The Truth-Teller's Lie (31 page)

‘I’m going to the Bay Tree,’ I tell her, standing up. ‘Are you coming or not?’

 

The building that houses the Bay Tree bistro is one of the oldest in Spilling. It’s been standing since 1504. It has low ceilings, thick uneven walls and two real fires—one in the bar area and one in the restaurant itself. It resembles a well-turned-out grotto, though it’s entirely above ground level. There are only eight tables, and normally you have to book at least a month in advance. Yvon and I were lucky; it’s late, so we got a table somebody had booked weeks ago for seven-thirty. By the time we arrived, they were long gone—sated and not insignificantly poorer.

The restaurant has an outer door, which is always locked, and an inner door, to ensure that no cold air from the High Street dilutes the warmth inside. You have to ring a bell, and the waiter who comes to let you in always makes sure to close the first door before opening the second. Most of the staff are French.

I’ve been here once before, with my parents. We were celebrating my dad’s sixtieth birthday. He banged his head on the way in. The Bay Tree’s ceilings are a hazard, if you’re tall. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I, Robert? You know the place better than I do.

On that night, with my parents, we had a waiter who wasn’t French, but my mother persisted in speaking to him in very slow simple English and in a quasi-continental accent: ‘Can we av zee bill, pleez?’ I restrained myself from pointing out that he was probably born and brought up in Rawndesley. It was a celebration, so no carping was allowed.

You’ve never met my parents. They don’t even know about you. I thought I was protecting myself from their criticism and disapproval, but it turns out that they are the protected ones. It’s an odd thought: that the large majority of people in the world—Mum and Dad, my customers, shoppers I pass on the street—have not had their lives devastated by you. They don’t know you and never will.

And it’s the same the other way round. The waiter who is looking after me and Yvon tonight—a little too attentively: he hovers too close to our table, his posture stiff and formal, one arm behind his back, surging forward to replenish our wine glasses each time one of us takes a sip—he has probably had his life shattered, at one time or another, by somebody whose name would mean nothing to me.

Only in a very minor, trivial sense do we inhabit the same world as others.

‘How’s your food?’ asks Yvon.

I ordered only a starter, the foie gras, but she can see I haven’t touched it. ‘Is that some sort of trick question?’ I say. ‘Like, have you stopped beating your wife yet? Is the present king of France bald?’

‘If you aren’t planning to eat anything, what the hell are we doing here? Do you realise how much this meal’s going to cost? The minute we walked in, I felt as if my bank account had turned into an hourglass. All my hard-earned money is sand, trickling away.’

‘I’ll pay,’ I tell her, waving the waiter over. Three steps and he’s at our table. ‘Could we have a bottle of champagne, please? The best one you’ve got.’ He scuttles off. ‘Anything to get rid of him,’ I say to Yvon.

She stares at me, open-mouthed. ‘The
best
? Are you crazy? It’ll cost a million quid.’

‘I don’t care what it costs.’

‘I don’t understand you! Half an hour ago . . .’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

‘Would you rather I was back on my sofa, staring into space?’

‘I’d rather you told me what’s going on.’

I grin. ‘Guess what?’

Yvon puts down her cutlery, steels herself for an unwelcome revelation.

‘I don’t even like champagne. It makes the inside of my nose itch and gives me really bad wind.’

‘Jesus, Naomi!’

Once you accept that nobody is ever going to understand you, and overcome the enormous feeling of isolation, it’s actually quite comforting. You’re the only expert in your own little world, and you can do what you want. I bet that’s how you feel, Robert. Isn’t it? You picked the wrong woman when you picked me. Because I am capable of understanding how your mind works. Is that why you now want me to leave you alone?

The waiter returns with a dusty bottle, which he presents to me for inspection. ‘That looks fine,’ I tell him. He nods approvingly and disappears again.

‘So why’s he taken it away?’ asks Yvon.

‘He’s gone to get one of those posh cooling buckets and special champagne glasses, probably.’

‘Naomi, this is freaking me out.’

‘Look, if it’ll make you happy we can go to the drive-through Chickadee’s tomorrow and you can buy a bucket full of birds’ wings boiled in fat, okay? If you can’t handle the high life.’ I giggle, feeling as if I’m speaking lines written by someone else. Juliet, perhaps. Yes; I am aping her brittle, glib delivery.

