I know that.

“Did she love him?”

“I guess,” he says, unconvincingly. Poor William. “Jesus, it’s not like I don’t care about him. It would destroy him if he found out.” He looks at me, sensing my inner turmoil, twisting the knife. “Livvy, I seriously doubt I was the first. That jewelry in the boxes that he called Mara about. I didn’t give her that stuff.”

A feeling of sickness spreads through me. I wish I didn’t believe him, but I do. Perhaps it is better that the inquest goes ahead, reaches its half-baked conclusion, and William starts down the long road toward acceptance without all this painful, lurid detail. But I do still believe there’s power in truth, however uncomfortable that truth is—at least the picture is in focus, the details clear and stark. How can he ever stop grieving when he knows in his heart there’s more to discover, more left out there in the ether, floating
free, unclaimed? And he does know, I can tell by the way he’s shut me down, time and time again; it’s a door that’s slammed shut in fear, not one that he swings closed, secure in his certainties. Richie’s watching me carefully, waiting for my next move.

“I don’t want to hurt William any more than you do. At least if I know everything . . . I don’t want to get things wrong, make it sound worse than it was. You packed up the apartment, yes?” He gives a guilty shrug of assent. “There’s some papers, an appointments diary.”

He nods.

“If you let me have it, I’ll have everything. And I’ll tell him what you said, that you weren’t going to steal her from him. If he just has these e-mails that’s what he’ll think.”

And that’s when I see him flinch, haunted by the knowledge of what the worst actually is. I remember him at the funeral, how marooned he looked, staring into the middle distance, unable to make it back to dry land.

“What was it, Richie? What sent her over the edge? She told you about the bipolar, didn’t she?” He nods, mute. “Did she stop taking her medication?”

“She was always coming on and off them, saying she didn’t need them. That’s why she never wanted him to know. She wouldn’t believe she was ill.”

We sit there in silence for a minute or so, his gaze trained out on the lake, that same sense of painful dislocation he had at the funeral. I can see a titanic struggle going on between self-preservation and a need to offload the crushing weight of his secret.

“Tell me.”

“She pushed me too far.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was crazy. She had this whole plan, she’d got that apartment, turned out she’d been moving stuff into some storage place from like, week three. She’d even put my name on the paperwork . . . I wasn’t signed up for any of it.”

“And you told her?”

“I had to spell it out to her. She went absolutely nuts.”

I’ve never known anyone who hated being thwarted the way Sally did.

“Was that when she drove off?”

“No,” he says, slowly shaking his head, his voice heavy with it. “She took my phone, she said she was gonna call Mara and tell her everything. I grabbed her, and I shoved her against the wall. I said some godawful things to her, Livvy—and then she just ran out of the place. That was the last time I ever saw her. Do you think if I hadn’t . . .”

I look at his pale, haunted face that seems to have aged ten years in the time we’ve been talking, and find I can’t help but feel sorry for him now. He’s a vain, weak man who sleepwalked into quicksand right up to his neck.

“I’m not excusing you. It’s unforgivable what you’ve done to William, but it wasn’t you driving that car. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Don’t tell him. Please don’t . . .” He breaks down. “I don’t want to lose my family, not that too. They’re all I’ve got.”

And as he sits there, his shoulders shaking beneath that expensive pea coat, I can see again exactly what Sally would have fallen for. She would have loved that effortlessly stylish exterior, so different from William’s tweedy rigidity. But that’s all it is—a thin, shiny exterior as fragile as a robin’s egg—whereas William has a deep well of strength right at his core. The tragedy is that he could have held her, kept her safe, if only she’d let him.

“Look, just let me have the diary. I’m not going to tell your wife. It’s up to William whether he does or not.”

He’s as good as his word: a porter delivers the diary to my hotel room a couple of hours later. In the meantime I’ve just lain here, flat on my back, utterly spent. Now I grieve her, now the picture’s starting to come into focus for me. You didn’t have to leave. You didn’t have to push away the people who loved you most. If you’d let us keep hold of you, you’d have had everything. I think of Madeline, that fierce bravery of hers. She needs to be able to let go of her secrets too.

