The Book of You: A Novel (18 page)

He sounded detached. He was looking at the ground as he spoke. She’d never seen him do that before. Revealing himself, but at the same time hiding.

Thursday

I
T WAS THE
first time she and Robert spent lunch together. They detoured through the quiet paths of a nearby park, where the sounds of Bristol traffic seemed to disappear as soon as they entered. Without Robert there, she never would have ventured into a park. She missed parks.

Robert sat down on a wooden bench beneath a tree, and she did, too, curling her legs beneath her. His sudden stiffness of the previous afternoon seemed to have melted away.

“Lottie doesn’t do much to help herself, does she?” he said.

She shook her head in sad agreement, hoping the same would never be said of her. “Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.” She startled herself, asking this.

He considered for a few seconds. “I met my wife on a blind date. She—” He broke off. “Another time. Not a story for now.” But he smiled, a brave and philosophical-seeming smile to diminish the refusal, and she thought the subject pained him too much. She didn’t want to press him to talk more about his dead wife, especially after seeing what the subject had done to him yesterday.

“You’d be well within your rights not to answer,” he said, “but will you tell me your worst thing?”

She was watching a robin hopping around on the grass, seeming to find nothing. She forced herself to raise her head and look at him. “Sleeping with someone I didn’t care about.” Her voice was very soft.

“That isn’t so terrible,” he said. “Or so uncommon,” he added.

“It is—was—pretty terrible.” And there were other terrible things she could have told him.

The phone ringing a couple of months after Henry left his marriage and moved into her flat. His wife screaming down the line about male midlife crises and younger women and clichés. She said Clarissa was far from the first woman Henry had had an affair with. She said Henry was infertile. She said Henry didn’t want children anyway, so not being able to have them suited him just fine. She said Henry would deprive Clarissa of the chance to have a baby and before Clarissa knew it, it would be too late. She said she knew all too well what that felt like.

Henry had wrested the handset from Clarissa’s clenched fingers and tried to soothe the woman, but Clarissa could hear her final screamed words before she cut Henry off: Clarissa was an evil husband-stealer and would get what she deserved. It was a curse that Clarissa had begun to fear was coming true.

Afterward, Henry had held Clarissa and comforted her and promised he would do his best to give her a baby if she wanted one, though he explained they wouldn’t be able to do it naturally. But Clarissa couldn’t stop thinking of the poor woman who wasn’t in Henry’s arms, yet wanted to be; the woman who had never had a child, despite yearning for one. His wife’s behavior was not that of someone who no longer loved her husband, though Henry had sworn that was the case.

Robert was looking at Clarissa intently, as if trying to see inside her skull, which was exactly the place she didn’t want him looking. “Tell me more about fires,” she said. Her teeth were chattering.

“You’re too cold, out here.”

“I’m not.” She didn’t want to leave.

He took off his scarf, reached his arms behind her, wrapped it around her neck. “Much prettier on you,” he said.

She shifted along the bench, closer to him. “Tell me,” she said again. “Please.”

“I can see that fighting you is hopeless.” He was soon looking serious again. “You’ve got to feel what the fire’s doing,” he said, “how it’s going to behave. Use all of your senses, not just your mind. You can see the fire breathing,” he said, “see it pulsing. Dancing angels,” he said, “are deadly. It’s like looking at a ceiling made of stars. You can’t let yourself be lured into watching them.”

“Like the Sirens,” she said.

He nodded. “Just like the Sirens, yes. When you see dancing angels, you need to get out before the flashover. There’ll be nothing left of you if you don’t get straight out.”

M
R
. B
ELFORD ROSE
unhurriedly, paused to read his notes, then leaned over and whispered something to his junior. His box of tricks for unnerving witnesses. This one nervously pushed her hair behind her ears when he finally spoke to her.

“At the time you examined Miss Lockyer you had been a police medical examiner for only two months. The truth is that you were not very experienced at this, were you?”

Dr. Goddard shifted in her chair. “I’ve been a qualified doctor for twenty years.”

