The Bones of You (10 page)

After coffee, we wander outside.

“Have a wonderful weekend, Jo. Both of you. You really deserve it.” I kiss her cheek.

“Thank you. We will! And come over soon, Kate—so I can tell you about it!”

I nod, already seeing myself on Jo’s brand-new sofa, listening, a little enviously, to her blow-by-blow account of her glamorous night and the celebrities she was rubbing shoulders with. In her beautiful dress, fighting to keep smiling while her daughter’s never far from her mind. To stay off the pills. And though I don’t want it to, an image of a shining star comes into my head, dazzling everyone with its brightness, flaring up one last time before imploding.

 

It’s Jo I’m thinking of yet again as on Friday evening, around seven, I’m driving past the village shop and see a small figure weaving along the pavement. As I pass, it lurches into the road just in front of me. I slam my foot on the brake, only just managing to stop in time.

I leap out to give whoever it is a piece of my mind, then stop, completely horrified, as I realize who it is.

14

I
leap out of my car, over to her side.

“Christ, Jo! I nearly hit you. . . .”

Even with me holding her arm, she wobbles as she gets up. Then one of her ankles gives way, and as she flashes a lopsided grin at me, I realize she’s blind drunk.

“I thought you were going to London! Come on. I’ll drive you home.”

I take her arm and help her into my car, where the extent of her inebriation becomes apparent as she fills it with what smells like pure alcohol fumes.

“I’m fine, Kate. Really! Look how happy I am! I’m just fine. . . .” But her words are slurred; her intonation is too exaggerated.

“You’re not.” I wind down the window, the blast of cold, damp air in my face welcome. “Do you have your keys?”

She opens her bag and rummages messily and unsuccessfully, by which time I’ve pulled up in her drive. Hoping to God she finds them, because it doesn’t look like anyone else is home, I take her bag.

“Here.” I dangle them in front of her. “Come on. I’ll walk in with you.”

I unlock the door, fumbling around in the darkness for a light switch. Jo totters down the steps and almost falls over.

“I’ll make us some coffee,” I tell her.

“It would be much more fun if we have a drink!” She falls onto the sofa. Under the electric light, her face is blotchy and her eyes are bloodshot. Then she leans back and throws up her arms. “I know! Vodka, Katie! Loosen up a little! Let’s get completely trolleyed. . . .”

“Jo, you don’t need another drink. Why don’t you stay there? Put your feet up, and I’ll get the kettle on.”

I leave her muttering about how Neal doesn’t like feet on sofas.
Neal, Neal, Neal . . .
Without her watching me, I take in the empty vodka bottle, which I drop into her bin, then use the wrong tap to fill the kettle, before switching it on and hurrying back to check on her.

I sit down next to her. “What happened, Jo? Why aren’t you in London?”

The drunk smile wanes as the corners of her mouth turn down. Something happens to her face, as if she’s been slapped really hard. Then it crumples.

“Oh my God . . .” She gasps, raising a slow-motion hand to her mouth, uttering a moaning sound as pain hits her. Her eyes slowly turn to mine, blinking, trying to focus. “He doesn’t want me.” She garbles it so quietly, I miss it the first time. When I ask her to repeat what she said, it’s like I’m asking her to rip out her heart.

After that, she doesn’t say much, just makes small, pitiful mewling sounds, all the time holding her head in her hands, rocking slightly. I make her coffee she doesn’t drink; then, before I can help her upstairs to bed, she lies on the sofa and closes her eyes. In seconds she’s asleep. I find two of her beautiful handstitched cushions and slip them under her head, then search for a throw of some kind to drape over her. Finding nothing, I venture upstairs.

It’s the first time I’ve been up here, and it’s like a five-star hotel, with thick, pale carpets and new, immaculate everything, interior designed to within an inch of its life, as though it’s waiting for someone—a rock legend or a Hollywood star kind of someone—to move in. Eventually, I find a blanket like no blanket I’ve ever owned—softest cream cashmere. After creeping back downstairs and covering Jo with it, I tiptoe out.

 

I know the next day she won’t want to see me. I wait until nine, to give her a chance to sleep it off, before I go round there, ringing her bell several times. When there’s no answer, I open the letter box and call through it, “Jo? I won’t stay. But I do need to know you’re all right.”

Only after I stand there several minutes longer, repeatedly ringing the bell, does she let me in.

I close the door behind me. “How are you, Jo? Are you okay?”

She shakes her head. “No. I don’t think I am.”

She looks terrible. I take her arm and lead her over to the sofa, the same place it looks like she’s just got up from. It’s then that I notice the strips of green silk ripped and torn on the carpet.

Her beautiful dress.

“Oh, Jo . . .”

She covers her face with her hands. “I feel a fool. Such a fool.”

“You’re not a fool, Jo. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

She searches for the right words, or maybe it’s the courage to speak them.

“Neal doesn’t think so.” She whispers it.

I can’t believe he’s upset her, not again. “What happened, sweetie?”

“Says . . .
ugly,
” she mutters. “I’m . . .
old. Embarrassing
. . .” I strain my ears to make out her words.

Then suddenly coherent, she sits up and says, “He didn’t want me to go to London, because he was meeting someone else, Kate. He’s having an affair.”