Eventually I call Jules, pouring everything out, with all the extra pieces that today has thrown up. She too offers to fly out, baby in tow, and I realize that between her and James I feel ridiculously loved.

And now I’m here, holding the purple cloth diary between my hands, steeling myself to open it. I slip it into my handbag and set off into Manhattan, looking for somewhere where I can be less alone when I finally open its pages.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I ask my friendly concierge where I should go, then jump in a cab and direct it to the West Village, where I find a French bistro that’s perched on a corner just down from the Magnolia Bakery. The little I’m seeing of New York makes me know that, like Sally, I could absolutely love it, but there is no time to start the affair.

The diary sits there in front of me, waiting for me to pick it up. It’s not a diary diary, it’s scribbles and fragments written opposite the appointments side. The sight of her loopy, excitable writing still fills me with sadness. I take another swig of my Fleurie, a wine I didn’t even know existed before William educated my adolescent palate, and start to read.

There’s more entries than these few, but I simply flick past them, rather than tracking right through them like an amateur detective. I can see now that I’ve gone far enough, that it’s for William to take the final journey with her and decide what the truth of her state of mind really was. The scribbled appointments are almost as sad as the diary entries—
Maddy, dentist, Josh, cut and color
—little fragments of normality that she somehow couldn’t squeeze the juice out of. And no wonder Madeline was so clear about what her name was, Maddy was obviously her mom’s special privilege.

I’m looking increasingly incongruous, the Saturday night crowd starting to trickle in. There are couples of all ages—uber-cool twenty-somethings, trendy glasses banging against each other as they kiss, harassed thirty-something parents snatching a much needed date night, even a white-haired couple at the head of a big table, looking like they’re waiting for their unpunctual family to come help them celebrate an anniversary. I look to my waiter, trying to ascertain if he’s wishing me gone, but he gives me a warm smile and a gesture that tells me the table’s mine as long as I need it. Every single stitch in the tapestry goes straight to my heart. I’m so glad I’m here, I think, able to watch all of life going by. I take my phone out and make the call I’ve both dreaded and longed for.

“William, I’m sorry to call you out of the blue. I’m in New York.”

I tell him that I need to talk to him, and he doesn’t question me too closely, simply tells me, in a rather businesslike way, to meet him in a hotel nearby called the Venice. I’m waiting for him in its low-lit lobby, my hands shaking as they clutch the diary. I went back via my hotel, got the rental agreement, the phone and the tag. It’s time to hand everything over.

It takes twenty-eight interminable minutes for him to arrive, but then finally he appears. He strides through the doors, impeccably dressed in a navy coat, still exuding that almost pathological confidence, that poise, that never wavers. And yet, as he gets closer, I start to see the cracks. His eyes look even more hooded than normal, with bluish circles so dark that they look like bruising. His skin is dull, and there’s more stubble on his jawline than I’ve known him to permit. That’s when love surges right back through me, when I spot the shadow self that’s trapped beneath the exterior, utterly vulnerable and utterly alone. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to stay.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, as I stand up. He leans in and awkwardly kisses my cheek. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”

“No, it’s fine,” I say, trying not to feel devastated by the formality of it. All I want to do is put my arms around him, tell him how much I miss him, but tonight is not about the two of us. No night ever will be.

“Can I get you a drink?” he says, standing aside to let me pass.

I can’t quite speak, so I just give him a mute nod, and we head to a tiny little bar concealed behind a velvet door in the far side of the lobby.

“This bar’s a bit of an inside secret,” says William, attempting a smile. Once we’re sitting down, drinks in front of us, he starts to apologize again.

“William, please, don’t. There’s nothing left to say.” An expression of hurt crosses his face, and I think about qualifying what I said, but I know that if I don’t tell him, right now, everything that I know, I will lose the strength. I hope it won’t make him hate me. “I’ve found out some things about Sally . . .”