He lowered his spectacles slightly to study her. “You noted that Miss Lockyer had tenderness to her chest and painful breathing. These are reported injuries: the patient’s subjective account of her symptoms. You had no means of verifying whether she was telling the truth about them.”

Thursday, February 26, 8:40 p.m.

I am startled by a soft knock on the door of my flat. I feel as if I have just run a long distance and abruptly stopped. I grab my phone. I’m ready to dial 999 if it’s you—if you’re actually in my building, then that counts as a real emergency. But it is only Miss Norton’s voice that answers my anxious “Who’s there?” I remember the apprentice locksmith telling me and Annie we should get peepholes for our inner doors, his purple earphones still in place as he spoke. I promise myself I’ll arrange for a security specialist to do this over the weekend, after this false little fright.

Miss Norton is wearing her powder-blue dressing gown. It’s made of thick felt. She smells of baby talc. A dusting of it is visible on her wrists and hands, which are holding a large white oblong box. I follow her into my living room as if it is her flat and I am the guest. She lowers herself onto my sofa and pats the cushion next to her. “Sit down beside me, dear,” Miss Norton says. But she is not entirely her usual hostessy self: she is frowning. She keeps the box on her tiny lap. “There was no card or name, Clarissa.”

I do not need a card or a name to know that the box is from you.

“That’s why I opened it,” she says.

I know that whatever is in this box cannot be good. If I had a pet, I’d expect the box to contain its corpse.

Miss Norton lifts the lid and I make myself peer inside, refusing to hesitate, refusing to act as if I am frightened, even though I need to remind myself to breathe steadily.

But no monster jumps out. No bomb explodes. No scent of death wafts from the container. There is only the fragrance of roses.

They are black roses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black rose before, and find myself wondering if they are an odd hybrid, a rarity. I imagine somebody painting them, like the flowers in
Alice in Wonderland
. I cannot help but think they are beautiful. If they weren’t from you, I would let myself love them. The roses are startling. They are twined with red poppies and crimson anemones.

Until Miss Norton speaks again, I think that maybe this is not so terrible a gift, though I know that my sense of terrible is now formed by the most extreme relativism.

“They’re death blooms, Clarissa, all of them,” Miss Norton says. “It’s a coffin spray. Being as old as I am, I’ve seen quite a few. They go on a casket at a funeral. I know I’m not long in this world, but I’m quite certain it’s not meant for me.”

I squeeze Miss Norton’s hand. The saliva seems to have dried in my mouth. I picture your scissors cutting my underwear, your scissors between my legs, your scissors cutting these flowers. There’s a brief sharp stab, low and central and in my cervix or pubic bone, a kind of convulsion. I know the physical sensation is a real thing and not an imagined one; my period is due tomorrow, and this sudden spearing must be to do with that.

“You think I’m just a sweet old lady, Clarissa, a kindly spinster who knows nothing and has experienced nothing”—I am shaking my head in protest—“but I can see that something is very wrong. Your parents would be extremely upset by this. Shall I phone them? They always put their number and address on Christmas cards, dear, just in case. So kind . . .”

“I need water.”

Miss Norton does not take her eyes from me as I lurch up from the sofa and stumble into the kitchen. I gulp two glasses, spilling a lot of it down my chest. I drag my sleeve over my eyes and mouth to wipe them. I stand against the fridge, pressing my forehead against the cold metal, as if to cool my brain.

I return to the living room and sit beside Miss Norton again and kiss her cheek. “Please don’t phone my parents, Miss Norton.” I touch the box. “May I?” She nods, and I take the box from her and examine it. No trace of the flower shop on it. “They worry about me too much as it is.” I search beneath the spray, ruffle through the tissue paper on which it sits. Miss Norton is right. You have left no clues. “I don’t want them upset.” There will be other ways of finding out where you got it, though; it must have been a special order.

