The Truth-Teller's Lie (7 page)

She was christened Eleanor—Eleanor Rosamund Newman—but when she was twelve she decided that she wanted to be called Yvon instead. She asked her parents if she could change her name, and the fools agreed. They’re both classicists at Oxford, strict about education but nothing else. They believe it’s important to let children express their personalities, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their getting straight ‘A’s all the way through school.

‘They’re a pair of numbskulls,’ Yvon often says. ‘I was twelve! I thought “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo was the best song ever written. I wanted to marry Limahl. They should have locked me in a cupboard until I grew out of it.’

When Yvon married Ben Cotchin, she took his surname. Her friends and family, including me, were mystified when she decided to keep it after the divorce. ‘Every time I change my name, I make it a little bit worse,’ she explained. ‘I’m not risking it again. Anyway, I
like
having a shit, wrongly spelled first name and the surname of a spoiled, lazy alcoholic. It’s a fantastic exercise in humility. Whenever I pick up an envelope addressed to me, or fill in the electoral register form, I remember how stupid I am. It keeps the old ego in check.’

‘Are we going home?’ she asks now.

‘No. To the police station.’

I so badly want to tell her. Yvon is the person whose opinions I use to test my own. Often I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve heard what she thinks. But I can’t risk it this time. Besides, there’s no point. I know all the reasons why it’s wrong and bad and crazy, and I’m going to do it anyway.

‘The police station?’ Yvon begins to protest. ‘But—’

‘I know, I should give them a chance,’ I say bitterly. ‘But this isn’t about that. This is something different.’ I feel stunned by my own outrageous nerve, but calmer, also, now that I have decided on a course of action. No one can accuse me of being a coward if I do this.

‘Let’s talk outside,’ Yvon says. ‘I don’t like this place at all. It’s too close to the river, the water’s too loud. Even inside there’s a damp, waterlogged atmosphere. I’m starting to feel like a creature from
Wind In the Willows
.’ She stands up, pulls her purple shawl around her shoulders.

‘I don’t want to talk. I just need a lift. You don’t have to come in with me, you can drop me off and go home. I’ll make my own way back.’ I start to march towards the car park.

‘Naomi, wait!’ Yvon runs after me. ‘What’s going on?’

Saying nothing is not so hard after all. This isn’t the first secret I’ve kept from her. I’ve had three years to practise.

Yvon waves her car keys in the air, leaning against her red Fiat Punto. ‘Tell me or I’m not driving you anywhere.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe that Juliet’s done something to Robert. You think he’s dumped me and hasn’t got the guts to tell me.’

There is an echoey squawk of birds above our heads. It’s as if they’re trying to join in our conversation. I look up at the grey sky, half expecting to see a committee of gulls staring down at me. But they are oblivious, going about their business as usual.

Yvon groans. ‘Can I refer you to my forty-seven previous answers to the same question? I don’t know where Robert is, or why he hasn’t been in touch. And neither do you. It’s very, very unlikely that Juliet’s chopped him into small pieces and buried him under the floorboards, okay?’

‘She knew my name. She’d found out about the affair.’

‘It’s still unlikely.’ Yvon relents and unlocks the car. I am disappointed. She could have persuaded me to tell her, if she’d pushed a bit harder. Most people are not as persistent as I am. ‘Naomi, I’m worried about you.’

‘It’s Robert you should worry about. Something’s happened to him. He’s in trouble.’ I wonder why I am the only person to whom this is obvious.

‘When did you last eat?’ Yvon asks, once we’re in the car. ‘When did you last get a good night’s sleep?’ Every question she asks me I think of in relation to you. Are you hungry and tired somewhere, gradually giving up hope, wondering why I’m not trying harder to find you? Yvon thinks I’m being melodramatic, but I know you. Only something that paralysed or confined you, or took away your memory, would prevent you from making contact with me. A lot of tragedies are unlikely, but they still happen. Most people do not fall off bridges, or die in house fires, but some do.

I want to say to Yvon that statistics are irrelevant and unhelpful, but I can’t spare the words. I need all my energy to steel myself for my next step. It’s obvious, anyway. Even if the odds are one in a million, that one could be you. It has to be somebody, doesn’t it?