As the words land, his face pales, the bluish shadows beneath his eyes rendered even darker. I hope he can see in my face how much I still care—that even if I cannot walk alongside him, the part of my heart that he’s colonized forever will be there with him in spirit. The part of me that has been shaped and molded and indelibly changed by the time that we’ve spent together, its intensity more relevant than its brevity. And there it will stay, a solid monument within my internal landscape, even when I’m someone else’s, and he’s just a portly married man that I say a quick, heartfelt hello to when I collect my adolescent god-daughter for the annual date she probably wishes I’d forget to keep.

“Do go on.”

“There’s something I should have told you a long time ago, but I didn’t know if it mattered, and I didn’t want to give you anything extra to worry about . . .”

I bring out the tag, and I lay it on the polished rosewood table, sliding it toward him as I tell him how I came upon it. Then I tell him about the storage unit and the apartment,
all in a rush, then falter when I come to what it is that I found there.

“I’m sorry. I need some water.”

“Of course,” he says, summoning the barman. Once he arrives, I can see him suddenly unable to speak, and it’s me who asks for it, in little more than a whisper. When he’s gone, William smiles at me, a smile that is obviously so hard for him to muster that tears spring to my eyes at the sight of it.

“Livvy, you should have told me,” he says, voice hoarse. “You shouldn’t have gone off like that.”

“I don’t blame you if you hate me for it—”

“I don’t! I could never hate you. But you shouldn’t have had to do all this alone.”

“I did try and tell you that I had suspicions. Madeline’s secret place?”

He looks away, swallows. I think he’s still numb from the shock of it all. And yet, the worst is still to come.

“You did, it’s true. And believe me, despite what you think, nothing you can tell me would be worse than what my imagination has conjured up over the last few months.”

I take the diary out, put it on the table, then put the phone on top.

“She can tell you,” I say.

“You found her diary?”

“Richie took it.” William’s face drops, white-hot anger springing up in those hooded eyes. My hand moves almost unconsciously toward his, but then I pull it back. I think of what Richie said, what Lola said: I don’t want the slightest sense of the two things becoming confused. “I’m so sorry. I thought about not telling you, but you don’t deserve any more lies or half-truths.”

“How . . .”

“She was ill, William. She was bipolar. I’ve been reading about it. When it’s type two you can manage it, live what looks like a normal life, but it’s a constant struggle. I really don’t think she set out to hurt you.”

He sits there, that vein that always gives way pulsing in his forehead, his hands clenched into tight fists.

“Did you always know that?”

“No! Of course not. I found her medication, at the apartment. It’s all in her maiden name.”

He slumps into a profound silence, and I sit there, waiting for him to come back.

“She should have told me,” he says, vehement. “What on earth did I do that made it so impossible to tell me?”

I look at his helpless face, searching for something that will help.

“That was Sally all over. She hated showing weakness. And . . .” I sit there, trying to form my thoughts. “I don’t know . . . but I think for all that bravado, there was maybe a part of her that hated herself. It would explain why some of the time she hated the people who loved her. When we loved her it contradicted what she felt, secretly somewhere inside.” I shrug. “I might be wrong about that.”

“It makes a sort of sense to me.” He looks away. “Nothing could ever stay the same with her. She couldn’t appreciate peace.”

“The ordinary bits.”

He shrugs, shaking his head. Then he turns to look at me, his eyes burning.

“Why did you do this? The truth of it, Livvy, I need to know.”

His gaze almost frightens me. It pinions me, demands an answer I don’t know that I even know myself.

“I didn’t set out to do it. I just wanted to try and be around for you, and then I found I . . .” I can feel myself blushing. I didn’t want to cross the line, but the crossing of it is part of the story, “wanted to be around you. And I just kept feeling like things didn’t add up. I did it for you, William, because I thought you’d be trapped by the not knowing, but if I’m honest I also did it for me. I didn’t know it until she died, but I’ve been trapped by her for years.”

“Thank you,” he says, then stands up, dropping forty dollars on the bar. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got some things that I need to deal with. Would you mind if I leave you?”