“It’s very unpleasant. It’s threatening, to send such a thing to a young woman,” Miss Norton says. “I’ve been considering, Clarissa dear, since you became so distressed on Valentine’s Day. And that man who upset you so much. I haven’t seen him since, but I suspect that you have. You need to ask for some help, dear. You need to make a complaint.”

I am calmer, in my relief that it isn’t another photograph. That extreme relativism kicking in again. A lesson you’re teaching me well. You’ve made it clear how much you like to give lessons.

I close the box and cross the room, pulling another stack of fabric from the cupboard to make space for it. “I do intend to complain,” I say. “I promise. There are just a few more tiny details I need to sort out first, to make sure it will work. I want the complaint to stick.”

Like all the best fairy godmothers, Miss Norton is bossy. She stands up to leave, waving away my offer to see her downstairs, but not without a final order. “Don’t wait too long, dear.”

Friday

T
HE JURORS FOR
Court 12 had taken to playing poker. Sitting around two wobbly tables they’d pushed together, they shouted and clapped and screeched out laughter, gasping in disbelief or comic annoyance. Other jurors came and went, doing their nine-day stints but pausing as outsiders to observe and even envy the strange camaraderie and seasoned ownership of the jurors’ waiting room that came from being thrown together for such a long trial.

Clarissa didn’t know the game, but once in a while she’d sit companionably nearby, quietly reading or sipping coffee. Robert did sometimes play, though Clarissa secretly suspected it wasn’t because he wanted to but as a kind of goodwill effort. Firefighters must need to be skilled at working in teams, she thought; they must be hyperaware of how groups of people function and how to maneuver them. The others always embraced Robert’s participation heartily, or at least the men did. She was certain they’d elect him jury foreman.

Usually the poker happened during lunch, but on Friday morning of their fourth week their usher apologized for a mysterious delay that would take at least an hour, so the Court 12 jurors gathered with their cards. Clarissa was surprised to see Robert sitting separately, at a table on the other side of the room. He was near the window so the light could fall on what was clearly a sketchbook.

He was working so intently. She watched him for a few seconds, not meaning to draw his attention away as she quietly stepped closer, not wanting him to notice her observing him, but he looked up and caught her inspecting his cartoon. It was of Mr. Morden. Robert had caught him exactly, and though it was comical, he’d managed nonetheless to capture Mr. Morden’s seriousness and intelligence, his air of goodness.

“So you draw, too?” she said. “When you’re not reading poetry and performing heroic rescues?”

He’d been saving that poker face of his for her. “I like to doodle.”

“It’s good.”

He flashed a smile, as if he’d decided it was the right move, and she could see how shy and stiff he was in the face of what he was doing, but also secretly proud without wanting to admit it. “Amuses the guys at work, my cartoons of them.”

“You have an amazing visual memory, to pull that off. Like with the lighter. You should give Mr. Morden that drawing.”

The smile melted into something deeper, something he seemed not to be able to control. “The judge might throw me in jail if Mr. Morden shows him. Literal contempt of court.” He closed the sketchbook. “There are nicer things I could draw. Out of this place.”

The night before, she had at last cut out the nightdress from the Japanese pattern book, using the bruise-colored silk. She was determined not to let Rafe and his grisly flowers and repulsive photos take over her world. She imagined wearing the nightdress for Robert. To be with Robert would obliterate any trace Rafe had left on her. It would undo those photographs like a magic spell, and what Rafe had done would have no power.

M
R
. B
ELFORD RESUMED
his evisceration of the police medical examiner. “Come, Doctor. A brutal rape by two large men and no visible vaginal injury?”

“Rape victims do not necessarily demonstrate evidence of vaginal trauma. Many comply out of fear and offer no physical resistance.”

She thought of Rafe’s astonished rage in the park.
You were only pretending.
She would never know with certainty what her fake compliance had saved her from, but there was no doubting that the pretense had bought her time.

“This is the medically accepted view,” Dr. Goddard went on. “It’s also worth saying that consensual sex can result in vaginal trauma. Vaginal tears, and a lack of vaginal tears, are both neutral findings.”

“Why did you question Miss Lockyer about her sexual and menstrual history?”