‘So, what’s the deal with you and Ben?’ I ask Yvon, remembering that her life has not ended even though mine has.

‘Nothing!’

‘Really? That big a nothing? Wow.’ Ben Cotchin is not that bad. Or if he is, he’s bad in a normal way. Which, the way I’m feeling at the moment, seems quite benign—perhaps the best anybody can hope for.

‘Stop it,’ says Yvon. ‘I was upset and I didn’t have anywhere else to go, that’s all. And . . . Ben’s given up drinking.’

The waiter returns with our champagne in a silver bucket full of ice and water, a stand on wheels to support the bucket, and two glasses. ‘Excuse me,’ I say to him. Might as well do what I came here to do. ‘Have you worked here long?’

‘No,’ says the waiter. ‘Only three months.’ He is too polite to ask me why, but there is an enquiry in his eyes.

‘Who’s been here the longest? What about the chef?’

‘I think he has been here for a long time.’ His English is meticulously correct. ‘I could ask him, if you wish.’

‘Yes, please,’ I say.

‘Shall I . . . ?’ He nods at the champagne.

‘Afterwards. Speak to the chef now.’ Suddenly I can’t wait.

‘Naomi, this is insane,’ Yvon hisses at me as soon as we’re alone again. ‘You’re going to ask the chef if he remembers Robert coming in and ordering that meal for you, aren’t you?’

I say nothing.

‘What if he does? So what? What are you going to say then? Are you going to ask him what exactly Robert said? Did he look like a man who’d just fallen in love? This is
not
healthy, indulging your obsession like this!’

‘Yvon,’ I say quietly. ‘Think about it. Look around you, look at this place.’

‘What about it?’

‘Eat your expensive food, it’s going cold,’ I remind her. ‘Does this look like the sort of restaurant that’d let someone dash in off the street and order a takeaway? Can you see a takeaway menu anywhere? The sort of place that’d let a complete stranger walk out with not only food but also a tray and cutlery and an expensive cloth napkin? And just trust him to bring it back, when he was finished with it?’

Yvon considers this, chewing a mouthful of lamb. ‘No. But . . . why would Robert lie?’

‘I don’t think he lied. I think he withheld certain crucial facts.’

Our waiter returns. ‘I introduce you to our chef, Martin Gilligan,’ he says. Behind him is a short, thin man with untidy ginger hair.

‘How’s your food?’ Gilligan asks, in what sounds like a northern accent. I had a friend at university who was from Hull; this chef’s voice reminds me of his.

‘It’s fantastic, thanks. Amazing.’ Yvon smiles warmly. She says nothing about thinking it’s overpriced.

‘Etienne said you wanted to know how long I’ve worked here?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m fixtures and fittings.’ He looks apologetic, as if he fears we might accuse him of being unadventurous for staying. ‘I’ve been here since it opened in 1997.’

‘Do you know Robert Haworth?’ I ask him.

He nods, looks pleasantly surprised. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

I won’t say yes to this, even if doing so would help the flow of the conversation. ‘How do you know him?’

Yvon watches us as she might a tennis match, her head turning back and forth.

‘He used to work here,’ says Gilligan.

‘When? For how long?’

‘Oh . . . let’s see, it must have been 2002, 2003, something like that. It was a good few years ago. He’d just got married when he started, I remember that. Told me he’d just got back off his honeymoon. And he left . . . ooh, about a year later. Went on to be a lorry driver. He said he preferred open roads to hot kitchens. We’re still in touch, still have the odd bevvy now and then, at the Star. Though I’ve not seen him for a while.’

‘Robert worked in the kitchen, then? He wasn’t a waiter.’

‘No, he was a chef. My second-in-command.’

I nod. That’s how you were able to get your hands on your little surprise for me. They knew you at the Bay Tree—you’d worked here—so of course they trusted you. Naturally, they let you take a tray and cutlery and a napkin, and Martin Gilligan was only too happy to cook
Magret de Canard aux Poires
for you when you told him it was urgently needed to help a woman in distress.

I don’t need to ask any more questions. I thank Gilligan, and he returns to the kitchen. Like Etienne, our waiter, he is too discreet to demand to know why I felt the need to interrogate him.