“He can’t be.” What she’s saying is outrageous. She’s more unstable than I’d realized. And although they have their ups and downs, he
can’t
be having an affair. “Surely not.” I shake my head. “Maybe you’re misunderstanding things, Jo.”

“Oh, Kate,” she says, looking at me sadly. “I thought you’d realized. Don’t tell me you’re another.”

“Another what?” I’ve no idea what she means.

“You can’t bear the thought that Neal and I are anything but a devoted couple, can you? It would be too hard, too unfair, after losing Rosanna, for us to lose each other, as well. . . .”

I gasp. I’ve thought exactly that; of course I have, as anyone would. Told myself that at least each of them knows how the other feels, that there’s the smallest comfort to be found in sharing their pain, that being alone would be too unbearable.

“You just want everything to be perfect,” she says, gazing out toward the garden.

This time she’s wrong. “Believe me, Jo. I don’t do perfect. I do gardens, things that grow and evolve with all the imperfections that make them beautiful. Anyway, one person’s paradise is another’s nightmare. Each to their own. I just think, well, you and Neal, after all you’ve been through, surely he’d see you’re better off together than apart?”

“You don’t understand.” She clasps her hands, then gets up, her voice ragged. “No one can, Kate. It’s not the first time. He does this, and I have to live with it—because I can’t leave him.”

 

I spend a large part of that day shoring her up, not sure what to believe and what to dismiss as fabrications of her clearly troubled mind. But the more I learn, the more I realize I’ll never truly understand how it is to be Jo.

Angus is wary. “Just be careful, Kate. I know you’re worried about her, but Jo’s world is about Jo. What about Delphine while all this is happening? Is she even thinking about her?”

“Delphine’s fine. She’s with a friend this weekend. Which is just as well,” I tell him. “Neal’s a complete bastard. If you knew the half of it . . .”

“So why does she stay with him? She doesn’t have to. She’s not stupid, Kate. No one sticks around if it’s that bad.”

“I know,” I say, weary. And he has a point. “But don’t you think, when you’ve lost a child, that maybe there are different rules? And you’re not exactly sympathetic, Angus. God, if it was us . . . if we’d lost
Grace
. . .”

He’s silent, then pulls me over, hugs me tight against him, his chin resting on the top of my head.

“She’ll be home soon.”

“Two weeks.”

Two weeks
. . . That’s all it is until her Christmas break starts, with the decorating, the present wrapping we always do together, the cooking, with the inevitable last-minute shopping, because no matter how organized you are, there’s always something you forget.

Suddenly, I miss her terribly.

 

I’m at Jo’s early Sunday morning, tidying the kitchen while she’s upstairs having a bath, when Neal arrives back home unexpectedly.

“Kate?” He seems surprised to see me. “What are you doing here? Is Jo all right?”

“Not really,” I say quite coolly. “But then, it’s hardly surprising, is it? She was really looking forward to this weekend.”

Neal puts down his bag and stands there, looking puzzled. “Wait a moment.... What exactly are you saying?”

I stare back at him, speechless. Astounded at his nerve.

Then he nods. “I see,” he says softly. “She told you it was my fault.”

I frown. Confrontation’s not my style, but after the weekend Jo’s just had, I can’t stand here and say nothing. “All she told me was what you said to her, Neal.”

He walks over to the window and stands there, looking out, so I can’t see his face. Then he turns, and I see how weary of this he is, too.

“Did she tell you all of it? That on Friday, before we left, she was drunk? So completely off her face, she couldn’t walk, least of all make it to a hotel and the awards dinner? Honestly, Kate, she was in no fit state to go anywhere.”

“She told me you called her ugly. And embarrassing. God, Neal. She’s so fragile. . . .”

He turns and walks slowly to the door through to the hallway, then quietly closes it before turning to face me. “I did call her embarrassing. And she was. It was supposed to be my big night.
Our big night.
Recognition for all the work we’ve done. I wanted my beautiful wife to share it with me. And what does she do? Gets smashed and bloody ruins it.” He clenches his fists. “Too right she’s bloody fragile. But believe me, Kate . . .” I see him take a breath. When he looks at me again, the anger has gone. “I love her. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do to help her.”

He’s so sincere. So utterly convincing. I apologize profusely, muttering about there being two sides to every story, and about how worried about Jo I am, before crawling away, mortified. But the conversation niggles at me until days later, I put it separately to both Angus and Laura.

“If you have two equally convincing opposing stories from two people who love each other, how do you work out what’s true?”

“Gut instinct,” says Angus, turning the pages of his newspaper.

“The truth is often somewhere in the middle,” says Laura.

“It’s probably quite simple,” Angus says.

“The thing is, one person’s truth is very often another person’s lie. There are small giveaway signs, too, which sway most of us without us really noticing,” she goes on. “Body language, for one. And eye contact. It takes a seasoned con artist to look you in the eye and lie outright.”

“We all do it,” says Angus. “Say things that aren’t exactly the whole truth. It’s human nature.”

“Of course, the other thing,” says Laura, “is the reason for the lie. Unless someone’s a pathological liar in the first place, they’ll have reasons of their own for twisting the truth.”