The Book of You: A Novel (10 page)

“I was worrying when you took so long to answer.”

Clarissa was her parents’ own fairy-tale child, born when her mother was forty-three, after sixteen long years with no baby. Her father liked to tease her that he’d had all the spindles in the kingdom burned, to keep her safe. She always teased back about how great that plan had worked out.

“I promise I’m fine.” She unzipped one boot and stripped it off, then the other as her mother passed the phone to her father.

Clarissa was up again. In the kitchen, turning off the screaming kettle, lulled as usual by her father’s voice. “Do you think it’s silly,” she asked, unable to resist confiding in him, “if I take taxis home from the station?” As she spoke, she felt walls closing in on her and the world growing smaller, but she knew it was the only thing she could do; she had to face that fully now.

“No. But why the change, Clary? You love walking.”

She was angry at herself for saying so much and worrying him. “It’s a long day, this jury service thing.”

“Good idea, then,” her father said.

She was in her bedroom, checking that nobody was hiding in the wardrobe, then lying on the bed, peeling off her stockings and letting them fall onto the deep-gold rug she’d made from a heavy vintage fabric covered in huge lilies. She bent her knees to her chest and wiggled her freezing toes.

Clarissa’s mother had spent five and a half decades intervening in her father’s conversations. Her voice was too clear. “Please tell your daughter that mango on its own is not lunch. And weak black tea is not a dinner food.” As if the phone itself knew that her mother had finished and Clarissa was not to have a comeback, it bleeped three times and died.

Thursday

Thursday, January 22, 2:30 p.m. (three weeks ago)

It is just over a week until I will leave work for jury service. I am on my way to deliver some papers to the new head of the English department, and I must pass by your blue office door. It is propped open, despite the plaque warning that it’s a fire door and must remain closed. The room is empty. But I spot something that halts me, my breath coming quicker, nervous that any second you will appear in the corridor. Still, I must look.

Only I would recognize the collection of items on top of your filing cabinet as a mini shrine. Do you plan to use it all for some weird voodoo ritual? An envelope addressed to you in my handwriting, which must have contained some boring piece of postgraduate administration. A yellow coffee mug covered in orange and green daisies; I’d used it every morning until it disappeared a month ago; you haven’t washed it. A plastic container of the strawberry yogurt I sometimes bring into work with me, streaked with the now-browning vestiges of what I failed to scrape from the pot. I can’t begin to imagine how you got that. An empty tube of the hand cream I always keep on my desk. Leaflets and magazines about amateur photography. Some discarded papers from a meeting, covered in the tulips I always doodle.

110.
They say that it takes an average of 110 stalking-related incidents before a woman goes to the police. I tell myself I can’t have got anywhere near 110, though I wonder if that depends on how they count.

Does each thing on your filing cabinet count as one incident? Actually, they probably don’t count as anything at all. I’d look like an idiot if I brought it up, and you’d be able to explain it all away, making me look paranoid and stupid. I can practically hear you, laughing conspiratorially at the utter nonsense of such an accusation.

Is every man who forgets to wash a coffee mug to be brought before the university harassment committee?

Am I the only one who’s ever mistakenly walked away with someone else’s teacup? Guilty as charged. But if she wanted it back, she could have asked for it. I had no idea it was hers.

I will write Domestic Services a formal letter of apology for my negligence in dealing responsibly with food waste.

I admit that I’m blushing about the hand lotion, but it’s winter—men get dry skin, too.

I acknowledge that I ought to develop a better system for recycling envelopes and papers. Take me before a competency tribunal. Punish me with some staff development.

I’d get nowhere, complaining. I can’t prove anything with any of this.

I look again at my tulips. Seeing them in your office puts me back in that meeting. You stop to write something, then look intently at me and nod to yourself in a satisfied way, as if you have confirmed some fact about me that you can now note. It makes me feel stolen. There is nowhere to hide from your eyes, whatever way I try to pull my chair back or sink down low or position myself to be blocked by Gary. I look down at the table. I squirm, self-conscious and embarrassed.

“Interesting,” you say in a knowing tone when I mumble something that is the very opposite of interesting in response to one of Gary’s requests for dull information. To the others you sound engaged and attentive; you’re on top of your job. The worst they’d think of you is that you’re sucking up to Gary. None of them would dream that you’re pestering me.

