The Woman He Loved Before (43 page)

To never turn out like my father
, I thought, and blew. The stream of my breath, thankfully, extinguished all the candles.
Thank you
, I thought to whoever was there.
Thank you, because I never want to be like him
.

‘How is Libby feeling?’ My mother asks me. I’ve always been envious of the way Libby so easily calls her parents Mum and Dad, the way she says, ‘my mum’ or ‘my dad’. I’ve never been able to do that, I’ve never been that free with them. They are formal people to me, formal and removed. Eve never talked about her family, not until the night she told me everything about herself. And that became lost in the midst of what else she told me. I never found the right moment to ask her about it, another of those things I can chalk up to thinking I had all the time in the world.

‘She’s better. Still finds it hard to leave the house, but she isn’t as … wounded any more.’ I think about the moment we shared earlier, I think I may have a chance. I may have another chance with her.

‘She really is lovely,’ my mother says.

‘I know,’ I reply.

We clean up in silence for a while and then my mother places a plate decisively on the recently dried pile and turns to me. ‘I wish you were closer to your father,’ she says. ‘Things were never really right with you two after that trip to London on your birthday. What happened?’

‘Which trip was that?’ I ask, wondering if I can tell her now. I look at her: her hair, streaked with white is cut into a style that flatters the soft lines of her face. Her eyes, always so kind and understanding, are surrounded by a network of lines that show she has had laughter in her life. My mother is a welcoming woman, which is why I have always wondered why my father does it. What can he want out there that he does not get from her?

‘Your fifteenth birthday trip to London,’ she says calmly, obviously she has not fallen for my attempts to deflect this conversation.

‘When we fell out over the watch?’ I ask her.

‘Jack,’ she says, reaching out to stroke the length of my face with her hand, ‘my little boy, you don’t have to protect me. Tell me what really happened.’

If I don’t protect her, who will? ‘Mother; Mum,’ I try out the word, it doesn’t feel right on my tongue, but I repeat it, to see if I can get a proper taste for it, ‘Mum, it was a long time ago. I’ve forgotten most of what happened that day. Hector probably has, too.’

She nods her head, and smiles at me, sadness in her eyes. ‘I thought so,’ she says. ‘But, Jack, don’t ever believe that. Your father never forgets anything.’

libby

I am sitting here, playing a game of visual chicken with the man who probably killed Eve.

And I know he is going to win. Because the calm certainty of his stare and the way he is unruffled by my revelation have confirmed what I realised microseconds after I revealed I had the diaries: he is cold enough to kill.

Feeling no shame in looking away first, I remove my gaze from his hypnotic stare and focus on my hands. Grace hasn’t had a chance to redo my nails and I have been neglectful with the hand cream – my hands are going to get old before their time. That’s ironic: my body will age normally, but the things that set me apart, my scars, will always be at least thirty-six years younger than the rest of me. By the time my body has renewed itself in seven years, the scars will be old but the rest of me will be older.

‘Eve was a very troubled young woman, prone to fantasies and uncontrolled flights of imagination,’ Hector informs me, in a measured manner. I am not surprised that Eve was too scared to run away until something more important than her own safety gave her the courage. I am unsettled, uneasy, probably bordering on terrified at this moment and I have a table separating us as well as two people in the other room protecting me.

‘If you could show me the diaries, I could explain to you what she might have meant by the things she wrote.’

The day I met Jack, I remember smiling at the car salesman with my lips curled into my mouth and my eyes focused elsewhere because I found him so irritating, condescending and generally unpleasant. I give Hector another version of that smile because I do not want to say any more. I have done enough to dig my own grave for now. If I do not engage any more, I can maybe keep him at arm’s length until the other two return.

‘I don’t appreciate the silent treatment,’ he says to me, and frost snakes down my spine.

I keep my head lowered and say nothing. It is not a good idea to enrage him, but I do not want to engage either. How do you deal with the most dangerous man you have ever met?

‘Coffee or tea?’ Harriet says, entering the room in that space in time where I was about to be forced to choose my next move.

I immediately get to my feet. ‘Harriet, you sit down, I insist. Jack and I will make the coffee, I need to talk to him any way.’

Harriet, ready to protest, opens her lips, but I am already at the door. Harriet looks from me to Hector but if she suspects something, it does not show on her face.

‘Coffee for me,’ Hector says, normal again, a father and husband again.

‘Me too,’ Harriet adds.

‘Coffee all round,’ I say then slip out of the room and into kitchen.

‘Everyone wants coffee,’ I say to Jack who is standing by the kettle, staring at its shiny surface, waiting for it to boil.

‘You don’t usually drink coffee this late,’ he says to me.

‘No, I don’t. Actually, I think I’m going to go to bed. Do you mind if we talk tomorrow or something? I’m a bit tired.’

He’s disappointed, but I do not wait to be touched by it, to be persuaded to stay and see the night out in the company of Hector.

As I undress, my mind keeps going to Eve’s diaries. I need to finish them as soon as possible, to find out what happened to Eve. To find out if I really have just had dinner with a killer.

And if I’m going to be next.

libby

All day some fuckwit has been calling the house and hanging up when I answer.

I can’t ignore the phone, either, because it might be important and since I spend all day down in the cellar and the mobile reception is dodgy enough in the rest of the house, I have to go and pick it up.

As soon as I do, the person on the other end stays there for a few seconds then hangs up.

I hope they get bored and find someone else to bother, soon, because I really can’t be bothered going up and down the stairs all day.

‘Butch, are you coming with me?’ I ask. He’s been a little quieter than normal today. I didn’t even realise until I got into bed that he’d slipped into the room with me. He jumped onto the bed and curled up beside me. I’d stroked my fingers through his fur and had felt so much calmer,
safer
with him beside me. I could do with that influence now.

