‘It’s completely your fault!’
A group of men spill out of a pub, their laughter grows louder when they think they’ve walked into a domestic. ‘Calm down, love,’ one laughs at me.
‘Keep it at home,’ another guffaws, his arm slung over his friend’s shoulder.
‘He’s not my husband!’ I want to say, but that’s far worse, isn’t it, to be shouting in the street at a man who isn’t my husband, and suddenly, Daniel has stepped between the men and me. He is bristling, shoulders raised, fists clenched, he’s a split second from launching at them, and I can’t help it – I put my hand on his arm. He stands down instantly. They turn the corner. Abruptly, I remove my hand.
He blinks at the imprint of my palm on his sleeve. ‘You were saying?’ he asks and I am astounded at his snap from inmate to lepidopterist, from the man he was in prison to the man he is with me, but also at my instinct to calm him, the power I still wield.
I take a deep breath, try to calm down, to sort through the rush of thoughts. I will speak coolly, rationally. I am a grown woman. Not a child. ‘It is your fault I have no friends. Because at some point in a friendship, someone will say something awful and true . . .’ Jennie at Wyatt, who told me she’d rather stay at school during holidays than hear her mother unscrewing her bottle of gin; stick-thin Evangeline at Oxford, who once told me her father pulled a chip out from her mouth and called her a greedy cow; Emma, who said she clubbed all night because she was so fucking lonely. ‘When they do that, they’re inviting you to do the same, to go deeper, if they give you their secret and you give them yours, you’re friends for life. But I never say anything back.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if I do, they’ll see you.’
He stops suddenly under the covered doorway of an investment bank. The quiet here, the rain falling beyond makes me feel like the world has drawn a circle round us and abandoned us in it, everything hushed and dangerous, and then I know he is about toshatter the ground beneath my feet, tilt my axis, because he gives me a look, long and penetrating, the same look he gave me the first time he saw me in my living room, when he took my wrist between his fingers. ‘You haven’t told him, have you?’
‘Who?’
‘Kit.’
I blink. Knowing this buys me only seconds from the car crash of my life. Wanting them anyway. Through the window, the lobby is lit with chandeliers, the receptionist is straightening newspapers – I could walk right up to her, say,Help me, please. I need to get away.But I don’t. I stare at the man staring silently back at me, willing me to have kept our secret, terrified I might have told, and the enormity of my mistake breaks over me. Because if I had told Kit, Daniel’s hold over me would be broken – Daniel knows it, I know it. But I never told him. I feel, then, the cool needle of my own complicity sliding into my side.
‘He doesn’t know you exist,’ I whisper. ‘He only knows that Mama died, that I went to boarding school. I never told him that you married Mama or that she died on her honeymoon or where you’ve been for the past eighteen years.’ I’m not sure how I’ve done it. Kept this entire world of a person a secret. ‘I came close to telling him a few times.’ Those lazy, weekend mornings, nothing separating us except skin, Kit would tell me all his secret fears – how he’d never felt as clever as Cassie or as fun as his younger brothers, and I tasted it then, my confession on my tongue. But I didn’t. Just diverted him with more ordinary hurts – the strangeness of never knowing my father, how ugly I used to feel, the grief of losing Mama. Never the guilt. Never Daniel. It wasn’t just shame. There was a ruthlessness about it also, I saw achance for reinvention and I took it. I almost told him later, when he found me digging up the garden, but we’d just moved into The Wedge, we were engaged, we were talking wedding venues. I was so close to normal. I couldn’t let it slip away.
‘Do you love him?’
‘What?’
‘Do you love Kit?’
My mind goes white, I’m falling. I hear myself shouting things (‘How dare you? Don’t say his name! Don’t you fucking say his name!’) as if they might defy my terminal velocity, as if they are ripcords on a parachute. But there is no parachute.
‘You can’t love him if you don’t trust him.’
‘I’ve never said I don’t trust him!’
‘Then why have you kept so many things from him? Oh Lolly, this is why you’re here, isn’t it?’ And then I know he’s seen it, my swarming hive of secrets. I cross my arms over my body, a desperate, helpless gesture, because I am defenceless against him, powerless to make him stop. ‘You don’t love him and he doesn’t love you. How can he when he has no idea who you are?’
‘Stop!’
‘And you had a child? Withthisman?’
‘Don’t you dare!’
‘Did you ever feel for him what you felt for me?’
‘Get away from me, get away!’ I whisper, but he does the opposite, he pulls me into the cave of his blazer.Scream, I think but nothing comes out, because we’re both stricken by his hands on my arms, both captive to it. I think a hundred crazy things. That his arms feel so much stronger after prison. How large and warm his chest is. How small I feel in his grasp.
‘Do you think it’s any different for me?’ His whole body is trembling, or perhaps it’s my vibrations pulsing through him. ‘We’re each other’s secret. No one can change that.’ Our ribs rise and fall together, our breathing synced. I don’t know if he’s going to punch me or kiss me. Do I want him to do neither or both? ‘Don’t you see, darling? We’re the same. Cut me open and inside it’s you.’
From: Kit McDermott
11:05
You took your favourite T-shirts with you, those black, linen ones that you wore for the whole of your pregnancy, the ones with holes in that you promised you’d throw away. Well, here’s a secret for you, you who’ve kept so much from me. Two weeks ago, I ordered five new black ones, I had them delivered to my office so you wouldn’t notice, I’ve been swapping the old ones out for the new. I think of you all the time. Are you thinking of me?
28