I shake away the meeting and remember where I am. There’s the tread of an ogre on the stairs so that the building seems to wobble. It must be you. Your steps are always noisy and hurried, as if you want everyone to think that you know where you’re going; you’re purposeful; you have a lot of extremely important things to do and you mean business. What a model employee you are.

I knock quickly on the new head of department’s door, relieved when she answers immediately. I slip inside, the sound of your hello close behind me, and I pretend not to hear it.

I am so intent on plotting how I can get past you on my way back that I don’t even think about the fact that I am standing in Henry’s old office; I don’t even take in how much the new head of department has changed it and erased him; I don’t even replay the time he and I had sex on the mess of a desk that is now littered with her spreadsheets and files but was always carefully ordered and clear when it belonged to him. I invite her to come with me straightaway to see a new computer suite for postgraduates. I want to hug her when she eagerly says yes, though I manage to restrain myself.

Escorted and busy in my improvised new role as tour guide, I see you watch in frustration as I pass your illicitly open door. The head of department pauses to scold you for defying fire regulations and disregarding health and safety training. There is no irony in her voice as she kicks away your improvised doorstop of a plastic folder.

I know you are glaring at her, though I don’t look. You applied for her job and didn’t get it. Now she has added this to the list of insults and grievances you must be collecting, and I feel a pang of concern for her, though I still want to cheer her as the heavy wood slowly swings, then clicks shut, with you on the other side of it.

T
HE ENTIRE WORLD
seemed to be closed on Thursday morning. Clarissa knew from email that the university was shut because of snow. But there were enough trains and buses into Bristol for the court to go on.

She sat companionably with Robert, waiting for the others to struggle in.

Robert retrieved a clear plastic bag from his backpack and took out a chocolate croissant. He broke it into two pieces and wordlessly offered one of them to her.

She was about to say she never ate breakfast, but she stopped herself and accepted it. “Thank you,” she said, taking a bite, waking up a bit more as the taste of butter and strong chocolate did its lovely work. “This is so good.”

“The café just outside the court.” He chewed thoughtfully. “Let’s hope Lottie has an easier day today.”

Lottie. It was affectionate, even intimate and loving. Along the lines of how Clarissa’s father always called her Clary. Yet it was an endearment for a woman she and Robert would never actually talk to or know, a woman they ought to remain entirely detached about.

Clarissa had started it. Once, just once, she’d slipped and used the name aloud to Robert. Instantly, he caught it from her. That had only been on Tuesday, but already the two of them were in the habit of using it with each other. Never in front of the other jurors, though. That was an unspoken, instinctive rule. It was their private, secret thing.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s hope.”

His phone buzzed. He stuffed the rest of the croissant into his mouth and scanned a text. “Drinks with the guys tonight after work. Want to text Jack back for me that I’ll be there?” He passed her his phone.

“Are you sure you trust me?”

“Entirely.”

She knew exactly what to say. Robert would know the message was for him rather than Jack, but there was just enough teasing uncertainty about this for her to dare.

I’m longing to be with you. xx.

Blushing a little, she flashed the screen at him for inspection. “Shall I press send?”

“Go ahead.” He was entirely deadpan.

She went ahead.

“Clarissa!” He sounded completely shocked. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it. I was only joking.”

She gasped and began to apologize, but he only interrupted. “Got you!” A text came back almost straightaway. He read it, grinning. “Not fit for your eyes.”

“Are you going to tell him it was me?”

“Nah. Why spoil his happiness? So proud he even read it to the others. But I can see I’ll need to watch out with you. You’re a tricky one.”

C
OURT 12 BEGAN
only an hour and a half late.

Miss Lockyer sipped some water, visibly relieved to be back in Mr. Morden’s hands.

“Can you describe your condition in the days following your abduction and rape?”

“I was withdrawing. I was extremely distressed. I couldn’t stop vomiting. They had to give me pills to stop the anxiety and help me sleep, and I’m the last person doctors want to give drugs to.”

Mr. Morden never took his sorrowful, pitying, gentlemanly eyes, full of admiration, from his star witness. “Thank you, Miss Lockyer. You’ve been very brave.”

Clarissa wanted one last look at her face, but Miss Lockyer had collapsed like a rag doll, her head dangling from her flower-stalk neck, hiding as well as she could in that very public courtroom, retreating back into her own world, now that she was allowed to.

T
HE SNOW WAS
whirling thickly outside the windows as they swept through the jurors’ waiting area. All of the other courts had finished early that day because of the weather. The large room was uncannily empty and quiet. The jury officer’s desk was deserted.