He barks happily, and jumps out of his basket and darts down the stairs ahead of me.

eve

5
^th
January 2000

I haven’t finished with Jack. And I haven’t told him I know his dad. How could I?

I know, I know: too many secrets. Secrets are not good, they are not healthy in a relationship. Especially when he has been making overtures towards marriage. I could be imagining it, but he has been having conversations relating to the future, relating to us, asking me what I think about the décor in this beautiful house. More than once he’s asked me to move in permanently, to give up my flat and move in; more than once I’ve turned him down saying it’s too soon.

It’s not too soon – it’s too scary. If I say yes without telling him about my past then I am not a good person. If I still have one foot out of the door, out of the relationship, then I can fool myself into thinking that I have not lied too much to him. I have not given myself completely to this relationship, which means I do not have to tell him everything.

Jack is hurt by it, but he would be more hurt to know what sort of woman I am. Something is going to happen to bring it to a head, though, I can tell. All it will take is for us to run into Caesar in the street.

Then it would be a matter of waiting to find out if he would come
himself, or if he would destroy me by destroying Jack and telling him that the woman Jack was sleeping with was a prostitute. I do not know.

Things would be simpler, of course, if I didn’t love Jack so much. I know I have calmed down a lot from the early days, and the loss has made me cautious, but I can’t deny what I feel for him. I can’t deny he is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. But that is selfish, isn’t it? Would I be the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with if he knew? I doubt it. I truly, truly doubt it.

This is killing me.

Eve

25
^th
January 2000

He’s just been round.

Hector, Caesar, Jack’s dad – whatever the hell he’s called. He’s just been round and put me straight.

I suppose I have antagonised him. I have worn red in front of the bull that is his personality so I should not have expected anything else. It all began at the weekend, when Jack finally insisted that I meet his parents. I’ve been avoiding it all costs, as I said before. I’ve made excuses, feigned illness, even begged to be called into work. But this weekend Jack wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I could tell in the way that he asked that it was important to him. My evasiveness was causing him pain; making him wonder if I was ashamed of him when of course it was the other way round.

I dressed as simply as possible: a cream, flowery dress, my hair loose, and flat shoes. As he drove us over there I kept cycling between mini panic attacks where I could hardly breathe, to gulping back retches. ‘I know you’re nervous,’ Jack said to me at one point, ‘but there’s no need to be. I’m sure they’ll love you.’

‘Jack, about—’ I began several times, and each time the words got stuck in my throat, wedged themselves there and would not
move. How did I tell him his dad was once my pimp? That I slept with his dad before I’d slept with him?

‘It’s all right,’ Jack said after the fifth or sixth time, ‘once my parents meet you, they’ll see how beautiful, kind and generous you are.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said, trying to be jovial, feeling the swirling of anxiety inside. ‘Only you see me like that. No one else does.’

‘Everyone loves you,’ Jack said.

I watched his hands, remembering how gentle and loving they’d always been when they touched me. Even in the heat of the moment, if we were consumed with passion, his hands, his body, his everything was always gentle with me. Gentle and loving. Despite all that I had seen and experienced, I knew that real men were like this. Most men were like this. They cared and were gentle and did not want to hurt anyone. They were nice because it was in their nature and they didn’t demand to receive it back; they were passionate without being cruel; they were nice without being manipulative. Jack reminded me of that.

He was so different from his father.

When Jack got out to open the car door for me, I almost slid across to the driver’s seat to hot-wire the car and drive away. Only problem being, of course, I did not know how to hot-wire a car. I did not even know how to drive.

We all shook hands in the corridor. I could not lift my eyes to meet Hector’s fully. I looked slightly to the side of him, so I would not look into the soul of a man who had been in control of my life for so long. Is that how slaves used to feel? Once they had freedom, once their former masters could not control them any more, did they feel defiance and independence inside, but could not show it because the memories of the beatings, the chainings, the abuse were still so strong?

I wanted to be defiant, strong, proud, to hold my head up high and act all ‘Look at me now, I made it despite what you did’, but I couldn’t. I’m sure most people couldn’t. I’m good at pretending, but not that good.

He shook my hand warmly, and so did Harriet, his wife. We had tea in the living room, Jack and I sitting side by side on the sofa, making small talk. Jack’s mum, Caesar’s wife, was nice enough. Cool, though. Reserved. I guessed she would be like that with any woman dating one of her precious sons.

Jack held my hand and smiled a lot and told jokes that we all laughed at, but the atmosphere was still there and I could not look at Caesar – Hector (I must remember to call him Hector) for any length of time – I felt sick every time I tried. I wanted to vomit because I could remember his hands on me, his body next to mine, him dominating me, him renting me out.

I try not to feel like a victim, but sitting in that living room, knowing this was where he would come after being at the flat with me, where he would pour himself a drink, where he would sit some evenings and read the paper with his wife, maybe even make love to her in front of the fire, it made me feel nauseous.

Eventually it was over, and we could leave. I had been inspected, lightly questioned, primarily approved. I knew this because at the door Harriet said, ‘The two of you must come back again for dinner very soon. Then we can spend much more time getting to know each other.’ Maybe she could see how much I loved Jack so she was inviting me back. I wouldn’t go, but having the invite meant a lot to Jack. I could feel him grinning beside me. I was about to smile in return when I saw from the corner of my eye Caesar stiffen, a warning that I shouldn’t even think about it. That was why I did it. A small little fuck you to the man who thought he could control everyone. I smiled at Harriet, took her hands and said, ‘Thank you, thank you so much for the invite. We’d love to come back. If your cooking is anyway half as delicious as those scones, I’m sure I’m in for a treat.’