The same doesn’t apply to Yvon. As soon as we’re alone again, she orders me to explain. The temptation to be facetious and evasive is strong. Games are safer than reality. But I can’t do it to Yvon; she’s my best friend, and I’m not Juliet.

‘Robert once said to me that being a lorry driver was better than being a commis,’ I tell her. ‘I didn’t understand. I thought he meant Commie, Communist, which didn’t seem to make much sense, but he didn’t. He meant a commis chef—c, o, m, m, i, s. Because that’s what he used to be.’

Yvon shrugs. ‘So?’

‘The man who raped me served a three-course meal to the men who watched,’ I say. ‘Every now and then he disappeared into a room at the back of the theatre and came out with more food. That room had to be a kitchen.’

Yvon is shaking her head. She can see where I’m going, and she doesn’t want it to be true.

‘I’ve never really thought about who cooked the food.’

‘Oh, God, Naomi.’

‘My rapist had his hands full. He had to entertain the men, clear each course, bring the next course. He was front of house.’ I laugh bitterly. ‘And we know he didn’t operate alone, from what Charlie Zailer’s said. At least two of the rapes took place in Robert’s lorry, and it was Robert who raped Prue Kelvey.’ I am making the agony worse, deliberately taking as long as I can to arrive at my conclusion. Like when you’ve got an elastic band round your wrist and you pull it back as far as it’ll go, stretching it until it’s taut and skinny, then letting it snap back against your skin. The further away it is, the more you know it will hurt you in the end.
Hurting distance.
Isn’t that what you called it?

Yvon has stopped trying to defend you. ‘While that man was attacking you, Robert was in the kitchen,’ she says, giving up, letting me know I’ve convinced her. ‘He cooked the meal.’

 

I jolt awake, with a scream trapped in my throat. I am soaked in sweat, my heart drumming fast. A bad dream. Worse than being awake, than real life? Yes. Even worse than that. Once I’ve waited long enough to check I’m not having a stroke or a heart attack, I turn to the radio alarm clock by my bed. I can only see the tops of the digits, small glowing red lines and curves poking out behind the tall pile of books on my bedside cabinet.

I knock the books on to the floor. It’s three-thirteen in the morning. Three one three. The number terrifies me; the hammering in my chest speeds up. Yvon wouldn’t hear me if I called her, even if I screamed. Her room is in the basement, and mine is on the top floor. I want to run downstairs to where she is, but there isn’t time. I fall back; fear pins me to the bed. Something is about to happen. I must let it happen. I have no choice. Pushing it away only works for so long. Oh, God, please let it be over quickly. If I have to remember, then let me remember
now.

I was Juliet. I pulled that certainty out of the nightmare with me. I’ve dreamed of being your wife for so long, but always while I’m awake. And the dream was that I, Naomi Jenkins, was your wife. I have never wanted to be Juliet Haworth. You talked about her as if she were weak, craven, pitiable.

In my dream, the worst I’ve ever had, I was Juliet. I was tied to the bed, to the acorn bedposts, on the stage. I had turned my head to the right, so that my cheek was flat against the mattress. My skin stuck to the plastic covering. It was uncomfortable, but I couldn’t turn to look straight ahead, because then I’d have seen the man, seen the expression on his face. Hearing what he was saying was bad enough. The men in the audience were eating smoked salmon. I could smell it—a disgusting pink fishy smell.

So I kept my head where it was and stared straight ahead, at the edge of the curtain. The curtain was dark red. It was designed to go round three sides of the stage, every side apart from the back. Yes, that’s how it looked. I didn’t remember that before. And there was something else unusual about it. What? I can’t remember.

Beyond the edge of the curtain was the theatre’s inside wall. I looked down at a small window. That’s right: the window wasn’t at eye level, it was lower than that. It wasn’t at eye level for the men around the table either.

I wipe sweat from my forehead with the corner of my duvet. I’m sure I’m right, the dream was accurate. That window was odd. It had no curtain. Most theatres don’t have windows at all, not in the auditorium. I had to cast my eyes downwards to see it, and the men would have had to look up. It was between the two levels, in the middle. As it got darker, I stopped being able to see anything. But before, when I was Juliet in the dream and I was lying on the bed, and that man was cutting off my clothes with a pair of scissors, I could see what was outside. I fixed my eyes on it, trying not to think about what was happening, what was going to happen . . .