Of the twelve jurors, Clarissa and Robert were the only ones from Bath. “We might get stuck here,” Clarissa said to him as they fought their way through the blizzard. “The trains may not be running.”

“If that happens, I’ll phone the station. One of the guys will come and pick us up.”

“They’d come all the way to Bristol to get us?”

“Yes,” he said, with that simple, calm matter-of-factness he always used.

“Will it be a fire engine?”

He smiled at her as if she were a child, but his “No” was uttered with the same kind firmness. “It’ll be a jeep.”

“I’m disappointed,” Clarissa said as they squeezed onto the five o’clock train, miraculously running. “I wanted to ride in a fire engine.”

“It wouldn’t be—” He bit back the end of the sentence and smiled.

The previous three trains had been canceled, so this one was packed. Clarissa couldn’t move in much beyond the door. She leaned against the partition, and Robert stepped in after her, standing only inches away. When the train moved off, he swayed toward her for a few seconds and she found herself wondering what it would be like to kiss him. There was a drop of melted snow on his cheek, and she had to resist the impulse to reach up and wipe it away.

“Do you feel,” Clarissa wondered, carefully, “that with each new question the ground shifts again, and then everything you thought just a minute earlier, you’re no longer sure of it?” The judge couldn’t object to that question, despite his continuous solemn warnings not to discuss the case.

“I do. Exactly like that.” His breath was like toothpaste. She thought he must have slipped a mint into his mouth when she wasn’t looking. She was pleased by the idea that he’d made that secret effort at the possibility of being in close proximity to her.

The train was approaching the platform. The door was opening. She was sorry it was already over. She was pulling on yet another hat and pair of mittens her mother had knitted her. Knowing Robert was behind her, she stumbled off with the same self-consciousness she felt whenever she entered or exited the courtroom.

They paused for a minute in front of the station. The night sky seemed to be under a spell; it was a backdrop of softly glowing light and whiteness from the snow instead of the usual dark. Robert’s black fleece hat quickly looked as if it had been dusted in pale blossom.

“I live near Lottie’s old flat.” She blurted this out, wanting to delay their parting by finding something to say.

“Small world. Have you told the others?”

“No. I pass it sometimes, going to the station. But I’ve been getting taxis in the mornings—running late,” she added quickly. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ll go that way anymore after dark. I’ve started taking taxis home, too.”

She glanced across the street. Rafe ducked into a doorway.

“Is something wrong?”

She faltered. “The stuff we hear in court may be scaring me.”

Robert was studying her carefully. “That’s understandable. There’s not much of you, and that hill’s shadowy at night.” After a few shy seconds, he said, “I’m on the other side of town. Not far from the scented garden for the blind.”

She knew his street. A row of beautiful Georgian houses, slightly smaller scale than the grandest of Bath’s listed buildings, but still pretty huge and rather special. “It can’t be an attic flat,” she said, thinking of a top floor’s low ceilings, impossible with his height.

“It’s not a flat,” he said.

“Oh.” She tried to conceal her wonder that he could afford a whole Georgian house.

“You’re shivering,” he said. “You better get home. Good night, Clarissa Jane Bourne.”

There was no doubting whose fault it was that her mind jumped the way it did. She tilted her head, looking at him quizzically, trying to keep her voice casual. “What superpowers do you have to know my middle name?”

“No laser beam eyes or magical brain scanning or secret agent snooping involved. It’s full names on the jury list. I see yours each morning when I cross my own off. Yours is at the top.”

She bit her lip in mock embarrassment. “And how did I not notice that?” she said, laughing a bit, dismissing herself. “Silly.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not a word I’d use about you.”

And in truth she didn’t feel silly. He wasn’t a man who made her feel silly at all. Even when she had to face her own default paranoia, even when she lost control and couldn’t help but let him glimpse it, he seemed to respond only with gentle good humor and kindness. And she truly did think that he saw so much. Names. Lighters. She wondered what else he saw.

“Say hello to Jack for me,” she said.

“I’ll do that.”

She didn’t want to look back after they parted to see if Robert was watching her, just as she never looked to see where the barristers’ and defendants’ eyes were as she went in and out of the jury box. But she did turn. She couldn’t help it. Robert walked on, straight and purposeful and evenly paced, and never looked back himself.

She hurried into a waiting taxi, grateful there was no queue, refusing to search again for Rafe’s horrible shadow. She knew it was there. She didn’t need to see it to know that.