Yvon is on Juliet’s side; she too believes I’m better off without you. She thinks you’re repressed and sexist, and that the way you talk is grandiose and pretentious, that you say lots of things that sound deep and meaningful but are actually meaningless and trite. You present clichés as if they are profound, newly discovered truths, she says. Once, she accused me of trying to mould my personality to suit what I imagine you want, although she took that back the following morning. I could tell from the look on her face that she had meant it, but thought she’d gone too far.

I wasn’t offended. Meeting you did change me. That was the best thing about it. Knowing I had a future with you helped me to bury everything I hated about the past. How I wish I could leave it buried.

We drive up the steep tree-lined road, the sound of the river fading behind us. There are no leaves yet on these trees, which throw their bare arms up towards the sky.

Yvon doesn’t ask again why I want to go to the police station. She tries a new tactic. ‘Are you sure I wouldn’t be better off driving you to Robert’s house? If you’re so sure you saw something through the window . . .’

‘No.’ The dread I feel at the mention of it is like a hand closing round my throat.

‘It’s one mystery we could easily get to the bottom of,’ Yvon points out. I understand why she thinks it’s a reasonable suggestion. ‘All you need to do is go and look again. I’ll come with you.’

‘No.’ The police will go, as soon as they’ve heard what I’m about to tell them. If there’s something to be found, they’ll find it.

‘What could you possibly have seen, for God’s sake? It can’t have been Robert, handcuffed to a radiator and covered in bruises. I mean, you’d remember that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t joke about it.’

‘What
do
you remember seeing in the room? You still haven’t told me.’

I haven’t because I can’t. Describing your lounge to DS Zailer and DC Waterhouse was bad enough; some reflex in my brain kept springing back, away from the image.

Yvon sighs when I fail to answer. She turns on her car radio and jabs one button after another, finding nothing she wants to listen to. In the end she chooses the station that’s playing one of Madonna’s old songs, and turns the volume down so that it’s barely audible.

‘You thought Sean and Tony were Robert’s best mates, didn’t you? That’s how he talked about them. He misled you. They’re just two guys who work behind the bar at his local pub.’

‘Which is how they met Robert. Obviously they became friends.’

‘They don’t even know his real name. And how come he’s in the Star every night? How come he’s in
Spilling
every night? I thought he was a lorry driver.’

‘He doesn’t do overnights any more.’

‘So what does he do? Who does he work for?’

She is picking up speed, and I raise both my hands to stop the flow. ‘Give me a chance,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing mysterious about it. He’s self-employed, but mainly he works for supermarkets—Asda, Sainsbury’s. Tesco.’

‘I understand the concept of supermarkets,’ Yvon mutters. ‘You don’t have to list them all.’

‘He stopped doing overnights because Juliet didn’t like being left on her own. So most days he loads up out of Spilling, drives to Tilbury, where he loads up again. Or sometimes he loads up out of Dartford . . .’

‘Listen to yourself,’ says Yvon, shooting a puzzled look at me. ‘You’re talking like him. “He loads up out of Dartford”! Do you even know what that means?’

This is becoming irritating. I say sharply, ‘I assume it means that, in Dartford, he puts some things in his lorry which he then transports back to Spilling.’

Yvon shakes her head. ‘You don’t get it. I knew you wouldn’t. It’s like he’s taken you over, and what have you got in exchange? He gives you nothing but empty promises. Why can’t he ever stay the night with you? Why can’t Juliet be left on her own?’

I stare at the road ahead.

‘You don’t know, do you? Have you ever said to him, “What exactly is wrong with your wife?”’

‘If he wants to tell me, that’s up to him. I don’t want to interrogate him. He’d feel disloyal discussing her problems with me.’

‘Very noble of him. Funny, he doesn’t feel disloyal fucking you.’ Yvon sighs. ‘Sorry.’ I hear a trace of something in her voice: scorn, perhaps, or a weary kindness. ‘Look, you saw Juliet yesterday. She appeared to be a self-sufficient, able-bodied grown-up. Not at all the poor, frail thing Robert’s described . . .’

‘He hasn’t described her. He’s never said anything specific.’ I am starting to feel a little bit angry. I need all my energy to look for you, to stay positive, to stop myself going crazy with worry and fear. It is too much to have to defend you at the same time. Too preposterous, as well, when the attack comes from someone who’s never met you.