“It can be relevant to the alleged assault. If you observe vaginal bleeding, you’re asking yourself, is this menstrual bleeding? Or could it be a postcoital bleed?”

That was what she’d had after the night with Rafe: a single day of spotting. Her period had come a week later. She always knew where she was in her cycles. It was a habit she’d formed when she and Henry started trying for a baby. It was made easier by the fact that her cycles were dependably twenty-seven or twenty-eight days long; even severe stress didn’t affect them. Despite her dread that Rafe had made her pregnant, she’d known it was highly unlikely.

“The blood that the forensic scientist found on Miss Lockyer’s clothes could have been menstrual blood,” Mr. Belford said. A well-thumbed medical dictionary lay on top of his files. “They cannot distinguish menstrual blood from other vaginal blood.”

“True. But the alleged rape took place on day five of her menstrual cycle. Usually a woman has finished bleeding by then—she’d have some spotting, at most.”

Friday, February 27, 6:30 p.m.

All the way home I do not think of you at all. I do not think of the photographs. I do not think of your magazine.

I have forgotten my umbrella. Robert holds his over us both as we walk. He sits next to me on the train, and when he lets his arm rest against mine, my face goes warm. He stands with me in the taxi queue at the station, the two of us talking and talking until I reach the front and he carefully opens and shuts the taxi door for me, smiling his slight, closed-mouth smile as he watches it drive off.

As the taxi winds its way up the hill, I think only of Robert, imagining what it would be like to sleep with him.

The instant I walk in the door and see your envelope, you are back inside my head, where you want to be. I know it is another photograph before I’ve opened it.

It is the next step from the last one. The blindfold and gag and bindings are exactly as they were, but you’ve removed my underwear. You’ve dropped them beside me, sliced at the hips so you could get them off without untying my ankles. You’ve uncoiled the whip and draped the last foot of it over my stomach.

I am forcing myself to think rationally. The whip is just part of your display. You didn’t actually use it on me. I’m sure you didn’t. I wouldn’t have missed the marks if you had. The sore spots and chafing wounds had been on my wrists and ankles. I’m actually relieved to think of them. They suggest that, even unconscious, I was still pulling at the restraints and straining to get free, trying to fight you. Even if you got off on my struggling, I’m glad of this evidence that I didn’t want you. There’d been red compressions that turned into bruises on my inner thighs, probably from your hands, but those came after you took your pictures. There were no bloodied welts that could have come from your whip.

I put your photo in my wardrobe with the others. I look at my bed, the sheets clean and never slept in, covered in my newly sewn quilt cover. I think of Lottie curled in the corner of the sagging mattress in that London flat. I haven’t eaten or showered or brushed my teeth. I haven’t taken off my clothes. I am very, very cold.

I go into the living room and huddle on the sofa beneath blankets. Gradually, I’ve been moving my nighttime things in here. I reach onto the side table for my sleeping potion and gulp down two pills, knowing my mother would say I’m getting addicted. I curl onto my side, trying to consider and plot as calmly as I can about what I will do tomorrow, not thinking I will ever sleep but astonished to feel myself floating away, carried by the force of drugs that work as well as any witch’s spell. I am frightened that you wait for me in my dreams, too.

S
HE WAS IN
a golden coffin, holding the death blooms, and Rafe was wrenching them from her grasp, dragging her from the coffin’s white silk lining, throwing her onto concrete that felt like sandpaper. She was on the ground, naked, trying to hide beneath a quilt. The defendants were gathered in a circle around her, tearing the quilt away, kicking her, beating her with a broom. The broom became a whip. They were lifting her high into the air and forcing her back into the coffin, which was displayed on a table. They were holding her down so she couldn’t move, cheering from the sidelines as Rafe climbed on top of her, pressing the thorns of the black roses into her bare breasts with the weight of his body, stopping her from being able to breathe. Robert was standing there, silently watching, a pair of scissors in his gloved hand. She tried to cry out his name, but the words made no sound.