‘Why can’t you pin him down? If he can’t leave Juliet now, when will he be able to? What will change between now and then?’

I want to protect you against the sting of Yvon’s hostility, so I say nothing. You could have lied about why you won’t leave Juliet immediately; many men would have. You could have made up a story that would have kept me at bay: a sick mother, an illness. The truth is harder to accept, but I’m glad you told me. ‘It’s nothing to do with Juliet,’ you said. ‘She won’t change. She’ll never change.’ I heard what sounded like determination in your voice, but perhaps it was a sort of furious resignation, anger filling the gap where hope once was. Your eyes narrowed as you spoke, as if in response to a sudden sharp pain. ‘If I left her now, it’d be the same as if I leave her in a year, or five years, from her point of view.’

‘Then why not leave her now?’ I asked. Yvon isn’t the only one who has wondered.

‘It’s me,’ you admitted. ‘This won’t make sense, but . . . I’ve thought about leaving her for so long. Planning it, looking forward to it. I’ve probably thought about it too much, in a way. It’s turned into this . . . legendary thing in my mind. I’m paralysed. It’s become too big for me. I get too preoccupied about the details—how and when to do it. In my mind, I’m already caught up in the process of leaving her. The grand finale—what I’ve been working towards for so long.’ You smiled sadly. ‘Trouble is, the process hasn’t yet manifested itself in the world outside my head.’

You took a long time to say all this, taking care to choose exactly the right words, the ones that most accurately described your feelings. I’ve noticed you don’t like to talk about yourself unless it’s to say how much you love me, or that you only feel truly alive when you’re with me. You’re the opposite of a self-absorbed, oblivious man. Yvon thinks I’m obsessed with you, and she’s right, but she’s never seen you in action. Nobody but me knows how you stare at me hungrily, as if you might never see me again. Nobody has ever felt the way you kiss me. My obsession is dwarfed by yours.

How can I explain all this to Yvon? I don’t entirely understand it myself.

‘What if leaving Juliet always seems too big?’ I asked you. ‘What if you always feel paralysed?’ I’m not a total fool. I’ve seen the same films Yvon has about women who waste their whole lives waiting for their married lovers to get divorced and commit to them properly. Though I will never regard you as a waste of time, no matter what happens. Even if you never leave Juliet, even if all I can ever have of you is three hours a week, I don’t care.

‘I
will
always feel paralysed,’ you said. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I turned my face away so that you wouldn’t see my disappointment. ‘I’ll always feel the way I do now: hovering on the verge, not ready to throw myself over the edge. But I will do it. I’ll make myself do it. Once, I really wanted to marry Juliet. And I did marry her. Now you’re the one I’m desperate to marry. I look forward to it every minute of every day.’

When I replay things you’ve said and hear your voice so clearly in my mind, I feel like a dying animal. It can’t be over. I have to be able to see you again. There are two days to go until Thursday. I will be at the Traveltel at four o’clock. As usual.

Yvon nudges me with her elbow. ‘Probably I should keep my big gob shut,’ she says. ‘What do I know about anything? I married a lazy alcoholic because I fell in love with the summerhouse in his back garden and thought it’d be ideal for my business. Got what I deserved, didn’t I?’

Yvon lies about her romantic history all the time, making herself sound worse than she is. She married Ben Cotchin because she loved him. Still does, I suspect, despite his aimlessness and his drinking. Yvon and her business, Summerhouse Web Design, now live in the converted basement of my house, and Ben’s summerhouse, if Yvon’s spies are to be believed, is used primarily as an extra-large drinks cabinet.

We are nearly there. I can see the police station, a blur of red bricks in the distance, getting closer. There is a large obstruction in my throat. I can’t swallow.

‘Why don’t we go away for a couple of days?’ says Yvon. ‘You need to relax, detach a bit from all this stress. We could drive up to Silver Brae Chalets. Did I show you their card? I could get us a chalet for next to nothing, being well connected, you know how it is. After you’ve done whatever you need to do at the police station, we could—’

‘No,’ I snap. Why is everybody talking about bloody Silver Brae Chalets? Detective Sergeant Zailer quizzed me about it, after I stupidly gave her the card by mistake. She asked if you and I had ever been there.